My room was like all the others I've slept in over the past few years. The bedspread was green and quilted and slick, and the picture above the bed was a bridge somewhere in Europe, looked like. Other than those little identifiers, I could have been in any cheap motel room, anywhere in America. At least it smelled clean. I pulled out my makeup-and-medicine bag and put it in the little bathroom. Then I went and sat on the bed, leaning over to peer at the dial-out instructions on the ancient telephone. After I'd looked up the right number in the little area phone book, I called the law enforcement building and asked for the sheriff. Branscom's voice came on in less than a minute, and he was clearly less than happy to talk to me a second time. He started in again on how I'd been misrepresented—as if I'd had anything to do with that—and I interrupted him.

"I thought you'd like to know that a dead man named something like Chess, or Chester, is in the burned laundromat on Florida Street, about five blocks off the square."

"What?" There was a long moment of silence while Harvey Branscom let that soak in. "Darryl Chesswood? He's at home in his daughter's house. They added on a room for him last year when he began to forget where he lived. How dare you say such a thing?" He sounded honestly, righteously, offended.

"That's what I do," I said, and laid the receiver gently on its cradle.

The town of Sarne had just gotten a freebie.

I lay back on the slippery green bedspread and crossed my hands over my ribs. I didn't need to be a psychic to predict what would happen now. The sheriff would call Chesswood's daughter. She would go to check on her dad, and she'd find he was gone. The sheriff would probably go to the site himself, since he'd be embarrassed to send a deputy on such an errand. He'd find Darryl Chesswood's body.

The old man had died of natural causes—a cerebral hemorrhage, I thought.

It was always refreshing to find someone who hadn't been murdered.

T