“You showed it to other people,” she reasonably replies.
I realize with the little bit of objectivity I have left that if Berger hasn’t talked to everyone around me, including Lucy and Marino, she will. It is her duty. She would be foolish and negligent if she didn’t. “December the sixth,” she resumes. “He wrote the letter on December the sixth, nineteen-ninety-six, and instructed Senator Lord to deliver it to you on the December the sixth following Benton’s death. Why was that date special to Benton?”
I hesitate.
“Thick skin, Kay,” she reminds me. “Thick skin.”
“I don’t know the significance of December the sixth, exactly—except Benton mentioned in the letter that he knew Christmas is hard for me,” I reply. “He wanted me to get the letter close to Christmas.”
“Christmas is hard for you?”
“Isn’t it hard for everybody?”
Berger is silent. Then she asks, “When did your intimate relationship with him begin?”
“In the fall. Years ago.”
“Okay. In the fall, years ago. That’s when you began your sexual relationship with him.” She says this as if I am avoiding reality. “When he was still married. When your affair with him began.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay. This past December the sixth, you get the letter and later that morning responded to the scene at the Richmond port. Then you came back here. Tell me exactly what your routine is when you come straight home from a crime scene.”
“My scene clothes were double-bagged in the trunk of my car,” I explain. “A jumpsuit and tennis shoes.” I keep staring at the empty space where my car should be. “The jumpsuit went into the washing machine, the shoes into a sink of scalding water with disinfectant.” I show her the shoes. They are still parked on the shelf where I left them to dry more than two weeks ago.
“Then?” Berger walks over to the washing machine and dryer.
“Then I stripped,” I tell her. “I took off everything and put it in the washing machine, started it up and went inside the house.”
“Naked.”
“Yes. I went back to my bedroom, to the shower, without stopping. That’s how I disinfect if I come straight home from a scene,” I conclude.
Berger is fascinated. She has a theory going, and whatever it is, I am feeling increasingly uncomfortable and exposed. “I just wonder,” she muses. “Just wonder if he somehow knew.”
“Somehow knew? And I really would like to go inside, if it’s all right with you,” I say. “I’m freezing.”
“Somehow knew your routine,” she persists. “If he was interested in your garage because of your routine. It was more than setting off the alarm. Maybe he really was trying to get in. The garage is where you take off your death clothes—in this instance, clothes sullied by a death he caused. You were nude and vulnerable, even if ever so briefly.” She follows me back inside and I shut the mud room door behind us. “He might have a real sexual fantasy about that.”
“I can’t see how he could know a damn thing about my routine.” I resist her hypothesis. “He didn’t witness what I did that day.”
She raises an eyebrow as she looks at me. “Can you say that as fact? Any possibility he followed you home? We know he was at the port at some point, because that’s how he got to Richmond—aboard the Sirius, where he’d covered himself with a white uniform, shaved visible areas of his body, and stayed in the galley most of the time, working as the cook and keeping to himself. Isn’t that the theory? I certainly don’t buy what he said when I interviewed him—that he stole a passport and wallet and flew coach.”
“It’s a theory that he arrived at the same time his brother’s body showed up,” I reply.
“So Jean-Baptiste, caring guy that he is, probably hung around in the ship and watched all you people scurrying around when the body was found. Greatest show on earth. These assholes love to watch us work their crimes.”
“How could he have followed me?” I get back to that outrageous thought. “How? He had a car?”
“Maybe he did,” she says. “I’m getting around to entertaining the possibility that Chandonne wasn’t the lone, wretched creature who just happened upon your city because it was convenient or even random. I’m no longer sure what his connections are, and I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps he might have been part of a grander scheme that has to do with the family business. Perhaps even with Bray herself, since she clearly was involved in an underworld of crime. And now we have other murders, one of the victims clearly involved in organized crime. An assassin. And an undercover FBI agent working a gun-smuggling case. And the hairs at the campground that might be Chandonne’s. This is all adding up to something more than a man who killed his brother, took his place on a ship bound for Richmond—all to get out of Paris because his nasty little habit of murdering and mutilating women was becoming increasingly inconvenient to his powerful criminal family. Then he starts killing here because he can’t control himself? Well.” Berger leans against the kitchen counter. “There are just too many coincidences. And how did he get to the campground if he didn’t have a car? Assuming those hairs turn out to be his,” she repeats.
I sit down at the table. There are no windows inside my garage, but there are small windows in the garage door. I consider the possibility that Chandonne did follow me home and peeped through the garage door at me while I was cleaning up and undressing. Maybe he had help finding the abandoned house on the river, too. Maybe Berger is right. Maybe he isn’t alone and never has been. It is almost midnight, almost Christmas, and Marino still isn’t here and Berger’s demeanor tells me she could keep going until dawn.
“Alarm goes off,” she resumes. “Cops come and go. You return to the great room.” She motions me to follow her there. “You’re sitting where?”
“On the sofa.”
“Right. TV on, going through bills, and around midnight what?”
“There’s a knock on the front door,” I reply.
“Describe the knock.”
“A rapping with something hard.” I try to remember every detail. “Like a flashlight or tactical baton. The way police knock. I get up and ask who’s there. Or I think I ask. I’m not sure, but a male voice identifies himself as police. He says a prowler has been spotted on my property and asks if everything’s okay.”
“And that makes sense because we know a prowler was there about an hour earlier, when someone tried to force open your garage door.”
“Exactly.” I nod. “I turn off the alarm and open the door, and he is there,” I add as if I am talking about nothing more threatening than trick-or-treaters.
“Show me,” Berger says.
. . .
I WALK THROUGH the great room, past the dining room and to the entrance hall. I open the door, and just the act of recreating a scenario that almost cost me my life causes a visceral reaction. I feel sick. My hands begin to tremble. My front porch light is still out because the police removed the bulb and fixture and submitted them to the labs to be processed for fingerprints. No one has replaced them. Exposed wires dangle from the porch ceiling. Berger is waiting patiently for me to continue. “He rushes inside,” I say. “And back-kicks the door shut behind him.” I shut the door. “He has this black coat and he tries to put it over my head.”
“Coat on or off when he came in?”
“On. He was grabbing it off as he came through the door.” I am standing still. “And he tried to touch me.”
“Tried to touch you?” Berger frowns. “With the chipping hammer?”
“With his hand. He reached out his hand and touched my cheek, or tried to touch it.”
“You stood there while he did that? Just stood there?”
“It all happened so fast,” I say. “So fast,” I repeat. “I’m not sure. I just know he tried to do that and was snatching off his coat and trying to throw it over my head. And I ran.”
“What about the chipping hammer?”
“He had i
t out. I’m not sure. Or he got it out. But I know he had it out when he was chasing me into the great room.”
“Not out at first? He didn’t have the chipping hammer out at first? You’re sure?” She presses me on this point.
I try to remember, to envision it. “No, not at first,” I decide. “He tried to touch me first with his hand. Then net me. Then he pulled out the chipping hammer.”
“Can you show me what you did next?” she asks.
“Run?”
“Yes, run.”
“Not like that,” I say. “I’d have to have the same adrenaline rush, the same panic, to run like that.”
“Kay, walk me through it, please.”
I move out of the entrance hall, past the dining room and back into the great room. Straight ahead is the yellow Jarrah coffee table I discovered at that wonderful shop in Katonah, New York. What was the name? Antipodes? The rich blond wood glows like honey and I try not to notice the dusting powder all over it, or that somebody left a 7-Eleven coffee cup on it. “The jar of formalin was here, on this corner of the table,” I tell Berger.
“And it was there because . . . ?”
“Because of the tattoo in it. The tattoo I’d removed from the back of the body that we believe is Thomas Chandonne.”
“The defense is going to want to know why you brought human skin to your house, Kay.”
“Of course. Everyone’s been asking me that.” I feel a rush of annoyance. “The tattoo is important and created many, many questions because we just couldn’t figure out what it was. Not only was the body badly decomposed, thus making it very difficult to even see the tattoo, but then it turned out that it was a cover-up tattoo. One tattoo covering up another, and it was crucial, especially, that we determine what the original tattoo was.”
“Two gold dots that were covered up with an owl,” Berger says. “Every member of the Chandonne cartel has two gold dots tattooed on him.”
“That’s what Interpol told me, yes,” I say, and by now I have accepted that she and Jay Talley have spent a lot of quality time together.
“Brother Thomas was screwing his family, had his own side business, was diverting ships, falsifying bills of lading, running his own guns and drugs. And the theory is the family caught on. He changed his tattoo into an owl and began using aliases because he knew the family would kill him if they found him,” I recite what I have been told, what Jay told me in Lyon.
“Interesting.” She touches a finger to her lips, looking around. “And it appears the family did kill him. The other son did. The jar of formalin. Why did you bring it home? Tell me again.”
“It wasn’t really deliberate. I went to a tattoo parlor in Petersburg to have the tattoo from the body looked at by someone who’s an expert, a tattoo artist. I came straight home from there and left the tattoo in my office here. It was just a chance situation that the night he came here . . .”
“Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.”
“Yes. The night he came here I had carried the jar in here, in the great room, and was looking at it while I was doing other things. I set it down. He pushes his way into my house and I run. By now he has the chipping hammer out and has it raised to strike me. It was just a panicked reflex that I see the jar and grab it. I jump over the back of the sofa and unscrew the lid and throw the formalin in his face.”
“A reflex because you know very well how caustic formalin is.”
“You can’t smell it every day and not know. It’s accepted in my profession that exposure to formalin is a chronic danger, and all of us fear being splashed,” I explain, realizing how my story may sound to a special grand jury. Contrived. Unbelievable. Grotesquely bizarre.
“Have you ever gotten it in your eyes?” Berger asks me. “Ever splashed yourself with formalin?”
“No, thank God.”
“So you dashed it in his face. Then what?”
“I ran out of the house. On my way, I grabbed my Glock pistol off the dining room table, where I’d left it earlier. I go outside, slip on the icy steps and fracture my arm.” I hold up my cast.
“And what’s he doing?”
“He came out after me.”
“Instantly?”
“It seems like it.”
Berger moves around to the back of the sofa and stands at the area of antique French oak flooring where formalin has eaten off the finish. She follows the lighter areas of hardwood. The formalin apparently splashed almost to the entrance of the kitchen. This is something I didn’t realize until this moment. I only remember his shrieks, his howls of pain as he grabbed at his eyes. Berger stands in the doorway, staring in at my kitchen. I go to her, wondering what has caught her interest.
“I have to stray off subject and say I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kitchen quite like this,” she comments.
The kitchen is the heart of my house. Copper pots and pans shine like gold from racks around the huge Thirode stove that is central to the room and includes two grills, a hot water bath, a griddle, two hot plates, gas tops, a charbroiler and an oversized burner for the huge pots of soup I love to make. Appliances are stainless steel, including the Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer. Racks of spices line the walls and there is a butcher block the size of a twin bed. The oak floor is bare, and there is an upright wine cooler in a corner and a small table by the window that offers a distant view of a rocky bend in the James River.
“Industrial,” Berger mutters as she walks around a kitchen that, yes, I must admit, fills me with pride. “Someone who comes in here to work but loves the finer things in life. I’ve heard you’re an amazing cook.”
“I love to cook,” I tell her. “It gets my mind off everything else.”
“Where do you get your money?” she boldly asks.
“I’m smart with it,” I reply coolly, never one to discuss money. “I’ve been lucky with investments over the years, very lucky.”
“You’re a smart businesswoman,” Berger says.
“Try to be. And then when Benton died, he left his Hilton Head condo to me.” I pause. “I sold it, couldn’t stay there anymore.” I pause again. “Got six-hundred-and-something thousand for it.”
“I see. And what’s this?” She points out the Milano Italian sandwich maker.
I explain.
“Well, when this is all over, you’ll have to cook for me sometime,” she says rather presumptuously. “And rumor has it that you cook Italian. Your specialty.”
“Yes. Mostly Italian.” There is no rumor involved. Berger knows more about me than I do. “Do you suppose he might have come in here and tried to wash his face in the sink?” she then asks.
“I don’t have any idea. All I can tell you is I ran out and fell, and when I looked up he was staggering out the door after me. He came down the steps, still screaming, and dropped to the ground and started rubbing snow in his face.”
“Trying to wash the formalin out of his eyes. It’s rather oily, isn’t it? Hard to wash out?”
“It wouldn’t be easy,” I reply. “You would want copious amounts of warm water.”
“And you didn’t offer that to him? Made no effort to help him?”
I look at Berger. “Come on,” I say. “What the hell would you have done?” Anger spikes. “I’m supposed to play doctor after the son of a bitch has just tried to beat my brains out?”
“It will be asked,” Berger matter-of-factly answers me. “But no. I wouldn’t have helped him, either, and that’s off the record. So he’s in your front yard.”
“I left out that I hit the panic alarm when I was running out of the house,” I remember.
“You grabbed the formalin. You grabbed your gun. You hit the panic alarm. You had pretty damn good presence of mind, didn’t you?” she comments. “Anyway, you and Chandonne are in your front yard. Lucy pulls up and you have to talk her out of shooting him point-blank in the head. ATF and all the troops show up. End of story.”
“I wish it were the end of the story,” I say.
“The c
hipping hammer,” Berger gets back to that. “Now you figured out what the weapon was because you went to a hardware store and just looked around until you found something that might have made a pattern like the one on Bray’s body?”
“I had more to go on than you might think,” I reply. “I knew Bray was struck with something that had two different surfaces. One rather pointed, the other more square. Actual punched-out areas of her skull clearly showed the shape of what struck her, and then the pattern on the mattress that I knew was made when he set down something bloody. Which most likely was the weapon. A hammer or pickax-type weapon of some sort, but unusual. You look around. You ask people.”
“And then of course when he came to your house, he had this chipping hammer inside his coat or whatever and tried to use it on you.” She says this dispassionately, objectively.
“Yes.”
“So there were two chipping hammers at your house. The one you bought in the hardware store after Bray had already been murdered. And a second hammer, the one he brought with him.”
“Yes.” I am stunned by what she has just indicated. “Good God,” I mutter. “That’s right. I bought the hammer after she was murdered, not before.” I am so confused by what has passed, by the days, by all of it. “What am I thinking? The date on the receipt . . .” My voice fades. I remember paying cash in the hardware store. Five dollars, something like that. I don’t have a receipt, I am fairly sure, and I feel the blood drain from my face. Berger has known all along what I have forgotten: that I didn’t buy the hammer before Bray was beaten to death, but the day after. But I can’t prove it. Unless the clerk who waited on me in the hardware store can produce the cash register tape and swear I am the one who bought the chipping hammer, there is no proof.
“And now one of them is gone. The chipping hammer you bought is gone,” Berger is saying as my mind reels. I tell her I am not privy to what the police found.
“But you were there when they were searching your house. Were you not in your house while the police were?” she asks me.
“I showed them whatever they wanted to see. I answered their questions. I was there on Saturday and left early that evening, but I can’t say I saw everything they did or what they took, nor were they finished when I left. Frankly, I don’t even know how long they were in my house or how many times.” I am touched by anger as I explain all this, and Berger senses it. “Christ, I didn’t have a chipping hammer when Bray was murdered. I’ve been confused because I bought it the day her body was found, not the day she died. She was murdered the night before, her body found the next day.” I am rambling now.
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