Relentless

controller.”
    Sensing that Penny was about to shush us again, I fell silent.
    The longer we waited in the dark, the more it seemed to me that we had done the wrong thing by hiding there.
    I was holding my pistol, and I was sure Penny must be holding hers, but I still felt trapped and helpless.
    If I voiced my doubt, Penny would ask what was Plan B. I didn’t have one. I kept my mouth shut.
    The lights came on.

   By tilting my head to the right, I could peer out through the narrow gap between the old furnace and the hot-water tank. I had a clear view of the coal-room door about thirty-five feet away.
    Farther to my right, Penny and Milo were discernible in the shadows.
    Because the cellar was mostly open and bare, with just a couple of stacks of crates and a line of support columns, the guy appeared at the coal room less than half a minute after the fluorescents came on.
    From this distance and in the inadequate light, I couldn’t see enough of him to provide a credible description. Suffice it to say that in terms of the physical qualities of long-ago movie stars, he was more like Lon Chaney Jr. than like either Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff, and nothing whatsoever like Cary Grant.
    He had a gun. I half expected that from now on everyone I met would have a gun, even if I lived for a hundred years.
    He opened the coal-room door and, like they do in the movies, hewent in low and fast, gun arm out, the weapon just below his line of vision, left hand finding the light switch in an instant, as if by instinct.
    When the coal room proved to be deserted, he clicked off the lights in there and came out, noticeably more relaxed than when he had entered my field of vision. He looked as if he had decided that whoever killed Booth and Oswald was no longer in the house.
    Leaning left to peer through the narrow gap between the hot-water tank and the water softener, I watched him as he moved more casually to the exterior door, disengaged the deadbolt, and peered up the steps at the underside of the padlocked rain doors.
    From the farther end of the cellar, someone said, “Brock?”
    “Over here,” our hunter replied as he closed the exterior door.
    Leaning right once more, I saw Brock come face-to-face with Shearman Waxx in front of the coal-room door.
    Waxx had traded his hound’s-tooth sport coat with leather elbow patches for a tan cardigan sweater. He still wore a red bow tie.
    “Two clear bloody shoe prints, part of a third in the hallway,” Waxx said. “Small feet, shape of the shoe—has to have been a woman.”
    “What woman?”
    “It’s got to be Greenwich’s wife, the Boom woman.”
    “They’ve
already
been here?”
    “And gone. Three mugs in the kitchen. One with warm coffee.”
    “Warm?”
    “Plenty warm. The other two clean, one dry and sitting on a damp dishtowel, the other washed but still wet. They were having coffee with Walbert is what I think, when Rink and Shucker show up to whack him, and after it went down, they’re wiping off any prints they left. And there’s a clean glass on the counter, probably their weird little Einstein, and on the floor a few spilled drops of orange juice.”
    Brock said, “Waxx, you’re telling me a kid’s-book writer took out Rink and Shucker?”
    “Either she did or Greenwich did, or they did it together.”
    Evidently, Rink and Shucker were the real names of Booth and Oswald.
    “Sonofabitch, what kind of writers take down Rink and Shucker? We’ve been going through these people like … like …”
    “Butter through a knife,” Waxx said, heading back toward the stairs.
    Following Waxx, Brock declared, “By now, I know writers, and writers are fun to play with, you do what you want to them, they don’t
play back
at you.”
    “Her footprints in the hall were the thinnest film of blood,” Waxx said, “should have dried in five minutes, but they’re wet. So they slipped out the back after being here when we pulled up.”
    As their voices grew more difficult to hear, I rose behind the hot-water tank and slipped sideways, past the water softener and the rock-salt tank.
    From behind the furnace, Penny whispered, “Cubby, no!”
    I had to hear as much as possible. In the open, I could see Waxx and Brock more than halfway across the cellar, their backs to me.
    Crouched but visible to them if they turned, I moved quickly past a support column—
    “Where was their car?” Brock asked. “They didn’t come in a car?”
    —and I hid behind the first