3 Requiem at Christmas Read Free

needles made her eyes tear. She hadn’t known it was
possible to feel one’s heart thudding in the eye sockets when cold threatened
the brain.
    When she was a yard away from the automobile, she could hear
that the engine of the other car was still running. This struck her as ominous,
though it made sense for a driver to keep the heater on if he was stuck and
waiting for help.
    Juliet was usually a great believer in following hunches.
They were her brain’s subconscious processing information which it then
categorized by emotion, which in turn led to immediate impulses which arrived
ahead of logical thought and which could—and did—sometimes save lives. It also,
almost always, made her look for evidence of chicanery since this was how her
brain was trained. This was a habit she wanted to leave behind since chronic
suspicion made no one happy.
    Still, the hairs on her neck were raised. She paused,
wondering if she should go back to her car for her gun. She felt watched—maybe
by an animal. There were bears up there, weren’t there? But they should be
asleep for the winter. And if there were wolves they would be howling—at least
they always seemed to howl on those nature shows. Actually, nothing would be
abroad in the storm. As the old saying went, it wasn’t a fit night out for man nor beast. Even the boulders were hunched down trying to
avoid the lashes of the wind.
    No, going back to her car would take time. The driver could
be badly hurt, possibly dying of a heart attack or hypothermia or heaven only
knew what while she dithered.
    Juliet shook off her foreboding and forced herself forward,
pushing into the wind until she reached the Jaguar. She could tell what it was
because of the hood ornament. The silver panther looked like it was diving into
the snow.
    The driver’s window was completely covered in clumps of ice
which had frozen into a solid sheet and would not break away though she tried
clearing the snow. She beat on the door and shouted but there was no answer and
no suggestion that anyone was trying to open it from inside. She began to worry
about carbon monoxide poisoning. Had the tail pipe been plugged somehow and had
the building exhaust overcome the driver?
    It took some pulling since the snow had built up, but she
was finally able to get the door open about halfway before it wedged solid in
the snow.
    “Oh, damn,” she said, but the wind tore her words away. Not
that the man in the car was in any state to hear her swearing.
    The driver was dead, and Juliet found herself very much
wishing for her gun because the corpse had a knife in its chest. Actually in
its stomach but angled upward toward the heart. There was also a tear in the
throat that had bled heavily and a look of horror on his face. An open
passenger door suggested—in case she had had any wild theories—that this wasn’t
a bizarre suicide but rather a murder. Or a poorly timed fight that had ended
in a killing which the murderer had fled.
    But fled where? There was nowhere to go.
    Juliet spun around, looking for danger, but in the snow it
was impossible to see if anyone was near her. There had probably been tracks and
maybe blood in the snow but they were long since filled and she had no idea
where the killer was.
    Horror swamped her usual prescience, but her brain made note
of several things for later recall as her eyes darted among the trees. The dead
man was wearing a kilt in a tartan that belonged to Clan Buchanan. She wasn’t
an expert on tartans, but the Buchanan tartan was exotic enough to recall since
it looked a bit like Halloween had thrown up all over a circus tent. The knife
in his chest was what the Scots called a sgian dubh . Most people thought of them as
Scottish costume accessories, like a sporran or tam, but they could be—and in this
case it obviously was—completely functional. The corpse wore a gold signet ring
on manicured hands. Custom kilt, jewelry, Jaguar—the man had died wealthy.
    Juliet craned her neck