28 Hearts of Sand

by Jane Haddam

  Tim Brand leaned over a chair and took a huge wad of papers off it. “You’re in luck,” he said. “Kyle was here not too long ago, and I had to clear a chair for him. I expect you’ll be talking to Kyle, too, eventually. You’ll be talking to everybody that hung around with Chapin Waring thirty years ago.”

  Gregor thought about the notes. “Westervan,” he said finally. “Kyle Westervan. There were six of you. You were linked to Chapin Waring. Kyle Westervan was linked to—”

  “To Virginia Brand, now Virginia Brand Westervan,” Tim said. “She’s my sister. My fraternal twin sister, if you want to know. After that, there was Hope Matlock and poor Marty Veer. The absolutely coolest crowd at Alwych Country Day, all home from college for the summer and causing more trouble than any of us were worth. Jason Battlesea thinks Chapin was murdered over all that stuff that happened thirty years ago. Do you?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Right now I’m interested in something else. Have you ever heard of a man named Ray Guy Pearce?”

  “Sure,” Tim said. “He publishes all those conspiracy books. He’s published two or three dozen about Chapin and the robberies. Just after all those things happened, I used to read those books and wonder where he was getting all his information. I even went into Queens one day and threatened to punch him out.”

  “Did you?”

  “No,” Tim admitted. “I was never really any good with physical violence. I just came home and fumed some more.”

  “He was getting all the information from Chapin Waring,” Gregor said carefully. “He knew where she was, and he was in contact with her for all of those thirty years. Someday when I have more time, I’ll tell you all about it, if you’d like. Right now, I need to know something, and you seem to me the most likely person to have the information.”

  “Sure. What do you need to know?”

  “One of the things Ray Guy Pearce said to me when I talked to him earlier today was that Chapin Waring used to come into Alwych every once in a while, and that she came here because, she said, there was somebody here she wanted to talk to. And that she was making these trips fairly recently. It seems logical to me to think that the person she was meeting was either one of you four remaining from thirty years ago, or a member of her family.”

  “Why wouldn’t a member of the family be the most logical choice?”

  “I’ve met the only member of the family still living here,” Gregor said, “and that’s possible. There are two other sisters, but there’s no reason why Chapin Waring would have met them in Alwych. They don’t live anywhere near Alwych, and they would have been putting themselves in danger of being caught if they kept coming here. If Chapin Waring was coming to Alwych to meet someone, it would most likely have been someone who lives in Alwych and has to do nothing unnatural to be here. That includes the four of you. I’ll admit that I don’t know anything much about this Hope Matlock. I do think, though, that it’s implausible that Chapin would have been coming here to meet your sister. Your sister is a United States congresswoman. She’s much too high profile. That leaves you, Hope Matlock, and Kyle Westervan. Kyle Westervan works in the city. Chapin could have met him there more safely than she could have here. That leaves you and Hope Matlock.”

  “Not bad,” Tim said. “But it could have been Evaline, you know. Marty’s sister. If there’s anybody in town who has a reason to want to talk to Chapin Waring, it’s Evaline. I don’t think she’s ever gotten over the accident. None of us have, of course, in some ways, but for Evaline it’s been very painful for a very long time. When I first heard that Chapin had been stabbed in the back, the first person who came to mind was Evaline.”

  “And you weren’t meeting Chapin Waring in town on and off over the years?”

  “No,” Tim said. “Not even once. I had no idea that anybody was. I’ll admit I think I’d be the last person in the world she would want to see.”

  “Why?” Gregor asked. “You were her boyfriend at the time of the robberies, weren’t you? That’s in my notes, too.”

  “I was her boyfriend,” Tim agreed, “in the sense that we’d been going around together all through high school and, yes, we slept together on and off when Chapin found it convenient. She didn’t always find it convenient. But being boyfriend and girlfriend at that age isn’t usually a matter of affection. I never did think Chapin liked me very much. I never very much liked her. We were the perfect match on paper—families, education, background, all of that—and a complete mismatch when it came to personality.”

  “Were you surprised when you heard about the robberies?”

  “Yes and no,” Tim said. “It shocked me that she’d killed someone, or participated in the killings, or whatever it was. I would never have thought Chapin capable of murder. But Chapin liked pushing the envelope. She liked causing trouble. And she loved an adrenaline rush.”

  “I see,” Gregor said, “you’d have been in the backseat because you’d have been sitting next to her as—her boyfriend.”

  “That’s right,” Tim said. “As it was, I was in the backseat. Hope and Kyle were lucky that they didn’t end up dead or worse.”

  Gregor nodded. “Were you shocked to find that Martin Veer had participated in the robberies?”

  “Not really,” Tim said. “Marty and Hope were both eager to please. They wanted to keep Chapin happy, because Chapin was what kept them as part of the Popular Crowd. Sorry if I seem to be verbally capitalizing, but it was that kind of thing. Chapin had the power in high school to determine who was in and who was out. And she kept that power when we were all at home that summer after the first year in college. I have no idea why we give people that kind of power over us at those ages, but we do. And Marty and Hope—especially Hope—would never have been considered anybody important at Alwych Country Day if Chapin hadn’t taken them up.”

  “Have you seen them since?” Gregor asked. “Did the five of you keep up with each other?”

  “I didn’t see Chapin, if you’re asking that again,” Tim said, “but I do see the others. Kyle and I have remained reasonably good friends, in spite of the fact that he spends his time worshiping Mammon. I saw Virginia less than an hour ago. She came down by the back stairs by herself. It gets a little touch and go, our relationship. She says it’s because we both have constituencies.”

  “I can see that,” Gregor said.

  “As for Hope,” Tim said. He looked away for a moment. Gregor was sure he saw a flash of pain in the man’s eyes.

  “As for Hope,” Tim said again. “Well, let’s just say that she drops by the clinic every once in a while, too. She’s had the hardest time of all of us. Her family never did have any money, but that isn’t really it. She got a doctorate. She could have had a decent teaching career. There were a lot of jobs open for English professors when she finished graduate school. And she started out to do that, I think, and then she came back here and—nothing. Maybe she has posttraumatic stress syndrome, and we’re all too stupid to notice it.”

  “What were you doing on the night Chapin Waring died?” Gregor asked.

  “Good question,” Tim said. “I don’t think I have what you’d call an alibi. For most of the evening and night I was here. We had a big crowd that night. Earlier, though—well. I got up around noon. I did some errands. I attended the Vigil Mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help at five. It was a perfectly ordinary day. And that was surprising.”

  “Surprising?” Gregor asked. “Why?”

  “Because I thought, unconsciously, that if Chapin ever came back into my life, there’d be something spectacular about it. After all, she represented the most spectacular thing that had ever happened to me except for my conversion, and my conversion wasn’t a public event. Maybe I thought she’d come into town followed by a posse of FBI agents firing machine guns.”

  “The Bureau hasn’t indulged itself in machine guns in some decades,” Gregor said.

  “You know what I mean,” Tim said. “I thought it would fit in with the rest of it
, the robberies, the crash, the insane manhunt after the police had figured out that it was Chapin who’d masterminded the robberies.”

  There was something of a commotion in the hallway. Tim Brand crossed the small office and opened the door. He stuck his head out and said, “Marcie? Jennifer? Somebody? What’s going on?”

  Gregor went to the door, too. Tim stepped out into the corridor. The woman who had been at the reception desk came around the corner, hurrying.

  “What’s going on?” Tim Brand asked again. “Marcie, what are you—?”

  “Something happened on the terrace,” the woman said, picking up the pace a little and sounding winded. She came to an abrupt stop in front of Tim Brand’s office door. “Maartje was out there taking a break and she called in and was incoherent, so I sent Juliette out to see what was going on. Then Juliette called and she was even more incoherent.”

  “Maybe we ought to go back there and look.”

  Gregor thought the two of them had forgotten he was there. They took off down the corridor to the back, and he followed them.

  The corridor turned again at the very back, and then there was a small vestibule. Outside, Gregor could see two very young women huddled together near a low stone wall, and cement steps going up the hill behind them toward the hospital above.

  Tim and Marcie went outside, and Gregor went after them. The first thing he noticed was that one of the young girls was very, very pregnant.

  Marcie went up to the girls and then past them, almost to the wall. Then she stepped back quickly and said, “Oh, my God.”

  Tim Brand moved in swiftly. He stopped and stared at something on the ground. Then he stepped back, too.

  “Bloody hell,” he said, and all three of the women looked at him, shocked.

  Marcie started to move forward again. Tim Brand grabbed her by the sleeve and pulled her back.

  “Don’t touch anything,” he said. “The most important thing right now is that you don’t touch anything. Has anybody touched anything?”

  The two young girls shook their heads. The one who wasn’t pregnant started to cry.

  Gregor moved up, past the girls, past Marcie and Tim, and right up to the low stone wall.

  Lying right next to it on the ground was the body of a man in what Gregor could recognize even in the half darkness was a very good suit.

  He was lying on his face.

  He had been stabbed in the back.

  PART THREE

  “Why the hell don’t you sit in your office and let people come to you fully clothed?”

  —Paul Drake to Perry Mason in Erle Stanley Gardner’s Case of the Half-Wakened Wife

  ONE

  1

  It was an hour later when yet another high-voiced, much-too-young special agent returned Gregor’s call, and the too-young special agent was obviously bewildered.

  “He’s giving a speech,” the special agent said. Gregor decided that it was a he, although the evidence was ambiguous.

  “He’s been here since six o’clock,” the special agent said. “And he couldn’t have left, not even for a moment. There are hundreds of people here. He walked in at six, he went up onto the platform, and they’ve been staring at him ever since. According to the people here, he hasn’t so much as taken a bathroom break.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “Good. That was better than I expected.”

  “He’s also signing books,” the special agent said. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Are all these people crazy? Because I’ve been listening to this stuff, and I’ve been looking at some of the books, and this stuff is—”

  “‘Crazy’ is as good a word as any,” Gregor said.

  Over near the wall, a state police forensics officer was guiding two uniformed Alwych police officers through collecting the fibers and the fingerprints and the fluids. On the other side of the open space, Tim Brand was leaning against the door to the clinic, where Marcie and the two young women had gone with another uniformed police officer. Jason Battlesea, Mike Held, and Jack Mann were standing in the middle of everything, looking useless.

  “What was that?” Jason Battlesea asked when Gregor put his cell phone away.

  “I asked the Bureau to do us a favor and check on the whereabouts of Ray Guy Pearce.”

  “You did? That’s great. Is he in town?”

  “He’s in a Midtown Manhattan hotel giving a talk and signing books in front of a couple of hundred people,” Gregor said. “He’s been there since at least six o’clock, and he hasn’t left the stage even once.”

  Jason Battlesea looked confused. “But that’s not good, is it?” he asked. “I mean, how could he have been here committing a murder—”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that this Pearce guy killed Chapin Waring and then somebody else came in and killed Mr. Westervan here? Because—”

  “No,” Gregor said. “I told you before. Pearce was responsible for the break-ins, but he wasn’t the person who murdered Chapin Waring, and he has what most people would call an airtight alibi for the murder of—Mr. Westervan.”

  “Kyle,” Tim Brand said from his place at the door. “His first name was Kyle. And he was here, in this clinic, yesterday. And he was fine.”

  Gregor turned to face Tim. “He didn’t die of a heart attack,” he said. “He was stabbed in the back.”

  “And how did he get here?” Tim demanded. “I was out here just as it was getting dark, and Virginia—oh, crap. Virginia was here, too. She came down those stairs and we talked for a couple of minutes and then she left. And no, there wasn’t a body here when she was here. I was sitting right on that wall. I’d have seen it. And it couldn’t have been more than an hour before Maartje and Juliette came out here. What did he do? Come down the stairs and then what? Why would he come down the stairs? Why wouldn’t he just come right into the clinic by the front door? It’s what he usually did.”

  “Oh, my God,” Jason Battlesea said. “The congresswoman was here? Right here? In back here?”

  “And I was here with her,” Tim Brand said. “I was sitting right over there when she came down the steps and I was sitting right there when she went back up.”

  “Did she have anybody with her?” Jason Battlesea asked. “Don’t politicians usually travel around with lots of people with them?”

  “No, she didn’t have anybody with her,” Tim said. “There might have been somebody waiting for her up there, but she didn’t say anything.”

  “Were you expecting her?” Gregor asked.

  Tim shook his head. “I’m never expecting her. She drops in on me about once a year. She’s my twin sister. There’s really nothing sinister in all this.”

  “Why would she have come by the route here,” Gregor asked, “instead of by the front door?”

  “Because unlike Kyle, she does have to be careful about who sees her going where,” Tim said, and shook his head. “She gets a lot of bad publicity when she comes to the clinic. So mostly she goes to my house. She’s in town for the Fourth. She’s doing something public tomorrow, I think. She decided to stop in and not direct attention to herself by going through the front door. If I hadn’t been down here, she would have come through this door and found me in my office.”

  Gregor nodded, and walked over toward the wall where the forensics people were working. There was no access for cars or vans out here. It was an enclosed back space, used mostly for people who worked at the clinic to have somewhere to go when they wanted to take a break. Now there was crime scene tape across the top of the stairs and too many people in the small space.

  Gregor went back to Tim Brand.

  “I think you’re going to find,” he said, “that Mr. Westervan was killed up there and the body tipped down here. Tipped or pushed. If he hadn’t fallen all that way, he might still be alive. Would most people here have known that tipping a body over that wall up there would land it here, behind the clinic?
”

  “I don’t know,” Tim said. “A lot of people would have known it, probably.”

  “What’s up there, exactly?”

  “That’s the overflow parking lot for the hospital,” Tim said. “They’ve got a regular parking lot in the front, and then they’ve got that one if it gets full up. I don’t think it does, very much. They put it in about ten years ago when there was a school bus accident and the place went crazy, with parents coming in and that kind of thing. I doubt if they’ve used it much since.”

  “So there’s not likely to be any cars parked there?” Gregor asked.

  “Not many,” Tim said.

  “Is it well lit?”

  “There are security lights around the perimeter,” Tim Brand said. “You can see them if you look up. I don’t know how well lit that makes it. I don’t know if I’ve ever been up there in the dark.”

  “You told me before that Mr. Westervan had given you some legal advice recently,” Gregor said. “Would you mind telling us what it was about?”

  Tim stared at the sky above him. “If you really think that is why he was murdered, you’re out of your mind,” he said. “We got letters recently from the Office of Health Care Access and the Office of the Health Care Advocate that said we were operating as an emergency room and that as an emergency room, we would have to follow Connecticut law as regards emergency rooms.”

  “And?” It was Gregor’s turn to be puzzled.

  “And,” Tim said, “in the state of Connecticut, emergency rooms are required by law to provide rape victims with the morning-after pill if they want it. The morning-after pill is an abortifacient. That means it essentially causes an abortion, although a very early abortion. This is a Catholic clinic. We will not provide abortions or abortifacients for any reason. If the state changes our classification from that of a clinic to that of an emergency room, we’ll have to shut down. And yes, Mr. Demarkian, we will shut down under those circumstances. I will not compromise on that.”