hrader picked up Sam at her apartment an hour after the Jeep was discovered, but the medical examiner and CSU were already at the scene when he and Sam arrived. He pulled to a stop behind several other vehicles parked on the main road and, with Sam in the lead, they made their way down the slippery path trampled into the snow by the parade of heavy, booted feet since Friday.

The cabin was tucked close against a high tree-covered hill at the rear, a position that gave it shelter from behind while allowing a spectacular, unobstructed view of the mountain scenery from the front. The bomb shelter-garage was around the corner and on the back side of that same hill. "Who'd have thought there was a hole in the damned hill behind this place?" Shrader commented as they trudged past the cabin, following a fresh path of footprints around the hill to the back.

McCord was standing just outside the open garage doors watching an NYPD crime scene unit methodically going over the narrow interior, gathering samples and taking photographs. Two more members of the unit were standing outside with him, waiting to go inside when there was more room.

"What have we got?" Shrader asked McCord.

McCord started to answer, but the M.E., a heavyset man with red cheeks and blue earmuffs, walked past the doorway just then and assumed the question was directed at him. "We've got a corpse, Shrader," Herbert Niles said cheerfully. "A nice, perfectly preserved corpse, thanks to this underground freezer he's been sitting in. He's not as pretty now as he looked on his driver's license, but it's definitely Logan Manning."

As the M.E. spoke, he walked into the garage, leaned into the Jeep and carefully lifted first one wrist and then the other, swabbing each hand on the back, the fingers, and the palm with sticky pads used to pick up traces of nitrates found in gunpowder residue. "We've also got what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the right temple—"

Sam moved to the side and got a full view of the male body slumped partway between the steering wheel and driver's door, the window beside his head heavily splattered with blood and brain matter, the passenger's window partway open and unharmed.

"Weapon?" Shrader prodded.

"There's a recently fired thirty-eight special, with two empty cartridges in the chamber, lying near the victim's foot—" Niles paused to deposit the last sticky pad into an evidence bag and write down the part of the hand where he'd taken the swab. "One slug penetrated his skull and exited on the left side, traveling through the driver's side window and lodging in the left wall."

"What about the second one?" Shrader asked.

"I think we can reasonably conclude that he didn't fire the second one after he blew his brains out. That could mean he missed his own head the first time he aimed at it, or—more likely—and this is the theory I like—he fired the first shot a year ago at an empty beer can on a fence."

Since transferring to homicide, Sam had worked with only two other M.E.'s, both of them as humorless as the work they did. Herbert Niles was in charge of the M.E.'s office, and despite his glib remarks, he was reported to be even more conscientious than the more serious-minded M.E.'s who reported to him. She glanced at McCord, but he was watching one of the CSU people who'd stopped taking photographs and was using a flashlight to inspect the old cans and containers on the steel shelves. He was looking for that second slug.

Niles backed himself out of the Jeep and stripped off his rubber gloves. "The light is lousy in this cave, and the battery's dead on the Jeep, so we can't use its headlights. CSU has more lights with them, but there's no room for them in there until we get the vehicle out." He looked at the men waiting outside with McCord. "I'm done. Go ahead and push the vehicle out; then we'll bag and tag Mr. Manning and I'll take him back home. After that, this place is all yours."

He looked at McCord. "I suppose you'll want to know what's on those swabs first thing in the morning, Mack?"

Instead of replying, McCord lifted his brows.

Niles sighed. "Right—I'll let you know in about four hours. That gives me three and a half hours to make the drive back and a half hour to study the swabs under the microscope. Assuming your dead guy didn't warm up in there during the last week, any powder residue on his hands will still be there, and the swabs should have picked it up. You'll have to wait until tomorrow for us to match up prints and start the rest of the process. Don't expect much from me on a T.O.D." he added. "Manning's body is perfectly preserved with no apparent signs of deterioration."

"Not a problem," McCord said. "Detective Littleton has already figured out when Manning died." It was the first time he'd actually looked at Sam since she arrived. "Haven't you?"

Sam slid her sunglasses low on her nose and eyed him reproachfully above the frames for subjecting her to another pop quiz. "I'd put his time of death at last Sunday, between three P.M. and three A.M. the next morning—probably closer to three P.M., Sunday."

"How did you arrive at that?" Niles asked.

"There were a couple inches of snow on the Jeep in the garage, which means Manning put the vehicle in there sometime after two P.M., when the snow really started falling. By three A.M., there was almost a foot and a half of snow on the ground, so the drifts down here would have barricaded the doors completely, preventing him from being able to move the vehicle in or out. The doors were still barricaded by snow this morning, which means he's been in there all this time."

"Sounds good to me," Niles said, jotting down notes about her timing.

McCord wanted to look around the inside of the house. "I've been over the photographs CSU took last week," he said to Littleton, "but I'd like you and Shrader to show me what you saw and point out where everything was."

They were standing in the main room a few minutes later, discussing the glasses in the kitchen sink and the presence of only one sleeping bag, when one of the CSU guys poked his head inside the open doorway. "We've got the second slug, Lieutenant."

All three of them turned at once. "Where was it?" McCord asked.

"Lodged in the timbers of the right-hand wall of the garage."

The Jeep had been pushed outdoors and was being dusted for prints and checked for fibers, which left room inside for CSU's battery-operated high-wattage lights. "We'd have spotted it sooner if we'd been able to get our lights in here earlier.'' He walked over to the wall on the right and pointed to a fresh hole in the timbers about four and a half feet up from the floor. "Was there anything in front of it on the shelf?" Sam asked.

"Nope. No one tried to hide it. We just couldn't see it until we lit the place up."

Silently, Sam gauged the height of the newly discovered hole and turned, comparing it to the height of the open window on the passenger door of the Jeep.

"Interesting, isn't it?" Shrader said, arriving at the same possibility Sam had reached.

"I assume the window on the passenger side was down when you got here?" Shrader asked him.

"If it's down now, it was down when we got here."

"Was that a definite yes?" Shrader said impatiently. "Or was it 'I think so, it should have been, it probably was.' "

"The windows are electric and the battery is dead, so it had to have been down when they got here," Sam pointed out in a low voice.

"I know that," Shrader said irritably. "I just don't want to listen to any smart-ass answers on my day off."

"It was definitely down when we got here, Detective," came the more respectful reply.

"Thank you," Shrader retorted.

An hour after Niles left with Manning's body, Sam and Shrader hiked back up to the main road behind McCord. "It's two-thirty," McCord said. "By the time we get back to the city, Niles should know whether or not Manning was holding that thirty-eight when it fired. Once we know that, we can call on his widow in person and watch how she takes the news."

"I'm going to let the two of you handle that yourself" Shrader told him. "I had to miss my granddaughter's birthday party today, and I'd like to go by and see her before she's in bed asleep. Is it okay if Sam rides back with you?"

"It's fine," McCord said.

Her unexpected attraction to McCord yesterday had surprised and concerned Sam so much that she'd made a very deliberate, and successful, effort to rationalize it out of existence by the time she went to bed. As a result, she was able to spend three and a half hours in the car with him, talking about nothing in particular, without experiencing so much as a tiny, inappropriate tremor of sexual awareness. There was no more banter between them on the trip back to the city, no stimulating repartee or personal comments.

Only two things bothered Sam in that regard: One, she rather missed all that, and two, she didn't think McCord even noticed it was missing.

Shortly before six P.M., McCord stopped at a convenience store to buy a sandwich, and while Sam waited in the car, Herbert Niles phoned. He was still reexamining the last swab under a scanning electron microscope, but he was eager to impart his findings to Sam the instant she picked up McCord's cell phone from the seat and answered it. "There was no residue on Manning's right palm," Niles told her, "so he wasn't holding up his hand in a defensive pose when the shot was fired. I got residue off the fingers of his right hand, so there's no doubt his hand was on the weapon when it fired at least one of those shots. But you know where else I ought to find residue if he fired that weapon without any 'assistance'?"

Sam named the only other location he would have swabbed: "On the back of his hand."

"That's right. I'm looking at the swab of the back of his right hand right now, and it's perfectly clean. You've got yourself a homicide, not a suicide, Detective."

Sam tried not to sound as surprised as she felt when she relayed Nile's findings to McCord a few minutes later: "Niles called. Someone else's hand was covering Manning's and holding it on the thirty-eight when it fired."

"There was no powder residue on the back of his hand?" McCord's smile was slow and satisfied.

Sam shook her head. "No. The only residue was on the fingers of his right hand."

"I knew it," McCord said softly. "I knew it was going to play out this way as soon as CSU dug the second slug out of the wall. It always amazes me…"

"What does?"

"The stupid mistakes murderers make."