“Why are you asking about enemies?” Gloria asked. “Did someone deliberately do this to Angus? It wasn’t an accident? Did someone kill him?”

If only it was just that, Harry thought.

“We are treating this as a suspicious death.”

Suspicious, Harry thought. If that wasn’t the understatement of the year.

Harry stopped in at the Hillmans’, too, figuring once they knew Angus Tanner had been found, Walter might be next. He said they were still looking for Walter, and that there was, so far, nothing to link the two disappearances.

Then he went to the station and asked Mary Walton, who worked the front desk and handled various communications details, to come into the office so they could hammer out a press release on Angus Tanner. Mary was pushing sixty but could easily pass for seventy. Thin and wiry, she’d lost, two years apart, one lung and then a breast to cancer and kept on beating the odds, coming back after both operations and explaining that she was too mean to kill. Tough, without a doubt, but Mary was a sweetheart under her weathered exterior.

Harry told her what they could and couldn’t say, and Mary went back to her computer and had something printed out for his approval in fifteen minutes.

“Press is gonna want a quote from you, so I made up a couple,” she said.

Harry had a read of them. “Sounds like something I’d say. Let ’er rip.”

“And this won’t be enough. TV types are gonna want you in person, looking all chief-like.”

Harry didn’t enjoy going before the cameras but knew it was likely inevitable. “You can set it up for later today.” He told Mary to fax the release to the usual list of media suspects while he headed off to the Lucknow Public Library.

He was relieved to have been able to put off, at least for now, telling Tanner’s widow about the deboning of her husband’s body, but he couldn’t get the word out of his head. Was deboning the most accurate, the most clinical, way to describe what had been done to the man? Was there no more dignified description than what one would do to a brook trout or a chicken breast?

Maybe he’d find the answer at the library.

He was pretty much a stranger to the building, not being much of a reader himself, but Janice and their son, Dylan, were regulars. On an almost weekly basis, they were here to borrow reading materials or attend special programs. Dylan, unlike his father, went through books the way Harry went through bad coffee, primarily paperback novels based on characters from the Star Wars universe. Chewbacca was his favorite.

The librarian helped Harry find several medical reference books, and when she showed some curiosity about what he might be researching, he simply smiled and thanked her for her help.