Running, I felt as if I did so through a nightmare. Each yard felt like a mile and the door seemed to recede away from me. But it was all a lie of my strung nerves, a result of adrenaline overdrive, and I almost careened through the door without stopping. At the final moment I did manage to slide to a halt and ducked low to the left of the doorjamb. Briefly I glanced back, and I could just make out Rink’s tawny features as he watched me from along the hall. I pumped my clenched fist in the air counting down from three, then grabbed for the doorknob and opened the door. At the same time, I went to my belly on the floor, training my SIG on the far end of the room, expecting a swarm of bullets to cut through the space above me.

The bullets didn’t come.

Pushing with my feet I cleared the door frame and checked left and right.

No sign of Rickard.

With my worm’s-eye view I could see under the bed. Rickard wasn’t hiding there. The blankets had been pulled off the corpse and hung over one side of the bed, and I could tell that the only person on the mattress was the dead woman.

“Where are you, you bas . . . ?”

I saw the black rectangle in the ceiling and knew.

The tricky son of a bitch.

Coming quickly to my feet, I moved into the room, gun now aiming high as I approached the bed. Now that I was much closer, the rectangle didn’t look so black, just an empty space in the hung ceiling. Dust filtered down from above and I heard the subtle movement of a shifting weight. Glancing once at the woman was enough to cause an involuntary cringe. A dusty boot print was centered on the white slip she was clothed in. Rickard had used her as a step up while he clambered into the roof space above.

Clever. I’d used a similar escape once when cornered by sheriff’s deputies who’d been misled into thinking I was a dangerous fugitive. The difference here was that I’d used a credenza as a stepping stone to an attic: using the woman like this was sacrilegious.

Then again, just about everything that Rickard did went against what was good or holy, so I shouldn’t have been surprised.

A low noise from behind alerted me to Rink’s presence. The lack of gunfire had brought him to the room to see what was going on. We shared a glance and I nodded up at the ceiling. “He’s getting away.”

“You going after him?”

“There’s nothing else for it.”

“Of course there is. We could go outside and pick the punk off with rifles when he shows.”

“Where’s the satisfaction in that?”