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assets, they haven’t any real reason to charge me. There’s no solid evidence. They couldn’t find any weapon at my place. My fingerprints weren’t anywhere up here. Which doesn’t remove me from the top of the suspect list, of course, because everyone figures I could have dumped a weapon out at the mine. There are old shafts out there you could probably shove a Volkswagen in, and it would never be found.”
    “Motive looks like the big thing, then. But someone else must have had a strong motive too.”
    “It’s all speculation. Unfair speculation,” Kelli added on another note of bitterness.
    “Do you have an alibi?”
    “I have the truth. Which is that I was working on my book manuscript, at home with Sandra Day, the evening it was probably done. Unfortunately, a cat alibi doesn’t carry a lot of weight with the police.” Kelli tried to speak lightly, but the words snagged on a convulsive swallow. “Sometimes I get . . . afraid. I know I’m innocent, and I-I believe in our legal system. I wouldn’t be a lawyer if I didn’t. But people do get convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.”
    I reached over and squeezed her hand, her very cold hand, and tried to think of something reassuring and helpful. But she was right. Sometimes innocent people were convicted. “Do you work on a computer with your book?”
    “When I’m at the office. That’s where my computer is. But at home I just fill up these big, yellow, legal-size tablets. Then I transfer them to the computer, revising as I go.”
    Which shot down my idea that some expert could go into the internal workings of her computer and prove that she’d been using it at the time Hiram was killed.
    “No fingerprints anywhere?”
    Kelli shook her head. “Nothing up here. And too many prints of all kinds of people downstairs. I guess prints can hang around for a long time.”
    “Did you find the body?”
    “No, it was Lucinda, his fiancée. She’d been trying to call Uncle Hiram for a couple of days. When she kept getting no answer she decided to come over and check on him.” Kelli moved over to look down now, as if pulled by something stronger than the revulsion that held her back.
    “She waited two days before coming over? Didn’t they keep in closer touch than that?”
    “They weren’t like teenagers on the phone half a dozen times a day. It also wasn’t unusual for him to go out of town for a day or two. He was dealing with some big mining outfit about reopening the Lucky Queen, or he may have been trying to round up some private investors. He didn’t discuss any of that with me. In any case, he was too independent to think he was obliged to keep anyone informed of his whereabouts.”
    “Not even a fiancée?”
    “Not a fiancée, and certainly not me, either.”
    “How long had he been dead when she found him?”
    “Probably two to three days. With the body outside, and the variable weather conditions we’ve had, they couldn’t pin it down exactly.”
    I studied the street in front of the house. It was not busily traveled. Only one car went by as I watched. There were no houses beyond the far side of the pavement, just a concrete curb. The narrow street followed the curve of the hillside, the ground falling off steeply beyond the curb on the far side, only roofs of houses below visible. It was a large lot, houses on either side at least a couple hundred feet away, trees between. Ideal setting for a murder.
    “No one spotted the body in all that time?”
    “The hedge blocks view of the yard from the street, so someone would have had to actually come into the front yard to see him lying there on the bricks, and I guess no one did. Oh, there’s Chris!”
    She waved wildly at a man getting out of a red Mustang, but he didn’t look up to see her. “Be back in a minute,” she called as she dashed for the stairs.
    I didn’t see any point in lingering at the window. Not because I wasn’t interested, but because, since we were going to be