were an awful lot of folks here for an accident…
One of them was just zipping up a body bag. “Would you mind staying where you are? In fact, if you could just turn around and—”
“I’m looking for Scott Tomberg,” I said. “I was told he might be here and he wanted my assistance in dealing with…well, I’m assuming that’s Professor Garrison.”
“Mr. Tomberg isn’t here right now. I think you’ll probably find him back in the lobby.”
“He wasn’t there, and they sent me out here.” I tried to put as much authority into my voice as possible. The snow-covered ice on the lake was no longer pristine; an irregular rectangle almost thirty feet on its long sides had been trodden. A dark red stain ringed with diffusing pink was near one edge of the space. Must have been where he fell, I thought, the way the blood had…bled into the snow. “Do you know when Professor Garrison died? Mr.—?”
“Officer. Walton. He’s been out here a while.” Walton shrugged. “Hard to tell with the temperature.”
“What about the snow?” I pressed. “Was there a lot on top of him?”
He wasn’t giving any more away, however, and said with an annoyed look, “Who are you?” He was joined by a second officer, who looked no more helpful and less friendly.
I introduced myself, noticing a distinct lack of enthusiasm in the officers. “I thought I could help. You see, I was out here last night, just before one o’clock, and this was all fresh snow then. No tracks that I could see.” No body either, I continued to myself.
“Well, they’re going to take a look at him and see what it was that did him in,” Walton said. “Shouldn’t have been out here at all, man of his age. Constitutional or no. Probably wasn’t too bright of you to be out here either, in a storm. You take constitutionals too?”
“I just wanted to get some air before I slept,” I said, realizing that Walton hadn’t said so directly, but suggested that Garrison was out during the night. “My room was too hot and the crowds were too loud.”
“Well, if you wouldn’t mind, we’d like to get out of the snow now,” he said, with mock courtesy.
“Sure.”
I stepped back as they hoisted the gurney up the stairs. It was going to be a long trip for them. I let them pass, and then tagged along, not too far behind.
“This is all a shock,” I said, scrambling to keep a foot in the door, so to speak. Crunching up the stairs, our breath came in gasps as we stumbled over the patches made icy from compaction. “I mean, he was a colleague of my grandfather’s. He used to come to our sites, my grandfather’s sites, all the time.” Which wasn’t quite stretching it past truthfulness; just a matter of contextual timing.
That bait seemed to work. “Sites?”
“Archaeological sites.”
“So you’ve known him for a long time?”
“Seems like forever.” Sometimes, it really felt like forever, too. “I know he was old, but I didn’t think he was particularly frail or anything.”
“We’d heard from Dr. Tomberg that he was a little unsteady. And that other one, the older woman, Petra Williams? She said that his medications had been bothering him.”
“I didn’t know he was on any medications.” No reason I should have, but I was on a roll here.
“Anticoagulants, among other things. I guess they were making him a little dizzy, but even if he hadn’t been on them, he shouldn’t have been out here in that weather. What time did you come out here again?”
“It was before one, I think.” As I said it, I remembered the noises that had ultimately driven me back into the hotel. I told him about the noise I’d heard, the sharp crack and muffled thud in the woods I’d attributed to breaking branches.
Officer Walton was interested for real now. “And he wasn’t there when you were out?”
“No. It seemed like I was the first one out here then. I mean the snow was still pristine, still in drifts, if you know what I mean.”
“No footsteps that might have been filled in? No cleared-off railings, nothing like that?”
I thought back, and all I could come up with was just how untouched everything was. “I really don’t think that there was anything like that. I would have noticed. If someone had been out there ahead of me, he would either have had to come a different way or been out there so much earlier that all