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head in the direction of a short hallway running parallel with the front of the house, with doors on both sides. “That’s where the shotgun came from, the parents’ bedroom. We found a coloring book open on the floor of the girl’s place and some loose crayons, like she might of dropped everything and run in here after the first shot, the one that killed her mother. Only a shotgun makes a hell of a loud wham indoors and if I was a little girl I’d run the other way.”
    “She could have come out during the shouting match and been here when Evancek fetched in the gun.”
    “Yeah. Also there’s no predicting a person’s reaction under stress, especially a kid’s. It’s just one more of those things that can go six ways when you try putting a thing together backwards. Killers don’t write scripts neat like you see on TV. The kitchen used to be this way.” He went down the hall and turned left.
    It still was, a fairly modern room about half the size of Mayk’s kitchen, with the usual kitchen stuff plus a microwave oven and blue stylized flowers on the floor tiles and that symbol of our times, a woodburning stove, all black iron and white enamel with a warming oven overhead. There was a door at the back with a square window looking out on a shallow back porch. Firewood was stacked to the overhang with syrupy blackness beyond.
    “The porch is new,” Mayk said. “Different appliances and paint job. Jesus, you wonder who’d have the stomach to scrub the place down after a thing like that. That’s the door Evancek was sitting with his back against when we found him.”
    “Was he sitting when he pulled the trigger on himself?”
    “We figured he stood with his feet braced and his back against the door and slid down afterwards. There was a good five feet between where the top of his head would of been if he still had a head and where the blood started.”
    “What’d he trigger it with, a stick?”
    “We didn’t find one. You can do it with a toe, but he had his shoes on. The gun was a Marlin and short, just barely legal. He could of held it out in front of him with the muzzle to the bridge of his nose and triggered it at arm’s length.”
    “Awkward.”
    “There’s no textbook way to blow your face off,” he said.
    “You ran the gun for prints?”
    He nodded. “We got a clear thumb off one of the shells in the magazine. It was Evancek’s. The rest of the prints were smeared the way they always are coming off a gun.”
    “That just proves he loaded his own shotgun.”
    “Don’t look to go unraveling no mysteries from the past, Sherlock. They buried the killer with his victims years before you got your first lay.”
    “Who buried him?”
    “How the hell should I know? The Nortons, I guess. Jeanine Evancek’s sister and brother-in-law.”
    “Damn generous of them.”
    “Maybe the space was paid for already and they didn’t want it going to waste.” He grinned suddenly. “Why did the undertaker fire his Polack gravedigger?”
    “He dug the hole too deep and didn’t have enough dirt to fill it back in. Thanks for the tour.”
    “Old times,” he said, moving a shoulder. “Not that they were that good. In the department we used to call Bill Mischiewicz the original six-foot Pole you wouldn’t touch anything with. You get anything out of this?”
    “Not really. If there are vibes here I’ve got a tin ear.”
    We went back into the living room. I leaned through the doorway into the addition and rapped on the frame. “Thanks, Mr. Stanislaus.”
    He folded his copy of the News and got up from a worn green La-Z-Boy to see us out. His wife was sitting on a sway-backed sofa watching television, and two boys of about seven and nine with dark tousled hair and bright black eyes were pretending to do their homework on the rug over the slab concrete floor in front of the set. The same cop show or one just like it was howling and banging away onscreen.
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