Phantoms

any shooting had been done, he was probably the one who had pulled the trigger.
    She picked up the pistol and examined it. The cylinder had a six-round capacity, but three of the chambers were empty. The sharp odor of burnt gunpowder told her that the weapon had been fired recently; sometime today; maybe even within the past hour.
    Carrying the .45, scanning the blue tile floor, she rose and walked to one end of the reception area, then to the other end. Her eye caught a glint of brass, another, then another: three expended cartridges.
    None of the shots had been fired downward, into the floor. The highly polished blue tiles were unmarred.
    Jenny pushed through the swinging gate in the wooden railing, moving into the area that TV cops always called the “bull pen.” She walked down an aisle between facing pairs of desks, filing cabinets, and work tables. In the center of the room, she stopped and let her gaze travel slowly over the pale green walls and the white acoustic-tile ceiling, looking for bullet holes. She couldn’t find any.
    That surprised her. If the gun hadn’t been discharged into the floor, and if it hadn’t been aimed at the front windows—which it hadn’t; no broken glass—then it had to have been fired with the muzzle pointing into the room, waist-high or higher. So where had the slugs gone? She couldn’t see any ruined furniture, no splintered wood or torn sheet-metal or shattered plastic, although she knew that a .45-caliber bullet would do considerable damage at the point of impact.
    If the expended rounds weren’t in this room, there was only one other place they could be: in the man or men at whom Paul Henderson had taken aim.
    But if the deputy had wounded an assailant—or two or three assailants—with three shots from a .45 police revolver, three shots so squarely placed in the assailant’s body trunk that the bullets had been stopped and had not passed through, then there would have been blood everywhere. But there wasn’t a drop.
    Baffled, she turned to the desk where the gooseneck fluorescent lamp cast light on an open issue of Time . A brass nameplate read SERGEANT PAUL J. HENDERSON. This was where he had been sitting, passing an apparently dull afternoon, when whatever happened had… happened.
    Already sure of what she would hear, Jenny lifted the receiver from that stood on Henderson’s desk. No dial tone. Just the electronic, insect-wing hiss of an open line.
    As before, when she had attempted to use the telephone in the Santinis’ kitchen, she had the feeling that she wasn’t the only one on the line.
    She put the receiver down—too abruptly, too hard.
    Her hands were trembling.
    Along the back wall of the room, there were two bulletin boards, a photocopier, a locked gun cabinet, a police radio (a home base set), and a teletype link. Jenny didn’t know how to operate the teletype. Anyway, it was silent and appeared to be out of order. She couldn’t make the radio come to life. Although the power switch was in the on-position, the indicator lamp didn’t light. The microphone remained dead. Whoever had done in the deputy had also done in the teletype and the radio.
    Heading back to the reception area at the front of the room, Jenny saw that Lisa was no longer standing in the doorway, and for an instant her heart froze. Then she saw the girl hunkered down beside Paul Henderson’s body, peering intently at it.
    Lisa looked up as Jenny came through the gate in the railing. Indicating the badly swollen corpse, the girl said, “I didn’t realize skin could stretch as much as this without splitting.” Her pose—scientific inquisitiveness, detachment, studied indifference to the horror of the scene—was as transparent as a window. Her darting eyes betrayed her. Pretending she didn’t find it stressful, Lisa looked away from the deputy and stood up.
    “Honey, why didn’t you stay by the doors?”
    “I was disgusted with myself for being such a coward.”
    “Listen, Sis, I told you—”
    “I mean, I’m afraid something’s going to happen to us, something bad, right here in Snowfield, tonight, any minute maybe, something really awful. But I’m not ashamed of that fear because it’s only common sense to be afraid after what we’ve seen. But I was even afraid of the deputy’s body, and that was just plain childish.”
    When Lisa paused, Jenny said nothing. The girl had more to say, and she needed to get it off her mind.
    “He’s dead. He can’t hurt me.