“Room six,” I said. I thought of telling them not to look, but I knew they’d have to eventually. There was nothing they learned in the academy to prepare them for this.

“Holy Sweet Jesus,” I heard one of them say when they peeked into the room. They closed the door and kept it closed.

One of the officers came to me. “Chief Maven will be here in a few minutes,” he said.

“I figured as much,” I said. “Your partner going to be all right?” He had disappeared behind the squad car. I didn’t have to guess what he was doing.

“I don’t know. I’m going to go wake up the owner of the motel.”

Chief Maven pulled in a few minutes later. He came out of his car looking like a man who had been rousted out of bed in the middle of the night to come look at a murder scene. He flipped a pad of paper out of his coat and spoke to the officers for a minute, looked at the door of room six, and then at the two of us standing there. “McKnight,” he said as he approached us. “Alex McKnight.” The man had the cold blue eyes of a cop, the mustache that needed a good trim, the timeworn face. And that voice an old cop uses like a dentist uses a drill.

“That would be me,” I said.

“You called this in?”

“Yes, Chief.”

“Start at the beginning.”

“I found him, sir,” Edwin said.

Ma ven shot him a look that would’ve taken the rust off a weather vane. “I haven’t started talking to you yet,” he said.

Edwin closed his mouth and looked at the ground.

“This is Edwin Fulton,” I said. “He found him, he called me, I came to the scene, and then I called the police. That’s it.”

“Says here you’re a PI.”

“Yes.”

“You have a card?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I’ve only had my license a few months.”

He tore a sheet from his pad. “Then why don’t you write your address and phone number on a piece of paper and we’ll just pretend it’s a card.”