Phantoms

and dreamy murmurs of a thousand peacefully slumbering children.
    However, it wasn’t just the beauty that was arresting. The perfect stillness, the silence— that was what made Jenny pause. On their arrival, she had found it strange. Now she found it ominous.
    “The sheriff’s substation is on the main street,” she told Lisa. “Just two and a half blocks from here.”
    They hurried into the unbeating heart of town.
     

Chapter 5
    Three Bullets
     
    A single fluorescent lamp shone in the gloom of the town jail, but the flexible neck of it was bent sharply, focusing the light on the top of a desk, revealing little else of the big main room. An open magazine lay on the desk blotter, directly in the bar of hard, white light. Otherwise, the place was dark except for the pale luminescence that filtered through the mullioned windows from the streetlights.
    Jenny opened the door and stepped inside, and Lisa followed close behind her.
    “Hello? Paul? Are you here?”
    She located a wall switch, snapped on the overhead lights—and physically recoiled when she saw what was on the floor in front of her.
    Paul Henderson. Dark, bruised flesh. Swollen. Dead.
    “Oh, Jesus!” Lisa said, quickly turning away. She stumbled to the open door, leaned against the jamb, and sucked in great shuddering breaths of the cool night air.
    With considerable effort, Jenny quelled the primal fear that began to rise within her, and she went to Lisa. Putting a hand on the girl’s slender shoulder, she said, “Are you okay? Are you going to be sick?”
    Lisa seemed to be trying hard not to gag. Finally she shook her head. “No. I w-won’t be sick. I’ll be all right. L-let’s get out of here.”
    “In a minute,” Jenny said. “First I want to take a look at the body.”
    “You can’t want to look at that.”
    “You’re right. I don’t want to, but maybe I can get some idea what we’re up against. You can wait here in the doorway.”
    The girl sighed with resignation.
    Jenny went to the corpse that was sprawled on the floor, knelt beside it.
    Paul Henderson was in the same condition as Hilda Beck. Every visible inch of the deputy’s flesh was bruised. The body was swollen: a puffy, distorted face; the neck almost as large as the head; fingers that resembled knotted links of sausage; a distended abdomen. Yet Jenny couldn’t detect even the vaguest odor of decomposition.
    Unseeing eyes bulged from the mottled, storm-colored face. Those eyes, together with the gaping and twisted mouth, conveyed an unmistakable emotion: fear . Like Hilda, Paul Henderson appeared to have died suddenly—and in the powerful, icy grip of terror.
    Jenny hadn’t been a close friend of the dead man’s. She had known him, of course, because everyone knew everyone else in a town as small as Snowfield. He had seemed pleasant enough, a good law officer. She felt wretched about what had happened to him. As she stared at his contorted face, a rope of nausea tied itself into a knot of dull pain in her stomach, and she had to look away.
    The deputy’s sidearm wasn’t in his holster. It was on the floor, near the body. A .45-caliber revolver.
    She stared at the gun, considering the implications. Perhaps it had slipped out of the leather holster as the deputy had fallen to the floor. Perhaps. But she doubted it. The most obvious conclusion was that Henderson had drawn the revolver to defend himself against an attacker.
    If that were the case, then he hadn’t been felled by a poison or a disease.
    Jenny glanced behind her. Lisa was still standing at the open door, leaning against the jamb, staring out at Skyline Road.
    Getting off her knees, turning away from the corpse, Jenny crouched over the revolver for long seconds, studying it, trying to decide whether or not to touch it. She was not as worried about contagion as she had been earlier after finding Mrs. Beck’s body. This was looking less and less like a case of some bizarre plague. Besides, if an exotic disease was stalking Snowfield, it was frighteningly virulent, and Jenny almost surely was contaminated by now. She had nothing to lose by picking up the revolver and studying it closely. What most concerned her was that she might obliterate incriminating fingerprints or other important evidence.
    But even if Henderson had been murdered, it wasn’t likely that his killer had used the victim’s own gun, conveniently leaving fingerprints on it. Furthermore, Paul didn’t appear to have been shot; if