Most of the people at the Detente-Doniphan wedding reception had seen somebody jump out of a cake before, in the movies if not in person, but nevertheless, they were all taken quite by surprise when that fella in the blaze-orange ski mask damn near erupted right out of the middle of the four-tiered wedding cake, put a McDonald's straw to his lips and shot Leslie Marshall Doniphan, mother of the bride, in the neck with a blow dart.

His aim was impeccable, this masked man, and Leslie, who also happened to be the Chancellor of Mexico State University and a former United States Senator -- the first female Senator ever from Missouri -- keeled over immediately with a tiny dart lodged in her jugular vein, dead on the spot.

First Lieutenant Craig McKittrick (he'd been promoted from Lieutenant for his part in solving the Percy Crocker murder, but we'll get to that later) didn't know Leslie was dead when he brandished his firearm and shot that fella square in the chest -- he would later say he was just acting on instinct, which I have a hard time believing, since most of Craig's police-related instincts revolve around playing Free Cell at the station house, and that day at the wedding was the first time he had ever discharged his service revolver outside of the firing range. But, a hero's a hero, I suppose, and for killing Chancellor Doniphan's assassin, he was not only given a lifetime 10% discount at the El Vaquero -- the only genuine Tex-Mex restaurant in Mexico, Missouri, Houston Cowgill would no doubt want me to mention -- but he was also promptly promoted to captain.

However, since Craig killed the fella before anybody'd had a chance to question him, nobody at the wedding had any idea who, in fact, that masked man was -- even after they pulled off his mask. All anybody knew was that Chancellor Doniphan was dead, an anonymous blow-dart assassin was dead, and murder had come to visit Mexico once again.

Before we get any further, I probably should introduce myself. My name's Culp -- Emo Culp. I've lived in Mexico my entire life, and I used to write a column called "A Nose For News" for the local paper down here, "The Daily Mexican." I don't write it any more, at least not for a while -- I'm locked up in the Audrain County Jail for another three to eight years for the murder of Percy Crocker. Now, I know the Sheriff, Glenallen Plad, real well -- hell, Glen and I used to meet for chili at the G & D Family Steakhouse down by the Wal-Mart every other Wednesday, before he locked me away -- and he understands that though I did in fact kill Percy Crocker, there were extenuating circumstances (namely, Percy's confession that ten years earlier he had killed his wife Ashley (who also happened to have been the love of my life), and my subsequent rage at finally having my suspicions of this confirmed), and so he takes it pretty easy on me. He let me bring my laptop into my jail cell (though he won't let me connect to the Internet; I've still got to communicate with people via the United States Postal Service, or on a phone with a glass pane between us), and I'm free to write as much as I like, which, with plenty of time on my hands, I've been doing. In fact, had I known that incarceration would have afforded me the opportunity to read and write as much as I have these last two years, I might've killed Percy earlier, just out of principle. I used to have a stack of books that were "one day" books -- books that I really wanted to read one day, but never seemed to find the time to get to -- and now I've plowed my way through that whole stack, plus most of the books in that Modern Library Top 100 English-language novels of the 20th Century List, and I've started reading the entire John Updike oeuvre in chronological order. I'm up to "Rabbit at Rest."

Anyway, in addition to all that reading, I've had some time to do some writing. I haven't penned The Great American Novel yet, though I plan to -- I've been too busy telling the tales of what's happened here in Mexico. I explained the whole Percy Crocker mystery in "Soy de Mexico," an expertly-told tale, if I do say so myself, in which the twist of the story -- the thing that made it such a good book, if you ask me -- was that the narrator and killer were the same person, in this case, me. But you don't find that out until the very end, of course. That would've made reading the book no fun at all.

Now, in this book you're reading, I promise you -- I'm telling you right up front -- I am not the killer. First of all, I would never have killed Senator/Chancellor Leslie Marshall Doniphan. She's an absolutely lovely woman, her sister is, or was, I suppose, the late Ashley Crocker, who as I mentioned earlier was the love of my life, and she was always very good to me whenever I needed a piece about the University. Some administrators have been a real pain in the patoot, if you know what I mean, when it comes to talking to the media, but Chancellor Doniphan understood that cooperating with journalists just made everybody's life easier. Of course, I suppose the fact that she was Ashley's little sister, and I had known her since she wore diapers, made it easy for her to trust me. Leslie was also always very kind to animals, and I'm a big believer that people who are kind to animals -- not the ones who'll just tolerate it when a dog comes up and wants to sniff their crotch, but the ones who go out of their way to be kind to animals -- are incapable of having hate in their hearts. Now, I suppose there are a few serial killers who were truly, truly kind to dogs, but it's my belief that they're the exception to the rule. The way I see it, if a person's kind to animals -- truly kind, like I said before -- you can trust them with your life.

So like I was saying, I've been busy writing, first the story of the murder of Percy Crocker, and now the story of the murder of Leslie Marshall Doniphan. Now, as I'm sure you know by now, I do in fact know who the killer is -- well, at least who's responsible for the killing -- but I'm not going to tell you that just yet. Frankly, that would spoil the plot. And seeing as I haven't been able to run a column in nearly two years -- Glen says it would be unseemly for an incarcerated man to have his own newspaper column, and I suppose I must concede he's got a point -- I'm willing to do whatever I can to keep a reader engaged. Which, now that I say that, I'm probably failing to do at this very moment right now -- I've gone off rambling about me, and about reading and writing in jail, and about a bunch of things that really don't have much to do with anything, and you're probably much more interested in that masked blow-dart assassin, and why he wanted to kill Leslie Marshall Doniphan at her daughter's wedding. And frankly, that's a much more interesting story than anything about me, so I'm thinking we should get back to that.

The initial murder weapon, the blow dart, was rather quiet -- if you'dve been listening, you might've heard a "whoosh," but otherwise, blow darts, poisonous or not, tend to be damn near silent, which is how they're able to succeed as such a subtle killing mechanism -- but the blast from Craig McKittrick's .38 Special was loud enough, particularly since the room had gone quiet for the cutting of the cake, that practically everybody in the Three and a Half Seasons heard it, and came running immediately to the Barnett Ballroom.

The Barnett Ballroom, named after Mexico's most illustrious mayor, Aldrich Barnett, is the crown jewel of the Three and a Half Seasons in Mexico, which sits astride Lakeview Lake like some sort of Victorian palace.

The Three and a Half Seasons (or the Three and a Half, as it's known around town), began its life fully intending to become a Super 8, but it never quite got there. Construction began on it in 1993, but the zoning board, feeling a little bit full of themselves, also approved a permit for a new Holiday Inn Express on the other side of town two months later, thinking there were enough business travelers coming in to Mexico to merit two national chain hotels. Well, in 1993, the Holiday Inn Express concept was only two years old, but was already making major waves in the hotel industry, and those Holiday Inn folks had all but perfected the process of building a new property and getting it up and running within six months. I don't know the exact details, but I think they were building prefab hotels somewhere in Arkansas and shipping them wherever they needed to be. Super 8 had no such plan, so before they could even finish the first floor of their property, the Holiday Inn Express was already up and running.

Not surprisingly, business at the Holiday Inn Express wasn't exactly booming -- this is Mexico, after all, not Hannibal -- and based on the Holiday Inn Express vacancy rate, the people at the Super 8 began to reconsider whether they wanted to continue to dump money into a hotel that would rarely, if ever, surpass 37% occupancy, except on homecoming and graduation weekends at Mexico State.

So, in an attempt to convert a potentially-disastrous business proposition into something that wasn't a total loss, the Super 8 people tried to con the Motel 6 people into buying the property from them; they claimed that the opportunity in Mexico was truly fantastic, but that alas, it just "wasn't where their business was going right now." Fortunately for Tom Bodett and everybody else in the company, nobody at Motel 6 was buying it -- figuratively or literally. The Super 8 folks tried shopping the property around a bit, but not surprisingly, there were no takers, and from mid-1993 to October of 2002, the lot lay untouched, a frightening-looking ghost of a low-rent hotel that never was. It was Percy Crocker, of all people, who brought that lot back to life.

Well, not directly, of course. Percy wasn't exactly a hotelier -- he was a gas grill man. He had made his fortune with OriFlame, one of the nation's largest manufacturers of propane grills, and the largest employer in Mexico outside of the University, and as a loyal alum of Mexico State, he had left half his fortune in his will to MSU -- and, much to the delight of then-Chancellor Doniphan, the funs were unrestricted. As such, several scholarships were established in Percy's name, a freshman residence hall was named after him, and with the money that was left over, Chancellor Leslie Marshall Doniphan created the university's first new college in ten years, as the Percy A. Crocker School of Hospitality and Tourism, or PAC-SHIT, as it unfortunately came to be known among the undergraduates, joined the College of Arts & Sciences, the College of Business Administration and the College of Engineering under the Mexico State umbrella. Leslie later made an executive decision and changed the name to the Percy A. Crocker School of Hospitality and Hotel and Restaurant Management, primarily because it was much more difficult to come up with a dirty acronym based on those letters, but you know undergrads -- you give them a good nickname for something, and it'll stick around for years.

Anyway, since none of the Missouri state institutions offered a hospitality school, it was hoped that the PAC-SHIT would become a breeding ground for top hotel and hospitality professionals across the state, and in an effort to ensure the school's success, Leslie thought that the University needed a top-flight hotel right here in Mexico in which to train its students. As such, she approached several of the top hotel chains, and thanks to her name recognition as a former U.S. Senator, was able to get many of them to visit Mexico and inspect the site she had selected for the new hotel -- the Lakeview Lake-side site of the incomplete Super 8. In a bit of a coup, she had quietly bought the land for herself from Cendant, Super 8's parent company, for pennies on the dollar when she had first returned to Mexico from Washington, D.C. after her term in the Senate, thinking it might be a nice investment property. So, when the University assumed its half of the Crocker estate, she had the property appraised -- at six times what she'd paid for it -- and then used Percy's money to buy the land from herself for the new hospitality school.

Well, a Senator's name will get people like Hyatt, Hilton and the Four Seasons to show up in Mexico, but it certainly won't get them to invest in a place that Super 8 deemed unfit for business, and needless to say, there were no takers. Determined, Leslie decided she would just go right ahead and build her own high-class hotel, and tell all her friends at Hyatt, Hilton and the Four Seasons that they were not welcome to stay there.

When it came time to pick a name, she considered calling it University Towers, but the place wasn't even a single tower, let alone two; when the Super 8 folks had stopped at the first floor, they weren't a tenth of the way to completion -- they were half way. Thanks to some persistent negotiating, Leslie got the professors in the civil engineering department to say the foundation would support three floors, but they all agreed that if she tried to go for four, they'd have to call the authorities, which meant that the hotel, whatever it ended up being called, would never be mistaken for a high-rise. So, after ruling out University Towers, the Doniphan Center (too narcissistic) and the Vasco da Gama (a nice tribute to the MSU mascot, but she felt it conjured images of a Spanish prison more than an upscale hotel), she settled on the Three and a Half Seasons, inspired by an offhand comment that her friend from the Four Seasons had made: "A Four Seasons here, dear? I don't think Mexico merits a Four Seasons. Three and a half, maybe, but definitely not four." Whether out of spite, or simply to thumb our collective nose at those who said Mexico wasn't worthy of world-class luxury, the Three and a Half Seasons it was. Personally, I would've called it the Conquistador, but considering I killed the man whose money made the whole thing possible, I can understand why they didn't take my suggestion.

But I digress -- I was telling you about Leslie Marshall Doniphan getting shot with the blow dart.

At first, not everybody realized what had happened; in fact, many people thought that the guy jumping out of the cake was just a fun surprise that somebody had planned for the new couple. How anybody could conceive of a guy in a blaze-orange ski mask jumping out of a cake as a fun wedding surprise I'll never know, but we are talking about Mexico, Missouri, here -- it ain't the civilized capital of the world. But anyway, when the fella first jumped out of the cake, some people clapped and cheered. But Craig was standing near the cake, since he was hoping to get one of the first slices, so he was watching intently when the fella popped out. And, as he will no doubt tell several generations of future Mexicans, as soon as he saw that fella put the straw to his lips and blow, his keen police instincts kicked in, and he knew something fishy was up. He saw where the man was aiming, saw that it was Leslie, then saw her go down. He would later say that the whole thing seemed like it was happening in slow motion. "It was like I was in the zone," he told me. "You know how they say that in the big games, in crunch time, when the quarterback has to make a crucial decision, that for the good ones, like Joe Montana, that everything slows down, and they can just see everything clearly?" I nodded, somewhat amazed that Craig was about to compare himself to Joe Montana. "Well, that's what it was like for me," he continued. "Everything just slowed down, and when I saw that dart pierce Senator Doniphan, I didn't even have to think to pull out my gun. I just reacted." Which is how Stella and Hiram's beautiful white wedding cake got drenched in blood.

Craig's shot was quite possibly the most perfect shot he's ever made, or ever will make, in his life. The blow-darter had blown his dart, and was squatting down in the cake, preparing to jump out, when Craig's bullet pierced his rib cage and drove right through his heart. The shot knocked him back, taking several layers of cake with him, and he landed on his back in a pool of frosting and blood. "Call an ambulance!" Craig shouted. "Somebody call a doctor!" Already, though, there was a doctor in the room -- Dr. Marion Marlborough, the doctor who had delivered Stella when she was born, was kneeling at Leslie's side. Calmly, he put his fingers to her neck to look for a pulse. Finding none, he put his hand over her eyes and closed her eyelids, just like they do in the movies.

"I'm sorry, Stella," he said. "There's no pulse. She's gone."

Stella, like the rest of the room, was in shock. She'd been used to being worried about assassination attempts when her mother was a Senator, and when they'd lived in D.C.; several times, when Leslie was working on controversial legislation, or taking an unpopular stance, she had had Secret Service agents assigned to her for protection. But since moving back to Mexico, Leslie had never worried about protection, and Stella hadn't thought twice about it either. She was thinking twice about it then.

"Don't move!" Craig yelled at the limp corpse of the masked blow-darter, standing spread-legged above him, his gun aimed unsteadily at his head. "I said, 'Don't move!'"

"Craig, I think he's dead," said Houston Cowgill. Houston, as I may have mentioned before, is the proprietor of the El Vaquero, the only authentic Tex-Mex restaurant in Mexico.

"I think I saw him twitch, Houston."

"Okay, Craig," Houston said. "You keep your gun on him, and I'll see if he's dead."

"Good idea," Craig replied. "But don't pull his mask off."

"Why?"

"Because I want to pull his mask off," Craig replied. He was trembling, and his gun was still aimed at the masked man's chest.

"Okay, Craig. Fair enough," Houston replied. "You shot him, I suppose you ought to be the one to de-mask him." Houston leaned over and repeated what Dr. Marlborough had done. He didn't find a pulse, either. "There's no pulse, Craig. I think he's dead."

"You think he's dead, or you know he's dead?" Craig said. He was still shaking. He'd never shot anybody before, and while he hoped that his aim had been true, and that he'd killed the man -- especially now that he knew Leslie was dead -- the fact that he had taken a man's life was playing hell on his nerves.

"I know he's dead, Craig," Houston said. "Look." Houston picked up the man's limp left arm and let it go. It plopped convincingly to the floor, where it sent a bit of frosting flying. "The man ain't going anywhere. Put down the gun and come take off his mask."

"Okay," Craig said finally. "But he better be dead." Craig put his gun into his holster and slowly walked over to the body. As if at some sort of morbid carnival, many members of the crowd moved from circling around Leslie's dead body to circling around the assassin's dead body, because they'd heard something was about to happen over there. Most of them felt guilty, but they couldn't turn themselves away. That's the nature of a train wreck, I suppose -- as much as you know you shouldn't want to look, you can't imagine not looking. So they crowded around, and Craig slowly reached for the mask. In what definitely was slow motion, he grasped the top of it and held it tight. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he yanked it off. The mask crackled with static electricity, and the crowd gasped. None of them knew why -- it wasn't like anybody recognized the guy.

"Who the hell is that?" Houston said.

Nobody knew. But if Stella's cousin Durham -- Percy's son, Leslie's nephew -- had been at the wedding, as soon as that mask had come off, he would've said, "That's Joplin Stiles," which would have given the authorities something to go on.

Only problem was, on the day of Stella and Hiram's wedding, Durham still hadn't made it back from Mexico. The country, that is.