“How did you come up with that?” Gideon asked.
“One of the employees, the kid who brought around the towels.” He gestured with the bottle at a tall, skinny boy with a turned-around baseball cap, one of three people who were working at the barbecue pit and who was at that moment serving Honeyman his steak. “Him. He was there a couple of minutes before five, and the do-not-disturb sign was hanging on the door. I figure that’s got to mean Harlow was already dead, don’t you? I mean, why would Harlow put the sign out? He wouldn’t know anybody was coming around with towels.”
Gideon nodded. “True.”
“The employee,” Julie said. “Did he see anything?” “Nah, just the sign. He couldn’t see anything through the window. Come on, they’re starting to run out of steaks over there.”
They walked to the stone barbecue pit and got utensils and plastic plates from a table alongside it.
“Why couldn’t he see anything through the window?” Gideon asked. “I could see through the window.”
“Weil, there were those flowers right in front of it. They made it hard to look in.”
“But I looked in. I saw Harlow.”
John shrugged as he helped himself to a roll. “I guess he didn’t look as hard as you.”
“Were those his exact words? He couldn’t see anything?”
“Look-”John lowered his voice; they were approaching the boy. “This is not a particularly swift kid, you know? Words are not his thing. But go ahead and ask him, if it’s worrying you.”
“It’s not worrying me. I was just wondering.”
John had reached the boy, who was standing at the ready, tongs in hand, having just served Julie. “How’re you doing, Vinnie? Let me have that one on the side there.”
“It’s pretty well-done.”
“Great, that’s the way I like ’em.” He held out his plate. “And my associate here has something he wants to ask you.”
What he really wanted to ask him, Gideon thought, was why so many kids walked around with their baseball caps on backward, a fashion that had mystified him since the first time he’d seen it. Instead he said: “I understand you’re the one who left the linens at Cottage 18.”
The boy regarded him suspiciously.
“I understand you said you couldn’t see anything through the window.”
“That’s right. You want a steak? I’m not supposed to be talking to the customers.”
Gideon held out his plate while Vinnie dropped a huge T-bone into it. “What did you mean when you said you couldn’t see anything? You must have been able to see something.”
“I already told him,” Vinnie said, indicating John. “I didn’t look. There wasn’t no point.”
“Why wasn’t there any point?”
“Because,” Vinnie said, showing a streak of adolescent impatience with slowminded adults, “the blinds were down. I already told him that.”
There was a moment of startled silence before John said, “Uh, actually, I think you missed that little detail.” “Well, they were,” Vinnie said sullenly.
“You’re absolutely positive?” Gideon said. “They were down?”
“Well, jeez, I know what blinds look like.”
“All the way down?” John asked.
“Yeah, all the way down. I gotta go back to work. There’s more people.”
“Why all the fuss?” Julie asked as the three of them moved away from the pit. “Why is it so important that the blinds were down?”
“Because,” John said, coming to a standstill, “they were up when we found him. And if he really was dead when Vinnie was there, that means somebody must have come back later-before we found him-and raised them. Is that the way you see it too, Doc?”
“Mm.”
“Oh,” Julie said, chewing gently at her lip. “But that doesn’t make any sense. You mean somebody wanted the body to be found?”
“Looks like it,” John said.
“But then why not take down the do-not-disturb sign too?”
“You got me.”
“And why would the killer want the body to be found anyway? Wouldn’t he want to put it off as long as possible? Don’t all those gruesome pathological clues get harder and harder to figure out as time goes on?”
“Yeah, they do,” John said thoughtfully. “Everything does. You know, maybe it wasn’t the killer. Maybe-maybe what?”
John and Julie looked at each other and shook their heads. “Gideon,” Julie said, “you’re being awfully quiet.”
Gideon was being quiet because his mind was racketing along another track entirely, one that hadn’t even vaguely occurred to him before.
“I was just thinking…” he murmured. “What if those blinds didn’t really have anything to do with keeping people from seeing in? What if…I don’t know; I don’t quite have it worked out…”
“Hey there, you three,” Miranda called from a few feet away, “we can squeeze you in here if you don’t mind consorting with known suspects.”
And indeed, there they all were, lined up at a single table: Miranda, Callie, Les, Leland, Nellie, and Frieda.
“Thanks,” John said, “but I’ve still gotta talk to my compadre about a couple of things. You guys go ahead.” He headed for the next table, where Farrell was sitting.
Callie slid over so Julie had room next to her. Gideon sat around the corner from Julie, on her right, next to Leland. Frieda and Nellie were across the square table from him, with Les and Miranda on the fourth side.
“We have been driven to band together,” Leland said, “by the unrelenting scrutiny of our peers.” He looked sourly across at Callie. “We are now hard at work providing each other with a caring, nurturing environment in which to initiate the mind-body healing process.” Something in his voice suggested that the glass of white wine at his elbow was not his first.
Callie glowered briefly at him. “Do you suppose we could get the potato salad started around, please?”
Julie began to cut into her steak, then stopped and touched the back of Gideon’s hand. “Everything all right?” she asked quietly.
“What? Yes, fine, I was just thinking.” He sliced a wedge from his steak and began chewing.
The blinds, the blinds. Down shortly after Harlow’s death, up twenty-four hours later when he and John had found the body. All the way up, letting the sun pour in…
Julie passed him the big blue bowl of potato salad. “Thanks,” Gideon said absently and put it down without spooning any onto his plate.
The blinds-yes, sure, the blinds could have fooled them all; especially with a little help from the air-conditioning. But what about those Calliphora eggs? Surely there was no way to fake them, no way to alter the “Hey, if you’re not going to have any of that stuff, cover it up, will you?” Les said to him from the other side of Leland. “The flies are having a field day.”
“Oh-sure,” Gideon said. Mechanically, he began to tug at the plastic wrap that still covered half the bowl, pulling it down over the rim.
And then, suddenly, he was on his feet, almost upsetting the bench and Leland with it. “Plastic wrap!” he blurted.
Faces at nearby tables as well at their own turned toward him with varying expressions of astonishment.
“What did he say?” Frieda asked.
“I believe,” Miranda replied drily, “that he said ‘plastic wrap.’ I may be mistaken, however.”
But it was Callie that Gideon was looking at, and Callie who stared rigidly back at him, her long face frozen and waxy, her nostrils pinched. For a second their eyes locked, and then she was up too.
“Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, no. No, no, no.”
Even while rising she had been groping in her shoulder bag, and when her hand came out, it was clutching a squarish, compact handgun of dully gleaming black metal.
“This won’t do,” she said wildly, but not so wildly that she forgot to slide back the safety. “I can’t have this.”
The pistol’s muzzle swept the table erratically. A wave of flinches followed in its wake. Leland made a peeping noise, either of outrage or fright.
Callie said something unintelligible. The pistol came up a few inches, sleek and wavering, like the head of a snake homing in on its prey.