Deception by Randy Alcorn Page B

appeared to be two shots, close together, over the heart. His shirt was soaked.
    Multiple causes of death on one body?
    I’d never been in this house. Why did it seem familiar? It was as if I’d been here in a dream. A recent dream. I tried to shake off the déjà vu.
    The victim’s clothes swallowed him. I remembered him as bigger in that classroom. Death had shrunk him 20 percent. I studied his dark eyes, open and vacant. They looked like manholes over hell.
    I used to stare at stiffs without taking death personally. Lately it’s been different. I’ve been pondering that the death rate is 100 percent, and I’m not going to be the exception. I wonder … does everyone slip into a dreamless sleep? Part of me hopes so. Hell scares me. Heaven scares me almost as much.
    Suddenly I realized I was holding hands with a dead man. I dropped it. I looked up, hoping Abernathy wasn’t watching. He was.
    The victim’s wallet was stuffed in his right front pocket. I examined his driver’s license and another picture ID.
    “Professor William Palatine,” I said. A tech informed me Palatine had taught at PSU for many years.
    “What do you call those outfits?” Clarence asked, pointing at two criminalists.
    “Bunny suits. The technical name is biohazard coveralls. Protects them from contact with body fluids. And protects the evidence from them.”
    Already one criminalist was on his hands and knees fussing with carpet fiber.
    “Why’s he that color?” I asked.
    “What color?” the criminalist said, reluctantly turning from fiber, his first love, to flesh.
    “Bluish.”
    He shrugged. “You’re the detective.”
    “I’m the detective who’s asking the criminalist why he’s that color.”
    He looked around the room as if, having no opinion of his own, he wanted to borrow one. “ME’ll run a tox.”
    I pointed to the computer. “Check the keyboard for prints?”
    He looked at me as if the question didn’t deserve an answer. One thing I’ve learned in decades of detective work: I’d rather get dirty looks now than find out later that somebody messed up.
    “We’ll get the bullets first,” he said.
    “How many?”
    “Two through his chest. Presumably in the floor.”
    “He was on the floor like this when shot?”
    “Looks like it.”
    “Seen the bedroom?” It was Officer Guerino.
    I followed his pointing finger to the hallway leading to the back left of the house. The bedroom was mostly neat and tidy, bed made, drawers shut, light lemon smell. But the outside window had been broken.
    I looked it over. Entry point? Break-in? No. Not a big enough hole in the glass. And too jagged. No blood evident. Anyone coming in this way would have taken a couple more whacks at it and cleared the jagged glass before entering. They probably knocked it in, then decided on another entry.
    I stared out the fractured window into the darkness. A single streetlight was blocked by a tall maple still holding a third of its leaves. Then I realized what wasn’t lying at my feet: broken glass.
    “What are you seeing?” Abernathy sounded like Darth Vader with a head cold.
    “The glass didn’t fall inside.” I shone my flashlight on the carpet to make sure I wasn’t contaminating evidence.
    “So?”
    “So it has to be outside.” I stepped forward carefully and looked out the window, following the beam.
    “There.” I pointed outside to broken glass on the ground.
    “This wasn’t an attempted break-in. It was an attempted break -out.”
    “Who?”
    “Palatine? Hard to imagine the killer breaking the window from the inside. Why risk waking the neighbors?”
    “Why wouldn’t he unlock the window and pull it up? There’s room to crawl out. Not for you or me, but he’s not that big.”
    “Maybe he was running and panicked, threw himself at the window. If so, fibers from his clothes may show up on the glass.” I knelt down. “There’s a shoe impression here in the carpet. And a slight mud residue. And there’s a little