Phantoms

inward, and jumped back, out of the way.
    Nothing rushed from the unlighted room.
    Tal inched to the edge of the jamb, reached around with one arm, fumbled for the light switch, and found it.
    Bryce was crouched down, waiting. The instant the light came on, he launched himself through the doorway, his revolver poked out in front of him.
    Stark fluorescent light spilled down from the twin ceiling panels and glinted off the edges of the metal sink and off the bottles and cans of cleaning materials.
    The shroud, in which they had wrapped the body, lay in a pile on the floor, beside the table.
    Wargle’s corpse was missing.
     
    Deke Coover had been the guard stationed at the front doors of the inn. He wasn’t much help to Bryce. He had spent a lot of time looking out at Skyline Road, with his back to the lobby. Someone could have carted Wargle’s body away without Coover being the wiser.
    “You told me to watch the front approach, Sheriff,” Deke said. “As long as he didn’t accompany himself with a song, Wargle could’ve come out of there all by his lonesome, doing an old soft-shoe routine and waving a flag in each hand, and he mightn’t have attracted my notice.”
     
    The two men stationed by the elevators, near the utility room, were Kelly MacHeath and Donny Jessup. They were two of Bryce’s younger men, in their mid-twenties, but they were both able, trustworthy, and reasonably experienced.
    MacHeath, a blond and beefy fellow with a bull’s neck and heavy shoulders, shook his head and said, “Nobody went in or out of the utility room all night.”
    “Nobody,” Jessup agreed. He was a wiry, curly-haired man with eyes the color of tea. “We would’ve seen them.”
    “The door’s right there ,” MacHeath observed.
    “And we were here all night.”
    “You know us, Sheriff,” MacHeath said.
    “You know we aren’t slackers,” Jessup said.
    “When we’re supposed to be on duty—”
    “—we are on duty,” Jessup finished.
    “Damn it,” Bryce said. “Wargle’s body is gone . It didn’t just climb off that table and walk through a wall!”
    “It didn’t just climb off that table and walk through that door, either,” MacHeath insisted.
    “Sir,” Jessup said, “Wargle was dead. I didn’t see the body myself, but from what I hear, he was very dead. Dead men stay where you put them.”
    “Not necessarily,” Bryce said. “Not in this town. Not tonight.”
     
    In the utility room with Tal, Bryce said, “There’s just not another way out of here but the door.”
    They walked slowly around the room, studying it.
    The leaky faucet drooled out a drop of water that struck the pan of the metal sink with a soft ping .
    “The heating vent,” Tal said, pointing to a grille in one wall, directly under the ceiling. “What about that?”
    “Are you serious?”
    “Better have a look.”
    “It’s not big enough for a man to pass through.”
    “Remember the burglary at Krybinsky’s Jewelry Store?”
    “How could I forget? It’s still unsolved, as Alex Krybinsky so pointedly reminds me every time we meet.”
    “That guy entered Krybinsky’s basement through an unlocked window almost as small as that grille.”
    Bryce knew, as did any cop who handled burglaries, that a man of ordinary build required a surprisingly small opening to gain entrance to a building. Any hole large enough to accept a man’s head was also large enough to provide an entrance for his entire body. The shoulders were wider than the head, of course, but they could be collapsed forward or otherwise contorted enough to be squeezed through; likewise, the breadth of the hips was nearly always sufficiently alterable to follow where the shoulders had gone. But Stu Wargle hadn’t been a man of ordinary build.
    “Stu’s belly would’ve stuck in there like a cork in a bottle,” Bryce said.
    Nevertheless, he pulled up a stepstool that had been standing in one corner, climbed onto it, and took a closer look at the vent.
    “The grille’s not held in place by screws,” he told Tal. “It’s a spring-clip model, so it could conceivably have been snapped into place from inside the duct, once Wargle went through, so long as he wriggled in feet-first.”
    He pulled the grille off the wall.
    Tal handed him a flashlight.
    Bryce directed the hewn into the dark heating duct and frowned. The narrow, metal passageway ran only a short distance before taking a ninety-degree upward turn.
    Switching off the flashlight and passing