“Maybe one clean cut,” I agreed, “but not exactly a slash. Slower than that. A slash, if it curved, ought to curve up, away from the slasher, in the middle, and down towards him at the ends—just the opposite of what this does.”
“Oh, all right. Is this Sherry a southpaw?”
“I don’t know,” I wondered if Marcus was. “Find the knife?”
“Nary hide nor hair of it. And what’s more, we didn’t find anything else, inside or out. Funny a fellow as scared as Kavalov was, from all accounts, didn’t keep himself locked up tighter. His windows were open. Anybody could of got in them with a ladder. His door wasn’t locked.”
“There could be half a dozen reasons for that. He—”
One of the deputies, a big-shouldered blond man, came to the door and said:
“We found the knife.”
The sheriff and I followed the deputy out of the house, around to the side on which Kavalov’s room was situated. The knife’s blade was buried in the ground, among some shrubs that bordered a path leading down to the farm hands’ quarters.
The knife’s wooden handle—painted red—slanted a little toward the house. A little blood was smeared on the blade, but the soft earth had cleaned off most. There was no blood on the painted handle, and nothing like a fingerprint.
There were no footprints in the soft ground near the knife. Apparently it had been tossed into the shrubbery.
“I guess that’s all there is here for us,” the sheriff said. “There’s nothing much to show that anybody here had anything to do with it, or didn’t.