“I can’t be responsible for what they might do if they see you touching that body,” Kypo warned. “It’s been cleansed.” A shadow emerged out of the darker shadows. Kypo’s wife came to his side, her face tight with fear.

“What do you mean he is killed again?” Shan asked.

It was Kypo’s spouse who answered, her eyes flaring for a moment as Shan took another step toward the body. “Bones, heart, head,” she said, her voice heavy with warning.

Another figure appeared, silhouetted in the doorway to the street. The hulking blacksmith, the second husband of the household, cursed and made a quick lunge at Shan. His fist was blocked by Kypo’s raised arm.

“I was taking him on his passage,” Shan declared in a level voice, “before half the people of Tumkot even knew he was dead.”

The blacksmith shoved Kypo back and took another step toward Shan, his hand reaching for a hammer on his belt. “He is the one who brings them back when they die,” Kypo called out. “Shan knows the words to say. He wears a gau. He was a prisoner of Major Cao,” he added, struggling how best to explain Shan.

The big man’s arm swung up again, but more slowly. Shan did not move as the man pushed open the top of Shan’s shirt and pulled out the prayer amulet hanging from his neck. The blacksmith’s face wrinkled in confusion. He did not protest when the wife of the household pulled him away, back into the shadows.

“I explained already that his bones were broken in the fall, that the holes were put in his chest by the knobs,” Shan said to Kypo.“Those are the explanations for what happened to his body.” But what had Kypo’s wife said? Bones, heart, head.

The Tibetan just stared wordlessly at Shan, as if to say Shan did not understand.

Shan, more confused than ever, pulled the blanket back to expose the upper torso. “The body was given to me on the trail above the road to the base camp. I helped wrap him in canvas and tie him to the mule.”

Two Tibetan women appeared, carrying torma offerings, little deities shaped out of butter. As they positioned themselves beside the body, a teenage boy appeared, anger in his eyes, holding a staff before him as if to threaten the two outsiders

“Megan!” Yates suddenly exclaimed, then quickly lowered the pack on his back, extracted his small computer and set it on a half wall along one of the stalls. A moment later its screen began to glow and he started scrolling through lists of files.

Shan eyed the gathering Tibetans behind Kypo. There were more than ten now, all watching him with intense distrust, several holding objects that could be used as weapons.

Yates, oblivious to the hostile, expanding crowd, tapped on the keys of his computer. “Megan has. . had a special technique she used to weed out the climbers she thought wouldn’t make it to the top. She kept a file in her computer of photos. On any expedition she was affiliated with she made sure everyone saw them before they climbed above base camp.”

“I don’t understand,” Shan said.

The American gestured Shan toward the screen with a grim expression. “The dead,” he said in English. “She collected the dead.” Yates began to scroll through a series of macabre photographs. “According to this, Tenzin was the twenty-fifth dead climber she photographed.”

With a shudder Shan recognized the sherpa. He had gone up to the advance camps himself only once, but it had been high enough to see three of the gruesome figures frozen to the mountain, slowly being covered with snow and ice. He glanced up at Yates in confusion. The image on the screen was simply Tenzin in repose, his body laid out at the base of the rock face from which he had fallen.

“I looked at it the day you took Tenzin away,” Yates explained. “My gut said there was something amiss, but I couldn’t find it.”

It took Shan a few seconds of silent searching to find the answer. With new foreboding he pointed to Tenzin’s feet.

The American sagged. “Damn it, no,” he moaned in an anguished voice. “Not Tenzin.” It was indeed as if Tenzin had just died again.

“What is it?” Kypo demanded over his shoulder.

“The boots,” Shan explained.

“They’re backward,” Yates said. “His climbing boots are on the wrong feet.”

“But what does it mean?” the Tibetan asked.

“It means he was murdered,” Shan said. “I should have seen it,” he said, anguish now in his voice. “If I had seen it I might have. . ” His words drifted off. Done what? Shan himself felt like one more victim running before the deadly avalanche let loose the day the minister died. No, he chastised himself as he turned back toward the body, these villagers deserved the truth. He knew now the avalanche had started with Tenzin, not with the minister. “What it means,” he said, “is that it was not the hand of the mountain that killed Tenzin, it was the hand of a man.”

“Who here is his family?” Shan asked after a moment.

“A sister is here, with her son,” Kypo said, gesturing to a woman in her forties and the teenage boy who wielded the staff. “His mother is on the other side, in Nepal.”

“They must roll him over,” Shan said.

“He’s been cleansed,” the sister protested. “Purified for his passage on.”

“And what kind of passage will that be,” Shan asked, “if we cannot send him with the truth? I need to turn him over. You saw something when you cleaned him, evidence of the third killing.”

The woman searched the confused faces of her companions then gestured for Kypo, not Shan, to help turn the body over.

Bones, heart, head. At first everyone had thought he had died from the fall that had crushed so many bones. Then two bullets had been shot into his heart. Shan investigated the third killing of Tenzin by studying the back of his head.

Somehow murder always seemed abstract to Shan until he saw the sign of the deathblow. A dark, empty thing began gnawing inside him as he gazed at the mark at the base of the sherpa’s neck, but the foreboding was quickly replaced by shame. He should have known. He had failed Tenzin, and by doing so had given room for the murderer, then the knobs, to play their games with the people of the hills.

After a moment he spoke into Kypo’s ear, then waited as Kypo disappeared, the Tibetans getting more and more restless, until a minute later Kypo returned from his supply stores holding a foot-long steel pin, pointed at the bottom.

Shan took the pin and extended it for all to see, then pushed back the thick hair at the base of Tenzin’s neck. “He was sleeping at his new advance camp. There’s enough soil and gravel there to use tent stakes like this. Someone came up and sank this one into the back of his neck. It was over instantly-no blood, no pain. Then the killer pulled him from his sleeping bag, dressed him, in his haste putting the boots on the wrong feet, and dropped him over the side.” He glanced at Kypo. “Using a frayed rope certain to break to complete the image of someone who had died in a fall.” It had seemed so obvious that he had died in a fall no one had bothered to ask any questions. Shan looked back at the small puncture at the base of Tenzin’s neck, noticing a speck of soil at the edge of the wound. The pin had probably been taken out of the ground then reinserted after the killer was done.

The villagers reacted as if they had seen Shan himself drive the pin into Tenzin’s spinal cord.

“The mountain people don’t kill each other,” the blacksmith growled. “You outsiders killed him!”

“I didn’t kill him,” Shan shot back, then gestured toward Yates. “This man didn’t kill him.” A man stepped forward, an ax in his raised hand. Yates retreated into the shadows. So much for allies, Shan thought. He eased backward to avoid the man’s swing but then another villager advanced at his flank, his face dark with anger, his hand clutching a short club.

Suddenly the American was back, brandishing a long hoe, swinging it to clear a radius of several feet around Shan.