28 Hearts of Sand

by Jane Haddam

  Twenty-one hundred dollars might not sound like a lot of money, but it was twenty-one hundred more than Hope usually had in the summer. She could stop worrying about paying her gas and electric bills. She could start thinking seriously about doing a massive Costco shop.

  She thought about the papers out on the dining room table, and mentally imagined them dissolving into air. There were people she needed. Tim Brand was one of them. She could just imagine what Tim would say about all that.

  She got up and went out into the kitchen to see if there was anything going on. Sometimes she fell into a stress-induced sleep before she’d remembered to put away the mayonnaise or clean up the stove after dinner.

  She looked into the refrigerator and didn’t like anything she saw. She looked into the freezer and found a large bag of Pizza Rolls. She took this out and arranged twenty of them on a plate. She shoved the plate into the microwave and set it for two minutes and fifteen seconds. Then she went back to the refrigerator and got a large, three-liter bottle of IGA cola.

  The microwave beeped. Hope took the plate of Pizza Rolls and the bottle of cola and went through the dining room into the living room. She sat down on the couch and put the plate and the bottle on the coffee table. The coffee table was covered with books and magazines and take-out menus from half a dozen restaurants. The menus came in the snail mail, and Hope kept them all just in case something came along that meant that she could use them.

  She was feeling a little dizzy again. She needed to take the medication Tim had given her. She preferred to get her medication from Tim rather than the emergency room, because Tim never looked at her funny or asked her to make a plan to pay.

  She finished off the Pizza Rolls and thought about making another plate. She decided against it and went upstairs to shower. The stairs were hard. She was hyperventilating by the time she got to the top of them, and she was dizzy again.

  She showered, and washed her hair, and gave some thought to the world out there, if only in Alwych. This was the day Gregor Demarkian was supposed to show up. She didn’t believe the man would be able to make any more sense out of the life of Chapin Waring than anybody else had. It was silly to think of Chapin as a force of nature. She had only seemed like that to Hope when Hope was very young, and it was part of being very young that you overestimated the lightweights with charisma.

  She went down the hall to her proper bedroom, the same bedroom she had had when she was growing up. She went into her big wardrobe and found some summer clothes. One of the wonderful things about being up here on the second floor was that she had access to all her things.

  She found a skirt and a T-shirt she particularly liked, and some almost-new underwear. She got dressed and then she looked through the wardrobe again. She got T-shirts and skirts and big, stretchy dresses.

  She went back downstairs again, carrying the big pile of clothes, humming a little. She put the clothes on the dining room table, on top of the papers she had spread out there.

  She was just about coming to the decision that she needed that extra plate of Pizza Rolls when she heard the sharp click from the computer that meant that she had new mail. She went in to see if it was something important.

  She found a new e-mail from Caitlin Hall. That would be Caitlin confirming she’d gotten Hope’s message, and probably promising an attachment with a syllabus template as soon as possible.

  Hope opened the e-mail. She stared at it for a minute.

  Oh, Hope, it said. I’m so sorry. I sent that last night, and I was under a lot of pressure to fill that immediately if not sooner. I’ll let you know if anything else shows up.

  The dizzy thing was back again, right there at the top of her head. Her entire skull felt numb.

  It would be crazy to think Caitlin had done this on purpose, but that was what Hope did think. There was just something about this that felt deliberate, like the bait and switch children used to make fun of other children. Lucy taking the ball away before Charlie Brown could kick it. Kids at a junior high school dance pulling a chair out from under someone trying to sit down near the wall.

  Hope closed the e-mail. She got up and walked away from the computer. She walked into the dining room. The clothes were still there, spread out across the papers.

  She leaned forward and picked up some of the clothes. She moved them carefully to another part of the table. She looked at the papers underneath them and made a face.

  She had to ask herself, when she found herself in these situations, if the people who believed in karma had it right. Maybe she had been something terrible in her last life, something that deserved everything she was getting now.

  Maybe she had been Caitlin Hall in her last life, and the gods that controlled that sort of thing would never let her forget it.

  EIGHT

  1

  The Alwych Police Department was the model of modern suburban law enforcement—suburban in the old sense of the word, when suburbs were places rich people went so they didn’t have to live next to all those other people in the city. The building was small but very, very clean. All the surfaces gleamed as if they had never been used. There was a big open area at the front, with a counter staffed by a woman in a crisply immaculate uniform and, beyond her, a sea of uncluttered desks. There was a corridor that looked completely blank going off toward the back. There wasn’t anything that looked like it could be a jail, or the gateway to a jail.

  Gregor could see Jason Battlesea looking at him as he looked around the room.

  “Are you waiting for me to ask?” Gregor said.

  “Sort of,” Jason Battlesea admitted. “There’s another entrance, around the back. It goes to the lower level. The holding area is there, and about a dozen cells, including two isolation cells. If we have to lock up people, we have a place to put them.”

  “That’s good to know,” Gregor said. “Do you ever have to lock up people?”

  “Sometimes. We have a fair amount of crime here in the good weather. Burglary and car theft mostly. We’re not all that far from Bridgeport, which means we get a fair influx of the kind of people who tend to make a career of that kind of thing.”

  Gregor considered this. “You don’t get anything local?”

  “Sure we do,” Jason Battlesea said. “Lots and lots of drunk driving, especially in the spring. That’s the party season here for the high school and the kids home from college. We get a lot of marijuana, although we don’t tend to pursue those.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the town doesn’t want us to,” Jason Battlesea said. “The parents here, they don’t just want their kids to go to college, they want them to go to Harvard. And the kids are not going to get there if they’ve been busted for weed. When we catch them with it, we don’t make a big deal out of it, and we don’t make it official.”

  “What about other drugs?”

  “Other drugs, we get more serious about,” Battlesea said. “On that one, the parents are adamant. They’re scared to death of heroin and cocaine. But even with that, we have to go slow sometimes.”

  “Was this the first murder you’ve had?”

  “The first in fifty years, yes,” Battlesea said. “The two people killed in the last bank robbery weren’t killed here. None of the robberies were even done here. But I looked it up. About fifty years ago, a woman named Grace Lewison shot her husband on the front lawn of their house on Sands Street at eight o’clock in the evening. She’d caught him sleeping with the maid.”

  “Is Sands Street a good part of town?”

  “There isn’t really a bad part of Alwych,” Battlesea said, “but it’s no Beach Drive. In case you’re wondering, it was the definition of an open-and-shut case. It was a nice summer day and the neighbors were all out on their lawns. They saw the guy run out of the house, they saw Grace run out after him shooting, and then when she got him she stood there and kept plugging him until the bullets ran out. Of course, this is Alwych, so she tried to plead temporary insanity.”

&nb
sp; “Do you have anybody here who’s trained in homicide investigation?”

  “Oh, we’ve got them trained,” Jason Battlesea said. “The town funds the hell out of it. It funds the hell out of all its public services. The public high school here will give you an education to out-Exeter Exeter. It’s got Latin and Ancient Greek as well as Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Chinese. The hospital offers cancer services to rival Yale–New Haven. So, yes, we’ve got people here who are trained in homicide investigations. They’ve been sent on training courses. They’ve been sent on refreshers. They’ve done all that kind of thing.”

  “They’ve done everything but work on an actual homicide investigation,” Gregor said.

  “I’ve got two detectives,” Battlesea said. “Both of them did liaison advisory stints with the Bridgeport police. That means they went down there and spent three months apiece working for the Bridgeport PD and going along on homicide cases with seasoned homicide cops.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Gregor said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Battlesea agreed. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t help us here. Bridgeport has a real police department, if you don’t mind my putting it that way. They deal with a lot of crime, and a lot of violent crime, and they deal with it every single day. The problem is that it’s not this kind of violent crime. They have carjackings. They have home invasions. They have gang murders. People get stabbed in the street and robbed at gunpoint, and you couldn’t get me to work in a liquor store or a convenience store in Bridgeport on a bet. But it’s not this kind of thing. To tell you the truth, Mr. Demarkian, I didn’t think this kind of thing existed outside of Murder, She Wrote.”

  “Are your two homicide detectives here now, by any chance?” he asked.

  “They’re downstairs,” Jason Battlesea said. “We can take the elevator.”

  Battlesea gave a little nod to the uniformed woman at the counter and led Gregor down the blank hall to an opening at the back, with elevator doors on both sides of it. The doors were wide enough to accommodate gurneys if they had to.

  Battlesea pushed the call button, and as soon as one set of elevator doors opened, he ushered Gregor in and pushed another button.

  The elevator bumped to a stop and Gregor followed Battlesea out and found himself confronted with what was, in a way, a more comforting atmosphere. It did look as if somebody had tracked dirt through here on and off, and there were people, many of them rumpled. Most of the rumpled ones were in the back, in open holding cells. They all looked tired.

  There was another woman at another counter. She was also in uniform, and also looked crisply efficient, but she had strands of hair coming out of the shiny metal hair clip she was using to hold it all back. She looked up when Battlesea approached and said,

  “They’re in the common room. They’ve got some files for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Battlesea led Gregor through the hatch door in the counter and across the broad room with even more desks in it.

  At the other end of the room, there was a door left slightly open. Battlesea pushed it in, and there were two men sitting at a cheap, wide table, drinking coffee.

  Battlesea gestured at Gregor.

  “Gregor Demarkian,” he said.

  “Damn,” one of the men said.

  The men were both white and in their thirties. They both had brown hair and brown eyes. They were so much alike, Gregor wasn’t sure he would have been able to pick one over the other in a lineup.

  The one who hadn’t spoken stood up. “Mike Held,” he said, holding out his hand. “This is Jack Mann.”

  Gregor shook Mike Held’s hand. Mike Held waved at the chairs around the table. Gregor sat down.

  “We’re really glad you’re here,” Mike Held said. “We really don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “We don’t even know where to start,” Jack Mann said. “And then there’s all that trouble with the state crime lab.”

  “What trouble?” Gregor asked.

  Now it was Jason Battlesea who sat down. “Not to put too fine a point on it,” he said, “they lost their accreditation.”

  Gregor tried to take this in. “How did they lose their accreditation?”

  “They say it’s mostly about not being fast enough and that kind of thing,” Mike Held said. “They haven’t had a full-time person over there for ages, and they weren’t getting the forensic evidence processed as fast as they should have. We’re beginning to think that even if we find the murderer and arrest him, even if you find him, it won’t matter, because the prosecutor will get into court and the defense will start going on about how you can’t trust any of the forensics because the lab is unaccredited, and that’s going to be that.”

  “You said ‘the lab,’” Gregor said. “There’s only one.”

  “There’s only one,” Jack Mann agreed. “For the entire state. And they couldn’t even put on a full-time person there.”

  “Let’s leave that for a moment, all right? You are the two who have been investigating this crime up to now?” Gregor asked.

  “Absolutely,” Mike Held said.

  “And it was copies of your notes that were sent to me when I agreed to come out here?”

  “We sent all the notes, not just ours,” Mike Held said. “We sent the notes of the uniform who responded at the scene.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “Uniforms responded at the scene. These were—”

  “A woman,” Mike Held said. “She was doing a patrol around Beach Drive. She saw what she thought was a light where there shouldn’t be any, and she pulled into the drive. You’ve got to wonder how stupid anybody had to be to leave a light on in that house.”

  “Maybe not,” Jack Mann said. “The family has timed lights for security. It’s not impossible for there to be lights on there.”

  “Maybe not,” Mike Held said, “but everybody on the force knows which lights those are. So if there are other lights, we’re going to go right ahead and check.”

  “The uniform didn’t know what to think when she got in there,” Mike Held said. “She didn’t know it was Chapin Waring. She’s much too young, even Jack and I are much too young, to have been around when all that happened. So in the beginning, we just went at it like any homicide case. And then—”

  “It was the ME’s office that figured out who it was,” Jack Mann said. “They got the body, and the guy who was supposed to work on it knew all about that case, and they called us immediately. And then we did what we were supposed to do to confirm it. It was bad enough having a murder case. Now we’ve got this, and we don’t even know where to start. Hell, the FBI doesn’t know how to solve this thing. How do they expect us to solve it?”

  Gregor was getting that feeling he had sometimes, that it was going to take infinite patience to get through the next fifteen minutes.

  “Solve what?” he asked them.

  2

  The scene would have been funny, if Gregor had been in a mood to laugh. The three men sat around their cheap table, staring at him as if he’d just told them that something they’d always believed to be true—that the world was round, for instance—wasn’t. Two of them actually had their mouths open. Jason Battlesea’s face had gone more than a little red.

  Gregor took the attaché case he’d been carrying and put it on the table. He snapped it open and went through the four bound stacks of paper he had there.

  He found the bound sheaf he was looking for. He had written “Alwych PD” across the front of it. He took it out and put it on the desk.

  “Do you know what that is?” he asked.

  Jason Battlesea looked a little uncertain. “You had us investigated?” he asked. “Do you do that with all your clients?”

  “I did not have you investigated,” Gregor said. “I did ask around, because that’s only sensible. If I’m going to take a case, I want to be sure that the people I’m working with are capable of being worked with. But this is not that. This is a hard-copy printout of the compute
r files you sent me outlining this case. And do you know what’s wrong with it?”

  “Did we leave something out?” Jack Mann asked. “We went over it and over it. We really did.”

  “You may have left something out,” Gregor said, “but it would be hard for me to know what. What’s wrong with this is this: Four-fifths of it concern the robberies, or Chapin Waring disappearing at the very moment when she was identified as one of the people involved in those robberies, or about the people Chapin Waring did or didn’t know in the period when those robberies were taking place. There are even six solid pages about debutante parties.”

  The three men looked more and more bewildered. It wasn’t stupidity. They were all bright enough. It wasn’t even entirely lack of experience. There were experienced agents of the FBI who were making this same mistake, but they had the excuse that this case was not actually theirs. Jason Battlesea, Mike Held, and Jack Mann had no excuse at all.

  Gregor tried very hard not to let his exasperation show.

  “No matter what happened with those robberies,” he said, “you have a case here and now. You have a body in the morgue. You have a crime scene. You have an act of violence. A woman was murdered in a house on Beach Drive. She was stabbed in the back with—with what? I presume a knife, but your report to me doesn’t actually say so. I can find out more about a thirty-year-old bank robbery in these pages than I can about your actual case.”

  “But,” Jason Battlesea said.

  “Yes?” Gregor said.

  “But aren’t they connected?” Jason Battlesea said.

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said.

  “But they have to be connected,” Jason Battlesea said. “She disappeared because of the bank robberies, and because those two people got killed in the last one. She wouldn’t just come back here for no reason. She knew the FBI was looking for her. And why would anybody kill her if it didn’t have something to do with the robberies? It’s not like she’d been here all the time, making enemies.”

  “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?”