Darkfall

Goldbloom said. “I mean, I’ve seen rat bites before. Every now and then, a wino will be drinking in an alley, have a heart attack or a stroke, right there behind the garbage bin, where nobody finds him for maybe two days. Meanwhile, the rats get at him. So I know what a rat bite looks like, and this just doesn’t seem to match up on a number of points.”
    “Could it have been… dogs?” Rebecca asked.
    “No. For one thing, the bites are too small. I think we can rule out cats, too.”
    “Any ideas?” Jack asked.
    “No. It’s weird. Maybe the autopsy will pin it down for us.”
    Rebecca said, “Did you know the bathroom door was locked when the uniforms got here? They had to break it down.”
    “So I heard. A locked room mystery,” Goldbloom said.
    “Maybe there’s not much of a mystery to it,” Rebecca said thoughtfully. “If Vastagliano was killed by some kind of animal, then maybe the thing was small enough to get under the door.”
    Goldbloom shook his head. “It would’ve had to’ve been real small to manage that. No. It was bigger. A good deal bigger than the crack under the door.”
    “About what size would you say?”
    “As big as a large rat.”
    Rebecca thought for a moment. Then: “There’s an outlet from a heating duct in there. Maybe the thing came through the duct.”
    “But there’s a grille over the duct,” Jack said. “And the vents in the grille are narrower than the space under the door.”
    Rebecca took two steps to the bathroom, leaned through the doorway, looked around, craning her neck. She came back and said, “You’re right. And the grille’s firmly in place.”
    “And the little window is closed,” Jack said.
    “And locked,” Goldbloom said.
    Rebecca brushed a shining strand of hair from her forehead. “What about the drains? Could a rat come up through the tub drain?”
    “No,” Goldbloom said. “Not in modern plumbing.”
    “The toilet?”
    “Unlikely.”
    “But possible?”
    “Conceivable, I suppose. But, you see, I’m sure it wasn’t just one animal.”
    “How many?” Rebecca asked.
    “There’s no way I can give you an exact count. But… I would think, whatever they were, there had to be at least… a dozen of them.”
    “Good heavens,” Jack said.
    “Maybe two dozen. Maybe more.”
    “How do you figure?”
    “Well,” Goldbloom said, “Vastagliano was a big man, a strong man. He’d be able to handle one, two, three rat- size animals, no matter what sort of things they were. In fact, he’d most likely be able to deal with half a dozen of them. Oh, sure, he’d get bitten a few times, but he’d be able to take care of himself. He might not be able to kill all of them, but he’d kill a few and keep the rest at bay. So it looks to me as if there were so many of these things, such a horde of them, that they simply overwhelmed him.”
    With insect-quick feet, a chill skittered the length of Jack’s spine. He thought of Vastagliano being borne down onto the bathroom floor under a tide of screeching rats-or perhaps something even worse than rats. He thought of the man harried at every flank, bitten and torn and ripped and scratched, attacked from all directions, so that he hadn’t the presence of mind to strike back effectively, his arms weighed down by the sheer numbers of his adversaries, his reaction time affected by a numbing horror. A painful, bloody, lonely death. Jack shuddered.
    “And Ross, the bodyguard,” Rebecca said. “You figure he was attacked by a lot of them, too?”
    “Yes,” Goldbloom said. “Same reasoning applies.”
    Rebecca blew air out through clenched teeth in an expression of her frustration. “This just makes the locked bathroom even more difficult to figure. From what I’ve seen, it looks as if Vastagliano and his bodyguard were both in the kitchen, making a late- night snack. The attack started there, evidently. Ross was quickly overwhelmed. Vastagliano ran. He was chased, couldn’t get to the front door because they cut him off, so he ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. Now, the rats-or whatever- weren’t in there when he locked the door, so how did they get in there?”
    “And out again,” Goldbloom reminded her.
    “It almost has to be plumbing, the toilet.”
    “I rejected that because of the numbers involved,” Goldbloom said. “Even if there weren’t any plumbing traps designed to stop a rat, and even if it held its breath and swam through whatever water barriers there