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and still feeling the promise of winter crawl down his neck. The Kleinfeldts bought the house three months later, according to Nancy Ann Kopetke at Countryside, who had apparently been knocked over with a feather when they paid the asking price without a twitch. The idea of Nancy Ann Kopetke, three bills if she was a pound, being knocked over with anything smaller than an eighteen-wheeler had given him the only other smile of the morning.
    He climbed the front porch with Danny, eyed the heavy plate of a good dead bolt, but still tried the knob. Stupid, of course. You didn’t padlock your driveway and leave your house wide open.
    “Should I try the back, Sheriff?” Danny was almost on the toes of his spit-shined shoes, eager to get into the house, find the clue and solve the crime.
    “Go ahead. I’ll try running the picks through this one.”
    For all the good it’ll do.
His thoughts grumbled a sullen accompaniment to the strangely merry sound of Danny trotting around the house through a crackling carpet of dried leaves. He’d played with this kind of dead bolt before and knew damn well that it was far beyond his meager skills. Still he went down into a crouch and started fooling with it, going through the motions, just as he was doing with the whole investigation.
    The minute he’d seen that cross carved into Mary Kleinfeldt’s chest, he’d had the bad feeling that this was probably one of those crimes that would haunt his old age. From that point on it had just been a matter of how much of his budget and how many of his resources he would use up before the county commissioners shut him down. Unless there were clues inside this house with big red arrows pointing to them, there was no way he could justify keeping the whole department committed.
    He gave up on the lock, pushed against his knees, and felt a crick he swore hadn’t been there yesterday. He rapped once against the door just to feel the weight of it, and frowned. One of those heavy metal numbers you usually saw only in the city. Hinges on the inside. Weird. Unless Danny worked miracles and found a way in through the back, they were going to have to break some glass here, because there was no way he was going to drive all the way back to town for the keys.
    He glanced down the porch at the old-fashioned six-over-six windows, thinking they’d have to break some hundred-year-old woodwork, too, and that was a shame. He reached inside his jacket for the package of Pall Malls in his shirt pocket. The cellophane wrapper crackled in the silence.
    The house muffled the sound of the shotgun blast, as much as such a thing can be muffled. It was still loud enough, or maybe just so unexpected, that Halloran jumped backward away from the door, heart pounding. Instinct kicked in before thought, dropping him to a crouch, 9mm already in his hand.
See that, Bonar?
he thought crazily.
How’s that for a quick draw?
    Before the thought was finished he was down the steps, off the porch, still crouched but running now, below the windows, around the house to the back corner. He stopped with his shoulder pressed against steel siding, gasping in silent, shallow breaths, listening so hard he could hear dried cornstalks rustling in the back field.
    Goddamn it, where are you, Danny?
    The part of the backyard he could see was treeless, lifeless; nothing but brown, close-cropped grass stretching a good hundred yards to the corn. He stooped, shot his head out to look around the corner, and jerked it back. Nothing. No bushes, no trees, no place for a shooter to hide, just a shallow cement stoop at the back door. He hugged the house and crept toward it.
    A few minutes later he found the first bloody pieces of Danny Peltier spattered all over the small mudroom. He walked a little farther into the house and found the rest of him, and almost wished that he hadn’t.
    Bonar found Halloran an hour later in the middle of the Kleinfeldts’ backyard. He’d dragged a kitchen chair outthere and