I ran down the rest of the way, through the hall and out the front door. Mark Tyler appeared, running around the side of the house.

“What was it . . . ?” he demanded. He was trying not to sound scared but it wasn’t working.

“Around the back?”

We went there together, moving more slowly now, knowing what we were going to find, not wanting to find it. The kitchen door opened and Brenda Blake came out. I noticed she was breathing heavily.

This time it was Libby Goldman. I’m afraid she had taped her last episode of Libby’s Lounge and for her the final credits were already rolling. Why had she gone outside? Maybe she’d decided to light up one of her cigarettes—in which case, this was one time when smoking certainly had been bad for her health. Fatal, in fact. But it hadn’t been the tobacco that had killed her. Something had hit her hard on the head: something that had been dropped from above. I looked up, working out the angles. We were directly underneath the battlements. Behind them, the roof was flat. It would have been easy enough for someone to hide up there, to wait for any one of us to step outside. Libby must have come out to get a breath of fresh air before the meeting. Air wasn’t something she’d be needing again.

There were footsteps on the gravel. Eric and Tim had arrived. They stared in silence. Mark stretched out a finger and pointed. It took me a minute to work out what he was pointing at. That was how much his finger was trembling.

And there it was, lying in the grass. At first I didn’t recognize the object that had been dropped from the roof and that had fallen right onto Libby Goldman. I mean, I knew what it was—but I couldn’t believe that that was what had been used.

It was a big round ball: a globe. The sort of thing you find in a library. Maybe it had been in Rory’s library before the killer had carried it up to the roof. The United States of America was facing up. It was stained red.

I looked at Eric Draper. His mouth had dropped open. He looked genuinely shocked. Mark Tyler was standing opposite him, staring. Brenda Blake was to one side. She was crying.

One of them had to be faking it. I was certain of it. One of them had to have climbed down from the room after watching Libby fall. There was nobody else here. One of them had to be the killer.

But which one?

MORE MURDER

Eric Draper? Brenda Blake? Or Mark Tyler?