Caxton and Glauer trudged back toward the house through the snow. It had grown significantly colder since they’d arrived in Bellefonte, and the sky had turned heavy and the color of lead. The snow flurry that had come just after dark had stopped, but it looked as if the clouds weren’t done for the night.
“What’s our next step?” Glauer asked, his voice nearly lost under the noise of their shoes crunching the powdery snow. It sounded like teeth grinding together to Caxton, teeth gnashing and tearing. She shook her head. It was only seven o’clock, but it felt much later. “We secure the scene. Call in the necessary people and wait for them to arrive.”
“I meant—” Glauer began, but then he just shook his head.
They walked the rest of the way in silence. Astarte’s house remained just as they’d left it. The cars out front had gained a thin skin of snow that diffused the light of the red and blue flashers so that instead of stabbing out at the night they just glowed fitfully, first one color, then the other. Glauer wanted to switch off the engines of the cars, but Caxton said no—it was important to maintain the integrity of the scene, down to the last detail.
She made the required phone calls. A lone officer of the local police department came quickly, but he did little beyond stringing up some yellow caution tape. He didn’t go inside the house at all. Ambulances arrived on scene next, but the paramedics had to wait for the local coroner’s office to officially pronounce everyone dead. A technician from the morgue arrived half an hour later, an annoyed-?looking doctor in a fur-?lined parka with the hood up. He went inside the house and came back out five minutes later. He just nodded to the paramedics and they went inside. Not that there was much for them to do. Lights came on in other houses up and down the street. Anxious-?looking people peered out of their windows, but none of them came down to have a look for themselves. Glauer offered to canvass the neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking if anyone had seen anything. “I doubt anybody did,” he said, “but it’ll calm them down if they have somebody to actually talk to.” Caxton cared very little what Astarte’s neighbors thought, but it was something for the big cop to do, and she let him go with a sigh of relief. He’d been pacing up and down the sidewalk, looking like he had something to say but never actually coming out and saying it.
Her own tension kept mounting, and she just wanted to get away. It was nighttime—it was going to be nighttime for another twelve hours—and she knew she wouldn’t relax until dawn came. There was work to be done, but she couldn’t leave, not until she could hand the scene over to someone officially capable of taking charge. Before she knew it she herself was pacing. The exercise kept her joints from freezing up if nothing else.
An unmarked late-?model car drove up and she squinted through the headlights, trying to see who was inside. There were two occupants, a man and a woman. She was very surprised when she saw them get out of the car—it was Fetlock and Vesta Polder.
The deputy marshal nodded at her, then walked over to talk to the local cop, who was standing guard at the front of the house. Vesta came straight over to Caxton and took her hands. The older woman looked over her shoulder, scanned the trees lining the street as if she expected to see ghosts there. “Astarte has passed,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t have come, especially not at this time of day. I don’t like to be away from my home at night, as you know. But I must see her.”
Caxton wasn’t sure what to make of that. It was against every protocol she knew to let a civilian into a crime scene that was still under investigation. Exceptions were made sometimes for direct family members, but Vesta Polder was no kin of the Arkeleys. Vesta wouldn’t explain why it was so important she see the body, either. She just stared into Caxton’s eyes as if trying to hypnotize her.
“Come on,” Caxton said, finally. It was still her scene, until a detective from the local PD showed up, so she was still in charge of who went into the house. She led Vesta inside, warning her not to touch anything, then took her up to the room where Astarte’s life had ended. The widow lay exactly as Caxton had first seen her. The blood on the floor had started to dry in the warmth of the house, but Vesta walked around it with mincing little steps, careful not to get any on her black boots. Caxton knew Polder enough to understand she wasn’t just being squeamish. Vesta moved to the foot of the bed and closed her eyes. Her lips moved, but Caxton couldn’t hear what she might be saying. A prayer, she supposed. When she had finished she remained there, eyes closed, hands held out slightly at her sides.