Hearts of Sand: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian Novels)

by Jane Haddam

  “Maybe,” Gregor said, “but I don’t know, and you don’t know either. What if this hadn’t been Chapin Waring who’d been killed? What if it had been some unknown woman? How would you have gone about it then?”

  “Well, we’d have tried to identify her,” Mark Held said. “But we have identified her this time. There were fingerprints and that kind of thing. The identification isn’t in doubt.”

  “If it had been an unknown woman,” Gregor said, “I presume you would have gathered all the forensic evidence and sent it to the lab. And yes, I know the state lab lost its accreditation. But you’d have done that. Have you done that?

  “All right,” Gregor said. “Then I would presume you’d cordon off the scene and keep going over it. You’d check out the rest of the house. You’d talk to the neighbors.”

  “We did all those things,” Mike Held said.

  “And you didn’t put that into your report,” Gregor told him. “She was stabbed. I assume with a knife. Where did the knife come from? Was it part of a set in the house? Was it brought in from outside?”

  “It wasn’t part of a set from the house that we could see,” Mark Held said. “We looked in the kitchen, and there were three or four knife sets in those wooden blocks, but they were all full. It could have been in the house in a drawer or something, not part of a set, but we’ve got no way of knowing. Nobody has lived in that house for decades.”

  “It’s still owned by the Waring family?”

  “Owned, but not occupied,” Jack Mann said. “The parents up and moved away less than a year after Chapin disappeared. The impression I get talking to people is that they couldn’t stand it. People were always coming around, invading their privacy.”

  “And the parents are now—?”

  “Dead,” Jason Battlesea said.

  “And the house still isn’t sold. And nobody lives in it.”

  “There are three other sisters,” Mike Held said. “Caroline lives right here in town. She and her husband have a place over in the Sheepwoods section of town. The other two—”

  “Charlotte and Cordelia,” Jack Mann said.

  “Right,” Mike said, “Charlotte and Cordelia. They’re not local anymore. I think one of them lives in Chicago, but I’m not sure.”

  “And the house has never been up for sale?”

  “Not that I know of,” Jason Battlesea said.

  “Well,” Gregor said, “did you ever ask yourself why?”

  The three men looked nonplussed.

  “But aren’t you doing the same thing?” Mike Held asked. “Aren’t you just concentrating on the old crime? I mean, okay, they kept the house like that all these years and it’s really odd, but isn’t the reason they did that something having to do with the older crime?”

  “Maybe,” Gregor said. “But unlike reports of the witness statements of the bank robberies, it’s also something that has an immediate relevance to this crime. Chapin Waring was found dead in her family’s home, which has been maintained—has it been maintained?”

  “If it hadn’t been, there would have been complaints from the rest of Beach Drive,” Jason Battlesea said. “I’ve driven by that place dozens of times, and the lawns always look really great.”

  “What about inside the house?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, that looks really great, too,” Mike Held said. “Except for the stuff that was shot up when the murder happened. Or maybe later.”

  “Do you know if the murder actually occurred in that house?” Gregor asked. “Do you know if Chapin Waring was stabbed there?”

  “No,” Mike admitted.

  “But you do know she had a gun?” Gregor tried to sound encouraging.

  “She had a gun in her hand when the body was found,” Jack Mann said.

  “And that doesn’t set off alarm bells in your heads?” Gregor asked.

  “Alarm bells about what?” Mike Held asked.

  “Well,” Gregor said, “here’s a woman who has been stabbed in the back. But she also has a gun in her hand. If somebody was trying to kill her, why didn’t she shoot?”

  “She did shoot,” Jack Mann said. “She shot up the entire living room. She shot a bunch of holes in this big mirror. She took out most of a really huge chandelier.”

  “Those were all bullets from the gun she was holding?”

  “They were,” Mike Held said, “so maybe she was shooting at the person who stabbed her. Maybe that person snuck up behind her when she didn’t know he was there—or she was there—and then she turned around and tried to get them with the gun.”

  “Okay,” Gregor said, “that’s not entirely implausible, but I don’t like it much. We have to presume she knew she was in a place where she was at least potentially in danger. I’d think she’d be on her guard. But let that pass for the moment. What time of day was the body found?”

  “It was at night,” Jason Battlesea said. “Maybe nine o’clock at night.”

  “And when she was found, she was dead? Do you know how long she’d been dead?” Gregor asked.

  “You know better than that,” Jason Battlesea said. “This isn’t CSI. We can’t pull magic out of our hats.”

  “You can usually tell if a body is a couple of minutes or a couple of hours cold,” Gregor said. “There’s nothing wrong with the state medical examiner’s office, is there? Isn’t that Henry Lee?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the medical examiner’s office, no,” Jason Battlesea said. “We must have all this information somewhere. I’m not sure why we didn’t send it to you. Why don’t we sit down and go through the computer files and see what we can find.”

  “Didn’t you say the first person on the scene was a uniformed patrolman?” Gregor asked.

  “Patrolwoman,” Mike Held said.

  “I want to talk to her,” Gregor said.

  “Of course,” Jason Battlesea said. “She’s—what, she’s still on night duty? She ought to be coming in around six.”

  “I want to talk to her now,” Gregor said. “Even if you have to get her out of bed.”

  3

  It took Angela Harkin nearly twenty minutes to get into the station, and when she arrived she was not in uniform. What she was wearing instead was one of those sundresses whose tops were made out of something ruched and elastic, with thin spaghetti straps and a hemline that ended above her knees. Gregor noticed first that she did not have the kind of body usually associated with that kind of dress. She was stocky and short, built more like a man than a woman in many ways. The next thing he noticed was the way she walked. She kept her back very, very straight. She always looked straight ahead.

  “Military?” Gregor asked her as she threw her huge tote bag down on the table in the middle of them.

  Angela Harkin nodded. “Army, ten years. MP the last six. Then my knees gave out. I felt like an idiot, you know? I mean, what do MPs do if they’re not in a war zone? Mostly, they pick up drunks who’re overstaying their leave or causing some kind of trouble. You’d think anybody would be able to handle that kind of thing. Well, one of my drunks had a baseball bat and went right for my knees, and a couple of months later another one tried to drive over me, and here I am. Not that I mind being here. It’s a great place. It’s just that I always intended to make a career out of the service.”

  “Angela gets a little bored,” Jack Mann said.

  “There’s a lot to get bored about in a place like this, Jack,” Angela said. “Nothing ever happens here that can’t be cleaned up by a call to Bridgeport or a call to Hartford, and I much prefer Bridgeport.”

  “There are always the calls to Washington,” Mike Held said.

  Angela Harkin rolled her eyes and sat down. “I take it this is Mr. Demarkian,” she said, turning to him and holding out her hand. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you. You been over to Beach Drive yet?”

  “He’s staying at the Switch and Shingle,” Jason Battlesea said.

  “Good,” Angela said. “Then you know what it’s like. Great
, big houses, set back, with their backs to the sea, and then on the other side with their faces to the sea. The ones that are right on the beach itself are more expensive. The Waring house is one of the expensive ones. So I patrol that, and I start at six o’clock. It was June, so it was light out. I made maybe three turns that night without seeing anything. And I mean not anything. I didn’t see any cars on the road. I didn’t see any people walking. Then I had to stop in at the Atlantic Club and check that out.”

  “What was going on at the Atlantic Club?”

  “Fund-raiser for Virginia Brand Westervan’s Senate campaign,” Angela said. “Virginia Brand Westervan is the congresswoman from this district, and now she’s running for Senate against an absolutely brain-dead jerk whose idea of fiscal responsibility is to eliminate homeless shelters.”

  “That’s not true,” Jason Battlesea said, “and you know it.”

  “All right, I’m exaggerating a little,” Angela said. “But not my kind of guy. Anyway, there was a huge fund-raiser over there and there was lots of security. We had a couple of guys on extra shifts, and Virginia had her own private security people. So I was supposed to stop in and look around and make sure everything was going okay. And I did.”

  “And everything was going okay?” Gregor asked.

  “Everything was fine,” Angela agreed. “Virginia came out and talked to me herself, and then she got this waiter to get me a bunch of these canapé things with lobster that were absolutely stellar. And I don’t want to hear one thing about what I was or wasn’t supposed to be doing on duty. I didn’t drink the champagne.”

  “If this was a serious police department,” Jack Mann said, “you’d have been fired months ago.”

  “I don’t like to hear that this isn’t a police department,” Jason Battlesea said. “This isn’t a high-crime area, but—”

  “Trust me, this is a high-crime area,” Angela said, “it’s just Federal crimes and they’re all financial. We’ve already had five people from Alwych go to Danbury for fraud, three of them for mortgage fraud, which, as far as I’m concerned, is as bad as it gets. But anyway, I took a little time eating the canapés and then I got back in the patrol car and started another round.”

  “And was it still light out?” Gregor asked.

  Angela nodded. “It was a little,” she said. “It wasn’t full dark, and wouldn’t be for a while, but the lights in the Atlantic Club were all on, and the lights were on in most of the houses I passed after that.”

  “That included the lights in the Waring house,” Gregor said.

  “Absolutely,” Angela said, “but that didn’t mean much, because the lights there are on a timer. They go on and off at set intervals, and the intervals are changed every once in a while. I’m not sure what the Waring girls think they’re doing, though, because it’s not like everybody on earth didn’t know that that house was empty. It’s been empty for decades.”

  “But well taken care of,” Gregor said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Angela said. “Really well taken care of. If you didn’t already know, you’d never guess from looking at the place from the outside. They’ve got people who do the snow in the winter. They’ve got people who do the grass in the spring and summer. They’ve got a cleaning service that comes in once a month to dust things. They’ve got a repair service that checks every week. They repaint the house every three years. They take care of it as if they were going to move back in, but they never have.”

  “Do they have a security system?”

  “Yep, and a good one, too,” Angela said. “One of those private outfits you pay significant money to so that if the alarm goes off, they call the police.”

  “But nobody called the police on this night?” Gregor asked.

  “Nobody called the police from the security service,” Angela said, “and nobody called the security service. Those two checked. But somebody on Beach Road did call earlier in the night, to say she thought she saw odd lights there, and then heard something she was sure was a gun going off. If it had been anywhere but the Waring house, somebody would probably have been sent over immediately. But the Waring house is our own private haunted house. We get a lot of calls about that house that turn out to be nothing.”

  “The way you get a lot of calls from people who think they’ve seen Chapin Waring?” Gregor asked.

  “Absolutely,” Angela said again. “And it had been that kind of day, from what I’d heard. People calling in, saying they saw her, I mean. So, when I made the round, I slowed down and looked hard at the house.”

  “And?” Gregor asked.

  Angela looked uncomfortable. “And I don’t know,” she said. “There were different lights on than what I thought ought to be there, but it’s like I said. They’ve done this well, and it’s not always the same lights. It was just—I don’t know. It felt wrong. So I pulled into the driveway, way up until I was near the house, and I got out to look around.”

  “There’s no security in the drive?” Gregor asked. “There’s no outside alarm system?”

  “No,” Angela said. “I walked around the house for a while and there didn’t seem to be anything. I stood on the terrace in the back and looked at the beach. There were footprints on the beach, leading up to the house.”

  “You’re sure of that?” Gregor asked.

  “Yeah, positive,” Angela said. “There were footprints coming up, but none going down. And I didn’t know if I was supposed to think that was odd or not. People have private beaches here, but they’re not really private. They run into each other, and all you have to do to walk along the shore is just walk. There are chain fences, but they don’t go very far out into the water, and at low tide you’d have a great big open space to walk in. And I’d bet anything that people walk along those beaches and then come up to the Waring terrace to look inside.”

  “But there were no footsteps leading away from the house,” Gregor said.

  “No, there weren’t that I could see,” Angela said. “But I just might have missed something.”

  “Do you really think you missed footsteps going away from the house?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” Angela said.

  “All right,” Gregor said. “That’s good. What next?”

  “I didn’t want to jump the gun. The house is empty, but it has owners, and one of them lives in town. The family does come in on and off and check the place out.”

  “They never stay there?”

  “I don’t know,” Angela said, “but I wasn’t going to barge in there before I knew what was going on. I was on the terrace, and the terrace has this big wall of glass looking out onto the ocean. It’s also got curtains, but I went up to the glass to see if I could see anything at all, and it turned out I could. I could see a foot in a pair of canvas espadrilles. And right then, I thought it was going to turn out that I only thought I saw a foot, and it was really just an espadrille on the floor. So I looked again, and it still looked like a foot. So I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to check it out, that maybe somebody had gotten in there and started squatting, so I went around to the front door.”

  “There was a reason you couldn’t get in from where you were?” Gregor asked.

  “I probably could have, but we’ve got keys to the security system at the front door, and it causes a lot less fuss if I do things officially,” Angela said. “I went around to the front and let myself in.”

  “The front door was locked?”

  “Yes, it was,” Angela said. “I had to jimmy it to get it open, and then I had to do a sprint to keep the alarm system from going off.”

  “But the alarm system was on?”

  “Yes, it was,” Angela said. “I stood in the foyer for a while and there was nothing to see. I called out and nobody answered. Then I went toward the back of the house, and there it was.”

  “It?”

  “The body,” Angela said. “She was lying on the floor, the knife was sticking out of her back, and the place was a complete mess. She had a gun in her ha
nd. The whole room was shot up, the mirrors, the chandelier, everything. There was glass everywhere. But that isn’t the detail you want.”

  “What detail do I want?” Gregor asked.

  “She wasn’t wearing espadrilles,” Angela Harkin said. She sounded almost triumphant. “These two have been telling me I must have been mistaken about the espadrille I saw when I looked in from the back, but I’m not. It was an espadrille I saw. But the body of Chapin Waring was wearing tennis shoes. And they weren’t anything like the same color.”

  The door to the room opened up, and the uniformed woman from the front desk looked in. “You haven’t been answering your beeper,” she said to Jason Battlesea. “You’re needed out here for a minute.”

  Jason Battlesea got up and left the room. Gregor turned his attention back to Angela Harkin.

  “This foot you saw,” he said. “Was it the foot of somebody standing up? Lying down? What?”

  “Not standing up,” Angela said. “It was up off the floor.”

  “Like somebody was sitting on the couch or on a chair?”

  “Something like that,” Angela said.

  “But there was glass everywhere?” Gregor asked. “You said everywhere. There was glass on the furniture, too?”

  “Yes, there was glass on the furniture,” Angela said. “Lots of it. Lots of it everywhere. Furniture, rug, floor, hearth, the body, everywhere.”

  “So that if somebody was sitting or kneeling on a piece of furniture, they would have to have been sitting or kneeling on glass?” Gregor said.

  “They’d have to have been sitting or kneeling on a lot of it,” Angela said.

  The door opened and Jason Battlesea came back in, looking harassed.

  “Here’s something,” he said. “The burglar alarm has just gone off at the Waring house.”

  PART TWO

  A genius is the one who is most like himself.

  —Thelonius Monk

  ONE

  1

  The Waring house turned out to be one of the ones with a high hedge near the road, so that Gregor couldn’t have seen it if he’d wanted to while he was being driven to and from town. It was yellow.