The door swung open.
Raising the candle, he crossed into the darkness. After several steps, Charlotte heard him halt and swear a low oath.
She smelled it, too—a mix of burnt gunpowder and the coppery scent of fresh-spilled blood.
Wrexford had found a lamp on the side table. Glass and metal rattled as he hurriedly coaxed a flame to life. The flare of light skittered across his cheekbones, deepening the hollows beneath his eyes.
Darting forward, Charlotte followed her nose to one of the side chambers, and pushed the door open.
“Ye gods,” Sheffield hissed through his teeth as he came up behind her.
The lamp’s glow had not yet penetrated the darkness, but a blade of moonlight cut through the windowpanes, illuminating the grisly scene at the writing desk. A man—his head half blown away by the force of a pistol shot—was slumped back in a slat-back wooden chair. Blood and bits of brain spattered his coat and shirtfront. The weapon, still grasped in his lifeless hand, had fallen—
She caught Wrexford’s sleeve as he started to push past her. “A moment, sir,” she said. “Let me study the details a little longer before we do anything to disturb the scene.”
He went very still. “What do you see?”
Charlotte didn’t answer. Her gaze moved slowly over the floorboards and the worn carpet covering half the room. “Angle the light there.” A curt wave indicated an area by the fringed side closest to them.
Crouching down, she took another long moment to examine the fibers. “I’ve seen enough. You may go closer now.”
Wrexford, to his credit, didn’t press her for an explanation. Moving lightly, he paced a methodical circle around the dead man, pausing every few steps to make an observation. Only then did he approach the desk.
“There’s a note,” he said, looking down at the single sheet of paper on the blotter.“I can’t live with the shame of my actions any longer,”he read aloud.“Forgive me.”
Sheffield swallowed hard as the lamplight flickered over the ruined face, then averted his eyes from the corpse.
“If you’re going to be sick,” murmured Charlotte, noting that he had gone a little green around the gills, “kindly step out to the entrance foyer.”
“No, no, I won’t embarrass myself,” came the choked reply.
“There’s no shame in a visceral reaction to violent death.” She moved closer, studying the gruesome patterns of blood and brains.
“Do you think . . .” Sheffield made himelf look at the dead man. “Is it possible he’s confessing to a more serious crime than cheating?”
“The words,” said Charlotte, “are conveniently cryptic.”
The earl exhaled a low grunt. “Your mind is as devious as mine.”
“W-What do you mean?” asked his friend.
The wind gusted, pelting rain against the window glass.
Avoiding the blood dripping from the desktop onto the carpet, Wrexford squatted down and made a close inspection of the weapon. Charlotte picked her way close to the corpse, forcing aside emotion to see the tableau as a puzzle.
And something wasn’t fitting together.
She waited until Wrexford straightened before asking him to hold the lamp closer to the dead man’s chest. Picking up the letter opener from the top of the blotter, she shifted one side of the unbuttoned coat open a fraction wider, revealing more of the shirtfront.
The earl leaned in closer. “How the devil did you see that?”
“I merely suspected something of the sort.”
He shook his head and muttered something under his breath about unholy magic.
“It’s logic, not magic, Wrexford,” countered Charlotte. “Look at the blood on his shirt. It’s saturated around the left breast, and yet it’s the right part of his head that’s blown away.” She straightened. “When you analyze the spray of blood and fragments from that wound, it’s clear they couldn’t have caused that much volume.”
“Then what did?” asked Sheffield. He shuffled forward, curiosity overcoming his squeamishness.
