Darkfall

chair, and examined the grille.
    He said, “The end of the duct has an inward-bent flange all the way around it. The screws go through the edges of the grille and through the flange.”
    “From here,” Rebecca said, “I see the heads of two screws.”
    “That’s all there are. But anything trying to get out of the duct would have to remove at least one of those screws to loosen the grille.”
    “And no rat is that smart,” she said.
    “Even if it was a smart rat, like no other rat God ever put on this earth, a regular Albert Einstein of the rat kingdom, it still couldn’t do the job. From inside the duct, it’d be dealing with the pointed, threaded end of the screw. It couldn’t grip and turn the damned thing with only its paws.”
    “Not with its teeth, either.”
    “No. The job would require fingers.”
    The duct, of course, was much too small for a man-or even a child- to crawl through it.
    Rebecca said. “Suppose a lot of rats, a few dozen of them, jammed up against one another in the duct, all struggling to get out through a ventilation grille. If a real horde of them put enough pressure on the other side of the grille, would they be able to pop the screws through the flange and then shove the grille into the room, out of their way?”
    “Maybe,” Jack said with more than a little doubt. “Even that sounds too smart for rats. But I guess if the holes in the flange were too much bigger than the screws that passed through them, the threads wouldn’t bite on anything, and the grille could be forced off.”
    He tested the vent plate that he had been examining. It moved slightly back and forth, up and down, but not much.
    He said, “This one’s pretty tightly fitted.”
    “One of the others might be looser.”
    Jack stepped down from the chair and put it back where he’d gotten it.
    They went through the suite until they’d found all the vents from the heating system: two in the parlor, one in the bedroom, one in the bath. At each outlet, the grille was fixed firmly in place.
    “Nothing got into the suite through the heating ducts,” Jack said. “Maybe I can make myself believe that rats could crowd up against the back of the grille and force it off, but I’ll never in a million years believe that they left through the same duct and somehow managed to replace the grille behind them. No rat-no animal of any kind you can name-could be that well-trained, that dexterous.”
    “No. Of course not. It’s ridiculous.”
    “So,” he said.
    “So,” she said. She sighed. “Then you think it’s just an odd coincidence that the men here were apparently bitten to death shortly after Wicke heard rats in the walls.”
    “I don’t like coincidences,” he said.
    “Neither do I.”
    “They usually turn out not to be coincidences.”
    “Exactly.”
    “But it’s still the most likely possibility. Coincidence, I mean. Unless…”
    “Unless what?” she asked.
    “Unless you want to consider voodoo, black magic-”
    “No thank you.”
    “-demons creeping through the walls-”
    “Jack, for God’s sake!”
    “-coming out to kill, melting back into the walls and just disappearing.”
    “I won’t listen to this.”
    He smiled. “I’m just teasing, Rebecca.”
    “Like hell you are. Maybe you think you don’t put any credence in that kind of baloney, but deep down inside, there’s a part of you that’s-”
    “Excessively open-minded,” he finished.
    “If you insist on making a joke of it-”
    “I do. I insist.”
    “But it’s true, just the same.”
    “I may be excessively open-minded, if that’s even possible-”
    “It is.”
    “-but at least I’m not inflexible.”
    “Neither am I.”
    “Or rigid.”
    “Neither am I.”
    “Or frightened.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “You figure it.”
    “You’re saying I’m frightened?”
    “Aren’t you, Rebecca?”
    “Of what?”
    “Last night, for one thing.”
    “Don’t be absurd.”
    “Then let’s talk about it.”
    “Not now.”
    He looked at his watch. “Twenty past eleven. We’ll break for lunch at twelve. You promised to talk about it at lunch.”
    “I said if we had time for lunch.”
    “We’ll have time.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “We’ll have time.”
    “There’s a lot to be done here.”
    “We can do it after lunch.”
    “People to interrogate.”
    “We can grill them after lunch.”
    “You’re impossible,