He moved around her and squatted for a closer look. He didn't touch it. He didn't have to. There wasn't a drop of blood on it, and it was lying faceup. A playing card.
The ace of spades.
"Son of a bitch," he said.
He was closing the office door behind him when he heard footsteps on the stairs. Jay pressed himself against a wall and waited. A moment later, a slender man with a pencil-thin mustache stepped into the hall. He wore slippers and a silk dressing gown, and there was an unbroken expanse of pale skin where his eyes should have been. His head turned slowly until he was looking into the shadows at Jay. "I can see your mind, Popinjay," he said.
Jay stepped out. "Call the police, Sascha," he said. "And don't call me Popinjay, dammit."
8:00 A.M.
Brennan leaned into the hill, arms pumping, breath flowing easily, sprinting up the steep grade near the end of the run that had taken him over forested hills and through dew-drenched meadows. The route he followed varied, but always ended at the unpaved county road that led him, sweaty and pleasantly winded, back to the gravel driveway with ARCHER LANDSCAPING AND NURSERY posted at the entrance.
The driveway looped around a series of gardens that were living advertisements of his horticultural skills. First was a Japanese miniature hill garden in the tsukiyama form, then an English shrubbery, and third a traditional flower bed blooming with a dozen different species of a dozen different hues. The driveway circled the flower bed and led past two greenhouses-one for tropical foliage, the other for desert species-and the A-frame house.
Brennan finished his run with a gut-busting sprint that brought him around behind the A-frame. He took a few minutes to cool down and calm his breathing, then folded himself comfortably into a meditative posture and gazed out over the kare sansui, the raked gravel bed rippling like frozen water in the morning breeze.