Velocity

that length of lumber, of course, because it did not exist.
    When Sobieski turned his head toward the house, Billy at once let go of the shade. He hoped that he had been quick enough.
    Until they were gone, Billy could do nothing other than worry. With everything he had to fret about, however, it was odd that his all-enveloping fog of anxiety quickly condensed upon the bizarre idea that Ralph Cottle’s body no longer lay under the desk in the study, where he had left it.
    To have moved the cadaver, the killer would have had to return to the house while both of the deputies had been speaking with Billy in the driveway, before he himself had returned to the house. The freak had proved his boldness; but this would have been recklessness if not the worst temerity.
    If the corpse had been moved, however, he would have to find it. He couldn’t afford to wait until it turned up by surprise in an inconvenient and incriminating moment.
    Billy withdrew the .38 revolver from under the sofa cushion. When he broke out the cylinder and checked to be certain all six rounds were whole and loaded, he assured himself that this was an act of healthy suspicion, not a sign of creeping paranoia.
    He followed the hallway as the disquiet that rang softly along his nerves quickened and, by the time he crossed the threshold into the study, swelled into clamorous alarm.
    He shoved the office chair out of the way.
    Embraced on three sides by the knee space, in the soft folds of his baggy and rumpled suit, Ralph Cottle looked like the meat of a walnut snugged inside its shell.
    Even minutes previously, Billy could not have imagined that he would ever be relieved to find a corpse in his house.
    He suspected that several pieces of subtle but direct evidence tying him to Cottle had been planted on the man’s body. Even if he took the time for a meticulous inspection of the cadaver, he would surely miss one incriminating bit or another.
    The body must be destroyed or buried where it would never be found. Billy had not yet decided how to dispose of it; but even as he coped with the mounting developments of the current crisis, dark corners of his mind were composing gruesome scenarios.
    Finding the body as he left it, he also discovered the computer screen aglow and waiting. He had loaded the diskette that he’d found in Cottle’s dead hands, but before he had been able to review its contents, Rosalyn Chan had called to ask if he had just phoned 911.
    He rolled the office chair in front of the desk once more. He sat before the computer, tucking his legs under the chair, away from the corpse.
    The diskette contained three documents. The first was labeled Why, without a question mark.
    When he accessed the document, he found that it was short: Because I, too, am a fisher of men.
    Billy read the line three times. He didn’t know what to make of it, but the hook wounds in his brow burned anew.
    He recognized the religious reference. Christ had been called a fisher of men.
    The easy inference was that the killer might be a religious fanatic who thought he heard divine voices urging him to kill, but easy inferences were usually wrong. Sound inductive reasoning required more than one particular from which to generalize.
    Besides, the freak possessed a knack for duplicity, a faculty for obfuscation, a talent for deception, and a genius for carefully crafted enigma. He preferred the oblique to the straightforward, the circuitous to the direct.
    Why. Because I, too, am a fisher of men.
    The true, full meaning of that statement could not be surmised let alone ascertained in a hundred readings, nor in the limited time that Billy currently could devote to its analysis.
    The second document was labeled How. It proved to be no less mysterious than the first: Cruelty, violence, death. Movement, velocity, impact. Flesh, blood, bone.
    Although without rhyme or meter, that triad seemed almost to be a stanza of verse. As with the most recondite poetry, the meaning was not on the surface.
    Billy had the strange feeling that those three lines were three answers and that if only he knew the questions, he would also know the identity of the killer.
    Whether that impression might be reliable intuition or delusion, he had no time just now to consider it. Lanny’s body still awaited final disposition, as did Cottle’s. Billy was half convinced that if he consulted his wristwatch, he would see the minute and hour hands spinning as if they were counting off mere