Keeler’s family hadn’t fought back. The sleep spell had struck them before they could react. Them, but not the security guards upstairs or the man himself. Either the libriomancer wasn’t strong enough to knock out the entire household at once, or else they’d targeted only the people downstairs. Assuming it was deliberate . . . “They needed Keeler awake.”

If his guards had time to draw their weapons, they’d had time to shout a warning. How much time had that given him?

“To question him,” guessed Lena. “Find out how much he knew and who he’d shared it with.”

“How much he knew about what?” Deb glared at the body.

They’d destroyed his computer and ransacked his files. I found a cellphone with a broken screen on the floor beside the wall. An empty slot on the side showed where the SIM card had been removed.

He hadn’t called 911. Otherwise the police would have discovered the bodies long before we arrived.

Alexander Keeler had been a bigoted, manipulative, obsessively narrow-minded man, but he wasn’t stupid. So what had he done in those seconds between realizing someone was in his house and the moment that intruder ended his life?

He might not have done anything. A lot of people froze in situations like this. I stepped around the desk and imagined myself in his place. The guards would have called out. We’d seen no evidence that either man had fired his weapon. They’d been overpowered quickly.

I examined the desk. He’d had a computer, but no time to compose an email. He might have scrawled a note instead. I checked the notepads and a half-empty packet of printer paper, going so far as to rub a pencil over the top sheets of each in case it picked up indentations from a previous page, but found nothing.

Grimacing, I checked the senator’s pockets next. I found his keys, eighty-three cents in change, a silver business card holder, and a leather wallet. They hadn’t taken his money or credit cards. The business card holder held about twenty of Keeler’s own cards on one side, and four more on the other.

I imagined my own office, mentally overlaying it with Keeler’s. “There’s no printer.”

“Maybe there’s a wireless printer somewhere else in the house,” suggested Lena. “One the kids shared for homework and things like that?”

“The paper’s here, and I can’t imagine someone like Keeler bothering to walk downstairs every time he needed a printout. Especially given the sensitive nature of his work.” I spread my arms and turned slowly to get a feel for what he could have reached from his desk. The file cabinet was just beyond arm’s reach. Easy enough to push back in a rolling chair and grab whatever he needed, and there was a gap of about four inches between the side of the cabinet and the wall . . .