by Jane Haddam
ATV. All-Terrain Vehicle. It took a while for Gregor to translate it, and by the time he did they were in the rounded open space in front of the garage. The car sitting there, giving off waves of heat, was a Ford Taurus sedan. It was a new sedan, but as Gregor went around the back of it he could see that it was a rental, from Enterprise, one of the cheapest outfits around. Even so, if it had been his car, Gregor would have wanted to give it a better driveway.
Stacey Spratz called in their location and the phone number where they could be reached until further notice. Gregor got out of the car and looked at the house. It was a remarkable piece of architecture, and “hanging off the side of a hill” wasn’t a bad way to put it, either. The thing must have been bolted into the rock. It went down a sheer cliff above a small stream, and the stream was very far down.
“This thing would give me nightmares,” Gregor said.
“Me, too,” Stacey said.
The front door was opened and a tall, thin, intensely well-dressed man stepped out. Gregor was interested to note that he could tell that Peter Greer was “intensely well-dressed” even though the clothes he was wearing were nominally casual—jeans, button-down shirt, sweater. The shirt was a good broadcloth, though, and the sweater was cashmere. Even the jeans looked expensive.
“Mr. Demarkian?” Peter Greer said.
“I’m Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.
“Mr. Greer and I have met,” Stacey Spratz said.
Peter Greer stepped back and motioned Gregor and Stacey into the house. The inside turned out to be just as spectacular as the outside had been. Just inside the door was a foyer. The ceiling of it rose two-and-a-half stories above their heads. Beyond the foyer was a living room, which also had a ceiling two-and-a-half stories tall. It also had a solid wall of windows looking out on the sheer drop and the stream below.
“This is a remarkable house,” Gregor Demarkian said.
“Yes, isn’t it? Lindal Cedar Homes. That’s the company that made the kit that it was built from. Custom designed, by the way. I saw an example of their work up in Salisbury and I had to have one.”
“It must have cost a lot of money.”
“I think it makes sense to spend money on where you live, don’t you? After all, you’re going to spend most of your time there.”
Most people spent a significant part of their time at their offices, but Gregor didn’t mention it. He assumed Peter Greer worked hard enough. Starting a successful business and turning it into a player in the national market was not a hobby. He allowed himself to be led into the living room and offered a chair. The chairs, and the sofa, were all navy blue leather.
Peter Greer went to the bar built into the side of one wall and poured himself a Perrier and lime. He gestured to Stacey and Gregor, offering, but they both declined.
“So,” he said. “You’ve come to talk about Kayla. And to get my alibi.”
“Something like that,” Gregor agreed. “Do you have an alibi?”
“I don’t know. I can’t figure out what time I’d need to have an alibi for. The news reports have been very confusing.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what you did on the night Kayla Anson died?”
“I worked late. I do that a lot. We have a new ad campaign ready to launch. I was checking out the print ads. We’re doing some television, too—once L. L. Bean started doing television, the rest of us had to, but if you ask me, it’s a pain in the ass. But I wasn’t ready to look at the television stuff anyway. I just looked at the print.”
“Were you with someone while you worked?”
“I was all by myself,” Peter Greer said. “Chessy Barre would usually have been with me. She’s my personal assistant. But she’d been out all day. She had some kind of food poisoning.”
“And this was from when to when?”
“I don’t know what you mean by from when to when. I got to work at eight-thirty on Friday morning. I usually do get to work at eight-thirty in the morning.”
“And you stayed at work?” Gregor asked. “All day? Without leaving?”
“Oh, no. I left at five or a little after and ran up to Subway in Watertown to get something to eat. I usually pack something from here. I hate fast food. But I hadn’t intended to work late that night, so I was stuck.”
“And your office is where?”
“On the Litchfield Road, in Watertown near the Morris line.”
“And there were people who saw you at work when you left at—five?”
“Or a little after, yes. There were probably a dozen people who saw me then. We go from nine-thirty to five-thirty instead of nine to five.”
“How about when you got back? Did anybody see you then?”
“Not a soul,” Peter Greer said. “By the time I got back it was after quitting time, and they were all gone. I hear there are places in this world where people work late with joy in their hearts, but Goldenrod is not one of them.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. The FBI hadn’t been one of them, either, for most of the people who worked there. “So you got back at—?”
“About six-fifteen.”
“About six-fifteen. And you stayed until when?”
“I don’t remember. Eleven, eleven-thirty. Something like that.”
“And then you came home?”
“Yes.”
“Straight home?”
“Yes. There’s nothing much open at that hour unless you want to go into Waterbury. And I didn’t.”
“Was anybody here when you got home?”
“No,” Peter said. He finished his Perrier and went back for more. “There was a message on the answering machine, though. A message from Kayla. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”
“Did you keep it?” Stacey Spratz asked.
Peter Greer shook his head. “It wasn’t a message to keep. It was mostly just hello and how are you and can we talk sometime. That kind of thing. It rather surprised me, really.”
“Why?” Gregor asked.
“Because we’d pretty much broken up,” Peter said. “I mean the whole thing was rather insane all the way along, wasn’t it? She was much too young for me. I don’t mean I was cradle robbing when we started seeing each other. She was eighteen, and she wasn’t an unsophisticated girl. But there were—gaps. Gaps in understanding. I should have reallzed that it wouldn’t work out.”
“What kind of gaps in understanding?” Gregor asked.
Peter Greer shrugged. “Gaps in understanding about work. I founded a company, and I run it. That takes a lot of time, and sometimes it means I have to take financial risks that leave me rather short of money. Kayla wasn’t used to not being the center of attention and she wasn’t used to not being able to do things because there simply wasn’t any cash. I don’t know. Maybe it was class as much as age. Do you see what I mean?”
“I see what you mean,” Gregor said. “Are you short of cash?”
“Right now? No. About three or four months after Kayla and I started dating, though, I took the company through an expansion period. It was either expand or die.”
“And you expanded.”
“Thank God,” Peter Greer said.
Gregor went to the wall of windows and looked out. He wished immediately that he hadn’t. He didn’t usually have a fear of heights, but this view gave him one. He retreated.
“So,” he said. “Tell me about Kayla Anson. And about you. Where you met her. What she was like.”
“We met at the Swamp Tree Country Club,” Peter said, “which is where everybody meets everybody out here. Or at least, where everybody like us meets everybody else like us. There was a dinner dance. The club has them about once a month. Kayla was there with Margaret. Oh, and with her friend. Kayla’s friend, Annabel Crawford.”
“And what was Kayla Anson like?”
Peter Greer shrugged again. “I think the tendency is to think of girls like Kayla as extraordinary—people do it with Chelsea Clinton, as well. Girls in the spotlight, so to speak, who
get a lot of publicity, who have to live public lives. We like to think of them as unusual people with unusual strengths.”
“And Kayla Anson wasn’t that?”
“Kayla was Kayla, that was all. She was an East Coast debutante. More intelligent than most, more grown-up than some, fairly steady emotionally and philosophically. And of course she was attractive, although she wasn’t really beautiful. That’s the other tendency we all have, with girls like Kayla. Even when they’re plain as toast, we like to describe them as beautiful.”
“I think it’s remarkable that you started a relationship—I presume a sexual relationship—with a woman you were able to look at so . . . judiciously.”
“Well,” Peter Greer said, “maybe I wasn’t so judicious in the beginning.”
“What about Kayla Anson? Was she judicious about you?”
“I think she was just—bored. Bored out here. Bored with going to parties. Bored and looking for somebody or something to distract her. And I was that somebody.”
“What ended it?”
“Kayla ended it,” Peter Greer said. “One night about two months ago, right out of the blue. Although I can’t really say I was all that surprised, once I thought it over. We were both just sort of marking time.”
There was a faint trilling sound. For the first few moments, Gregor didn’t recognize it as the ringing of a phone. Peter Greer did, and strode over to the end table near the couch to pick up. He said, “Peter Greer here” instead of “hello,” and then he listened.
Finally he looked up and held the phone out in Stacey Spratz’s direction. Stacey was near the window wall, looking green.
“It’s for you,” he said. “It’s your dispatcher. She says it’s urgent”
Stacey Spratz came forward and took the phone. Gregor thought he was being very careful not to look at either one of them, but that might have been nothing. That might have been Stacey still embarrassed at how badly he was taking the view. Stacey listened for a while and then grunted. He said, “Yes, yes, I understand” and “we’re leaving as soon as I hang up.” Then he handed the phone back to Peter Greer and looked at Gregor.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “There’s another body in Margaret Anson’s garage.”
PART THREE
PART THREE
One
1
To call what was going on in the road outside Margaret Anspn’s house a circus would be to make it sound more dignified than what it was. What was going on in the road outside Margaret Anson’s house was a form of lunacy. Gregor Demarkian had never seen anything like it, not even in the days after the Monica Lewinsky case started to go nuclear—and that, at least, had involved a president of the United States. It was hard to tell what it was people thought they were doing here. Vans that had been politely in the road only a few hours ago were now parked up on the grass. Reporters who had stayed where they belonged on the public pavement were now creeping up the long gravel drive, only to be turned back by one or another of the state police sentries who had been posted to deal with just such a problem. There were police everywhere, more police than Gregor had seen in one place since coming to Connecticut. Some of them were state police and some of them belonged to the Washington Police Department. Their cars were everywhere, parked on the sides of the drive, crammed into the roundabout in front of the barn. Their uniforms were the one consistent feature of the landscape.
Stacey Spratz pulled carefully into the drive, waving at the sentry there to make sure he understood that they were official and therefore allowed to pass—but instead of passing he found himself stopped, and the car beginning to rock.
“What the hell,” he said.
Gregor could see what was happening. There were two people nearly plastered to the window at his side. There were people everywhere.
“We’re being rocked,” he said. “From the back.”
Stacey Spratz looked into the rearview mirror. Gregor turned around in his seat. There were two men back there, leaning against the left side of the car and pushing. Every time they surged forward, the car swayed and shuddered.
“Jesus Christ,” Stacey said. “They’re going to turn us over.”
Gregor didn’t think it was impossible. The rocking had picked up momentum. Stacey didn’t dare rev the engine, for fear he would end up killing someone—and in the long run that would ruin him, even if the death were accidental, even if it were entirely justified. The car was now sometimes lifting off the ground on the left side. It wasn’t lifting very far off, not yet, but it would get farther. Gregor tightened his seat belt.
“I’m going to make a break for it,” Stacey said.
“No.” Gregor leaned across the front seat and hit Stacey’s horn, as long and as loud as he could. He didn’t know what make of car this was—he didn’t know what make of car any car was, unless somebody told him—but he knew in no time at all that this one had a very loud horn.
“You’re breaking my eardrums,” Stacey said.
The two men who were rocking the car had not been deterred by the noise. They were still rocking. Gregor looked up the drive and saw what he had hoped to see. Four tall state policemen were heading in their direction, coming at a run. It took them a couple of seconds to assess what was going on. Then they ran at the two men rocking the car as if those men had been boxing dummies.
“Get ready to get out of here as soon as they peel them off,” Gregor said.
“I’m watching,” Stacey said.
The two men gave one last heave. It was as if they were willing to risk anything to get the car turned over. It didn’t work. The car went up dangerously on one side, but it came down again. Seconds later, Gregor saw the crowd of state policemen pull the two men off and away.
“Go,” he told Stacey Spratz.
Stacey didn’t need the advice. He hit the gas, hard. The car jerked forward as if it had been launched. Ahead of them, the next sentry stood back to let them pass. They shot up the drive in the direction of all the police cruisers. They came to a stop just in time.
“Jesus,” Stacey said.
Gregor opened his door and swung his feet out. He was surprised to find that he was shaking. He wasn’t sure why. These were reporters he was dealing with. They wouldn’t have torn his arms off. He looked back down the drive and saw that both of the men who had been rocking the car where now in handcuffs, and surrounded by a large part of the crowd. Absent any other kind of a story, their story would do.
“Mr. Demarkian?” Stacey Spratz said.
He was standing in the drive next to Mark Cashman, who looked as ashen as Gregor had ever seen a man look in his life.
“She’s in the barn,” Mark Cashman said. “Just like Zara Anne Moss. She’s been dead—I don’t know. For a while.”
“Maybe we ought to go in and look around,” Stacey said.
“Tom Royce is in there,” Mark Cashman said. “Along with a million other people. Except it’s different from the last time. I don’t know what I mean.”
“I do,” Gregor Demarkian said.
“I was thinking maybe I wasn’t cut out for this,” Mark Cashman said. “I didn’t sign on for—I don’t know what. You can go fifty years in a town like this and never see a single murder.”
“Could we get down to practicalities here?” Gregor asked. “Could you tell me who was murdered?”
“Oh, Jesus,” Stacey Spratz said. “I didn’t even think about that. I just came hauling out here and I thoughts-Christ.”
“It was Margaret Anson,” Mark Cashman said. “Is Margaret Anson. I don’t know how to put it.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “How did the police find out she was dead?”
“We got a call. From Annabel Crawford. She’s—her parents have a place in New Preston. She’s sort of famous around here for having more fake IDs than an international terrorist. We’ve all picked her up at one time or another. But—”
“But?” Gregor prodded.
“Well, there’s no harm in her,�
�� Mark Cashman said. “She doesn’t drive drunk, and she never drinks more than about two beers, so she usually manages to keep the guy she’s with from getting behind the wheel and killing somebody else. She’s always with some guy. I mean, she would be. Wait till you see her.”
“She’s one of those debutantes,” Stacey Spratz said.
“She’s still here?” Gregor asked.
Mark Cashman nodded in the direction of the house. “She’s in the living room. She’s a mess, really. And I don’t blame her.”
“I’m going to go talk to Mr. Royce,” Gregor said. “Unless either of you mind?”
Neither of them minded. Mark Cashman seemed as if he would never mind much of anything again, and Stacey Spratz was obviously reluctant to go anywhere near the barn. To Gregor, police work had always had some connection with violent death. In the last ten years of his career, it had had no other connections at all. It seemed strange to think that there were men who wore police uniforms who had never seen violent death at all—and didn’t even want to.
Gregor left Mark and Stacey standing where they were and walked over to the barn. The state policeman on duty on the door nodded to him politely and let him pass. Gregor walked into the dark building and saw the body on the floor. It was right inside the bay, as if Margaret Anson had been on her way out into the drive when she’d been caught from behind. Because Gregor was fairly sure she had been caught from behind. He could see Kayla Anson being tricked by a murderer who came at her from the front, and certainly Zara Anne Moss, but Margaret Anson would have known better than to turn her back on anyone.
Tom Royce was bagging things. Gregor had never understood much about that part of police work. He went to stand in the circle around the body. This time, the white athletic shoelace was clearly visible. It was dug into the soft skin of Margaret Anson’s neck, like a cookie cutter half-pressed into dough. Margaret Anson had not been an attractive woman in life. She was even less of one in death.
Gregor cleared his throat. Tom Royce looked up and then stood up, visibly stretching.
“It’s you,” he said. “I thought you’d be along.”