Death on the Diagonal - By Nero Blanc Page 0,3

he made, as though the barn were getting ready to collapse around him. He couldn’t help second-guessing the wisdom of entering the structure. “Mr. C,” he shouted through the swirling smoke, “where the hell are you?”

“Over by the valve. Polk’s been knocked unconscious. Get over here and give me a hand.”

Coughing and blinking back acid tears, Jack worked his way over to the valve, where he found Todd crouched over Orlando’s prone body. “Is he alive?”

“I don’t know. Let’s get him out of here.”

“This place is gonna come down on top of us, Mr. C. Any second.” Jack ducked to the side as a bale of burning hay thudded down from the loft above, hissing when it hit the water on the ground.

“I don’t think so,” the old man shouted back. “I think it’s going to hold. Let’s get Orlando out of here pronto, though. I don’t want to push our luck any more than we already have.”

Jack bent down and slid his arms under Polk’s shoulders and lifted his chest, while Todd took hold of his feet.

“Ready?” Jack said.

“You betcha.”

They stood in unison, hefting the limp form and moving gingerly toward the east end of the stable. A loud and continual hissing sound now prevailed in the barn, and the smoke was heavy with steam and the smell of charred wood and ruined saddle leather.

Exiting the stable they heard the muffled sirens of approaching fire engines. After they set the body down in a grassy patch, Todd straightened and looked at Jack. “Did you call the damn fire department?”

“No.”

Todd kicked at the dirt with his good leg. “Damn . . . It must have been Ryan. Why can’t she listen?”

“Something wrong with the fire department, Mr. C.?”

Collins knelt down and checked Orlando’s pulse. “I like to keep situations like this in-house.”

CHAPTER

2

Contrary to the sleepy atmosphere that presently prevailed at Newcastle’s morning newspaper, the Herald, the offices of its afternoon rival, the Evening Crier, were rife with scurrying and worried feet, with furrowed eyebrows, grim expressions, and the kind of terse remarks that can’t help but sound insulting even under the most benign of moments—which “deadline” at a daily city newspaper definitely was not.

Although the dreaded moment was nearly four hours away, the Crier’s editors, reporters, columnists, and advertising account executives knew full well that the time could evaporate in the blink of an eye; and most were secretly en-vying the Herald employees as they did almost each and every day. Not that the folks at the Herald didn’t go through the same hysteria on a regular basis; it’s just that for them it rolled around at nine at night, not nine in the morning.

Annabella Graham stepped off the elevator on the third floor of the Crier building and into this tense melee, just as she had every Friday for the past seven years: equipped with a manila envelope tucked under her arm. Belle, as she preferred to be addressed after suffering too many puns of the anna-gram variety, was the crossword puzzle editor at the Evening Crier. She was thirty-three years old, bouncy, and lithe, with quizzical gray eyes, blond hair the color and consistency of dandelion down, and a radiant smile that revealed how little she cared about her looks. She was also smart.

Preferring to create her week’s offering of puzzles in the quiet and comforting atmosphere of her home, rather than at the Crier’s offices, Fridays were one of the few times the other employees got a glimpse of their Belle.

On the weeks when she opted to deliver the seven puzzles after deadline’s witching hour, most of her coworkers stopped by to chat, inquiring chummily about her husband, Rosco, a local private eye, or their two dogs, Kit and Gabby. But when she chose to arrive in the morning, as she had today, very few greeted the resident “brainiac” with more than a preoccupied nod. They were a mercurial crowd whose personalities switched back and forth, depending on where the big and little hands sat on the clock; and they had hard news to attend to. Word games might be popular with readers—very popular, actually—but to those who wrote the leading stories, Belle’s contributions couldn’t compete with lethal twenty-vehicle pileups on the interstate, or corporate malfeasance, or government lies, or domestic violence, or celebrity scandals, or war dead, or starvation in Africa, or any of the other fun articles that made the front page.

Belle had never much liked spending time at the Crier. It wasn’t the people