The hand was cold, damp. There was no pulse in the equally cold bare flesh beneath Walsh’s collar. The giant-sized Matthew Walsh seemed shrunken, a bundle of discarded clothes, lying here on the wet grass, his trousers soggy with dew, and Rutledge found himself remembering what Dr. Stephenson had said about Father James. When the power of the personality had gone . . .

By that time Blevins had stopped just at Rutledge’s back, and Rutledge could feel his gaze running over the corpse of his prisoner.

He rose slowly to his feet, not turning. Hamish said, “He died quickly. How do you think it was?”

But Rutledge was silent. Tanner, watching Blevins’s face, shifted from one foot to the other, waiting for his superior to speak to him.

And then Blevins said harshly, anger and grief thickening his voice until it was unrecognizable, “I wanted to see him hang!”

No one spoke for what seemed minutes. Then Blevins said, “All right, Tanner, tell me what happened.”

Tanner flinched, as if he’d been accused of murdering the man himself. He was young and all elbows and knees, but he said with a confidence that belied his years, “If you’ll look just over here, sir—”

He led them some six feet from the body and pointed down at the iron half-circle lying in the grass. “See here, there’s a shoe. And I backtracked the horse some distance. He cast it perhaps a quarter of a mile back—I found a muddy patch where you could see clearly that the off hind hoof was bare.”

Blevins grunted, then squatted by the shoe. “All right. Go on.”

“It’s my thinking, sir, that the rider didn’t want to do anything about it, exposed as he was. It’s fairly open on the hill; with the farmers out early, he’d have been wary of being seen. But he brought it along with him, and here, with the trees to screen him from the farm, looked to see what the damage was, and if he could continue with this mount, or if he needed to find himself another.”

“It makes sense,” Blevins said, nodding.

“And when he lifted the off hind, the horse didn’t care for it, backed away, and when Walsh bent to try again, kicked him in the head with the shod hoof.”

“How do you read that?”

“The grass is trampled a bit, just below where he fell, sir. See, it’s bruised and the ground is torn in one place. As if he might have been trying to make the horse stand still for him. Everywhere else you look, there’s no sign of that.”

Blevins went over to look at the grass. “Are you certain the doctor didn’t do this? Or you, even.”