by Jane Haddam
“They killed her?” Gregor said.
Gregor stepped past Mike Ingleford, turned the corner in the corridor, and stopped. There were dozens of them, at least, maybe over a hundred. He tried to remember if there had been this many at the press conference. He thought there were more here. He had no idea where they had come from. They were everywhere in the corridor, blocking the doors to the rooms, shoving equipment on wheeled carts into the walls and breaking some of it, overturning some of it. Gregor pushed his way through the crowd, inch by inch, person by person, but it was a struggle. The men around him were just as determined as he was, maybe more so, and they fought to hold their places and to get ahead into the crowd.
That was when Gregor first heard what he was sure was a woman crying, and then, a second or two later, a low scream. “Don’t,” the woman was saying. “Don’t. Don’t. Please don’t.”
Gregor thought the voice sounded familiar, but that was beside the point. If Marcey Mandret was right and this was Kendra Rhode, then Kendra Rhode was not dead, but in trouble. If Marcey Mandret was wrong and this was not Kendra Rhode, then somebody else was in trouble. Ofcourse the voice sounded familiar. He must have heard Kendra Rhode’s a thousand times, without being aware of it, on television.
He pushed at the crowd and made progress. Determination, concentration, and the conviction that a live person needed help ramped up his progress. He saw Stewart Gordon maybe four feet ahead of him, moving and pushing as well, that bald head bobbing and weaving among the dark-haired ones around it, tall enough to act as a beacon. Gregor pushed. Stewart pushed. Suddenly, he seemed to pop right out of existence, and the next thing Gregor heard was his deep, classically trained actor’s voice saying, “Get the bloody hell away from her.”
It was a deep voice, and it stopped time, if only for a moment. Gregor was just able to push through a few more layers before they started agitating again, and everybody started yelling again, but it was enough. He didn’t have far to go to the front. They were crammed against a doorway; that was the problem. He could see now that what he had thought was a wall was a doorway. He grabbed at the jacket of the man immediately in front of him and pulled him back. He hooked the leg of the next man up and pulled him to the side. There was the doorway and what seemed to be a single layer of men to go, and in a second he was past it, into the stairwell, into the center of the mess.
And it was not empty. There was no space. The people here were thicker than they had been outside. Flashbulbs were going off at a rate that Gregor was sure must make it impossible for any film to come out. Stewart seemed to be in the process of socking somebody in the jaw. A small woman—Leslie? Gregor had met her before; she was a nurse—was lying on the floor near the stairs, splaying her body over something Gregor couldn’t quite make out, and openly crying.
“Stop,” Leslie kept saying. “You’ve got to stop.”
Nobody was stopping, and Stewart couldn’t knock out enough of them to cause any serious dent in the insanity. Gregor was pinned in place. He squirmed and kicked and tried to maneuver, but he’d gotten as far as he could get for the time being. There were so many people in the small space, it was hard to breath. There were people all around him and there were people above him, on the stairs, snaking up into the second floor. For all Gregor knew, they might have come from above.
Two pairs of hands came out of nowhere and lifted Leslie up off the floor. She was flailing and screaming, and the hands were not gentle. They tossed her to the side, into the crowd, against the wall of men stuck in that corner there, and suddenly Gregor saw whateverybody was trying to get to. The body of Kendra Rhode was lying on the floor, its neck broken clean through, its head, yes, almost slightly backward. There was no way the woman was alive, but there was no way to know when or how she had died either. She could have been dead when Marcey Mandret found her or she could have died since, at the hands of these people, these people who seemed to want nothing and to care about nothing except the picture, the picture and the person who was not a person, the person who was—
Going to be torn apart, Gregor realized, with alarm. The photographers weren’t just taking pictures of the body. They were grabbing at the body, tearing at it. Somebody came forward and ripped a huge length of material off the front of Kendra Rhode’s dress. Somebody else pulled at the parka she was wearing until it came all the way off. Gregor was close enough to realize that Kendra Rhode had not been wearing underwear. Her legs were wide open and they were taking pictures of that, too, over and over again. Stewart Gordon was bellowing. Gregor could barely hear him over what had become the crowd’s droning roar.
Somebody grabbed at Kendra Rhode’s arm and pulled it. Somebody else grabbed at her leg. There was suddenly a tug of war going on, people on one side with the left arm and people on the other with the right leg. Hands kept coming out of the crowd and grabbing more and more clothing, more and more clothing, so that Gregor was sure that at any moment there would be no clothes at all. There would be just the naked body and maybe not all of that, because it wasn’t impossible to pull a body apart if you had enough people and they were willing to go ahead with it. A hand came out of nowhere and went up between Kendra Rhode’s legs and then up into her, all the way inside her, as if this were a snuff film and they’d gotten to the part where the actors got to sexually assault the dead body. Stewart Gordon saw it too, and lunged forward. Gregor saw the hand and arm jerk away from Kendra Rhode’s body as if they were a light plug being pulled out of a socket.
“Goddamn it to bloody hell,” Stewart Gordon said.
And that was when they first heard the sirens.
3
There weren’t as many sirens as there had seemed to be. Gregor and Stewart would find that out in no time at all. In the circumstances, it didn’t matter much, because the sirens acted like heat on ice cream. They melted the crowd away. It happened so fast, Gregor could not tell anyone, later, just what the sequence of events had been. One moment, the stairwell was crammed tight with people. Stewart was holding on to the photographer who had put his hand into Kendra Rhode’s body and was getting ready to hit him. Gregor had pushed all the way to the body itself and was knocking back other people who were grabbing, poking, kicking, snatching, anything to get a piece of her, anything to touch the dead flesh, anything to take away a souvenir, although by then there were no souvenirs left. Then the sounds started and suddenly, it was over. Done. Finished. The crowd had ceased to exist. There was no way to tell where it had gone. There was only Gregor, and Stewart, and Leslie on the stairs, sobbing. Kendra Rhode’s body was stark naked and bent in ways no live body ever could be.
Stewart stepped forward and threw his jacket over Kendra Rhode’s torso. “Don’t tell me we’re preserving evidence,” he said. “There’s no evidence to preserve.”
They could hear people in the corridor beyond the stairwell. The fire door opened and Jerry Young stood there,with Don Hecklewhite behind him, and beyond them men in uniform Gregor didn’t recognize. They all looked stupefied.
Clara Walsh came up behind them. Gregor could see her red hair moving among the uniforms. For some reason, it struck him as odd that both Clara Walsh and Marcey Mandret had red hair, although Marcey’s actually looked red, and Clara’s looked dyed red. This line of thought made no sense at all. If Gregor hadn’t known himself better, he would have wondered if he was in shock. He thought the nurse named Leslie really was in shock.
Clara made it to the front of the police ranks and stepped into the stairwell. She looked down at Kendra Rhode’s body. She looked up at Gregor and Stewart and Leslie. She said, “My God. What happened here?”
“She wasn’t naked to begin with,” Stewart said. “They pulled her clothes off. Ripped them right off of her while I was standing here and Gregor, too. They pulled the body around. They took pictures. I can’t imagine what they took for pictures.”
“She could be alive,” Leslie said. “She could be. She fell down the stairs, I think. I came out into the stai
rwell because of Mr. Bullard, Mr. Bullard got out of his bed somehow and he got into the corridor and the door to the stairwell was open when I found him, so I got worried about it, and I came into the stairwell and I looked down and there she was at the bottom. I think she fell down the stairs. But people fall down the stairs all the time and they break their necks and they’re still alive, so I came down here, I came down here, I did come down here and then there was noise and then people started coming in, all those people, and then—”
“Listen,” Gregor said gently. “Try to think. Was she alive when you got to her?”
“I never got to her,” Leslie said. “I got partway down the stairs and then they were everywhere. I couldn’t check. I couldn’t check. But she could still be alive. Somebody should check.”
“She’s not alive now,” Gregor said. “I think I can guarantee that. You can check her if you want to, though.”
Leslie looked up at the faces around her, police faces, Clara Walsh’s face. Then she seemed to decide that she had been given some kind of permission. She went down a few more steps to the body itself and put her stethoscope in place on her ears. She put the scope under Stewart’s jacket and felt around, then felt around again, then listened, then listened again. She withdrew the scope and shook her head.
“No,” she said.
“Didn’t you say that Mr. Bullard was out of bed?” Gregor asked. “Maybe you should make sure he gets back into bed.”
“I did,” Leslie said. “I put him back into bed before I came out to the stairwell. I don’t even know why I did. It was just that the door was open, and that didn’t make any sense, and we don’t know what happened to Jack, so I thought whoever had attacked him might still be around, or something, you know, the way it is on television. Attacked him before, I mean. I don’t think he was attacked this afternoon. I think the door was open and she fell down the stairs and he heard her cry out and tried to go to her. I must have been in the ladies’ room or downstairs picking up lunch. It doesn’t make any sense to have just one nurse on duty when there’s a patient on the ward, but then there are almost never any patients on the wards during the off-season and it costs so much money to keep people on. But I should have been there. I shouldn’t have left the station. I don’t even know what she was doing here.”
Gregor looked up and around the crowd again. Mike Ingleford was there, at the back, with his arms folded across his chest. “Dr. Ingleford,” Gregor said. “Do you think it’s possible to find out whether Kendra Rhode died from the fall or from the actions that took place afterward?”
Mike Ingleford looked amused. “I’m not a pathologist,” he said, “but I think I can assure you that forensics has not advanced to the point where it could tell you if a woman died now or fifteen minutes from now, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“What about what she died of?” Gregor said. “She fell down the stairs, Leslie thinks, and probably broke her neck.Could we find out if she died from the fall or from being manhandled later?”
“I doubt it,” Mike Ingleford said. “I don’t want to be a pessimist here, but assuming the reports are accurate and that she fell down the stairs and broke her neck, then in all likelihood that’s what she died from, whether she died instantaneously or because somebody pulled at her body while it was lying there and finished the job the broken neck started. But there would be no way that I know of to distinguish between the two.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Gregor said.
Jerry Young came into the now-open central area next to the body. “We ought to secure the area,” he said. “This is a crime scene, no matter what the difficulties. We need to putup tape and get some people in here who can at least attempt to collect evidence.”
“You should collect evidence on them,” Stewart said, jerking his head in the direction of a generalized outside. “It can’t be legal, what they did. It can’t be legal.”
“It’s not legal, but my guess is it also isn’t going to be possible to pin any of it on anybody in particular,” Gregor said. “And I agree with Jerry. This is a crime scene and it ought to be secured. But the damage has been done now. If somebody murdered Kendra Rhode we’re never going to know it and we’re never going to put that person away. We’d better hope that if somebody did murder Kendra Rhode, it was the same person who murdered Mark Anderman.”
“Why?” Leslie said, looking confused.
“It’s because he thinks he knows who killed Mark Anderman,” Bram Winder said, coming in from the rear and looking more disheveled than Gregor would have suspected he could get. “He thinks he knows right now, already. He hasn’t even talked to anybody, and he thinks he knows.”
“I don’t just think,” Gregor said. “I know, and after all this I’m positive. But for the moment we need to let Jerry Young and the people he’s brought—”
“Sheriffs from the other towns on the island,” Jerry said. “I just called everybody, and I called the state police, and I said emergency, and I said hurry, and here we are. We’re not much, but we did some good.”
“You did a lot of good,” Gregor said, which was the truth. He had the horrible feeling that if the riot he’d just been involved in had gone on much longer, the rioters would have torn Kendra Rhode into pieces. “Now the rest of us should get out of your way. Stewart?”
“Christ on a crutch,” Stewart said.
There was a rustle in the crowd, and Marcey Mandret came through, still looking wild, still looking not quite sober. Then she started laughing, and couldn’t seem to stop.
“I told you so,” she said. “I told you so. Look. She’s got her head on backward.”
Chapter Two
1
Arrow Normand could not have explained how she knew the things she knew, but she knew them, and she didn’t have to wait that long for her information. She knew that Kendra Rhode was dead before dinner on the night it happened, and she knew, waking up the next morning with the sun streaming in through the small window at the top of the wall of her cell, that she would be leaving jail soon. She was much calmer, if not perfectly calm. Too much of her life was about to be over for her to be perfectly calm. She kept wishing there were a way to avoid all the things she would have to go through now. It would be much better if life were more like a dotted line than like a real line, with everything all connected. She thought she wouldn’t mind so much having to leave California and her house and her cars and those big blown-up pictures of herself that she had on all her walls, if she could just wake up some morning, just like this one, and be without them. It was the process she was really afraid of. People would yell at her. Her mother would yell at her, and try to fix things, which would be worse. Nothing was fixable. Then there would be the stories, the photographers in her driveway while she moved her things out, the auction—she was sure there would be an auction, because it was what people did; they didn’t put all their things in the trash, they sold them—and finally all the weeks and months and years of watching people talk about her as if she weren’t really there. She wondered if it was possible to have cable TV without having either MTV or VH1. She didn’t want to see herself in one of those half-hour programs about “where are they now.” She didn’t want to think about the people she knew, the people who were really not her friends, and the things they would say about her when she was gone. Maybe they wouldn’t say anything at all. Maybe, when you didn’t belong in the places where she had belonged until now, maybe it was just as if you had never been.
The guard who was on this morning was named Marcella, a new one, brought in from another town on the island. Arrow didn’t know if she had ever been in any of the other towns on the island. She thought she must have. They’d been filming here for months. They’d been driving around in cars. It was hard to think. She wished her usual people were here, the ones who knew her, the ones she could trust to like her, at least for the moment. When you didn’t have money and you weren’t famous, people had to like you “for yourself,” and Arrow
didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant. She had a self, but it was all bound up in this, in what she was on the set of a movie or on a stage when she sang. There were people who said she didn’t sing very well, and secretly, she had always known they were right. If she sang well, they wouldn’t have to tech up her voice all the time, to make it stronger, to make it not so obvious when she couldn’t hold a note or got the melody wrong.
Marcella was in a hurry, and she didn’t understand why Arrow wasn’t in a hurry too. “Come on, now,” she said, checking to see if Arrow had changed into the little pile of clothes she’d brought in with breakfast. “Your mother is waiting for you, and a lawyer, and some other man, the investigator they brought in. And there’s not much time to talk, because there’s a hearing. You’re going to walk out of here today.”
“Yes,” Arrow said, and then, “thank you.” She had to remind herself to always say “thank you,” and “please,” and all those other things, because one of the biggest mistakes stars made was to think that they didn’t have to say those things, that they didn’t have to be polite, because they were not like other people. Stewart Gordon had told her that the first day they were on the set, when he had reamed her out about the way she’d spoken to one of the costume women, and then he’d told her she’d better call her the “costume woman” and not the “costume girl,” because “girl” in a case like that was offensive. Stewart Gordon knew things like that, lots of them. Arrow could never help wondering how he had found out.
Marcella had brought her a pair of jeans and a white turtleneck and a crew-necked navy blue wool sweater. It was the kind of thing Arrow had seen pictures of students wearing on college campuses, but not the kind of thing she had ever worn herself. She wondered where the clothes had come from. She was sure the jail hadn’t provided them, and she was sure her mother hadn’t picked them out. If her mother had picked out something for her to wear, it would have been a designer dress of some kind, and it would have required strappy little sandals. The shoes that had come with this outfit were thick suede boots with a faux shearling lining that went halfway up her calf. They were the kind of boots that were meant to be worn in the snow.
