by Jane Haddam
In Margaret Anson’s perfect world, money and merit would go together. The people who really understood opera and art and history would be in charge of everybody else, and recognition would come for taste instead of for overwhelming effort. The truth was, Margaret didn’t really have it all worked out, what she would like the world to be instead of what it was now. She only knew that she hated almost everything about what it was now, and what it had forced her to become. She was with the feminists on at least one thing, although she thought of most feminists as lower-class and overly fond of talking about their genitals. Marriage and prostitution were one and the same thing. You sold your body for money. You handed it over for sex and procreation. Robert hadn’t been much interested in sex, in the end. He had wanted another child, to try for a son, but he could have gotten that much by presenting her with a loaded turkey baster.
When Kayla was small, she had raced around their big apartment in the city, falling from things, jumping on things. Nannies had despaired of her. Maids had tried to stay out of her way. Margaret had seen from the beginning that she was Robert’s daughter and not hers. She had been born with all the vitality and all the crudeness of her father’s less-than-admirable social class.
I will not have her here, Margaret thought now. It was the only thought she could hold in her head. Even this one glass of sherry was making her wobbly. These last two nights of not getting enough sleep had made her something worse.
The body could stay at the funeral home; that’s what it could do. The body could stay there until it went to rot. Margaret had no intention of ever seeing it again. If there was a hell, she hoped that Kayla was in it. She hoped that the flames licked up from the molten lava on the ground and burned great blisters in that stupid girl’s feet. At least she would no longer have to open Town and Country to see her daughter’s face.
Life was not fair, that was what the problem was. Life had not been fair to her, to Margaret Anson.
And if life wasn’t fair, somebody had to pay for it.
Six
1
All murder is random. That was what Gregor Demarkian’s most formidable instructor at Quantico had said, when Gregor was young enough to think that murder was rare, except in war. Maybe the truth was that in those days murder was rare. It was the year before John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas. Television was full of happy families. Television news was careful to report only on those people who could be considered “significant.” If the denizens of the local trailer park got liquored up and slaughtered each other at will, nobody in the nicer subdivisions on the other side of town would ever hear about it. If children were beaten to death by their mother’s boyfriends, if they were left to starve and die by their mothers themselves—well, it all happened over there, in that part of town, and there was nothing more you could expect from those people. It didn’t make any difference to you. Gregor remembered sitting at a small desk with a little writing-desk extension on one side, trying to take notes in a spiral notebook. He was not only young enough to still think that murder was rare, but young enough to still be uncomfortable with his size. He sometimes thought he was still growing taller, in his sleep, and that every morning when he woke the world around him was a little smaller. He imagined himself as Alice, growing larger. Any minute now, he would grow too big for his own apartment. His arms and legs would push through the windows and leave him trapped.
All murder is random. At the time, he had thought the man was insane. Murder was deliberate. That’s why people were executed for it. He couldn’t remember how many years it had taken him to understand what had been meant, or how thoroughly he had to agree with it.
Now he let Bennis pull her car up in front of the tiny white clapboard house on Caldwell green, and felt again how foolish it was not to be able to drive. He was an urban animal, but all those years in the Bureau should have egged him into it at one point or another. Lord only knows, he had spent enough of his career as an agent in cars. The problem was that somebody else had always had a car. Now he felt oddly silly—the Important Consultant, being chauffeured around like a ten-year-old with a Little League game.
Bennis put the car into park and leaned toward the windshield to take in the green and what surrounded it. Gregor was fascinated with it all himself. It was so—New England. So exactly what it was supposed to be. The not-quite-rectangular patch of brown grass at the center. The churches on each of the four sides: Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal. The Congregationalist and Methodist churches were white. The Presbyterian and Episcopal were made of flat gray stone. The whole collection looked forbidding and completely empty.
“You’d never know that the Methodists are discussing holding blessings for same-sex marriages,” Bennis said.
Gregor got his coat out of the little well behind the two front seats.
“I’ll see you for dinner at the inn. I think we’re going around and looking at lab work. At any rate, I don’t think we’re staying here. You ought to try to stay out of trouble.”
“You ought to get a driver’s license. Although I don’t think you’d really be safe. Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you? Just to make certain that somebody’s here?”
“Somebody’s here.” The tiny white house with the sign in front of it that said RESIDENT TROOPER had a driveway. Gregor pointed down the flat cut of it to the garage at the back, in front of which a state police car was parked in full view of whoever wanted to look. “The rest of them will be here in a few moments, I’m sure. Unless they’re already here and parked somewhere out of sight. To make sure we don’t all get caught doing this.”
“You make it sound like you’re about to rob a bank.”
“We’ve been very lucky to avoid all the media nonsense that’s going on out there,” Gregor said. “They haven’t caught up to you at the inn. They haven’t caught up to me. It isn’t going to last forever. You might try being careful with yourself this afternoon.”
“I’m going to the mall. There’s a new one in Waterbury. Gregor, do you know the JonBenet Ramsey case?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not going to tell me who it is? Why not?”
“For the same reason that the Denver police aren’t making an arrest. They know who did it, too. They just can’t prove it. Cases like that aren’t really all that difficult, Bennis. They’re sort of standard operating procedure. Every police detective anywhere who deals with homicide on a regular basis has half a dozen like it in a drawer some--where, all of them officially unsolved. You have to be careful with them. More careful with them than you are with the others.”
“Why?”
“Because juries want to bring back convictions in child murder cases. They don’t like findings of not guilty when a child is dead. Even if the defendant doesn’t look to be guilty. Even if they don’t think the defendant is guilty. They want to convict somebody. What’s got you started on JonBenet Ramsey?”
“I don’t know,” Bennis said. “I was wondering about this, I guess. About Kayla Anson. I was wondering if you knew who had killed Kayla Anson.”
“I’ve only just got here, Bennis. I don’t even know who the suspects are.”
“Her mother.”
“Who, as far as I know at the moment, was sitting with you at the time that the murder occurred, making conversation about lesbian painters in Paris in the twenties. Why are you in such a hurry to convict Kayla Anson’s mother?”
“I’ve met her. Never mind. Are they all going to be there today, all the police officers from all the towns?”
“I don’t know. But you’re not going to be.”
Gregor opened the car door and climbed out. There was a jack-o’-lantern on the tiny clapboard house’s front stoop. It was the only sign of Halloween on Caldwell green. He leaned back into the car and gave Bennis a chaste peck on the lips. It was the best he could do. Contorted into that particular
physical position, it was all he could do to get his lips properly puckered.
“Go to the mall,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later. Nothing is going to go on for the rest of today but procedure. You’d be bored if you were here.”
“I know.” She gave him a peck on the cheek to go with the one he had given her on the lips. “Take care of yourself.”
“My biggest problem is going to be finding myself some decent food.”
Gregor stepped back out of the car. He slammed the door shut after himself. Bennis rolled down her window and stuck her head out.
“I’ll talk to you later,” she said.
Then she drew her head back into the car and rolled the window up again. A moment later, the car was moving away from the curb and out onto the narrow country road. What did it say about this place that even its main roads were narrow?
Gregor put his coat over his shoulders and went up to the resident trooper’s front door.
2
The resident trooper’s name was Stacey Spratz, and he was very young. Gregor had noticed that the night before, when they had met for the first time under Bennis’s watchful eye. It hadn’t been much of a meeting. Gregor had been too tired, and strung too tight, to be much help, or even to make much sense. All he and Stacey had been able to accomplish was to make it clear that, yes, Gregor would not mind looking into this particular case if the law enforcement agencies involved wanted him to—and no, Gregor did not charge fees for his work, although he did appreciate it if the people he helped out gave a donation to Foodshare or Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. This business about not paying him always held people up. They had contingency funds in their budgets for this kind of thing. Why wouldn’t he want to get paid? Gregor always found himself going into a long, convoluted explanation of something that should have been very simple. To be legitimately paid, he needed a private detective’s license. He had no intention of getting a private detective’s license.
That stopped them, too. Why wouldn’t he want to get a private detective’s license?
He went up to Stacey Spratz’s front door, found the bell, and rang. You did not go from being a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—from being the founder and head of the FBI’s behavioral sciences unit—to being a private detective. It was like starting out as Picasso and then going to work painting Mickey Mouse on clock faces.
Stacey Spratz opened the door and looked out. His face was tense. When he saw Gregor, he relaxed.
“Oh, it’s you. I keep expecting to be invaded. They have been invaded, out in Washington Depot. Cam Borderman called and told me they’ve set up a press room right there on the premises. It was either that or have reporters crawling all over the building at all hours of the day and night. And they still find the idiots all over the place.”
Stacey was headed toward the back of the house down a long narrow hall that went through the middle. The place was just as cramped as Gregor had expected it to be, with the added discomfort of having very low ceilings. Old, Gregor thought automatically. Probably as old as the churches. He had to duck to go through doorways.
Stacey Spratz did not have to duck. He was very short, for a man, and on top of that he was used to the house. He led Gregor into the kitchen and then motioned him to sit down at a round kitchen table. The table was covered with papers and file folders and Post-it notes stuck all over everything.
“Let me get you a cup of coffee,” Stacey said. “Then I’ll tell you where we’re at. I talked to my captain this morning. You’re officially on as a consultant as of this morning at eight o’clock. We had to get five people out of bed to authorize it, but nobody wants a mess on this one. Washington and Watertown are formally giving up jurisdiction to the state police—we don’t know where she was killed yet anyway. It could even have been Morris. Morris will give up jurisdiction, too. I think we’ve got everything settled that has to be settled.”
“I think so, too.”
“The thing is,” Stacey put a mug of coffee in front of Gregor, in spite of the fact that Gregor hadn’t actually said he wanted any. “I mean. Well… I tried to head them off. But they want to have a press conference. A big press conference. With the governor.”
Gregor thought this over. “Isn’t the governor in Hartford?”
“Yeah, but he’s from Middlebury. That’s right next to Watertown. Anyway, he’ll come out here. That’s not the thing. The thing is, this is going to be one hell of a press conference. We’ve got people out here from the networks. From CNN. I don’t know if you mind that kind of thing or not, but it scares the hell out of me.”
“It’s probably inevitable,” Gregor pointed out. He tried the coffee. It was as bad as Father Tibor’s. It might be worse. He put the mug down.
Stacey Spratz rubbed his hand across the side of his face. In spite of the youngness of it, Gregor could see where the lines would be, when they came. Stacey had the sort of pale skin light blonds often do in their teens and twenties. It went quickly to hell as they aged. Gregor’s guess was that Stacey Spratz was not very bright. His virtues ran to loyalty and honesty and the desperate need to do good in a world he found inherently confusing. It was not a personality type Gregor would have chosen if he were doing the hiring for his own police force. Maybe it was just what was needed in the way of a resident trooper.
“Mr. Demarkian?” Stacey said.
“Sorry,” Gregor said. “I was thinking about what you do. About what it consists of, being a resident trooper.”
“Mostly it consists of getting Mark Wethersfield off the road when he’s been drinking. And checking out break-ins. Which always turn out not to be break-ins. Not a lot goes on out here, Mr. Demarkian. We did have a murder out in Morris, back in ninety-one or ninety-two. At Four Corners. At the gas station there. This kid went in and shot his girlfriend and then he shot himself. Ex-girlfriend. She wanted to break up. They were both seventeen.”
“We get that kind of thing in Philadelphia, too.”
“I know. And they get it in Waterbury, too. The point is that we don’t get much else. And we’re all very—conscious, I guess the word is—we all know that we’re in way over our heads. That this thing is beyond us. If you know what I mean.”
“I know the feeling of being in over my head,” Gregor said.
“I’m supposed to lay all this out for you and then take you out to Washington Depot for the press conference. If that’s okay with you.”
“That’s fine with me.”
This seemed to be not quite fine with Stacey Spratz. He was hesitating, as if he were expecting Gregor to do something else, want something else, make some objection. When that didn’t happen, Stacey got up and got himself a second cup of coffee. Gregor didn’t understand how he’d managed to drink the first.
“All right then,” he said, coming back to the table and sitting down facing Gregor on the other side. “This is what we have, then.”
3
This was the part about a case that Gregor liked best—the part where you could put the pieces on the table and make order out of chaos. Gregor was a very orderly man. That had as much to do with his success as a detective as any trained intellect he could be said to have, or any talent, either. Life was never completely orderly. There were always loose ends. Still, a crime had a narrative, if it was any kind of crime at all. The kind of crimes that were really something else—the violence of too much dope or too much liquor—didn’t interest him at all.
Stacey Spratz was not an orderly man. He couldn’t even be said to be reasonably neat. Before he could get started telling Gregor what had gone on the night Kayla Anson was murdered, he had to hunt through the papers on the kitchen table three times to find his notes.
Gregor abandoned his coffee, stood up, and began to put the papers on the table in neat stacks, sorted by type. He did it as much to give himself something to do as to be any great help to Stacey Spratz. He had no idea if this case would be furthered or hindered by having a stack he th
ought of as “Watertown police reports” separate from the one he thought of as “Washington police reports.”
“Okay,” Stacey said. “The thing is, earlier that evening, around four-thirty or five, Kayla Anson went into Water-bury. She went out to the Brass Mill Center, which is the new mall. It’s actually in the town of Waterbury, right in the middle of it, right off Main Street. Not out in the country the way malls usually are. You see what I mean?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. He just didn’t see why it was important.
“Anyway, she went out there and did some shopping. She stopped at Waldenbooks. We talked to the manager. The manager knew her. Actually, most people did. She got around town a lot the past few months. Did I tell you she’d been expelled from her boarding school?”
“No.”
“Well, she had. Christmas last year. Actually, I think what it was was that she was asked to stop out for a year. She was supposed to go back this January. She and her friend Annabel Crawford got thrown out together. From the Madeira School, out in Virginia.”
“What for?” The Madeira School was the one Jean Harris had been headmistress of, before she drove up to Westchester and murdered Dr. Herman Tarnower.
“This Annabel Crawford was going to elope. Or said she was. With some local kid. And they’d been friends forever, so Kayla Anson helped her out by getting her horse out of the stables and parking it where Annabel could ride off on it. Do you know that some of these girls bring their own horses to boarding school with them?”
“I’d heard of it.”
“Well, they got caught. Actually, if you ask me, I think Annabel was pulling some kind of stunt and got Kayla Anson involved in it. We all know Annabel out here. She’s got more fake IDs than an Iranian terrorist. And she’s something of a rip. I don’t think she’d marry some local boy with no money and no prospects. He couldn’t keep her in shoes.”
