No Immunity

even the AR window was dim. A gust of voices blew out of the doorway as she went by, but it was quieter in there than she would have guessed.
    Next to the bar was a walkway. She moved in, immediately thankful for the shelter of the buildings. Anyone looking at her progress up the street would assume she had done as she said and headed into the bar for dinner. Anyone not invested in a setup. Now, if only the walkway went all the way through to the back of the businesses. She hurried on, moving flat-footed. The light from the bar was gone, and she squinted against the black, moved carefully up a wooden staircase, and found herself on a narrow street. Dim squares of light shone from houses on the far side, marking the windows but adding no light to the street. On the near side an overgrown bank led down to the row of businesses. She counted three storefronts to the mortuary.
    Scrambling down an incline through underbrush she couldn’t see, for the purpose of breaking into the funeral home to eyeball a dead body—good she wouldn’t be telling Tchernak about this. She heel-skied down the incline, her feet smacking into hard protrusions, sharp things grabbing at her pant legs, accompanied by scurrying noises she chose not to think about. Closer now, she could make out an unpaved alley one lane wide running from the corner as far as the funeral home. The bar owners, with their more-socially-acceptable street-side deliveries, hadn’t bothered to clear ground another fifty feet.
    She stopped beside the alley, checked around her, but in the dark she couldn’t tell if a car had parked there recently, only that the brush had not been smoothed by regular parking.
    No light illumined the wood-paneled double door, but she could make out the sign next to it: Constant Mortuary. It was a door she was not going through. Slowly she walked along the track back toward the hotel, looking for nooks between storefronts, sheriff’s deputies huddled in them. In this little valley between hillside and buildings the wind was weaker, but the cold from the ground held her feet and calves like icy metal clamps. After fifty yards she turned and started back, this time eyeing the roofline. There had to be a window well midway to the street.
    Was she walking wide-eyed into a trap? The don’t-try-this-at-home-kids of investigators’ training? “Couldn’t resist, could you?” Tchernak would be saying. “Just couldn’t wait and see.”
    For once the man would be right. Fox had made his reputation by letting a suspect assume he was free. If she walked—or morgue-broke—into a trap she’d not only be in jail, she’d be a fool. But if she did the prudent thing, the woman’s body would disappear into the bureaucracy or the crematorium, and Fox’s statement about her would become accepted fact. There would be no proof Fox was lying. She would never know if this was the index case of an epidemic barely dodged. And the dead woman would be a faceless, nameless addendum to a blip in history, hidden forever.
    Besides, she could move fast. She took the stairs to a porch, two units down from the mortuary, swung herself up over the porch, and stepped onto the tar-paper roof. In the starless dark the wind snapped her pant legs. Scraping noises came from behind her. She jerked around. Roof rats, she told herself. Frightened little creatures running away. But suddenly her running shoes felt paper thin.
    The window well was close to the back alley, an octagonal hole three feet across, a one-story-high air vent. It was hardly large enough to funnel in sunlight at noon, but for her purposes the narrow space was ideal. She ran a foot along the edge of the roof, knocking pebbles and other detritus into the well. She froze, alert for reactions to the telltale noise. Whisperings, feet moving closer. All she could make out was the wind playing with an edge of tar paper.
    Kneeling, she stuck her head over the edge and peered down into utter black. The smell of rot was nauseating-Creatures had died down there for a hundred years.
    She tested the gutter, swung herself over, and walked her feet down the wall till she could feel the top of the window. The air was so thick with dust, rodent hairs, and decayed organic matter, she felt like she was inhaling mulch. With sudden foreboding she slid her feet along the top of the window frame. She had been assuming the mortician opened this window, this lone source of natural light, but now, as she tried to shift the