Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “Well, it’s going to be on the news even more after this,” Gregor said. “If you thought the publicity was bad to begin with, just wait until the cable news networks decide they’ve got a crazed Creationist serial killer on their hands.”

  “Is that what this is? A crazed Creationist serial killer?” Tammaro looked doubtful.

  Gregor looked up the hill at the back of the house, then down the hill again toward the house and town. There were quite a few trees in back, a little wooded area, but it was in no way a forest or the start of real country. Gregor could see another house farther up the hill, although he couldn’t see it very well.

  “Let me ask you something,” Gregor said. “Did either of you see anybody in this stand of trees? Anybody standing around, anybody walking, anybody running?”

  “No, we didn’t,” Tammaro said. “And I think we would have.”

  “So do I,” Gregor said. “But look at the area here. It’s not large, but it’s large enough so that it’s unlikely that somebody could have fired a gun and then gotten out in time so that neither of you saw anything. Not unless whoever it was was right up against the back of the house, and even then it’s something of a climb down to town going this way.”

  “I’m pretty sure the shots weren’t fired right next to the back of the house,” Tammaro said. “The reports would have been louder.”

  “What about much farther way, all the way up to where that house is on top of the hill?”

  “No.” Tammaro was adamant. “The reports would have been much too faint. We wouldn’t have paid any attention to them. Hell, Mr. Demarkian. This is the country. People fire guns. They fire shotguns. They fire handguns. They fire rifles. I know this is pretty close to town, and that’s not as usual, but still. I’m willing to bet almost anything that those shots came from the middle of that mess of trees or close to it. And Canton felt the same way.”

  “Canton is the other officer?”

  “That’s right. And I’ve known him a long time. He’s a good officer.”

  Gregor was sure he was. He was also sure that it was not possible for somebody to have fired shots from those trees and made it out clean before Tammaro and Canton showed up. And yet the shots had been fired, and the fired shots had brought the two officers around to the back of the house, and in the short space of time in which they had been back there, a woman had been murdered. And not just murdered any which way. She’d been smashed to Hell with something like a bat, which was not an easy way to kill someone, or a way that was guaranteed to take no time at all.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said. “The two of you came around back here, and I suppose you spent at least some time checking out what might have been going on.”

  “Some time, yes,” Tammaro said, “but not very long. We were telling the truth to Dale back there, Mr. Demarkian. We really were. We came back here and there was nothing. Not a single thing. And we only looked around a little to make sure that nobody was hiding behind a bush with a shotgun, out to get us, or something. And we didn’t see anybody, so Canton went back to the front of the house and I started looking through the wood. We couldn’t have both been out here together for more than two or three minutes, tops.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “That tells us one thing. It’s unlikely anybody would have had the time both to murder Shelley Niederman and to get into the house to search.”

  “Nobody went into the house,” Tammaro said positively. “I can guarantee it for the time we were both out front, and Canton can guarantee it for the time he was there. And we weren’t gone long enough for somebody to get in and get out again.”

  Gregor thought about it. “There had to be a second time when nobody was in front of the house, isn’t that true? Didn’t Canton come back here and get you when he found the body?”

  “No,” Tammaro said. “He shouted, and I came around the front. And the house is locked up tight. We made sure of it when we came on duty. Nobody was in that house today, Mr. Demarkian, except for you, when you came in this morning and looked around. You could go back in there right this minute and you wouldn’t find a single thing disturbed.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “Then let’s go back and look at the house.”

  2

  The front of the house was still full of emergency vehicles and police officers, and probably would be for hours, but they had been joined by a thin line of cable news vans now parked on the road just outside the driveway. Gregor had wondered when that would begin to happen, and now it had. He walked over to the other officer, the one Tammaro had called Canton, and introduced himself. Somebody had put a floodlight on, in spite of the fact that it was the middle of the afternoon. The light hurt his eyes.

  “Canton is my first name,” Canton said. “Weeks is my last. Nobody ever calls me that. They ought to do something about the way they name children. Nobody ever seems to like their own name.”

  Gregor actually liked his name just fine, but this was just small talk. Shelley Niederman’s body had been taken out of the doorway, which was now in the process of being taped up as a crime scene. Shelley Niederman’s body was on a stretcher near the ambulance, in a body bag, as anonymous as garbage put out on the curb for pickup.

  “Just tell me one thing, if you could,” he said. “When you found her, she was dead. Not when the both of you checked her, but when you found her. Because you were by yourself in the beginning, right?”

  “Right. I came back around front because we didn’t want the front left unguarded for very long. As soon as I know there wasn’t anybody out there meaning to shoot us dead, I came back around and let Tammaro go on investigating. Not that I left him there for long. I came around and there she was, and I called for him before I even started trying to check her out. I don’t mean any disrespect for Dale Vardan—”

  “You ought to,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah, well,” Canton said. “What I mean is, there really wasn’t any time. It had to have happened really fast. And I can’t figure out how it did happen. I mean, I suppose we were back there longer than we think were, but it couldn’t have been that much longer. If you see what I mean.”

  “I do see what you mean. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t go into the house?”

  “You’re the chief investigator here,” Canton said. “I suppose Dale is going to bitch at you, but I don’t think he can do anything.”

  That was Gregor’s assessment of the situation, too. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and tried the front door. It was locked. He looked at Canton.

  “This door has been locked the whole time? I got in there this morning.”

  “I unlocked for you,” Canton said. “We have a key, but we keep the place locked. Just to be safe, if you see what I mean.”

  “And you locked up after me when I left this morning?”

  “Absolutely,” Canton said. “I wouldn’t forget a thing like that.”

  “Right.” Gregor motioned to the door. Canton came forward and opened up. The door swung on its hinges. The hallway beyond it was dark.

  “You always think of the twenties as being such a happy era,” Gregor said. “F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bright young things. And yet they built all these houses, and they were all so dark.”

  Canton Weeks said nothing at all, and Gregor bent down to step under the crime tape and go inside. He turned the light on in the hall. It was the middle of the afternoon, the sun was out, and this house still needed artificial light.

  “There ought to be a ghost in the attic,” Gregor said.

  He went down the hall to the living room, and through the living room to the dining room. The mess that had been made of the papers on the dining room table when Judy Cornish had been killed—or, at least, around the time Judy Cornish had been killed—and that had still been evident when Gregor had looked in this morning, had now been corrected. That must have been Lisa, going through things when he had asked her to see what might be missing. She had protested that she couldn’t really k
now what was missing, and that was true. But he couldn’t know, either, and yet he had looked through these papers once, and he was about to do it again. But first he was going to look through the house.

  He went through the dining room into the kitchen. It looked as blank and unused as it always had. He wondered if Annie-Vic used it when she was in residence, or if she had someone in to “do” for her now that she was old. He looked into the pantry, which was a big windowless room at the back, lined with shelves that were themselves lined with Mason jars which seemed to hold close to a century’s worth of canning. The jars were labeled, with both a description of the contents and the year they were being put up, and some of the years had an almost fantastical quality—1924, 1936. If Annie-Vic had been poisoned by eating ancient home canned goods, he wouldn’t have been surprised.

  He left the pantry and went into the back hall. There was another door there. He tried it, and it was locked. What was more, there was a small latch bolt near the top, and it was bolted solid. Gregor doubted that it would have been much of a problem for somebody to bust through it, but nobody had, and that meant that nobody had gone out the back door this afternoon.

  And if somebody had, he’d have had a good chance of running into Tammaro at the back.

  Gregor went back to the dining room. The papers were in neat stacks. He wondered if that was how Annie-Vic herself had left them, before they’d been disturbed by whoever was in here yesterday. He looked at the first stack and saw that the paper on top of it concerned the new teachers’ contracts. He thumbed through a few more pages and found more material on the contracts, material on the teachers’ pension funds, material on the buying of textbooks, material on the construction of the new school complex, even material on class scheduling for the upcoming school year. Annie-Vic was, as Catherine Marbledale had indicated, concerned with the nuts and bolts of the running of the school district.

  He was just going on to the second stack when Dale Vardan marched in, puffing. He would have been like a Gilbert and Sullivan character, Gregor thought, if he had only been funny. Dale Vardan was not only not funny, he didn’t ever seem to find anything funny, either.

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” he said. “This is a crime scene. You could be destroying evidence and not even know it.”

  “I think I know how not to destroy evidence at a crime scene,” Gregor said. “And as for whether or not I should be here, this is my crime scene, and my criminal investigation, unless I or the town of Snow Hill voluntarily decide to give it up to you, which we are not going to do. Have any of your people managed to remember to search the house this time?”

  “Why should we search the house? She was dead on the doorstep, for God’s sake, and the door was locked.”

  “Which only means that somebody locked it,” Gregor said. “And there are windows somebody could have gotten through. And then there’s that wooded area in the back, the one where your officers heard not one but three gunshots coming from.”

  “They were imagining things,” Dale Vardan said. “For Christ’s sake, Demarkian, look at the lay of the land here. They got around the back of the house and there wasn’t anybody there, and if there had been they would have seen him.”

  “I agree,” Gregor said, “but that doesn’t mean that nobody was ever there. If you people are going to help out here, you should start by searching that wooded area with a microscope. And you should do it now, because whoever killed Shelley Niederman is going to be back, as soon as he thinks he can get away with it.”

  “So, you know it’s a man, do you? Yeah, I’d take it for a man, too. Women don’t beat people to death with baseball bats.”

  Gregor wished everybody would stop assuming that all the murders had been committed with baseball bats. “I was using the word ‘he’ as a generic. I see no reason why a woman couldn’t have committed these crimes. The important question now is why. And the first necessity is to find whatever was left in that wood, before anybody can come and take it away.”

  “What makes you think you’re going to find anything in that wood?” Dale Vardan demanded. “There was nobody there. They would have seen him. I mean, for Christ’s sake, they’re screw-ups, but they’re not brain dead.”

  “They heard three shots, and shots do not fire themselves,” Gregor said. “If you won’t get a team of men on it, I’ll call the Governor and throw a right royal fit until you do. And don’t think I can’t do it. The other thing that needs to happen is that this house needs to be searched, top to bottom, again. Right now. That means all the upstairs rooms, all the upstairs closets, and the attic.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Dale Vardan said. “What the Hell do you think is going on here? You know what this is? This is another hillbilly country feud, that’s what this is. You get to the bottom of it, you’re going to find a couple of good ole boys and some liquor and lots of sex all over the place.”

  “Annie-Vic Hadley wasn’t a good ole boy, and she wasn’t a hillbilly. Judy Cornish and Shelley Niederman weren’t hillbillies, either. I’ve never seen a case that had less to do with hillbillies than this one.”

  “Bullshit,” Dale Vardan said. “What’s this whole thing about? Bible-thumping idiots, that’s what, all worked up because somebody told them they were descended from monkeys. Well, look at them. They look like they were descended from monkeys. They look like they’re still monkeys.”

  “That’s the thing,” Gregor said. “You see all these papers? I looked through them this morning, and then I had Miss Hadley’s grandniece look through them again this afternoon, just in case I missed something. You know what’s not here? There’s not a single thing, not one, having anything to do with Creationism and evolution, or even with the lawsuit.”

  “Well, Hell,” Dale Vardan said. “Our guy took ’em, that’s why. There’s something in those papers about him and he doesn’t want us to see.”

  “Took them when?”

  “Took them yesterday,” Dale Vardan said. “When he murdered the other woman. He had plenty of time.”

  “Then why did he murder Shelley Niederman?”

  “Because he’s not murdering them for the papers,” Dale Vardan said. “He’s murdering them because they’re Satan-worshiping secular humanists who want to bring that stuff about monkeys into the Snow Hill public schools. Hillbillies, Mr. Demarkian. I told you. They’re walking advertisements for mercy killing, only it would be a mercy to the rest of us if they’d just all end up dead.”

  3

  It was nearly five o’clock by the time Gregor got back to town, and by then he knew he would be spending another night with Gary Albright.

  “It’s really not a problem,” Bennis told him when he called. “If anything, it’s probably a good thing you’re out of the way. You’d only get caught up in this fight about the church. Go solve a murder and come back when it’s over.”

  Gregor didn’t even want to think about what it meant that that argument was still going on. “Did you talk to Sister Beata?” he asked. “Did you find out anything about Catholics and evolution?”

  “Only that Catholics have no trouble accepting evolution, because they’ve never taken the Bible to be literally true,” Bennis said. “Apparently, that’s a Protestant thing. She gave me some stuff to give you to read and I put it on your night table. Do you want me to send it to you?”

  “No, not really, not now,” Gregor said. “I still wish I understood all this, but I’ve got two murders and an attempted murder on my hands at the moment, so I’ll let it wait. I wish I understood people better than I do.”

  “You understand people better than most people do,” Bennis said.

  “Which doesn’t bode well for the human race,” Gregor told her. “Never mind. I have an early dinner meeting, except it isn’t going to be so early by the time I get there. And what’s worse, there’s only one place in town to eat, it’s owned by a suspect, and she hates me. Of course, she seems to hate practically everybody, so it’s probably nothing p
ersonal.”

  “Maybe I ought to come out there and keep you company.”

  “If you do, Donna and a bunch of Armenian-American women are going to come with you, and I think I’d go crazy. I’ll talk to you later. I’ve got to go eat a greasy hamburger on a cardboard bun. Let me tell you, it’s not true that these little diners are going out of business because McDonald’s is underselling them. It’s because their food tastes like this.”

  He flipped the phone shut and put it in his pocket. He was actually standing just outside the Snow Hill Diner. On any other day, he would probably have gone inside to sit down before calling Bennis. On this day he was just tired, and tired of being out in the sticks. He was not a small-town person. He didn’t find such towns friendly, and he didn’t find them comforting. In his experience, the smaller the town, the more likely it was to be a hotbed of intrigue and resentment. And resentment was the word for what was going on at the Snow Hill Diner and in Alice McGuffie’s head.

  Gregor looked through the window, past the half curtains and the gold-stenciled lettering. Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker were already sitting in a booth at the back, waiting for him.

  Gregor went inside. There was no hostess, as there was at the Ararat back home, and no procedure for seating except to let you seat yourself. There were plastic yellow ribbon magnets reading SUPPORT OUR TROOPS here and there, a few American flag posters, and a big poster of a gigantic bald eagle right over the counter. The bald eagle looked either constipated or angry. It was hard to tell which.

  Gregor made his way to the back and sat down across from the two agents-in-place. They both looked thoroughly bored.

  “Good evening, Mr. Demarkian,” Evan Zwicker said. “We were just talking about your latest murder.”

  “We were talking about whether or not there really was some kind of domestic terrorism going on,” Molly said. “You know, when you brought that up when we first met you, I thought you were being silly.”