I said Tanner’s name. He just kept staring. I looked around the bathroom. No gun. I looked at his hands. No gun. I stepped over him and straddled his splayed legs. He didn’t seem to notice. I leaned over and took the lid off the toilet tank and looked inside. No gun. Ditto the bathtub.

I said Tanner’s name again. He didn’t respond. I knelt down beside him and his eyes followed me but he still didn’t say anything when I said his name. I slapped him around a little and it seemed to clear his head marginally.

"Wha--?" he said.

"What the hell is going on here?" I asked.

"Matt?" he said. "What are you doing here?"

"I think right now it’s more important that you answer that question."

"Teresa called me and asked me to come," he said.

"Why?"

He frowned. "She didn’t say, really. I mean, she said she had to talk to me and needed help and to come here at nine-thirty."

"When was this?" I asked.

"Around seven, seven-thirty, I guess."

About the same time she’d called me. "When did you get here?" I said.

He looked at me like I was an idiot. "About nine-thirty, like she asked," he said. "The door was open. I came in."

"Uh-huh. So why have you been hanging out in the bathroom for an hour?"

"She was over there in the corner. I saw. I had to … I had to throw up." He actually looked ashamed at that. I thought it was a pretty reasonable reaction, myself.

"After, I just sat here. I didn’t want to go out there again," he said. "Then I heard the door open and figured I’d better hide. Didn’t know it was you."

I looked at Tanner and thought and made a decision. "Get up," I said.

"What?"

"Get up. You’re going home. In a little while the police are going to be calling you. You were never here. Remember that. You were absolutely never here. I don’t care where you were, but it wasn’t here."

"Don’t you think we ought to tell them what happened?" he said.

"No, I do not. I think that would be just about the dumbest thing you could possibly do right now."

"But--"

"Do you want me to find out what happened here, Tanner?" I said.

"Of course I do, but--"

"Well, you can’t pay me from jail. Now get up."

I helped him to his feet and more or less held him upright as we got out of the bathroom. I felt him stiffen as we walked into the bedroom and tried to steer him so he wouldn’t see any more than he had to. I got him out of the room and into his car. It was still raining that light, stubborn rain.

"You okay to drive?" I asked.

"I think so."

"Straight home. Understand? No stops. And you were never here. The cops call you, you were home watching TV when I found her here. I called you at ten o’clock and told you."

"Yes, but--"

"Tanner, that’s the story I’m telling," I said. "If you don’t back me up we’ll both be ear-deep in shit without a snorkel, and you will never know what went on here. Never. Am I clear?"

He sat there and chewed on his lips for a minute while I stood by his window and got wet. Then he nodded. "Okay," he said.

"Good. Get the hell out of here. I’ve got to call this in."

He started the car and drove off. I watched his taillights and hoped to God I wasn’t wrong about him.

I stared at the wet pavement where Tanner’s car had been. I had a thought. That didn’t seem to be happening often lately, so I paid attention.

I walked over to Sheri’s little blue Honda and knelt down beside it and stuck my arm under it as far as I could reach. The asphalt under the Honda was bone dry. The rain had started at eight, which meant she’d already been parked here then. Was probably already parked here and sitting in room 115 when she’d called me at seven saying she was headed somewhere else. The asphalt under Tanner’s car had been wet, which might back up his claim that he hadn’t gotten there until 9:30.

I stood up and looked around. No one was in the parking lot. No one peeping at me through a motel room window, as far as I could tell. No one cared if I got the clap or moved to Canada.

I went back inside 115 and went over and knelt by the body. There looked to be five entrance wounds, the one in the head and four in the torso. The body shots were all over the place. Even at what had to have been point-blank range, the shooter’s grouping had sucked. He’d probably fired off all five as fast as he could, knowing he couldn’t miss at that distance anyway. The headshot could very well have just been luck.

I glanced at the walls above the body. There was bloodspray, just a few droplets, staining the cigarette-tar about three feet from the floor, which meant she’d been killed here rather than dumped. One small hole in the plaster. The bullet from the headshot was probably lodged in there. The height of the spray and the hole told me she’d been on her knees when the round took the top of her head off. I’d missed the spray and the hole the first time. It’s easy to do. According to the movies you can repaint a room by shooting someone. In reality people just don’t have that much blood in them, and a quart of the stuff sure as hell doesn’t follow the bullet through an exit wound.

There was blood pooled under her head but none under her torso, which meant the other bullets were probably still in her. I revised my idea about the headshot being lucky. If it had gone on through after the other four had lodged in her, that probably meant the shooter had fired his first four from a distance of maybe eight feet max, considering the size of the room, then walked right up to her and delivered a coup de gras from inches away. There was too much blood on her face to see clearly, but I felt pretty sure there’d be powder burns and blowback around the wound.

She was wearing shorts and her legs were already noticeably paler than they’d been in life. I lifted one up slightly and looked at the underside of her calf. A little lividity had already formed there, but the purplish flesh blanched to white when I pressed my thumb into her calf, so the blood hadn’t congealed in the vessels there yet. Which told me nothing I didn’t already know; it wouldn’t have had time to congeal yet anyway. I reached up and kneaded the hinge of her jaw. The flesh there was like a rock. Her neck muscles were stiffening but not locked yet. The rest of her body was still pliable.

That told me something. Rigor starts in the eyelids and the jaw and works its way down. There’s a good deal of variation in the length of time it takes corpses to stiffen, but about three hours was a good working hypothesis for the amount of rigor I was seeing here. I glanced at my watch and was shocked to see it wasn’t even eleven yet. I was beginning to feel better about letting Tanner go. For all I could tell, Sheri had been dead within half an hour of talking to me. Maybe within minutes.

I spent another twenty minutes going through the room and wiping down every surface I could think of -- I wanted to keep Tanner out of this as far as I could -- then another five touching things to put my prints back on. The cops wouldn’t believe I hadn’t poked around before calling them. I gave the bathroom the same treatment, then ground my teeth and went to the phone.

###

Jonah Cooper caught the squeal. I was glad; Coop and I got along, which was more than I could say for my relationship with his boss, the sheriff. Coop was tall and wide and had hands the size of catcher’s mitts and a brain that had come equipped with a lot more RAM than the standard. He’d been a high school football star who was good enough to play his way to a college degree but not good enough for the pros. He’d joined the Sheriff’s Department in 1985 and made detective in ‘89, even though black men weren’t making detective in ‘89 in Dayton County, "New South" be damned. Sheriff Sweeting didn’t particularly like Coop, but Coop cleared cases -- and unlike a lot of the detectives on the county’s payroll, Coop cleared them clean enough to stick when it came time for the trial. Coop was also as gay as Old Paree, but I was certain that I was the only person in the county who knew it. Gay black men weren’t making detective in Dayton County anytime in the next millennium, no matter how many cases they cleared.

Now he was standing with me in the center of room 115 while uniformed deputies buzzed around us. He jammed his hands in his pockets and sighed.

"Well, ain’t this a fuckin’ mess?" he said.

"One way of putting it," I said.

"How about you tell me what brought you out here tonight?"

"This is going to sound pretty fucked up."

"Brother, it’s already fucked up," Coop said. "Whatever you got to say ain’t gonna fuck it any worse, and it ain’t gonna unfuck it, either. So tell me a story."

I told him quite a lot -- how Tanner had hired me, how I’d been seeing a woman named Sheri, how I’d realized Sheri and Teresa were the same woman. I told him about her calling me to set up the meeting and I told him about finding her dead when I arrived. I left Dave Tanner’s presence there out of it entirely, although I did say I’d called him to tell him the bad news. I also left out the cheap little Virgin Mobile phone in my pocket.

"That all?" Coop said when I was through.

"Jesus, Coop, isn’t that enough?"

"It’s more than enough," he said. "That’s what’s bothering me. I was expecting a two-minute pop song and you just sang me a whole goddamn libretto. You ain’t the talkative type usually."

"I’m usually not the type to accidentally be the guy the client’s wife is screwing around with, either," I said.

Coop nodded. "I can see where that would bother you," he said.

"Just a bit, yeah."

"Still, this is a nasty one. You know what has to happen now." Coop sighed and unpocketed his cell phone. "You and me got to go talk to the man."

Next Chapter: FOUR