I frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. We found a helmet next to his bike, so it only follows that he wore it when riding. And his bike was behind a tree. How could he have fallen from his bike and hit his head?”

“He didn’t fall.” Hal laid his hands flat on the folder. “The findings clearly indicate skull fractures that could not have been caused by a fall. In addition, there were no other injuries consistent with a fall. No scrapes or abrasions of any kind, no dirt on the knees, hips, palms, or elbows.”

My mind was blank. There was a conclusion right in front of me, but I didn’t want to make the jump.

Ash glanced at Hal and received a small nod. “Minnie,” Ash said gently, “Brown Bernier didn’t have a bicycling accident. He was murdered.”

Chapter 4

My first reaction was textbook. “No,” I said, denying reality. “That can’t be right. There are all sorts of ways he could have died. Tell your pathologist to look again.”

“Minnie—”

I ran over whatever Ash was trying to say. “How can you be sure that doctor checked for everything? It’s only been a few days. I’m no doctor and I can think of a whole bunch of ways he could have died. Heart attack, for one. Did your doctor look for that? Or a stroke. You don’t have to be elderly to have a stroke, people get them at every age. You can even have them before you’re born! Or an aneurysm. There are lots of kinds of those. In your brain, or in your heart. And I’ve read you can get aneurysms anywhere you have arteries, so I bet those are tricky to pin down. And . . . and . . .”

All through my soliloquy, Ash and Hal kept looking at me with calm compassion. When I ran out of possibilities, which didn’t take too long because my medical knowledge was limited, silence filled the room.

Death came in many guises. A calm death at the end of a long life, like Fred Hallenius, was one. Though you might always grieve when an elderly friend or relative passed, it was the natural order of things. And though accidental deaths and early deaths from disease were awful, they were also part of the human experience. But murder? Murder was an intentional snuffing out of a life. A violation of every value system I knew. An assault against all that was right and good in the world.

My breaths were going in and out as fast as if I’d just finished a hard run. I crossed my arms and shifted rapidly into grief’s second stage: anger.