Flat Lake in Winter Read Online Free Page A

might prove to have evidentiary value. When McClure led him to the second-floor doorway, Stanton poked his head in and studied the sight that greeted him. He said nothing, nodding rather nonchalantly. But McClure was certain he saw the investigator swallow hard several times and turn nearly white.
    While McClure waited in the hallway, Stanton entered the room and looked about. It was the first of four visits he would make to the crime scene that morning, returning to take blood samples, photographs, and measurements; to dust for latent fingerprints; and to take an inventory of every item in the room. To McClure’s way of thinking, all of those things could have been accomplished on a single visit. He suspected that Stanton was having some difficulty remaining in the room, but again he said nothing.
    By the time Stanton was finished, an ambulance from Mercy Hospital had arrived. Stanton let the EMTs observe the bodies from the doorway, but wouldn’t let them into the room itself until the medical examiner’s investigator had arrived, which took another half hour. When she did arrive (“she” being a rather striking redhead who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five by McClure’s guess), she needed less than ten minutes to do whatever it was she needed to - or perhaps she, too, wanted to be out of the room as soon as possible. She moved the bodies gingerly, bagged the hands with plastic and tape, and took rectal temperatures with separate thermometers. She reported Carter Hamilton’s as 92.6°, and Mary Alice Hamilton’s as 92.2°. She told Stanton that, given the room temperature and the fact that the bodies were pretty much uncovered, the numbers suggested that the deaths had occurred some six to eight hours earlier, or sometime between one and three in the morning.
    “What was the weapon?” Stanton asked her.
    “The weapon - or weapons,” she said pointedly, “will probably turn out to be some kind of hunting knife or knives. You’ll have to wait for the post.”
    Finally, Stanton let the EMTs come into the room. Although by law they didn’t have the authority to pronounce the victims dead, no one raised an objection when they placed them in body bags. There may have been some disagreement about time of occurrence, contamination of evidence, and number of weapons, but nobody had any doubts about the fact that Carter and Mary Alice Hamilton were good and dead.
    ONLY AFTER THE bodies had been transported off in the ambulance, and the ME’s investigator had driven her own car back down the dirt road, did Deke Stanton turn his attention back to Jonathan Hamilton. Instructing Trooper Carlson to secure the crime scene - including the greathouse, the guest cottage, and the pathway that connected them - with yellow plastic tape, he addressed Jonathan for the very first time. By then it had been roughly an hour and a half since Stanton’s arrival.
    “Come on over here, son,” he said.
    Jonathan, who had been sitting on a tree stump under Trooper Carlson’s watchful gaze until that time, looked up uncertainly.
    “Yes, you,” Stanton said.
    As McClure watched from perhaps ten feet away, Jonathan rose slowly and walked toward Stanton. When he got within arm’s length, Stanton stopped him by holding up a hand. To McClure, it seemed as though Stanton, who was about five-ten, was a bit put off by Jonathan’s height.
    “What happened here, son?” Stanton asked.
    Jonathan shrugged and said, “I d-don’t know.”
    The sun was up by this time, and Stanton was wearing aviator-style sunglasses, the kind with mirrored lenses. He kept them on as he spoke. “I think you do,” he said. “Your granddaddy and grandma are upstairs in the main house. They say you cut them. All I want to know is why you did it. I know there must have been a good reason.”
    McClure was surprised at the transparency of Stanton’s ploy. If Jonathan had indeed committed the crime - and McClure had little doubt that he had - surely he knew