by Jane Haddam
“I forgive you,” Sam said magnanimously, “just don’t go quite yet. Hear me out. All right?”
“All right.”
“Fine. Now, Demarkian will go back to his room and Donovan will go back to his office. You’ve already talked to Donovan, so I presume you’d prefer to talk to Demarkian from here on out—”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Well,” Sam said, “you never told Donovan what Don Bollander said to you, did you?”
“Of course I didn’t,” Glinda said. “Why should I? I told you last night how many people came in saying the same sort of thing—”
“Almost as many as came into Donovan’s office seeing ghosts,” Sam finished for her. “But Don Bollander’s dead now. What he said might be important.”
“Do you think so?” Glinda sounded doubtful.
“No,” Sam told her. “But I do think Demarkian and Donovan will both think it’s got to be important, and that’s why you’ve got to tell them. On your own initiative. Right away. Then, if it is important, you don’t have to worry about someone murdering you to keep your mouth shut.”
“Don’t be silly,” Glinda said. “Don wasn’t the kind of person to keep his mouth shut. He must have told half the town.”
“Even so.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Sam said. “I’m so sure, I’m going to come down and pick you up and take you over there, just so I’m satisfied you’re safe. And that you go along and do what I tell you to do. All right?”
“All right,” Glinda said. “I get off at three.”
“I’ll be there at quarter to.”
There was a pause on the line that went on so long, Sam almost thought she’d hung up without saying good-bye. Then she cleared her throat and said, “Sam? I had a very good time at dinner last night. I enjoyed myself very much.”
This time, she did hang up without saying goodbye. The phone went to dial tone hardly a breath after the last of her words, leaving Sam Harrigan stunned.
He was still stunned fifteen minutes later, when he heard all-too-human rustling in the brush beyond his screens and stood up to see who it was. He was so befuddled he forgot he’d put another pot on his lap just after he’d hung up. The pot crashed to the floor of the porch as soon as he got out of his chair, breaking into six pieces and scattering dirt everywhere.
“Who is it?” he demanded, listening to the shaking and screeching of frozen shrubbery. “This is posted property you’re on.”
The shrubbery shook and screeched a little longer, and then a man emerged from it, looking cold and petulant and sour. He was one of the few men anywhere that Sam Harrigan had ever disliked on sight. Sam had had several sights of him before this one, and what he had picked up from those told him his dislike was justified. The man was a gigolo—but that could be excused, Sam thought, under the proper conditions. The problem was, this man wasn’t even an honest gigolo. Sam had seen him with his own eyes, putting it to a young lady with nothing in common with his aging wife in the backseat of an expensive car he couldn’t have bought with his own money.
“What do you want?” Sam asked him. “Why didn’t you come to the front door and ring?”
The man had fought himself free of clinging branches at last. He was standing right in front of Sam’s screen, with his arms at his sides and the wind in his hair. Sam, protected by a roof and half-walls on all sides, was wearing a hat with earflaps and keeping his toes next to an electric space heater. It was some kind of lethal vanity that was willing to risk a frostbitten head to preserve itself from wearing something so unfashionable as a hat.
“I did come to the front door and ring,” Josh Malley said. “You didn’t answer.”
“I’m not going to answer now,” Sam told him. “Go away.”
Josh Malley looked up at the sky above his head and sighed. “I can’t go away, Mr. Harrigan,” he said. “I have something I have to talk to you about. Something that has to do with snakes.”
“I’m a herpetologist,” Sam said. “I don’t have to talk to anybody about snakes.”
“You have to talk to somebody about these snakes,” Josh said.
Then he moved very close to the screen, as close as he could get considering the fact that it was elevated, and smiled.
It was the coldest smile Sam Harrigan had ever seen on a human face, and it made him want to run. He’d met cannibals with better arrangements of facial muscles.
Three
[1]
WHEN GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD still been with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he had never been called in to a crime scene that was still a scene. No matter how vitally involved the Bureau was supposed to be in any subsequent investigation, they left the bottom-line work of discovery and classification to the locals. Since Gregor had retired, he had been at a number of crime scenes, but he hadn’t made up his mind about them. He was always happy for the chance to see a body before anybody else touched it. Once the photographers and the forensics team and the lab men came, it was touch and go. Of course, Pete Donovan and Maryville hardly had that sort of sophisticated assault at their disposal. What showed up in response to Pete Donovan’s radioed message for help with a homicide, was a small pack of young-looking, scared-looking, suspicious-looking boys who looked too small for their uniforms. Gregor got a strong impression that they hadn’t counted on things like this when they’d signed up for the force. He wondered what they had counted on. Since he’d been in Maryville, he’d heard about slums and dope and he didn’t know what else. Surely that meant that there had to be violence in these people’s lives every once in a while. Maybe Pete Donovan only hired the naive, and then the naive quit on him as soon as they saw a little action.
It was now half past one in the afternoon, and the naive young men were finished with what Pete Donovan had asked them to do. They had taken the body out of the laundry sink and bagged it. There was only one ambulance in Maryville, and it was delivering a burst appendix to the county hospital. There was a funeral van, but it was picking up a paying customer in the Adirondack Mountains and the roads were bad. Since there was nothing anyone would ever be able to do for Don Bollander ever again, there was no hurry about getting him moved to the county morgue. Gregor had watched the young men lift the body out of the sink and try to lay it down on the floor. The body was curled, stiff and unyielding. Every time they tried to move one of its limbs, it resisted. Gregor wanted to tell them they had no choice. They were going to have to break something. He didn’t say it. He could just imagine what kind of reaction it would have gotten. Instead, he stepped back a few paces until he was even with Pete Donovan and said,
“Look, the body was here before rigor set in.” Pete Donovan cleared his throat. He had been clearing his throat a great deal since he had walked in to find an actual body. He had been explaining a great deal, too. Gregor understood the explanation—although he still couldn’t forgive Donovan his behavior—and was even interested in it. There were a million small things like that in this case, bits and pieces, confetti evidence. Logically, most or all of these things were going to turn out to be nothing. From experience, Gregor knew that one or two of them might turn out to be important. Which one or two couldn’t be established in advance, or even by decree. The confetti had to be sifted through and examined. Gregor fully intended to examine it, but he didn’t want to do that now. He also didn’t want to listen to any more of Donovan’s embarrassed blithering.
“Look,” he said again, to forestall what he was sure was looming apology number sixty-seven, “it’s not just that the body was moved before rigor, it’s that it was moved before death. Of course, we need the forensic report to be sure—”
“Don’t we always?”
“—but all the signs are there. Or all the signs are not there. There’s nothing on his clothes.”
Pete Donovan shot Gregor a skeptical look, no apology in it at all. “You don’t know what’s on his clothes,” he said. “Most of th
e stuff labs find is microscopic.”
“I know,” Gregor told him, “but look at his suit.”
“What about his suit?”
“It’s wool.”
“So?”
“You ever see wool with a major water stain that hasn’t been treated? It puckers and it darkens. I just took a long look at that suit while your boys were getting the body to the floor. There isn’t a water stain on it.”
Pete Donovan frowned, working his way through it. “That doesn’t make sense, does it?” he asked. “That’s a sink he was in. He should at least have been wet from the sink.”
“I thought of that,” Gregor said. “I asked Sister Scholastica. She says the sink gets wiped down after every use, the faucet has never been known to leak, and this particular sink probably hasn’t been used for a week or two. There hasn’t been anyone sick or in the infirmary in that time, and this utility room isn’t convenient to much of anything else. It’s perfectly possible that that sink was bone dry when the body was put into it. And when I looked in for the first time, the faucet was turned away, over by the backboard instead of over the well. It wasn’t available to drip on the body even if it did drip. I don’t think Neila Connelly moved it.”
“You think we should ask Neila Connelly if she moved it,” Pete Donovan said. “I still don’t see your point. How does a lack of water stains on the suit translate into Bollander being alive when he got to the utility room?”
“Not necessarily the utility room,” Gregor said, “just the convent. And not just alive, either. Walking under his own power.”
“What?”
“Look at this.”
Gregor grabbed Donovan by the wrist and led him across the hall to the doorway that led outside, directly across from the one that led into the courtyard. It opened onto a narrow path bordered on each side by tall evergreen bushes. Beneath the evergreen bushes were evergreen ferns. Above them were the bare, spreading branches of trees reaching out from farther back on the lawn. Everything was crusted with snow, three or four inches thick.
“I dare you,” Gregor said, “to carry anything down that path without getting snow on it—a lot of snow on it. Those branches stick right out over the path. Anybody who tried to carry Don Bollander up this path dead or unconscious would have ended up with Don Bollander coated in white. Look at that out there. Nobody has so much as walked that way, single and alone and alive, since the last good fall.”
Donovan shook his head. “Maybe they brought him in by another door,” he said. Maybe they brought him in by the front door. I don’t see how you can tell.”
“What about the other doors?” Gregor asked him. “Are they close to here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are they kept open? Do the nuns lock up at night?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“I know something,” Gregor said. “To bring a dead body into this building and walk it through the halls to get to this particular utility room would have been crazy.”
“The nuns do go to bed early,” Donovan pointed out.
“The nuns are human beings like anybody else,” Gregor told him. “They get restless. They have insomnia. You couldn’t count on them staying in their beds. You couldn’t count on them all being heavy sleepers. You couldn’t count on not being heard. It would be much too risky, and what would you be taking the risk for?”
“Murderers,” Donovan started.
Gregor waved it away. “Murderers are always consistent,” he insisted, “internally consistent. They aren’t always rational—they’re almost never that—but they are always logical. There is only one logical reason why Don Bollander’s body should have ended up in that sink, and that was that was the most convenient place to put it. There is only one logical way for Don Bollander’s body to have been where it would have had to be to make putting it in that sink convenient, and that is if Don Bollander was already here while he was still alive. There is only one logical way that Don Bollander could have been here while he was still alive without any of the nuns knowing, and that is if he was being very careful to stay quiet. And that means—”
“I know what that means,” Donovan said. “Either Bollander came here to meet someone out of normal visiting hours, which would have been clandestine. Or Bollander came up on his own with the intention of breaking in—which would have to mean that one of the nuns was Bollander’s murderer. Or Bollander came to meet a third party, and the third party convinced him that they had legitimate reason for doing what they were doing—”
“Or the third party was part of a break in,” Gregor said. “Yes.”
“Do you have logical reasons like this for why Brigit Ann Reilly ended up covered with snakes?”
“The snakes aren’t part of it,” Gregor said. “It’s that storeroom that counts. There’s Sister Scholastica.”
“I know that’s Sister Scholastica.”
“I’m going to get her.”
Donovan was startled and more than a little put out. Gregor picked up on the signs. He didn’t do anything about it. He didn’t want to talk about Brigit Ann Reilly right now. Ever since he had first begun to examine the body of Don Bollander, his mind had been working overtime—but it needed to work some more. He could almost see the bare bones outline, the structure of the crime. That wasn’t enough. He needed to fill in the details, to color by the numbers. He needed to understand the personalities. Right now, he needed to know how a convent really worked.
Scholastica had come out of the corridor door closest to the utility room and was hurrying across the hall in the direction of Reverend Mother General. Gregor forced his way through a small knot of policemen into the only open space in that hall and shot out his arm to catch her.
[2]
Gregor Demarkian and Pete Donovan had been so intent on bodies and sinks and body bags and evidence, they had been oblivious to everything else that was going on around them. Gregor especially had forgotten that he wasn’t in the midst of what he still thought of as the “normal” venue for a homicide, the scene most often chosen by the serial killers he had spent so much of his professional life tracking. He was in a living, breathing, functioning institution, not an abandoned building or a vacant lot. While his mind had been elsewhere, great changes had been taking place around him. The nuns who had crowded the door to the courtyard and the space just beyond it were gone, he didn’t know where. Reverend Mother General was still holding the fort in an unobtrusive corner, watching the naive young men with a frankly contemptuous eye, but she was so silent she could have been invisible. Gregor saw her see him catch Scholastica’s arm and nod, as if she had been expecting something of the sort to happen soon. He was getting that feeling he always got with old-fashioned nuns, that he got with the Cardinal’s secretary: The feeling that wheels upon wheels were turning in a mind much more intelligent and much more disciplined than his own.
“He wants to know how a convent runs,” Scholastica told Reverend Mother General, after she had heard Gregor out and dragged him across the room to her superior. “He says it makes a difference to how the body got into the utility room.”
Reverend Mother considered this. “Tell me you’ve done what I asked you to,” she said to Scholastica. “Spell it out.”
“Yes, Reverend Mother, of course. The postulants are darning socks. Sister Gabriel is with them and she’s enforcing silence. The novices are in chapel with Sister Agnes Bernadine, praying for the repose of Don Bollander’s soul and the quick apprehension of his killer. They aren’t silent, but they won’t be getting a chance to talk about this for at least an hour. Sister Alice Marie has taken over portress duty so she can answer the phones. If parents call up being hysterical, she’ll calm them down. As for the Sisters—”
Reverend Mother General waved away the Sisters. “They’ll be all right,” she said. “I can trust most of them in a real emergency, even Peter Rose.” Then Reverend Mother General turned to Gregor Demarkian and smiled. “I know what you’re ge
tting at,” she said. “You think this man was alive and well when he got here.”
“Not necessarily alive and well,” Gregor said cautiously, “but alive. It can take quite a long time for coniine to work, especially on a large man like Don Bollander. He could have swallowed the poison any time up to an hour before he arrived at the convent and still have been moving under his own power.”
“Are you sure it was coniine?” Reverend Mother General wanted to know.
“No,” Gregor admitted. “It will take forensics to tell me that for sure.”
“You think they will tell you that for sure?”
“Don’t you?”
Reverend Mother General smiled, much more broadly this time. “Of course I do. We all do. Every Sister in the house. We’d rather not, but we do. All right, Mr. Demarkian. You want to know how a convent runs, I’ll show you how a convent runs. I’ll show you how this one runs, at any rate. There are a great many variations these days.”
“Is Mr. Donovan going to go with us?” Scholastica asked.
“Mr. Donovan has to stay and supervise his men,” Gregor said.
“You’re not going with us either,” Reverend Mother told Scholastica. “I want you to call the Chancery and make a report. Not to the Cardinal, mind you, and not to one of his assistants, either. I’m not ready to talk to John O’Bannion and I won’t be for several hours.”
“He’ll be ready to talk to you,” Scholastica said drily.
“Yes, he will,” Reverend Mother General said, “and it’ll be the first time in years, too. Alice Marie can talk to him. Alice Marie is so feminine she confuses him, and then he hangs up and has to call back again.”
“Right,” Scholastica said.
Reverend Mother General unhooked her keys from her belt and turned to Gregor Demarkian. “Come along,” she said. “This is a very modern house built to accommodate a lot of very old-fashioned customs. It gets confusing sometimes.”