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bulged from the mottled, storm-colored face. Those eyes, together with the gaping and twisted mouth, conveyed an unmistakable emotion: fear. Like Hilda, Paul Henderson appeared to have died suddenly—and in the powerful, icy grip of terror.
    Jenny hadn’t been a close friend of the dead man’s. She had known him, of course, because everyone knew everyone else in a town as small as Snowfield. He had seemed pleasant enough, a good law officer. She felt wretched about what had happened to him. As she stared at his contorted face, a rope of nausea tied itself into a knot of dull pain in her stomach, and she had to look away.
    The deputy’s sidearm wasn’t in his holster. It was on the floor, near the body. A 9mm pistol.
    She stared at the gun, considering the implications. Perhaps it had slipped out of the leather holster as the deputy had fallen to the floor. Perhaps. But she doubted it. The most obvious conclusion was that Henderson had drawn the pistol to defend himself against an attacker.
    If that were the case, then he hadn’t been felled by a poison or a disease.
    Jenny glanced behind her. Lisa was still standing at the open door, leaning against the jamb, staring out at Skyline Road.
    Getting off her knees, turning away from the corpse, Jenny crouched over the weapon for long seconds, studying it, trying to decide whether or not to touch it. She was not as worried about contagion as she had been immediately after finding Mrs. Beck’s body. This was looking less and less like a case of some bizarre plague. Besides, if an exotic disease was stalking Snowfield, it was frighteningly virulent, and Jenny almost surely was contaminated by now. She had nothing to lose by picking up the pistol and studying it more closely. What most concerned her was that she might obliterate incriminating fingerprints or other important evidence.
    But even if Henderson had been murdered, it wasn’t likely that his killer had used the victim’s own gun, conveniently leaving fingerprints on it. Furthermore, Paul didn’t appear to have been shot; on the contrary, if any shooting had been done, he was probably the one who had pulled the trigger.
    She picked up the gun and examined it. The magazine had a ten-round capacity, but three rounds were missing. The sharp odor of burnt gunpowder told her that the weapon had been fired recently; sometime today; maybe even within the past hour.
    Carrying the pistol, scanning the blue tile floor, she rose and walked to one end of the reception area, then to the other end. Her eye caught a glint of brass, another, then another: three expended cartridges.
    None of the shots had been fired downward, into the floor. The highly polished blue tiles were unmarred.
    Jenny pushed through the swinging gate in the wooden railing, moving into the area that TV cops always called the “bull pen.” She walked down an aisle between facing pairs of desks, filing cabinets, and work tables. In the center of the room, she stopped and let her gaze travel slowly over the pale green walls and the white acoustic-tile ceiling, looking for bullet holes. She couldn’t find any.
    That surprised her. If the gun hadn’t been discharged into the floor, and if it hadn’t been aimed at the front windows—which it hadn’t; no broken glass—then it had to have been fired with the muzzle pointing into the room, waist-high or higher. So where had the slugs gone? She couldn’t see any ruined furniture, no splintered wood or torn sheet-metal or shattered plastic, although she knew that a 9mm bullet would do considerable damage at the point of impact.
    If the expended rounds weren’t in this room, there was only one other place they could be: in the man or men at whom Paul Henderson had taken aim.
    But if the deputy had wounded an assailant—or two or three assailants—with three shots from a police handgun, three shots so squarely placed in the assailant’s body trunk that the bullets had been stopped and had not passed through,