No Immunity

to his full six foot four. “Come on, it’s pitch-black out there. How could I miss headlights?”
    “Did you see anyone in the parking lot?”
    “Yeah, but the car shot out of here so fast, I couldn’t make out anything but speed. So that’s good as nothing, right?”
    “Damned suspicious, and useless, right.”
    “Did you notify anyone?”
    “Not yet.”
    “But two strange vehicles in an empty parking lot, next to the room of a stranger... We might as well be advertising a circus in here. Watch the door.” She turned on the light and started toward the body.
    “The overhead? Do you want to announce us to the world? Don’t you have a flashlight?”
    “Right, Tchernak. It’d be so much better to be discovered lurking in here like burglars. If they’re going to spot us, they’ve already done it. Now’s the time for speed.”
    Blood was matted into the orange plaid bedspread all around Grady Hummacher’s body. His was the outside bed nearest the door. She moved between it and its twin. “Tchernak, the blood’s not just on his bed. It’s all over the other one, much thicker there. Strange.”
    “Maybe not. He had two boys with him, Panamanianans—“
    “The seismic aides?”
    “Two tribesmen he passed off as seismic aides. Adcock thinks they knew enough about his oil exploration that he didn’t want to leave them behind. The boys are deaf and mute. He brought them back from Panama, stashed them in an apartment in the barrio, and when they got sick, his doctor friend, Louisa Larson, took them to her office and Grady snatched them out of there and disappeared.”
    “Wha...?” Her head was swimming. She eyed the bloodstained bed. “Sick? Feverish, bleeding out?”
    “The doc, Louisa, didn’t say.”
    “You didn’t touch anything of theirs, did you?” She could hear the alarm in her voice and felt him stiffening behind her. “Did you?”
    “No. Probably not.”
    Again, fear spiked through her. How had the virus gotten here? Did it come from the boys? Could Grady Hummacher have been in contact with the dead woman? Or was this an epidemic much worse than she had imagined? “Kiernan, we need to call the cops.”
    “In a minute.” She turned from the bloody sheets to Grady Hummacher lying on his stomach, his face into the pillow. It was too late to worry about preserving the scene. The scene was already compromised, the body already moved. She bent over, looking closely at Grady’s arm. No visible bleeding through the skin. But his head was a different story. The bush of sandy hair was caked with blood in the area of the right rear parietal bone just above and behind the ear.
    She didn’t move his head. Instead she took off her jacket, wrapped it around her hand, and pushed the pillow down until she could see what she knew was there: the entrance hole in his left eyebrow. She had been ready to discover him dead of disease, but this—a gunshot wound— took things to a different level of desperation. “He didn’t die of virus. Grady was shot.”
    “Shot?”
    “In the face.”
    Tchernak’s “Oh” was so soft, she could barely hear it. Tchernak needed time to recover from this second shock. But they had no time. “You haven’t found the gun, right?”
    “No. But listen”—Tchernak pulled himself up straight—“like I said, he had to have brought the boys up here. He snatched them out of Panama, brought them to Vegas, left them, then snatched them out of there and brought them here to this miserable motel room in the middle of nowhere. It was probably his gun. They probably shot him.”
    She shook her head. “Doesn’t feel right.”
    “Why not?”
    “That would be spur-of-the-moment. But Adcock was already worried two days ago. He had some reason for worrying about Grady.”
    Tchernak strode to the door. “This is insane, us standing here in a death scene. I’m going to call the cops.”
    “No! The local sheriff is in this neck-deep. He’s the last man to call. The only people we can trust are ourselves.”
    “You’re planning to leave the scene of the murder? How will that make you look to this sheriff?”
    “The gun, Tchernak. Check the bathroom. I’ll explain the rest later.” She looked under the bed, under the table, in the dresser drawers. “Nothing.”
    “Same in here. Look, you go out of your way to spite authority, but not me. I’m making a report—”
    “Fine, you just stay right here and do that.”
    Before she could move, the door burst