Page 23 of Forbidden Protector

She looks at Room 6 with its dark window standing up in the frame and I watch her price it. The pipes, the drywall, and the room out of service in a month that has no other rooms to spare. Then I watch her decide not to say any of it.

"You come in the office where it's warm."

"In a minute."

She goes, at a speed her knees do not enjoy. Behind her, cruiser lights come up the road without a siren, unhurried, a man arriving to write something.

The cruiser parks in an actual space, which tells me everything about the next hour.

The deputy is young. Twenty-four, twenty-five, uniform pressed by somebody who loves him, and he comes across the ice with his hat on and a clipboard already out and no gloves, because he is twenty-four.

"Ma'am. Gavin Young, Pondera County. We had a welfare check called in on Room 6."

"Called in by who?"

"Party didn't identify."

"At what time?"

He looks at the clipboard. "Ten fifty-one."

At ten fifty-one I was sitting eleven feet from a wall unit with a rag in the flue, watching a drone come off a grid. I did not know. Ruby did not know, asleep at the other end of the building with her television going. The Bureau did not know. Nobody drove past. Nobody heard a thing through cinderblock.

Somebody knew.

He had hours. The church, the graveside. He could have done it any time in that window and been hours away from Rimrock by the time I got back to Room 6.

Somebody sat somewhere with the picture of that room in his head and got up and made a phone call and would not give his name.

Not the man who hired it done. That man is not calling anybody. He set a room to write its own report and then he went to bed, and the last thing on earth he wants is a sheriff's car in this lot in the middle of the night with me still breathing.

So it is the other one. The one who came in here with a rag and a screwdriver, did the job he was paid for, and then got out to his truck and sat there, and somewhere between this lot and wherever he sleeps, the guilt took over.

He could not say it out loud. Saying it out loud is a confession with his own voice on it.

Welfare check is what you say instead.

It is the only phrase in the language that sends a cop car and does not require a story.

"Ma'am?"

"Tatum. FBI." I show him the badge and watch him stand up straighter. "Deputy, before you write anything. Nobody has been back in that room and nothing in it has been touched. There is cloth packed into the flue behind the heater housing, four inches up, and the detector on the wall has no light on it. Photograph both from the doorway."

He gets his phone out and takes two pictures from the threshold and does not go in, because there is nothing to smell in there and he has been told at least once in his life what that means.

"Huh," he says. "Those things, the battery goes and folks pull it out to stop the noise. Happens all the time." He is writing while he says it. "Then something backs up in the vent and the guest don't know, and by morning..."

He hears the end of his own sentence and stops.

"Somebody packed it, deputy. That's not a bird's nest. That's four inches of rag put in by hand."

"Birds get in them." He says it fast, like a man handing back something hot. "Mice. You'd be surprised what comes out of a vent on one of these old units."

"It's from October."

"I'll note it." He does not note it. He notes something. "County will have somebody look at the appliance."

"Who?"