Free The Shadow Man by John Lutz Page A

had delivered the message, but the desk man hadn’t been on duty when it came. The girl who had been at the desk said she’d been busy when the message was given to her by a man to put in Larsen’s box. She could only describe the man as kind of stockily built. She barely glanced at his features and doesn’t remember a thing about them, not even the color of his hair.”
    “Did Dr. Larsen mention that Paul Liggett’s name was on the note?” Dr. Laidelier asked.
    Morgan did sit down now as he shook his head. “No. The motel people are certain that he didn’t mention who it was from. Maybe somebody was joking with Larsen. Or maybe Larsen was joking with Senator Andrews. But we can be certain of one thing: whoever’s signature was on it, there was a note.”
    “Very well,” Dr. Laidelier agreed patiently, “there was a note.”
    “Then I went to the Chicken Barn,” Morgan went on.
    “Chicken coop, you mean?”
    “Barn,” Morgan said. “It’s a restaurant right outside of town. They told me at the motel that Dr. Larsen always ate supper there. I asked all the employees if they could remember anything unusual about Dr. Larsen. I found out that a waitress had told Larsen about a man coming into the restaurant looking for him, and Larsen seemed to get upset, especially when the waitress described the man.”
    “And whose description was it?” Dr. Laidelier asked, anticipating the answer.
    “I don’t know,” Morgan said.
    “Didn’t you ask the waitress?”
    “No, I got all this secondhand. The waitress is dead.”
    “Ah,” Dr. Laidelier said, as if at last his keenest interest had been aroused. “Dead how?”
    “She fell down the cellar stairs in her house,” Morgan said. “Broken neck.”
    Both men sat quietly for a while, not looking at one another. Morgan began to drum on the arm of his chair with the knuckle of his right forefinger, the same monotonous tapping, over and over.
    Finally Dr. Laidelier asked, “Did you discover anything else?”
    “No,” Morgan said, stopping the tapping, “that’s all.”
    “Any conclusions?”
    “Not firm ones. I just thought you should know about what these people told me.”
    “It could pertain,” Dr. Laidelier said. “You don’t think Martin Karpp, or some part of Martin Karpp, is leaving the sanitarium and terrorizing the countryside, do you?”
    “Of course not,” Morgan said. “That’s the one thing that can be ruled out. As far as I’m concerned, the matter’s closed. It closed with Dr. Larsen’s death. I was only satisfying curiosity and tying loose ends.”
    “Which is as it should be,” Dr. Laidelier said.
    Morgan stood up and walked to the door. “At least we know that Senator Andrews is on the level, not inventing a reason to scrutinize us.”
    “I never suspected that,” Dr. Laidelier said, and he hadn’t.
    “I did, I’ll admit,” Morgan said. “I guess I’m too much of a skeptic.”
    “That’s your job,” Dr. Laidelier reassured him.
    Morgan smiled. “It is at that. Good night, Doctor.”
    After Morgan had left, Dr. Laidelier switched off the lamp and walked from his office. He strode down a corridor, opened a door with a large key from the ring on his belt and began making his way across the narrow stretch of grass to his bungalow that was located on the sanitarium grounds behind the main building.
    There was no sound other than the doctor’s rustling footsteps in the black grass, no normal background trill of crickets. Pesticides had eliminated most of the insects on the grounds. It was best that way. The inmates were extraordinarily inventive with insects.
    Inside his bungalow, Dr. Laidelier relaxed with his nightly glass of port before bed and thought about what Joseph Morgan had told him. There were, the doctor decided, a good many rational explanations for what Morgan had found out. A practical joke. Then someone happening to resemble Martin Karpp—at least to the waitress—when he asked for Dr. Larsen in the