“I was joking about the hair.”

“I wasn’t. Quickly now. We’ve established a timeline, and the longer it takes to phone…”

Unlike the basement, this space wasn’t empty. It wasn’t exactly jam-packed, either, just dotted with covered furniture and storage chests. From the dust, none of it had belonged to the previous owners. Not unless they’d moved out fifty years ago. As I walked, I remembered what Gabriel had said about footprints, and I stopped dead, cursing under my breath.

“What’s wrong?” Gabriel’s head crested the steps.

“You mentioned footprints. If someone’s up here, that would be a sure sign of it.” I backed up a few steps and waved my light around.

Gabriel gave me 1.3 seconds before saying, “Anything?”

I took another five before answering. “Not even my own, because someone has swept a path. I can see a few of TC’s prints, but he seems to have stuck mostly to the cleared part. Meaning at the end of this path, presumably, is where the head was. Or where the killer is lying in wait.” I raised my voice. “Did you hear that? I know where you are!”

“And now he knows where you are,” Gabriel muttered.

“Like he wouldn’t have the moment we started talking. Also, it could be a she.”

“Olivia…”

“I’m moving. Following this handy path to my doom. Did I mention I had a vision down there? I think it was some kind of banshee. Which is—”

“I know what a banshee is, and I hope you’re joking, and that you would not venture up here after hearing a death knell.”

I said nothing.

“Olivia…?”

“Hold on.” A few more steps. “I think I see where…”

I trailed off as I shone the flashlight at the path’s end. It was a table. Covered in a sheet. With something under that sheet.

The rest of Ciara Conway.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

As Gabriel phoned it in, I moved around the table, illuminating every surface with the flashlight beam. The swath swept around the table left enough room for the killer to maneuver without leaving footprints. I couldn’t smell the body or the embalming fluid; the stink of bleach was too strong. He—or she—had washed everything down. Laid Ciara out here, covered her, cleaned up, and left.

When Gabriel finished his call, he came up for a look himself. He surveyed the area and then scanned the floor with the flashlight, until he was reassured I hadn’t messed up anything. We left the sheet in place.

“We should wait downstairs,” he said.

We went down to the second-floor hallway. As we waited, I told him about the banshee. I was showing him the owl triskelion when a voice called, “Hello!” from the back door. The police had arrived.

Gabriel handled things from there. I’d met the chief before. Eddie Burton. A quiet man in his forties, with a wife and two teenagers who’d come along to the diner with him for dinner once a week. Sending the chief wasn’t unusual. He was pretty much the entire force. There was a local college boy taking police sciences who worked during the summer months, and two of the elders—Veronica and Roger—who volunteered. That was it.

Burton gave absolutely no sign that he considered me in any way connected to this crime. That surprised me. I’d just found a dead body mutilated postmortem … and my parents were supposedly serial killers who’d mutilated their victims postmortem. Even I wondered if there was some connection. Yet when Gabriel explained what had happened, Burton accepted his account.

I supposed it was pretty damned unlikely that I’d call the cops if I’d killed Ciara. Paw prints in the attic confirmed my story, as did those in the basement, along with the dead mice and my cat’s condition.

While Burton seemed to know what he was doing, I expected they’d need to call in the state police for this. I was wrong. As far as Burton was concerned, this was just a dump site. The city would handle the murder investigation, picking up from the missing persons’ case, and they’d want to process the scene. Escorting them in seemed the extent of Burton’s duties. That and the paperwork.

“Gonna be a lot of paperwork,” he said with a sigh. Then he flushed. “No disrespect to Ms. Conway. Horrible way for a girl to go. Horrible for anyone, of course, but a nice girl like that…” He shook his head. “I hope they catch whoever did this.”

He said it with all due gravity, but with the distinct air of one who’d play no role in that “catching.”

“Won’t they at least consider the possibility she was killed here?” I asked.

“Doesn’t seem like it. Looks like some kind of sicko serial—” He stopped, his pale face flushing again. “Sorry, Miss Jones.”

“I meant, couldn’t she have been killed within Cainsville, if not necessarily in this house?”

He looked as if I’d suggested aliens had murdered Ciara Conway. “We don’t get that sort of thing here.”

“I’m sure Cainsville has a very low murder rate—”

“It has no murder rate,” he said. “Never been a homicide. Accidents, sure, but that’s it.”

I glanced at Gabriel, expecting a faint eye roll that said he’d dispute this—in private—later. But he nodded and said, “Chief Burton’s right. Which is not to say that I share his opinion that this murder absolutely could not have taken place within the town limits, but it seems unlikely. However, given the hiding place for the body, the killer may have a connection to Cainsville, as Ms. Conway did.”

“Hopefully an equally distant one,” Burton said. A rap sounded at the door. “That’d be Doc Webster. If you two would like to get on home, you can just let her in on your way out.”

“Thank you,” I said. “And thank you for making this easy.”

Another frown, as if he was trying to figure out why he wouldn’t have made it easy, and I was reminded yet again why I loved this town.

“Next time you come by the diner, coffee and pie are on me,” I said.

His frown deepened. “That wouldn’t be right, Miss Jones, but thank you for offering.”

Gabriel had gone ahead to let Dr. Webster in. I stopped partway to the door and turned back to Burton.

“I’d like to apologize to the owners for breaking in,” I said. “Are they local?”

“She was. Died a few years back.” He hastened to add, “Cancer. She was seventy. Had a husband, but I’m not sure if he’s around anymore. Alive, I mean. The house was hers, and he moved back to the city after she died. He never really got used to Cainsville. Left as soon as he could.” A note of wonder in his voice, as if he couldn’t imagine such a thing.

“So it’s owned by her children?”

“Never had any. They married late in life. Nephew owns it, I think. Maybe great-nephew. He’s never lived here, and there’s some reason it can’t be sold. Contested will, maybe? It’s complicated. Damned shame, too, place like this. Should have a family living in it. You leave a house like this empty and…” He waved toward the attic, as if to say harboring corpses was the fate that befell abandoned homes. “Damned shame.”

It was.

TC hadn’t scratched up Gabriel’s car, which was a relief because I had not failed to note that he’d never actually replied when I said I wouldn’t be on the hook for damages. I took him back to my apartment and he happily trotted inside. TC, that is—not Gabriel, although he did come in, without comment or request, rather like the cat, presuming he’d be welcome and making himself at home.

Gabriel watched TC settle into his cardboard-box bed. “He certainly seems happy to be home, which suggests he didn’t leave willingly.”

I got the lone can of tuna down from a cupboard. “Or he did, and he regrets it now.”

I opened the can. TC sprang up and flew onto the counter, purring urgently as I dumped the tuna onto a plate.

“I don’t know what happened,” I said. “And I’m not sure I ever will. Too many unknowns, which seems to be the story of my life these days.”

I pointed Gabriel in the direction of the files I’d brought home. While he fetched the pages he needed, I looked around the tiny kitchen.