Deception by Randy Alcorn Page B

being caught? Consider the time involved with the rope, typing, messing with playing cards.”
    “It’s like he was waiting for something,” Jake said.
    “Waiting for him to die?” Clarence asked.
    “And when he’d waited long enough, he put the bullets in his chest. Then there’s the wineglasses.”
    “Wineglasses?” Clarence asked.
    “In the sink. You were off with Carp when I found them. Two wineglasses with a white wine residue. Couldn’t see fingerprints.”
    “What do you think it means?”
    “Maybe the professor had a guest earlier, came and went before the murder. But why wipe prints off the glasses? Could be the murderer was his guest. If they’re drinking together, he knows him.”
    “Then he’d have good reason to wipe the glasses,” Jake said. “His anyway.”
    “But where’s the wine bottle? Not in the house. Not in the trash. Nowhere. Manny searched, and he’s good. Looks like the killer took it. Why? Why take the risk of carrying a wine bottle from a murder scene if you don’t want to be noticed and might need to run?”
    We sat there quietly. No takers.
    “I’ve got questions too,” Clarence said. “Like, why didn’t the neighbors hear the gunshots?”
    “Could’ve had a silencer,” I said. “Then the shots aren’t much louder than a cough. Not enough to wake someone. If it was an apartment in the still of the night maybe, but not in a house next door or across the street.”
    Sherlock Holmes smoked while contemplating evidence and occasionally listened to himself play the violin. We sipped Rory’s dark Italian coffee. And listened to the Rock-Ola spin a 45, “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”
    “Ollie Chandler doesn’t understand, does he?”
    “Even Jake and Clarence don’t fully understand.”
    “Yes, but they know the One who knows all. And therefore they have a framework to understand what Ollie can’t.”
    “And yet he seeks the truth, doesn’t he?”
    “He seeks one kind of truth. The kind that leads to the incrimination and capture of others. He seeks truth that will expose them and justify himself. But does he seek truth that would expose himself?”
    “Does any man seek such truth unless the King empowers him?”
    “There’s always much to be learned from watching them, isn’t there?”
    “Yes. Just as there was much to be learned from watching us when we walked that world.”
    I drove toward the professor’s house, preoccupied. Suddenly I realized I’d gone three blocks too far. It was an unfamiliar part of town. I turned around at the next driveway, circling quickly by a little hole-in-the-wall with an old beat-up sign. It said “Wally’s Donuts.” I braked and swung back into the parking lot, popping the car into park before it stopped, lurching. I looked at the donut box still sitting in the passenger seat.
    Wally’s Donuts.
    The guy didn’t speak English, but after I showed him my badge, he got me on the phone with Big Wally himself, who said he’d closed the place up at ten thirty last night, but they have a Wednesday night special on donuts in the dozen and half dozen boxes, and they probably sold six hundred donuts to eighty different people, and he’s bad with faces, and it’s all cash, no credit or debit cards, so no records.
    Back in my car, I stared at a donut and a box. I closed my eyes and walked through the scattered events of the night before, moving the jigsaw pieces around, trying to make them fall into place.
    They wouldn’t.

6
“The principal difficulty lay in the fact of there being too much evidence. What was vital was overlaid and hidden by what was irrelevant.”
S HERLOCK H OLMES , T HE N AVAL T REATY
    T HURSDAY , N OVEMBER 21, 1:30 P.M .
    TAPED TO MY DASHBOARD are the words of Detective Hercule Poirot: “It is the brain, the little gray cells, on which one must rely. One must seek the truth within—not without.”
    I was searching inside myself, looking for the truth. I was pondering the professor but also thinking,