G Malliet - Death and the Lit Chick

"Let me see that report."

Moor handed it to him.

"Winston comes up clean, too," said Moor, as St. Just scanned the pages. An untested cop, an uncle who looked like a wanted suspect, stopped at a traffic light. He'd reached for his wallet to show his identification and…

St. Just willfully pulled his mind back to the case. Time enough to learn Portia's story later. Her uncle's death couldn't be connected to this crime-he only hoped to God it wouldn't end up having anything to do with the pair of them, himself and Portia. It certainly explained the "I could never marry a policeman" remark.

"Magretta Sincock did see something helpful that night," he told Moor, "but not a ghost. It was Kimberlee, probably on her way to the dungeon, 'to meet her fate,' as I'm sure Magretta would put it. It's odd, but… Winston thought he saw Kimberlee, too, later, but that's unlikely. As did Portia, although she's even less sure. Maybe it was someone wandering the stairs in one of the hotel's white robes. But by the time we lost the lights, Kimberlee was almost certainly already in the dungeon-and probably dead."

St. Just went on. "They all claim alibis but none that are reliable-or completely verifiable, for that matter. There was a lot of wine with dinner and drinks all around in the hours following. And they say no group, on average, can go through drink like a group of writers."

He couldn't help himself. He looked back into the garden. Portia had gone, leaving Winston sitting alone again. Good.

He turned back to Moor.

"By the way, we really should have someone hanging about the spa. There are some conversations going on in there that we should be privy to, and that might prove useful." And Portia could use watching if she's going to play detective, he added to himself.

"Good idea," said Moor. "Sergeant Kittle, I've been noticing you've been letting those enlarged pores of yours get the upper hand."

Kittle, stung, said, "What enlarged pores?"

"Get on with you, man. See what you can learn from our friends, the murder suspects."

"Sir, one of the WPCs would surely be a better-"

"Don't argue with me. Go."

As the door closed on Sergeant Kittle's back, stiff with outrage, St. Just said, "We come back to why she would be in such an unlikely spot, at such an unlikely hour. I doubt very much she was looking for inspiration for her book, as Magretta claims was her own mission. That's just silly enough to be believable where Magretta is concerned, but Kimberlee-I'm not so sure. So the question is, which of these people would Kimberlee agree to meet? We assume her lover. Why? Why not meet Jay in her room as he claims they had planned?"

"So many 'whys.' Someone met her at the bottle dungeon and that's all she wrote. Literally. We-"

Just then they heard a scream, followed by a low, keening wail.

"It's coming from outside," said St. Just, already running. "Let's go."

It was a small body, nearly as short as a child's, but then Florie Macintosh in life had been a small woman.

Magretta had found her, a fact suspicious in itself. To find one body-fine, okay. Two bodies shot a person straight to the top of a suspect list.

Florie was floating facedown in the moat, in an unlighted area to the rear of the castle. A large gash to the back of her head gave him the hope she'd died quickly, unawares, even before she'd hit the water. A mace, no doubt taken from the castle's extensive collection of weaponry, lay on the ground not far from where she floated. Magretta, sobbing hysterically, was crouched at the edge of the wide ditch, staring in disbelief into the dark water.

St. Just exchanged a few words with one of the constables hovering nearby before angrily stalking away, leaving Moor and Kittle to organize the forensics. There was nothing to be done until they retrieved that little form. He'd seen enough drowning victims to know Florie was past mortal help. And he didn't dare trust himself around Magretta.

"Have someone keep an eye on her-constantly," he told Kittle before he left, with a nod in Magretta's direction. "And get her away from the body."

Damn. Damn it all to hell. How could he have been so stupid? He'd as good as told Magretta that Florie was the one who blew her "alibi" apart. Could she really have raced right out to exact revenge? Had Florie been killed only because he'd bluffed Magretta into thinking Florie was a witness against her?

Was Magretta insane? Or just panicked into carelessness? Kimberlee's death showed signs of careful planning-the murderer had to have lured Kimberlee somehow to such an obscure part of the castle. Florie's death-it was madness for the murderer to have taken such a risk.

He tried to turn all his prior thinking on its head. Everyone had kept assuring him that Kimberlee Kalder had everything going for her-and yet Kimberlee Kalder had ended up dead. Now he wondered: Had he been wrong from the start not to recognize her as a victim-as someone whose looks and success would attract jealousy wherever she went, almost-as Desmond had said-no matter what she did?

His footsteps led him unseeing, far past the range of the castle floodlights, towards the outdoor cages of the falconry. A snowy owl was the only one at home at the moment. He had read somewhere there was a word for a group of owls-a parliament, that was it. A funny word for such a typically solitary creature. St. Just stopped in his tracks to stare at him-or her. The company of a creature that killed for food was infinitely preferable to that of a creature that killed for love or money-the usual human excuses. Love or money, sometimes with a little revenge thrown in.

The owl stared back at him with its great golden eyes-eyes that might have been lined with kohl. It seemed to say both, "Hello? What's all this, then?" and "I could have you for breakfast if I felt like it, you know," but all in a supremely indifferent way.

"Boo," said St. Just, experimentally.

The owl, not surprisingly, had no time for this and looked peevishly away: There must be better prey out there than this fool. St. Just stared at its downy, silken back. As he did so, a thought seemed to come from the remembered depths of the creature's eyes.

"What if?" he said aloud. "What if it was something else she'd seen? Someone else?"

He walked slowly back in the direction of the hulking gray bulk of Dalmorton.

Florie's body had been removed from the water. Sergeant Kittle stood respectfully back inside the scene shield, watching forensics do its job, his melancholy expression even bleaker than usual. Moor was on the phone, giving somebody hell.

"They found the laptop, sir," Kittle told him.

"Good. I'll be wanting a word with your IT man." St. Just turned away as the examiner began to practice the intimate, violating rituals of his trade. There was no dignity to be accorded the victim of foul play. "For one thing, depending on what's on that laptop, we might need it at trial. Listen, can you get a search-and-rescue dog out here?"

Kittle, momentarily taken aback, said, "I guess so, sir. Who are we looking for?"

"I think I've already found the one I'm looking for, actually. How long will it take to get someone out here?"

"An hour. Two at the most."

"You're certain?"

"For a high-profile case like this? With a serial killer on the loose? Yeah, I think so, sir. Besides, Robert, the handler, is one of my mates. I'll get him here with Rob Roy. That's the dog, sir."

"Good. Once they've arrived, I want you to get the suspects together in the library. All of them. Tell them the castle is offering free drinks all night. That will get them there with bells on. And when you talk with Donna about the drinks, tell her I want a word with her."