The house was a shingled Cape Cod with a porch. The front door was opened by an obviously upset woman wearing an apron. Rawls emerged from another room and waved them in. Harley Davis and Mack Morris were seated in the living room, while Jimmy Hotchkiss talked on the phone. Stone introduced Dino to everybody, then followed Rawls into a bedroom.

“Uh, oh,” Dino said.

Don Brown, The Old Fart who used the electric scooter, was sitting up in bed, a bullet hole in his right temple and a much larger hole in his left. A Colt.45 lay on the bed, and brains and blood were scattered around the bedspread.

“We’ve got another one,” Rawls said.

“How long have you been here?” Stone asked.

“Less than half an hour. I’ve mostly been on the phone calling people.”

“Has somebody called the state police?”

“Jimmy’s on the phone with them now.”

“Let’s get out of this room,” Stone said. “Have you touched anything?”

Rawls shook his head. “I know better than that.”

They went back into the living room and took seats, while the woman served them coffee.

“This is Hilda,” Rawls said. “She found him when she came to clean the house.”

“What time do you normally get here, Hilda?” Stone said.

“Usually, at nine,” the woman replied. “But it was ten, today; I had to do Mr. Brown’s grocery shopping. I always do that for him.” She went back to the kitchen.

“Dino,” Stone said, “you ask the questions.”

Dino nodded. “Gentlemen, did any of you know Mr. Brown to be depressed?”

“This wasn’t suicide,” Harley Davis replied.

“Please, just answer the question.”

“Don wasn’t depressed,” Mack Morris said. “He was pissed off.”

“About what?” Dino asked.

“About being in that fucking wheelchair thing. He didn’t like it at all; he was permanently pissed off about it.”

“Did he ever talk about suicide?”

All three men shook their heads. “He wasn’t the type,” Rawls said.

“Is the gun his?” Dino asked.

“Probably; he had a.45,” Rawls said. “If the cops don’t find another one, then it’s his.”

Jimmy hung up the phone. “The state boys will be on the next ferry,” he said, looking at his watch. “They should be here in an hour or so.”

“Gentlemen,” Dino said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d all go sit on the porch until the cops get here. Stone and I will take a look around the house.”

The four men went outside, and Dino went into the kitchen, followed by Stone.

“Hilda,” Dino said, “when you got here this morning, did you find anything unusual about the state of the house?”

“Well, Mr. Brown was dead in his bed,” she said.

Dino nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Anything else?”

“Well, the vacuum cleaner is normally in the broom closet, but it was sitting in the kitchen, by the back door, there.” She pointed. “And there wasn’t no bag inside it.”

Chapter 25

STONE AND DINO WENT and stood in the bedroom door, so as not to disturb anything further by entering the room.

“He’s sitting up in bed,” Stone said, “so whoever shot him woke him up first.”

“Unless he wasn’t asleep when the guy arrived,” Dino said.

“The TV isn’t on, and there’s no book present, so he wasn’t sitting up in bed reading. Nobody just sits in bed, doing nothin'.“

“Maybe you’re right. But why would the guy wake him up?”

Stone shrugged. “Maybe he had something to say to him before he shot him.”

“Like what?”

“Like, 'Here’s one from your pal, Joe,' or whoever ordered the hit.”

“You should write novels.”

“Short stories, maybe. There’s always a little story that goes with a murder. This wasn’t the burglary story, was it?”

“Nothing seems disturbed.”

“Let’s take a look outside,” Stone said.

They walked through the kitchen, where Hilda was sitting, disconsolately, drinking coffee, and out the back door. The sea was, perhaps, thirty paces away, and they avoided walking on the path, looking for footprints.

“Got a good one here,” Dino said, pointing.

“Deck shoe,” Stone said. “See the little ridges? That narrows the suspect list to everybody on the island and everybody on the coast of Maine.”

“Big deck shoe,” Dino said. “Size eleven or twelve. There are other partials here, going in both directions, but just this one good one.”

“That’s more than the cops found at Dick’s house,” Stone said. “I’d consider that a break.” He walked down to the rocky beach and pointed. “Some scrapes on the stones here; our man arrived by boat and pulled it ashore, but only a foot or two.”

“Must have been a sizable boat,” Dino said. “Not just a whatchacallit…?”

“Dinghy.”

“Yeah.”

They walked back up toward the porch, and Dino pointed: “Sand and dirt on the porch.”

“That’s about it,” Stone said. “Let’s take a look out front.”

They walked around the house.

“Too many cars and people here to find any usable footprints,” Dino said, “but I’m satisfied the killer came by boat.”

Stone walked up to the porch, where the Old Farts and Jimmy Hotchkiss had sat down. “Where’s the nearest house?”

Rawls pointed. “Over there, a couple of hundred yards.”

“The cops will want to know if anybody heard the shot.”

“Why? We know he was shot.”

“Fix the time of death,” Dino said.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Anybody got any thoughts about this killing?” Stone asked the group.

“We’ve all got the same thought,” Harley Davis said.

“Don and Dick were of different generations,” Stone said. “Would they have ever worked together on something?”

“Not recently,” Rawls said. “Don’s been retired for, I think, six years.”

“Where was his last posting?”

“Berlin.”

“And where was Dick at the time?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Could it have been Berlin?”

Rawls shrugged. “Everybody based in Europe got to Berlin sooner or later.”

Stone and Dino sat down on the front steps, and everybody fell silent.

An hour later a state police car drove up, and four men got out. Sergeant Young was the driver. “Good morning,” he said.

“No it ain’t,” Rawls replied.

“What have we got here?”

Stone and Dino took him into the house and showed him the corpse in the bedroom, then told him what they had observed since arriving, including the footprint. “Nearest house is a couple of hundred yards over there,” Stone said, pointing. “They should have heard the shot.”

“It’s a whole lot like the other killing, isn’t it?” Young asked.

“Sure is,” Stone replied.

“What did Dick Stone and Don Brown have in common?”

Stone spoke up. “They both lived on the same island, and they both worked for the same government agency. Brown retired six years ago.”

Stone and Dino left the sergeant and the crime-scene people to their work and went back to the front porch.

“Ed, when did you last talk to Don?”

“Last night, after supper, about nine.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Don called me, wanted to have lunch with the three of us tomorrow, that is, today. Said he had something to tell us.”

“Any hints about what he wanted to tell you?”

“No. Don liked to think things over before he spoke.”

“You think it had anything to do with Dick’s murder?”

“My guess is yes. He asked me to call Harley and Mack, and I did.”

The other two men nodded.

“He wouldn’t have made a lunch date if he’d intended to shoot himself,” Rawls said.

“That makes sense. Be sure and tell the sergeant about the call.” Rawls nodded. “This sort of stuff isn’t supposed to happen,” he said. “You do your work for thirty-five or forty years and you retire, and you’re out of it. Nobody comes looking for you five or six years later.”

“Don found out something,” Harley said. “God knows what.”

“Any of you know how Don spent his day yesterday?”

Jimmy Hotchkiss spoke up. “I know he was here at lunchtime, because I send the papers out to him every day.” He looked around him. “And don’t you other fellers get any ideas; I’m not running a paper-delivery service, except for a couple of people, like Don, who couldn’t get in the store easy.”