Velocity

could have panicked and fled.
    Returning to the house, closing the door behind himself, Billy swept the kitchen with his gaze, looking for something amiss. He had no idea what that might be.
    Everything seemed to be as it had been, as it should be. Uncertainty gave way to misgiving, however, and misgiving became suspicion. Cottle must have taken something, brought something, done something.
    From the kitchen to the living room, to the study, Billy found nothing out of the ordinary, but in the bathroom he discovered Ralph Cottle. Dead.
     
     
     

Chapter 25
     
    Hard fluorescent light painted a film of faux frost on Cottle’s open eyes.
    Having passed on rather than out, the drunk sat on the lidded seat of the toilet, leaning against the tank, head tipped back, mouth slack. Yellow rotten teeth framed a tongue that appeared milky pink and vaguely fissured from the dehydration of perpetual inebriation.
    Billy stood breathless, stunned stupid, then backed out of the bathroom into the hall, staring at the corpse through the doorway.
    He didn’t retreat because of any stench. Cottle had not voided bowels or bladder in his death throes. He remained unkempt but not filthy—the only thing about which he had seemed to have any pride.
    Billy just couldn’t breathe in the bathroom, as though all the air had been sucked out of that space, as though the dead man had been killed by a sudden vacuum that now threatened to suffocate Billy himself.
    In the hallway, he could draw breath again. He could begin to think.
    For the first time, he noticed the handle of the knife, which pinned Cottle’s rumpled suit coat to him. A bright-yellow handle.
    The blade had been thrust at an upward angle between the ribs on the left side, buried to the hilt. The heart had been pierced, and stopped.
    Billy knew that the embedded blade measured six inches. The yellow knife belonged to him. He kept it in his angler’s kit in the garage. It was a fishing knife, honed sharp to gut bass and fillet trout.
    The killer had not been in the woods or in a meadow swale, or in a neighbor’s house watching them through a telescopic rifle sight. That was a lie, and the drunkard had believed it.
    As Cottle had approached the front porch, the freak must have entered by the back door. While Billy and his visitor had sat in the rockers, their adversary had been in the house, a few feet from them.
    Billy had refused to choose someone in his life to be the next victim. As promised, the killer then made the choice with startling swiftness.
    Although Cottle had been the next thing to a stranger, he was undeniably in Billy’s life. And now in his house. Dead.
    In less than a day and a half, in just forty-one hours, three people had been murdered. Yet this still felt to Billy like act one; perhaps it was the end of act one, but his gut instinct told him that significant developments lay ahead.
    At every turn of events, he had done what seemed to be the most sensible and cautious thing, especially given his personal history.
    His common sense and caution, however, played into the killer’s hands. Hour by hour, Billy Wiles was drifting farther from any safe shore.
    Down in Napa, evidence that might incriminate him had been planted in the house where Giselle Winslow had been murdered. Hairs from his shower drain. He didn’t know what else.
    No doubt evidence had been salted in Lanny Olsen’s house, as well. For one thing, the place marker in the book under Lanny’s dead hand was all but certainly a photo of Winslow, linking the crimes.
    Now in his bathroom slumped a corpse from which bristled a knife that belonged to him.
    Here in summer, Billy felt as if he were on an icy slope, the bottom invisible beyond a cold mist, still on his feet in a wild glissade, but gaining speed that, second by second, threatened his balance.
    Initially the discovery of Cottle’s corpse had shocked Billy into mental and physical immobility. Now several courses of action occurred to him, and he stood hobbled by indecision.
    The worst thing he could do was act precipitately. He needed to think this through, attempt to foresee the consequences of each of his options.
    He could afford no more mistakes. His freedom depended on his wits and courage. So did his survival.
    Stepping into the bathroom again, he noticed no gore. Maybe this meant Cottle hadn’t been killed in the bath.
    Billy hadn’t seen evidence of violence elsewhere in the house, either.
    This realization focused him on the