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during an active investigation.
    Gus rose from the table. “If they’re going to let me open tomorrow, I need to buy some food.”
    “You can use the refrigerator in my apartment for storage,” I offered. “And I’ll clean as much as I can out of the little one behind the bar.”
    “Thanky.” Gus strode over to the counter and hefted the stack of homemade wooden boxes he used to transport Mrs. Gus’s pies from their kitchen where she made them. “Want a pie?” He turned toward us, offering the boxes.
    “Save them for tomorrow,” I said.
    Gus’s beak nose wrinkled. “I don’t serve day-old pie. Besides, what would Mrs. Gus do tomorrow morning?” After a recent illness, Mrs. Gus had cut down to making five pies a day, which made pieces harder to get, and therefore more precious. With this in mind, ignoring the vow I’d made after Thanksgiving dinner to eat lighter until Christmas, I asked if there was a pecan. When Gus said there was, I accepted it and thanked him.
    Chris and I remained at the table after Gus left.
    “I was the last one in the walk-in, wasn’t I?” Chris said. “Around ten? I’ve told the cops that twice. I want to make sure it’s what you remember.”
    “It is,” I confirmed.
    “And was the dead guy still sitting at the bar when I went in there?”
    “Yes, but he left just after.” I’d thought about little else all day. I was sure I was right. Unlike the rest of the crowd who’d driven to Gus’s, the dead man had walked over the hill from the Snuggles. The accident at Main and Main didn’t affect him. He was free to go, even if the rest of them were not.
    “Where’d he go?” Chris asked.
    “I thought he’d gone back to the Snuggles.”
    “And came back here and got himself killed in the walk-in?”
    “We can’t be sure of that,” I said. “Maybe he was killed somewhere else and dumped in there.” Maybe that’s why Binder had taken the techs with him. Somewhere there was another crime scene. Maybe it wasn’t even murder. Maybe the ME was wrong about the injection and, as I’d said to Jamie, when they did the autopsy they’d discover he’d died of a heart attack or a stroke. Which still didn’t make sense. Why would he have been in our walk-in?
    Chris took my hand. “We locked the doors when we went up to bed. There’s no sign of a break-in. That means Mr. Anonymous and possibly his killer were in the restaurant when we went upstairs.”
    I shuddered. Chris was right, but until he said it, I hadn’t thought it all the way through, as he had, and come to the obvious conclusion.
    “Did you actually see him go out the door?” Chris asked.
    “I’m not sure. I can’t remember. Did you?”
    “No.” Chris thought for a moment. “When was the last time you checked the bathrooms?”
    The bathrooms. Because we still felt like guests in Gus’s space, I was hypervigilant about inspecting the restrooms last thing at night before I went up to bed. But the previous night had dragged on and on, with our guests trapped in the restaurant by the accident. It was so late by the time we got everyone out, I’d staggered off to bed without looking in the washrooms.
    I admitted this to Chris, who shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, Julia. He couldn’t have hidden there the whole time. We had guests who were using the restrooms right up until we closed.”
    He was right about that. I specifically remembered that the Bennetts, who had the farthest to drive, had used the facilities immediately before they left. That was almost three hours after I’d last seen the man at the bar who’d died in our walk-in.
    “You can’t lock your apartment,” Chris pointed out.
    We’d had this discussion before. “I’ve told you, Gus says the lock broke ages ago. Besides, what difference does it make? We lock the outside doors to the restaurant.”
    “Normally, no difference,” Chris conceded. “Julia, face facts. We were locked in the building with a corpse, and possibly a