She shifted unhurriedly to her right and the point of the knife buried itself in her chair. When she looked up again, the world had returned to its normal speed.
Chapter 19
Every muscle in Eulalie’s body was bunched and ready for flight. Pastor Ellie sat back in her chair and folded her hands across her substantial middle. Slowly, Eulalie relaxed as well.
“Are you out of your mind?”
The Pastor’s smile broadened. “Not at all. Just testing out a theory.”
“And what theory would that be? That a knife thrown with force and accuracy will pierce the human body?”
“No, that you can anticipate my actions. And I was right. You were already moving out of the way before my fingers had begun to reach for the knife.”
“And what if you’d been wrong? I’d be skewered to this chair and you’d have a body to dispose of.”
“Nothing so dramatic. The knife wouldn’t have killed you, just inflicted a flesh wound. Yes, admittedly that would have been embarrassing, but I was very sure about what I could sense in you.”
“Where did you learn to throw a knife like that anyway?” Eulalie pulled the blade out of the chair and held it in her right hand, feeling the weight and balance. Knife-throwing. Why had she never thought of that? Her fingers itched to try it out.
“I enjoy all kinds of sports that involve aiming at a target. Darts, archery, target-shooting, knife-throwing. I have good hand-eye coordination for a woman.”
“What you have is an ability to persuade people. You can convince them to do things against their self-interest. You must be aware of that.”
“But of course. I’ve made a career out of it. Whatever it is – this ability of mine – it’s what enabled me to recognize the ability in you. When we were talking earlier, I saw you consciously shake off my influence. Most people can’t do that. They either feel it or they don’t. I knew you were unusual the moment you walked in here.”
“Don’t you ever feel bad about using your gift to talk people out of their money?”
“Dead people don’t need money.”
“Out of their inheritances then. It’s the heirs that you are really crooking.”
“Windfalls are bad for the character. It is better to make one’s own way in life.”
“It’s not up to you to decide that on someone else’s behalf.”
“What about you - using your abilities to play private detective? Isn’t that also unfair?”
Eulalie laughed. “The only thing I use to play private detective is good, old-fashioned detective work. I have a college degree in computer science and criminology, and I use it to do the best job possible for the client. I operate within the law and within a code of ethics. I have nothing to apologize for.”
“And right now, your training in criminology is making you wonder whether I arranged to have Emma killed on the off-chance that her family might bequeath some money to BRS in her name?”
“Actually,” Eulalie fingered the throwing knife, “I was wondering if you did it yourself.”
“Hmm. I wonder if I am capable of murder? That’s an interesting question. I suppose we all are in the right circumstances. But in this particular case, no. Far too speculative a venture. I had no idea whether any members of Emma’s family would be susceptible to my ‘charm’ or not. Only a small percentage of the population is. Also, I have no need to resort to such drastic measures at the moment. I happen to be very financially comfortable at present. I’m sure you’ve checked out my financials.”
Eulalie frowned. “Why has nobody ever exposed you?”
“Oh, they have. A number of times. It just doesn’t stick, you see. There will always be people willing to give me their money anyway. Even if you recorded our entire conversation and showed it to my congregation on Sunday, they would still fill the collection plate at the end of the service. I’m bulletproof, Ms. Park, so don’t even try. I’m also not the person you’re looking for. I didn’t kill your client’s wife.”
Mrs. Belfast was cleaning the coffee machine when Eulalie got back to the office. She had also obviously been dusting.
“That’s not necessary, Mrs. B. There’s a cleaning crew that comes in at night. They do all the offices along Bonaparte Avenue.”
“It’s no trouble,” said the secretary. “Just mopping up a spill. How did you get on with Pastor Ellie?”
“She’s an interesting woman, if a little terrifying. I hope she never goes into politics.”
“Perhaps there’s more money in religion.”
Mrs. Belfast left at five o’clock, but Eulalie wasn’t ready to knock off yet. She felt as though she had spent too much time interviewing people and not enough engaging with the physical evidence. That meant a trip to the police station, and possibly even the morgue. She wondered if Chief Macgregor was back from his meeting at the Governor’s office yet. When he didn’t answer her text immediately, she decided to go down to the police station and wait for him.
The late afternoon was a pleasant time for a stroll along Lafayette Boulevard. The sun’s rays struck the boulevard at an angle, turning the shopfront windows golden, and causing the leaves on the trees to sparkle with an unearthly light. The streets were full of holidaymakers and locals celebrating the end of the working day.
Eulalie soaked up the charm and the cheer, because looking at crime scene photographs was a melancholy business, and visiting the morgue was even worse. She enjoyed interviewing people far more than grappling with physical evidence, but knew she was good at both. She had the ability to look at a scene and see what was missing from it, or what had been artificially added to it. She had an excellent visual memory, which meant that she could spot the subtle differences between things.
When she got to the police station, she noticed the E-type snuggled into its parking bay. The chief was back from his meeting.
“Working nights, Manny?” she asked the desk sergeant as he came on shift.
“For my sins. As least I’ve got a week off after this. And the nights are pretty quiet around here. Just the odd drunk and disorderly.” He lifted up his iPad to show her. “At least I get to catch up on my shows.”
“Good to know that justice never sleeps. Is the chief in?”
“He just got here. We arrived at the same time.”
Eulalie texted him again to let him know she was about to walk into his office. He was always happier to see her when he was prepared for it.
“How was your meeting?” she asked as she settled down at the conference table in his office. He had been to fetch her the Egger murder book and it was lying unopened in front of her.
“It has made me a little anxious,” he confessed. “I had no idea what a challenge the Prince William’s Day parade has been in the past. This will be my first parade and the governor regards it as a test of my efficiency.”
“I’m glad I’m not in your shoes. It’s a security nightmare. Tourists have their wallets snatched every year, and there’s always some kind of disaster. One year, a giant float fell over into the crowd. Everyone on Prince William Island comes to the parade, and they all line up on Lafayette Boulevard. It’s no wonder something seems to go wrong each year.”
Chief Macgregor squared his shoulders. “Not this year. This year everything is going to go right. I have budget approval to hire private security - starting with you. Will you be part of my team?”
Eulalie smiled at him. “Only if the governor’s office makes it worth my while. We’re talking double my hourly rate, plus a performance bonus if all goes smoothly.”
She had been joking, but the chief nodded. “I’ll organize it. Now I have to get on with some paperwork, so I’ll leave you to the murder book. It has grown considerably since I sent you the electronic copy. If you want to go to the morgue afterwards, we can. Most of the staff will have left for the day but I have the keys.”
“Thanks.”
Eulalie put her head down and focused on the evidence in front of her.
&
nbsp; Some enterprising soul – it might have been Chief Macgregor himself – had drawn a rough sketch of the Egger house with everyone marked as a dot in the room they had claimed to be in at the time of the murder. People whose positions were verified by security cameras had a red tick next to their names. This included the guard in the gatehouse, the three permanent live-in servants, and the caregiver who looked after Josef Egger. A full-time gardener of whose existence Eulalie had been unaware was red-checked eating dinner at the table with her.
People whose positions were known to an almost certainty and who were not regarded as suspects were checked with blue pen. Joe and Lily’s three little daughters were present and accounted for. So were Richard and Jane’s three children, the oldest of whom was a boy of eleven.
Eulalie had taken a close look at Otto Egger at the BRS service, knowing that eleven-year-old boys could range from almost adult height to little shrimps. Otto was on the shrimpy side. Puberty was still a long way off, and he was small and skinny, barely as tall as his younger sisters. She couldn’t see him throwing an adult woman over a high parapet wall.
Also present and accounted for were Mark and Mary’s daughters. The eldest was fifteen. The Egger girls had never been on Eulalie’s radar. The other children were sure that their teenage cousins had been in the playroom watching The Lion King at the time of the murder.
The girls followed the family trend of being small and skinny. Eulalie supposed it was possible that the three of them had got together to turf their evil stepmother off the widow’s walk, but she didn’t think it likely.
She was much more interested in where the adults were at the moment Emma was having her fingers forced off the ledge.
Old Josef Egger was marked in blue as having been seated in the drawing room. Eulalie had no quibble with that. He lacked the strength to have committed the murder, and the one thing everyone agreed on was that he had been in the drawing room. The whereabouts of the other adults were much less certain.
Their names were written in pencil according to where they said they were at the time of the murder, but each name had a question mark next to it.
The three brothers all placed themselves in the drawing room with glasses of cognac, waiting for a refill of coffee to be brought in. None of them provided clear alibis for each other. All they knew was that there had been a lot of movement into and out of the drawing room all evening. Joe thought that Richard had been there, but wasn’t sure about Mark. Mark wasn’t sure of either of his brothers because he had been speaking to his father at the time. Richard thought that Mark had been there, but couldn’t swear to Joe.
None of the men could agree on which of the women had been in the drawing room at that moment. All three of them thought that Jane had probably been sitting next to Opa and helping him with his coffee. When pressed, they couldn’t be sure whether she had actually been there or whether that was just where she was usually to be found at family gatherings.
Josef Egger thought that everyone had been in the drawing room, including Emma herself. He was generally regarded as an unreliable witness.
Priscilla Bosworth was marked in pencil as having just returned to the drawing room after getting herself soy milk from the fridge in the kitchen. She vouched for Jane being in the drawing room, but wasn’t sure who else was there, besides Opa.
Lilly Egger was marked in pencil as having just left the drawing room to go in search of Emma to remind her of a promise she had made to let Lily look through her sons’ old clothes.
Then a scream and a loud thump had been heard, and everyone had congregated in the drawing room to speculate about what had caused it.
Eulalie put away the map and turned her attention to the photographs of Mark and Emma’s bedroom. These stretched over the course of several months. There were work-in-progress photos that must have been taken during the renovation. There were photos of the finished product, with Mark and Emma standing proudly in their new domain.
Then there were photos of the bedroom as it appeared when the police arrived on the scene minutes after Emma’s death. There were photos of the bedroom showing where the pills had been discovered. And finally, there were photos taken after that morning’s burglary.
Eulalie laid out the photos of the bedroom side by side to compare them.
Apparently, Emma had been struggling with her décor choices because the pictures on the walls kept changing and the arrangement of the ornaments and photographs did too. The room was at its most cluttered in the triumphant ‘after’ pictures, showing the finished product once the renovation was complete. It looked as though Emma had tried to fit all her treasures into the bedroom, but had gradually cleared them out to create a less cluttered effect.
Eulalie stared hard at the photographs, taking mental snapshots of what had been moved, what had been added, and what had been taken away.
After Emma’s death, the room looked noticeably less perfect. It was still clean and tidy, thanks to the efforts of Talia and her team. But it was obvious that Mark didn’t care about the precise placement of a vase, and whether it had flowers in it or not.
Next, Eulalie moved to the photographs of Emma’s body lying in the courtyard where it had landed after her fall. Powerful halogen lights had been set up in the courtyard so that photographs could be taken. By then it must have been ten at night.
The photos were hard to look at, but Eulalie forced herself to do so without flinching. Emma had landed on her back so that her face was relatively undamaged.
Eulalie picked up her phone and switched to a magnifying app to look at the photographs more closely. She had noticed tiny sparkling shards lying on and around the body. There had been a mention of glass in the evidence report, but she hadn’t paid much attention to it. Now her eyes were drawn to the tiny slivers.
She turned to the evidence report and saw that they were indeed glass. The crime scene investigator had regarded the glass as too thin and of too inferior a quality to have come from a wineglass or any other kind of drinking glass. None of the shards were curved, suggesting that they had come from a flat sheet of glass such as a mirror or a windowpane. It wasn’t a mirror because the pieces were not reflective, and it was too thin to be a windowpane. The crime scene investigator speculated that Emma had been holding something when she fell.
Eulalie looked up.
“I’m ready to go to the mortuary now.”
Chief Macgregor finished the email he was writing and shut down his laptop.
“Right, let’s go.”
“There won’t be anyone there this late?” Eulalie asked as they left the police station.
“Hard to say. There will definitely be a security guard and possibly some staff members working late.”
Eulalie pulled a face behind his back. The one person she didn’t want to run into was the medical examiner, Dr. Stephanie Autry. Something about that woman gave her an inferiority complex. But to say anything about it would make her seem petty, so she kept quiet.
The only lights on in the morgue were at the security desk. The rest of the staff had apparently gone home for the day. Eulalie exhaled in relief.
Chief Macgregor opened the front door and greeted the security guard at the desk. Then he led Eulalie through the long corridor that led to the cold room where the bodies were kept. He used an ID card and a fingerprint scanner to get in. The temperature dropped about twenty degrees and the tang of formalin assaulted Eulalie’s nostrils as they walked in. The bodies were kept in what looked like a giant metal filing cabinet. The chief unlocked the second drawer from the bottom and pulled it open.
Emma Egger was almost unrecognizable in death. Her skin had the grey hue of the non-living and there was a lot of damage to her body, both pre- and post-autopsy.
But Eulalie was there to look at her hands.
“Is this some kind of … coating on her nails?” she said, making use of her magnification app again.
“Yes,” Chief Macgregor said, consulting the autopsy report.
“It says she had gel nails on. It’s a sort of overlay that gets cured onto the natural nail. It makes them stronger.”
Eulalie rubbed her own steel overlays into the palms of her hands. She used them for self-defense. The only disadvantage to her steel tips was that if she got them caught in something, her whole nail was liable to rip off her finger.
“Yes, I know what gel nails are. It’s just that her nails are so torn I didn’t recognize it at first.
In real life – or in death – Emma’s fingers didn’t look as bad as in the photographs. One nail on each hand had ripped clean off the nail bed, and others were broken and chipped. But it hadn’t necessarily been the prolonged struggle Eulalie had originally thought.
Looking at the dead woman, she realized that it hadn’t taken a titanic effort to get her over that parapet.
Chapter 20
Eulalie was grateful for eight hours of dreamless sleep.
Useful as her dreams occasionally were, they left her feeling restless and disturbed the next day, as though she had been doing something much more stressful than sleeping in her own bed. She was reaching a crisis point with the Egger case, she could feel it. She had a strong feeling that Emma’s murderer was someone she had already spoken to, face to face. If only the physical evidence had been more helpful.
At this stage, the murderer would have to make a mistake for Eulalie to pinpoint them. Or perhaps they already had by breaking into Emma’s room to search it.
Eulalie blow-dried her hair straight and left it hanging over her shoulders. Usually she considered that too much trouble for a weekday morning, but today she felt like looking sharp. Today she was going to war against a killer, and it was a war she intended to win.
She checked her emails over breakfast and saw that Mark had responded to the query she had sent him the night before. She had asked him for the name and address of his new girlfriend, and he had supplied it, however reluctantly.
The Complete H-Series of The Eulalie Park Mysteries Page 39