by Jane Haddam
“No,” Liz said. “He’s going to treat everybody as a suspect. So will the police. That’s, what, standard operating procedure.”
“You also have to worry about a process of elimination,” Gregor said. “If any of … that … has dropped on the ground, the forensics people may pick it up. It would be necessary to eliminate it. We could do that if we had samples of the—”
“Jesus,” Jimmy said again.
Mark DeAvecca came out of the house and walked across the lawn to them. “What did you guys do to Maris? She’s smirking.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jimmy Card said.
“It’s just Maris,” Liz said. “It’s just the way she is. She panics and she acts like an idiot. She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
“I think you’d better get cleaned up,” Gregor said again, more firmly this time. “Get cleaned up. Have a brandy. Wait until the police want to talk to you. And don’t let anybody leave the house. No matter how much you might want to.”
“Meaning we’re stuck with the bitch of the Western world for the foreseeable future,” Mark said cheerfully.
“You go back in the house, too,” Gregor told him. “The police will be here any minute, and you don’t want to be in the way.”
“Yes, I do,” Mark said.
“Go.”
Mark shrugged. Liz backed up a little and looked in the direction of the body. Gregor didn’t think she could possibly have seen much, and she didn’t linger to see if she could get a better look. She took Jimmy Card’s hand and smiled at Gregor, faintly.
“Well,” she said, “I guess we’ll go back in the house and get cleaned up. Mark, you come with us.”
“Just a second,” Mark said.
Liz and Jimmy looked at each other, and then walked off, slowly. Mark stood silently until they were out of hearing range, his boy’s face shading in and out of adulthood in the dark and the artificial light. Gregor thought that when he hit twenty Mark was going to be a positive menace to female virtue.
“So,” Mark said. “I take it Maris has decided that Mom killed this—person. And she’s told you all about it.”
“Something like that.”
“Well,” Mark said, “if she tries to tell you Mom was here alone with Geoff and Grandma, she’s wrong. I was here, the whole time. I got back from the library at quarter after three. This woman Mom used to know gave me a lift. You might want to ask her about it.”
“Do you remember her name?”
“Emma Bligh. I remember because she reminded me of Captain Bligh. Marlon Brando, you know, in that ancient movie. Except it wasn’t Marlon Brando who was Bligh, it was some English guy. She had this other woman with her—Belinda something. Belinda had a daughter.”
“Oh?”
“Forget it. IQ in negative numbers, from what I could tell from what she was saying. What Belinda was saying, I mean. Belinda’s IQ was in negative numbers, if you want to know the truth, and Emma Bligh wasn’t much better. Is everybody in this town stupid? Belinda works in the library, by the way. I saw her there. She doesn’t know anything about books.”
“I know it isn’t legal,” Gregor said, “but you might want to take a swig of that brandy yourself. You’re shaking.”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “I just—I just want to know what’s going on with my mom, you know. I just don’t get it. I mean, I’ve been hearing about these people all my life. They intimidate her, they really do, and I know that she always feels as if she doesn’t deserve her own life. The more successful she gets, the more guilty she gets, and I can’t figure it out. Now I’ve met these people and they’re stupid, they’re shallow, and if they’re not that, they’re Maris, who’s some kind of frigging sociopath. What’s the point here? Why does she care so much?”
“I don’t know.”
“They all care,” Mark said. “That’s the weird part. They all care. You should have heard the two of them driving me home. It was insane. And they hate her for it, you know. They hate her for what she turned out to be.”
“They told you that?” Gregor was surprised.
“Not in so many words. But they told me anyway. In the way they talked about her. If I repeated the words, they’d sound like nice things. But they weren’t. You know what I mean?”
“Absolutely.”
“We shouldn’t have come here,” Mark said. “Jimmy was right. I was right. Those are the police cars.”
The sirens were still blasting, and there were a lot of them: the town police car, a state police car, an ambulance. The vehicles all came careening into the driveway at once.
2
It took Kyle Borden and the state trooper who had shown up to help him exactly thirty seconds to decide they were out of their depth and call for reinforcements. It took the ambulance men less than that to decide they were going to have nothing to do with the body—or the pieces of the body—on the ground in the hedges beside Elizabeth Toliver’s garage. Kyle did the intelligent thing and went back to the car to get sick on the floor of the front passenger seat. The state trooper began to pace back and forth along the edge of the lawn, as if the most likely danger was that somebody would drive right up from the street to snatch the body and spirit it away. Gregor went up to the car where Luis was now sitting behind the wheel, staring straight ahead, and asked the man for a flashlight.
Luis rummaged in the glove compartment and came up with a flashlight. He handed it to Gregor and went back to staring out the window.
Gregor flicked the flashlight on and off. The light hiccuped in the darkness. He walked back to the side of the garage and turned it on full blast. Now that he had a chance to really study the scene, instead of just react, he could see that there was more to what had happened to the body than he had originally thought. The cut in the belly was very much like the cut in the belly of the dog the night before, at least as the dog’s injuries had been described in Kyle Borden’s report and as Gregor himself had been able to see them. There was a slit either up or down the stomach in a single vertical line, or a line that would have been vertical if the victim had been standing. The slit was deep and savage enough to let everything behind it spill out, but it was not the only slit. Gregor let the light from the flashlight roll up the body and stopped at the neck. There was, quite definitely, another slit there, although it was not as easy to see as the one in the belly, and not as dramatic. The line was unmistakable, though, and in at least one place at the front, it gaped. Above it, the face was a jagged white mask, topped with thick dark hair that looked fake. There was no sign of graying at the roots. Either Christine Inglerod was a very lucky woman, or a very careful one.
Gregor snapped off the flashlight and walked back across the lawn to Kyle’s police car. Kyle was standing just outside of it, leaning against the side, while the trooper paced by him. The door to the front passenger seat was open. The night was very warm, but very humid.
When Gregor got to the driveway, he stopped, and both Kyle and the trooper moved toward him.
“Well?” Kyle said.
Gregor shrugged. “You need a forensics lab, a good one. This is going to be a little complicated.”
“Wonderful,” Kyle said. “This isn’t Philadelphia, you know. It isn’t even Pittsburgh. The state police will help us out—”
“We’ve got excellent forensic capabilities,” the state trooper said stiffly.
“—but the fact of the matter is that when it comes to crime technology, this is hicksville.” Kyle sighed.
“In all probability,” Gregor said carefully, “she moved after she was cut. She moved herself, I mean.”
“She was alive?” Kyle blanched.
The state trooper moved uneasily from one foot to another.
“You need a good forensics lab,” Gregor repeated, ignoring Kyle Borden’s protestations about “hicksville,” “but my guess is, yes, she was alive after she was cut for at least a few minutes. It looked like she tried to drag herself across the ground. That’s when the intestines probably
spilled out. They’re too widely distributed to be the result of gravity alone. She may have tried to call out, too, but it wouldn’t have done her much good.”
“Why not?” the state trooper said.
“Because she was also cut across the throat,” Gregor told him. “Straight across. I think the phrase in the pulp fiction of my childhood was ‘from ear to ear.’”
“Christ,” the state trooper said. “What was that?”
“He’s trying to say she had her throat slit like Michael Houseman did. Michael Houseman was—”
“I know,” the state trooper said. “Kid got killed in a park up here, thirty, forty years ago.”
“Thirty-two,” Kyle Borden said.
“The dog didn’t have a slit in his throat, did he?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Kyle said.
“It would be interesting to know which cut came first, in this case,” Gregor said.
“Why?” Kyle Borden demanded. “And how could anybody know that?”
“A decent forensics lab could make a good guess,” Gregor said patiently. “And why is because it would tell us something about the killer, and about the intent here. I remember Mark saying something to me this morning about how killing the dog was an angry thing to do.”
“You think this was a mistake?” Kyle said. “You think whoever it really was didn’t intend to kill Chris?”
“He or she might not have, at the time it started. Obviously, the intent was there by the time it was over—”
“Thank you for that,” the state trooper said.
“But you can’t simply assume,” Gregor said, “that whoever did this planned it. I’m told that one of the cars in the driveway belonged to the victim—”
“The Volvo,” Kyle said.
“—so let’s say she got here under her own steam. I’m also told that she was intending to invite Ms. Toliver to some kind of social function, apparently in an effort to make up for what went on here all those years ago.”
“Who told you this?” Kyle asked.
“Somebody named Maris,” Gregor said. “Maris Coleman, I presume.”
“There’s only one I know of.” Kyle Borden looked toward the house.
“She was just giving us a rundown as to why Ms. Toliver is the most likely person to have murdered Christine—”
“Chris—”
“Inglerod.”
The state trooper nodded. “I can see that,” he says. “There was a murder here all those years ago, and a bunch of people were involved in it, and most of them have been around the area for years without another murder happening, and then the one that’s been away all that time comes back and another murder happens and—”
“And crap,” Kyle Borden said. “Betsy Toliver was nailed into an outhouse at the time Michael Houseman was killed. Nailed. Literally. They’d taken a hammer and nails and nailed the door shut on her. She was in there screaming her head off when the cops got to the scene and when they did Michael had been dead less than twenty minutes and Betsy had been in that outhouse long enough to have stripped the skin off her arms from pounding on the walls.”
“Oh,” the state trooper said.
“I think the inference would be unwarranted for a number of reasons,” Gregor said. “It’s true that anybody might be capable of anything, but it’s also true that Liz Toliver doesn’t seem to have much of an incentive to commit murder in this case. It’s not enough just to have a motive for murder, there has to be an incentive, something to set it off. What’s the incentive here? Yes, she and this woman did not seem to be friends in high school, but Elizabeth Toliver and Maris Coleman weren’t exactly friends in high school either. If Elizabeth Toliver wanted to kill somebody, or revenge herself on somebody, why not on Maris Coleman?”
“It would have been a better choice anyway,” Kyle Borden said. “Chris was part of that crowd, but she wasn’t a ringleader. Maris was a ringleader. And a nastier bitch you did not want to meet—”
“I got that impression,” Gregor said dryly. “No, my point is, the murder has to be worthwhile for the murderer, or it has to be a spur-of-the-moment, thoughtless thing. That’s why I said that it would be good to know in what order the wounds were inflicted. Because if we have here a spur-of-the-moment, sudden burst-of-passion thing, then Liz Toliver might be a credible suspect. But if we have something planned, something thought out, then I don’t see it. Jimmy Card is in there, making her tea right this moment. The woman teaches at Columbia. She’s got a fullblast public career. What could Chris Inglerod have possibly done to Liz Toliver to be worth the risk of being caught, or even of being definitively suspected, of a brand-new murder?”
“It would make sense if Ms. Toliver had killed the kid,” the state trooper said, “and this woman could prove it.”
“Absolutely,” Gregor agreed. “But that lands us in all kinds of trouble. First being, of course, that one of the few things we know about Michael Houseman’s murder is that Liz Toliver didn’t commit it. The second being that if Chris Inglerod had had evidence of Liz Toliver’s guilt, there’s no reason why she wouldn’t have said so long ago. These women were not friends. It wasn’t a question of one close friend trying to cover up for another. As far as I can tell, Chris Inglerod belonged to a group of girls who would have thrown Liz Toliver to the wolves if they’d been presented with the slightest chance. Since she didn’t do that, I’d say she didn’t have what she needed to do it. If you see what I mean.”
“She might have done it with somebody else,” Kyle said slowly. “Chris might have. She might have known something about somebody else. About one of the, you know, uh, popular crowd.” He blushed. “She might have kept it quiet if it was somebody she cared about.”
The body was already beginning to smell, and it hadn’t been long dead when he’d first seen it. Give it another hour, and there would be insects all over it.
The state trooper was looking toward the house. “Did you say Jimmy Card was in there? You mean like Jimmy Card the rock star?”
“It’s hard to think of Jimmy Card as a rock star these days,” Kyle Borden said. “He does all this classical stuff.”
“Whatever,” the state trooper said. “That Jimmy Card?”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“Jesus,” the state trooper said. “This is going to be a zoo. I saw a case in Pittsburgh once, happened in this hotel to some girl seeing somebody in the Rolling Stones. It was insane.”
They all turned to look at the back of the house together, but this time nothing could be seen in the lighted windows of the kitchen. They went back to looking at each other. Gregor thought it was always hard to understand motive, because motive often made almost nothing in the way of sense. People killed for money, and for love, but in the end they almost always killed out of either too much heat or too much coldness. Gregor was inclined to go with Mark’s assessment and say that this was heat, if only because he could see no other reason for killing in the way it had been done. It would have been so much easier just to stab. It would have been less bloody, although it might not have been as sure. It wasn’t just a question of why Chris Inglerod had come here—it might be perfectly true that she’d come to invite Liz Toliver to something, and decided to do it in person because she’d have a better chance of getting Liz to say yes—but of why Chris Inglerod had gone around to that side of the garage. It wasn’t the side closest to the house. She hadn’t parked in the garage, where she might have been confused as to which door to take and taken that one, just as Gregor had. He hated things like this that seemed to make no sense to begin with, and then made less and less as he tried to straighten them out.
Finally, in the distance, there were more sirens. Gregor supposed they must be coming either from state police headquarters, or from some regional office able to supply not only a crime lab but a real medical examiner. As far as Gregor could tell, Hollman didn’t have one of its own.
“Oh, thank God,” Kyle said, turning toward the noise. “You have no id
ea how glad I’m going to be to hand this whole thing over to a real cop.”
3
It was after midnight before they were finished, and even then there was a tape up around the place where the body had been found and a single state trooper left to guard it. In the last hour, two unknown young men had shown up and tried to mingle with the police officers, but there was no one to mingle with, and nobody willing to talk to somebody they didn’t know with no known reason to be at the scene. Gregor was sure that at least one of the young men was stringing for the tabloids, or hoping to. He not only hung around far too long, but kept walking out to the front of the house and coming back again. Gregor meant to ask Kyle Borden if he knew who the young man was—Kyle seemed to know everybody who lived in town—but he got too involved in talking to one of the newest state troopers. By the time he looked up, the young man was gone. There was no way to cordon off the property. Sawhorses and police guards were all well and good, but they could be sneaked past, and if they could be they would be.
He waited on the back lawn until everybody but the one state trooper delegated to guard the crime area was gone. He said good-bye to Kyle Borden and promised to phone him “in the morning,” although he knew it was already morning, and that neither one of them was likely to be worth much until well after ten. He walked back to the tape cordoning off the crime area and looked over it at nothing much. It was far too dark to see anything. Even the grass looked like a black hole. He turned around and walked back to the house. The air felt heavy and thick, the way it did right before a rain.
Gregor let himself in through the back door of the house and went through the little pantry-cum-mudroom into the kitchen. He’d fully expected to find the place full of people—Liz and Jimmy and Mark and Maris Coleman, at least, and maybe the mother’s nurse—but instead, the only person there was Liz herself, sitting at the round breakfast table with a book open in front of her. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks was playing somewhere. Liz did not appear to be reading.
Gregor cleared his throat. “Where is everybody?” he asked. “I thought I’d come in here and find a horde of angry civilians, all wanting to know when the police would let them go home.”
