Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “What?” Eddie Block said.

  “More bodies,” Gregor told him. “Think about this for a minute. Annie-Vic was assaulted. This woman was murdered. We have no reason why any of it has happened, but we do know that it’s all in some way connected to Annie-Vic. Which means that there might be something here, something in the house, that’s triggering all this. And the relatives are staying in the house. And we don’t know where they are. For all we do know, they could be upstairs at this minute lying in pools of their own blood, because whatever is important enough to somebody to kill for is something they’ve been stumbling over since they arrived in town—”

  Eddie Block and Tom Fordman looked at each other. Their expressions were still both blank.

  That was when Gregor made up his mind. It didn’t matter that Gary Albright was a suspect in his own case, he could not be dispensed with. In Snow Hill, at just this moment, there was no other person who could make this case work at all. If they weren’t going to have Gary Albright, then they were going to have to call in the state police. Gregor was with Gary Albright on that one. You didn’t do that except as a last resort.

  Gregor got out his cell phone. “Give me half a second to make a phone call,” he said, “and then we’ll go upstairs and search.”

  2

  Years ago, so many now that he couldn’t imagine what he had looked like then, as a newly minted special agent of the FBI, Gregor had been sent on a kidnaping detail with a veteran agent and a tech crew. The case was being worked out of a small town in eastern Massachusetts, close enough to Boston and the Cape to be the location of serious money, but far enough away to look rural and “unspoiled.” In those days, Gregor had not understood the concept of “unspoiled,” or why so many of the people he worked with seemed to worship it. Unlike most of the people he worked with, and most of the people he’d gone to college and graduate school with, he had not grown up middle class in a suburb. He’d been raised in what would now be called the inner city, except that instead of a racial enclave he’d come from an ethnic one. Tenements full of apartments that never had enough windows, schools that had been built in the 1920s and not updated since—the only thing that broke the routine of work and grind and hope was the trip, once a year, to visit relatives who lived in “the country.” The country was a farm somebody had bought after coming over from Armenia with a little extra cash, or after working a few decades in a factory somewhere. Farming was the big thing, because in Armenia a man who owned his own farm was a man of stature. The farms Gregor had visited in his childhood, however, had really been unspoiled, untouched by human progress. The bathrooms were out the kitchen door to the back, in little wooden sheds that had no heat. Gregor could only imagine what they would be like in the middle of the night in the middle of winter. They were bad enough in the middle of the night in the summer heat. Water came into the kitchen sink by a hand pump. The roads were dirt. The nearest approximation of civilization was a small town thirty miles away that consisted of a feed store and a dry goods store and a gas station with a single pump. Why anybody would want to live like that, Gregor didn’t know—but of course the people he worked with didn’t want to live like that. They wanted to build big modern houses in the emptiness of the countryside and then travel an hour to get to what they’d consider a “real” job, where they could complain about the hardships of having to drive on the dirt roads and the glories of buying only locally grown vegetables.

  That kidnap detail had been centered on a house like that, fairly new, with a kitchen that looked like it could have served a small restaurant but that Gregor was willing to swear had never been cooked in. There were pots and pans hanging from the ceiling over a large center island, and one wall consisting of nothing but big banks of windows. One end of the island was constructed like a diner’s counter, with stools, and the mother of the victim sat at it while they talked to her.

  “It was his idea, this house,” she said, talking about the husband she was in the middle of divorcing, the one they thought had taken the child and run. “I never wanted a house like this. I wanted an antique house. I wanted dark wood and mullioned windows.”

  Going upstairs, Gregor thought that this was the kind of house that woman had meant, that this was what she had wanted instead of what she had. He also remembered how the case had worked out: it was his first real case, the one that was supposed to stay with you. There was the kidnap note left next to the phone on the built-in desk in the kitchen. There were the police cars and Bureau cars that came in and out of the driveway. There were the bodies, father and daughter both, lying on the floor of the third-floor playroom as if they’d been there for eternity. The man must have come back after the police first searched the house. He must have been watching and waiting and biding his time.

  Gregor and Tom Fordman were going up the stairs to the second floor of this house, where nobody was supposed to be home. There was a cold blast of air of, cold enough to make Gregor want a coat. Windows were open somewhere, in the rooms at the end of the hall. Somebody must have been airing the place out. Gregor knew how the houses of old people got when the old people lived alone.

  “Did you come up here and search the house when Annie-Vic was attacked?” he asked.

  “Gary did,” Tom Fordman said. “I didn’t see any point to it. The guy wasn’t going to be hiding out in the house.”

  “The guy?”

  “The guy who attacked her.”

  Gregor wanted to say that there was nothing he knew at this point that would rule out a woman, but he let it pass and opened the first closed door on his left. It was a walk-in linen closet, with built-in shelves lining the walls. There were sheets and pillowcases and towels, all neatly folded and segregated into categories. He went on to the next door, which was open. That led to a bedroom that had obviously been slept in, and recently. The bed was unmade. There was an oversize T-shirt lying on the end of it, the kind of thing college girls wore to bed instead of regulation nightgowns. Gregor walked in and looked around. He opened the door to the big wardrobe that stood against one wall and then closed it again. There was no closet. He wondered, idly, when it was that houses had started to have closets in every bedroom. It was so standard now that zoning boards didn’t count a room as a bedroom unless it had a closet.

  Gregor went back into the hall. “We should really get a team,” he said, “and go all the way through here thoroughly.”

  “Looking for what?” Tom Fordman said. “You never say. Do you really think the murderer is up here somewhere, hiding out?”

  “It’s possible,” Gregor said. “There are other possibilities.”

  “Like what?”

  Gregor thought of those two bodies on the third floor. Then he went into the next room, and that one he was sure was Annie-Vic’s own. It was scrupulously clean and mostly empty. There were two big wardrobes instead of just one. The furniture was old but not shabby. It had been well made and kept up over the years. Still, the wood was as dark here as it was downstairs. Everything was dark.

  “I think if you think the murderer is here, we ought to do this the way we were trained to,” Tom Fordman said. “We ought to have our guns out.”

  “I don’t have a gun.”

  “Really? You mean on you, or at all?”

  “At all. I don’t like guns. I carried one when I was required to, of course, but I was never happy with it. I’m not really interested in shooting at anybody. I’m not really interested in getting shot at.”

  “You were in the FBI, weren’t you? Gary said something about that. And you can’t count on not getting shot at.”

  “No, I know you can’t,” Gregor said. He was out in the hall again, and then into another room. The rooms seemed to go on forever. How did anyone live alone in a house of this size? If it had been him living alone here, he would have rigged up a place to sleep on the ground floor and restricted himself to that and the living room and the kitchen. He would have left the upstairs alone to gather ghosts. It felt to
him as if the ghosts had gathered anyway.

  He went in and out of another room, and another, and another. There was one more that had been slept in. Gregor assumed that that was where the grandnephew was staying. The rest of the rooms were all perfectly made up and perfectly clean—museum pieces, really, exhibits on How We Lived Then. When he had seen the last of them, he went out into the hall and looked around.

  “What about upstairs?” he asked. “Are there servants’ quarters?”

  “You must be joking,” Tom Fordman said. “Nobody in Snow Hill has servants’ quarters. It’s not that kind of place.”

  “But this house is clean,” Gregor said, “and Annie-Vic can’t have been cleaning it herself. And I can’t imagine her mother cleaning it herself, either. Not a family with enough money to send a daughter to Vassar. They’d have had somebody in to clean.”

  “Had somebody in, sure,” Tom Fordman said. “There’s a woman from out at the trailer park, you know, one of those, came in to do stuff for Annie-Vic. But she didn’t live here. You couldn’t get somebody to live here.”

  “All right. What about an attic? A house this old would almost certainly have one.”

  “Yeah,” Tom Fordman said. “I think it’s got an attic.”

  “Has anybody looked into it?”

  “I don’t get what all this is supposed to be about,” Tom Fordman said. “Nobody was killed in the attic, and nobody could hide out around here for long without somebody noticing. What is it you expect us to find?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said, and that was true. He had no idea. He just wished that things were being done more thoroughly, because in the long run thoroughness mattered.

  There were sounds outside. Gregor could hear them through that partially opened window at the end of the hall. He went to look and saw the ambulance pulling in. It hadn’t had its siren going. There was another police car, too, which Gregor assumed meant the arrival of Gary Albright. The Volvo that had been there when Gregor first arrived had not moved.

  “We’d better go down,” he said, gesturing to the driveway below them. “There are going to be some questions to be asked. Who is that woman who called us, the one we talked to? Who is she exactly?”

  “I don’t know about exactly,” Tom Fordman said, “but she’s from the development. I think she was that Cornish woman’s friend.”

  Gregor sighed. He was sure that the woman in the driveway was Mrs. Cornish’s friend, too, it was just common sense, but that wasn’t what he was asking. He stayed at the window for a moment and watched as men got out of cars and milled around.

  “We’d better go down,” he said. “We’ll find someone to do a better search here later.”

  3

  Gary Albright was leaning up against the driver’s-side door of Snow Hill’s other police cruiser while a tangle of EMT people went back and forth into the house, without getting anywhere. Someone had reminded Eddie Block of the rules of procedure for a crime scene, or Eddie had known them already and suddenly remembered them under the pressure of events. Yellow crime scene tape now surrounded the body. Shelley Niederman was still sitting in the Volvo, crying. Nobody looked as if he knew what he was doing.

  Gregor went up to Gary and looked around, one more time. “You do realize that you’ve got no choice but to call in the state police,” he said. “I know you’re reluctant to do it, but you don’t have the equipment for a proper crime scene investigation, and your people aren’t behaving as if they’ve got the training. If you don’t get some experts in here, you run the very real risk of going to trial against a murderer and losing. And once you’ve lost, you’ve lost. It doesn’t matter if somebody shows up with a photograph of the guy caught in the act.”

  “What did we do before we had all these forensics?” Gary Albright said. “I watch old television, Perry Mason, old cop shows from the fifties, old movies. No forensics, yet we still caught murderers.”

  “Now that the forensics exist,” Gregor said, “defense counsel can and will use your lack of them as reasonable doubt.”

  “You know how to run a crime scene investigation,” Gary said. “You’ve run dozens of them. I looked you up.”

  “I knew how twenty-five years ago,” Gregor said. “We didn’t have ‘all these forensics,’ as you put it, even then. And it might be longer than that, because my last ten years at the Bureau I had a desk job. You’ve got a dead woman in there. I don’t know if you’ve been in to look, but she’s bloody as Hell, and so is the scene. Assuming we’re looking for the same person in both cases, our guy decided he wasn’t going to miss the second time, and he didn’t. There’s somebody walking around who doesn’t mind doing a lot of brutal physical damage, and somebody like that is very dangerous. Call the state police.”

  Gary Albright was staring off into the distance. “I know how to run a crime scene investigation,” he said finally. “It might not be up to the standards of a place like Philadelphia, but we do have the equipment and I do know how to use it. That was the plan, all along. That I’d learn how to use it and then use it when the time came, and then all we’d have to do is send the samples to the state police lab. We wouldn’t have to actually call them in here.”

  “Well, that’s up to you,” Gregor said. “I thought from the beginning that you might be being a little over scrupulous in removing yourself from the case. If you can place yourself somewhere for sure for the relevant time—”

  “You mean if I have an alibi?”

  “I mean if you have an alibi,” Gregor agreed. “And we’re lucky in a way, at the moment. We can pinpoint the time within maybe half an hour or so, because that woman over there,” Gregor cocked his head in the direction of the Volvo, “saw the dead woman go into the house and sat there waiting for her every minute until she called the police department. Then she sat some more. This time, we know when the murder occurred almost as surely as if she’d witnessed it herself.”

  Gary Albright was still staring off into the distance. There was something about him that was very, very still, so quiet he might almost have been an inanimate object. Even dead bodies exhibit more of an air of movement than Gary did now. He had that open, steady, straightforward look of certain kinds of military people, the ones, Gregor admitted, that he had always liked. Gregor just wished he could figure out what the man was thinking.

  Gary Albright moved. It wasn’t really a sudden move, but it felt that way to Gregor, because he wasn’t expecting it.

  “The guy they’re going to send from the staties is named Dale Vardan,” he said. “They’ll send him with a partner, but they’ll definitely send Dale. The partner won’t matter. Dale will try to take over the case. You’re supposed to be running it. That’s what I hired you for. Is that clear?”

  “It’s perfectly clear,” Gregor said. “I don’t usually run investigations these days. I usually consult for the people who do.”

  “I want you running this one,” Gary Albright said. “That really is why I hired you. I want you running it, because I don’t want Dale Vardan running it. If the choice comes down to me or Dale, it’s going to be me, even if I ruin this case completely and get myself fired.”

  “I take it you don’t have an alibi for the time in question,” Gregor said.

  “I don’t know what the time in question is, yet,” Gary said, “but I don’t have an alibi for most of the morning, so my guess would be no. I’ve been driving around town, trying to think. Annie-Vic. The lawsuit. Even Nick Frapp. They all made me want to think. The world was not what I expected it to be, when I was growing up here.”

  “The world is never what we expect it to be when we’re children,” Gregor said. “That’s the nature of childhood.”

  “Maybe. But it seems to me that things ought to be arranged better than they are. It seems to me that it should be easier to tell the good guys from the bad guys.”

  “I think that’s a very dangerous opinion for anybody in law enforcement to have.”

  “Yeah,” Gary Al
bright said. He looked down at what Gregor knew was his prosthetic leg. “Maybe Dale won’t try to do to you what he’s always trying to do to the rest of us. You’re from Philadelphia. You’re famous. I don’t think you’re a believer. On the other hand, maybe Dale just pulls that stuff on whoever happens to be in the room at the time. Excuse me. I’m going to sit down and make that phone call.”

  Gregor watched as Gary pulled away from the car, got the door open, then got in behind the wheel almost as if he had two good legs. It was cold out here in the open, and the milling had reduced itself to men standing in place and stamping their feet. Shelley Niederman was still in the Volvo, waiting, probably, for somebody to tell her she could go, or not. Gregor wondered what this was going to entail. The dead woman had had children, which meant she’d probably had a husband. There would be people to notify. There would be questions to ask. Gary had left the car door open and Gregor could hear his voice on the radio, calling something in to Tina Clay.

  A moment later, a man in a paramedic’s uniform came up and introduced himself, sort of. “I’m with the ambulance,” he said. “I was just wondering. That guy over there said you were in charge.”

  “That guy over there” turned out to be Eddie Block. “I suppose I am,” Gregor said. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s about the body,” the paramedic said. “There’s nothing for us to do here, you know, but usually when the patient is dead we take him in to the hospital anyway, you know, to be checked out, or sometimes to go to the morgue. We take him, anyway. Her. Can we take the body now?”

  “Not yet,” Gregor said. “There should be some people here from the state police in a little while. They’ll have some things to do. When they’re done, they’ll let you take the body. The procedure is a little different in a murder investigation.”