by Jane Haddam
Zhondra Meyer opened the long center drawer of the desk and pulled out a single piece of typing paper. “I thought somebody was going to ask for that eventually. I’ve been keeping this for days. I’m afraid Dinah has more zeal than artistic talent.”
Gregor looked down at the sheet Zhondra Meyer handed him and blinked.
“Great Mother of Us All, make sacred my body,” it read and then:
Make sacred all my limbs
Make sacred my throat and tongue
Make sacred my thighs and breasts
Make sacred the folds of my vulva
Make sacred the flower of my clitoris
Gregor tried to hand the sheet to Clayton Hall, but he wouldn’t have it.
“I’ve already seen it,” Clayton said.
Gregor put the sheet down on the desk. “Very interesting,” he told Zhondra Meyer. “Does this really help women find their—spirituality?”
“I wouldn’t know. It’s like I said. I’m an atheist. But you see what I mean, Mr. Demarkian. There’s nothing of devil worship about it. There’s no violence. There’s no sacrifice. They just sing this thing or something like it, and light candles and close their eyes. They’ve done it hundreds of times in the last year or so and there’s never been any problem with it at all. Why should there suddenly be one now?”
Gregor thought about it. “You’re sure of what went on in these rituals? They couldn’t be telling you one thing and doing another?”
“I suppose they could, Mr. Demarkian, but why should they bother? I’m really quite tolerant of other people’s beliefs. I wouldn’t have stopped them, even if they had been sacrificing mice or whatever. But they weren’t. The whole point about the goddess movement is how nonviolent and antihierarchical it is. What they don’t like about Christianity is the whole idea of blood sacrifice.”
“Are these three women around here someplace where I could talk to them?”
“Of course. Do you want me to get them now?”
“Not just yet,” Gregor said. “What about this pine grove or whatever. Is it close?”
“Just off the terrace and down the hill about fifty feet.”
“Could we go there right away?”
“Of course.”
Zhondra Meyer got off her chair and went to the hearth to put her sandals on. Clayton Hall started to look uncomfortable.
“You know,” he said, “we’re pretty sure the baby wasn’t killed in the grove. It wouldn’t be like you were going to view the crime scene or something.”
“I understand that,” Gregor said. “I just want to see what this place is like. So many people seemed to be interested in it.”
Zhondra Meyer opened a set of French doors and stepped out onto the terrace. “Come with me,” she said. “It really isn’t very far at all. And it’s very clean, too. Goddess worshippers don’t litter.”
Gregor stepped out onto the terrace and looked around. Even from back here, the house was enormous. It looked like a hotel. He and Clayton Hall followed Zhondra. They went across the flagstones and onto the grass. Then the lawn began to slope gently toward a stand of trees.
“Be careful,” she called back to them, “there’s a path here and you’ve got to take it. The lawn is riddled with gopher holes. If you get off the track, you’re likely to break your ankle.”
Gregor stayed on the track. Clayton Hall wasn’t so careful, but nothing awful happened to him. Zhondra Meyer seemed to adhere to the path like a train on a track. It came naturally.
“That’s funny,” she said, stopping suddenly. “Somebody must have been drunk.”
“What do you mean?” Gregor came up behind her.
Zhondra Meyer pointed forward, and Gregor saw it. There was a clearing in the stand of trees, an almost perfect circle of pines. The clearing was covered with dead pine needles. At the center of it was a pile of stones made to look like the lip of a well. Next to the lip was what seemed to be a pile of old clothes.
“They never leave their things out here like this,” Zhondra Meyer said, striding forward. “They’re always very careful. I wouldn’t allow them to do this otherwise.”
Gregor put a hand on Zhondra’s arm to stop her. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “Not just yet.”
“Do what?” Zhondra asked.
Clayton came up behind them both and came to a dead halt. By then, Gregor didn’t see how either of them could be missing it. It seemed so clear to him, and so eerie, out here in the pines and the silence and the isolation, out here in the clear morning air.
It wasn’t a pile of clothes that was lying next to the stones.
It was a body.
PART TWO
One
1
HER NAME WAS CAROL Littleton. That was one of the few things Gregor could find out, for certain, in all the long two hours that followed the discovery of the body. Most of what went on was what he had become used to over the last few years: the routine of securing the crime scene, and talking to witnesses, and giving the tech men the space they needed to get done what they had to get done. Oddly enough, Gregor had never experienced any of it when he was still with the FBI. Once he became head of the Behavioral Sciences Department, he rarely left his office. When he did, as in the few times in his Bureau career when he had been called in on a murder that occurred on federal lands, he had arrived on the scene long after the initial details had been taken care of. The FBI dealt with the Big Picture, according to J. Edgar Hoover and every director who came after him. Gregor had gotten used to thinking of murders in terms of unified psychological histories and interstate tracking maps and cycles of violence. He didn’t think the death of Carol Littleton was going to call for that kind of expertise. She was lying out there in the leaves, tangled in a sheet and a rough brown poncho, looking haggard and heavy and ill. She had two tiny gold earrings threaded through her tiny pierced ears, a single uncertain concession to femininity.
“I’m so glad she turned out to be dressed,” Zhondra Meyer said at one point in the proceedings. She was whispering into Gregor’s ear. It had taken the media people in town no time at all to realize that something was going on up here. Locking the front gates of Bonaventura against them did no good at all.
“I was afraid she’d come out here to do a ritual,” Zhondra told Gregor, “and then had a heart attack or something. I was afraid she would be lying there with no clothes on, and it would be in all the papers tomorrow. Christ, couldn’t you just see it?”
“She didn’t have a heart attack, Ms. Meyer, she had her throat cut.”
Zhondra Meyer stared at Gregor solemnly. Her already large eyes seemed to get larger. Every visible part of her seemed to turn to glass. Gregor shifted from foot to foot, uncomfortable. It was like being watched by a machine with bad intentions.
“I wonder what she was doing out here all by herself,” Zhondra said. “They didn’t usually come here on their own. Except to set up for another ritual, maybe, or something like that. I wonder why she was here…”
“You really have no idea?”
“No idea at all.”
“Maybe they’ll be able to find out by talking to some of the other women. Maybe she was intending to meet somebody here.”
Zhondra Meyer looked away across the crowds of police and reporters. There was now a police officer doing nothing but keeping the reporters away from where the police needed to be. There was a little knot of women standing on the sidelines, too, but they weren’t causing any trouble. Some of the women seemed to be clones of each other, or members of the same club. They were all stocky, with blunt-cut hair and no makeup, wearing jeans or bib overalls. The rest of the women were birds of plumage, dressed up in red and blue and green. Gregor saw both of the women he had talked to about the case that morning: Maggie Kelleher and Naomi Brent. Then he wondered if it would really be this easy to tell the difference between the women of the town and the women of the camp. Certainly no woman of the town would for a moment dress
the way the women of the camp did. Bib overalls and stretched-out blue jeans were not high fashion in Bellerton, North Carolina. Still, Zhondra Meyer did not dress like that. There might be other women in the camp who didn’t, either. If you saw a woman in town, a woman you had questions about, how would you be able to tell?
Zhondra Meyer seemed to have made up her mind about something. She straightened up and brushed hair out of her eyes. “I don’t think any of the women here are going to do much talking to the police, this time,” she said. “We did a lot of talking to the police last time. Obviously, somebody is trying to persecute us. And the police are doing absolutely nothing about it.”
“You know,” Gregor said, “it might have nothing to do with persecution. It might be a simple case of opportunity. It’s very secluded out here.”
“It’s very secluded in half a dozen places in Bellerton. Murders aren’t happening there.”
“From what I understand, the first murder didn’t happen here.”
“Ginny said it did. Not that I have much respect for Ginny, because I don’t. But she said it did.”
“That doesn’t make it so.”
“It does make for a lot of trouble, Mr. Demarkian. Police all over the grounds. Everybody’s privacy being invaded. I don’t think half of this would have happened, half of this poking and prying and fussing, if we had been some more respectable organization, like Henry Holborn’s church.”
“A murder investigation is a murder investigation, Ms. Meyer. There are procedures that must be followed. There are things that must be done.”
“I don’t believe the same procedures have to be followed when the suspect is O. J. Simpson instead of some nobody street hood hanging out on Hollywood and Vine.”
“I’m not saying there are no inequities in the system,” Gregor said. “I’m simply saying that there’s a bottom line here. There are certain things that have to be done, no matter who you’re dealing with. There are certain questions that have to be asked. There are some things, Ms. Meyer, that just can’t be gotten around.”
Zhondra Meyer flicked imaginary lint off the bottom of her silk T-shirt. She hadn’t been looking at him through most of this conversation. She wasn’t looking at him now. She was staring into the clearing at the circle of stones and the men doing their work around it.
“You know,” she said, “most people think gay people are marginal. Especially lesbians. They think we have no money, and no clout, and no resources. That’s why they think we’re easy targets.”
“Ms. Meyer, I don’t believe a single person in the entire state of North Carolina thinks you have no money or no clout or no resources. Who and what you are have been shouted through every media outlet from North Carolina magazine to 60 Minutes. That was you, I think, that I saw profiled once on 60 Minutes.”
“That was me,” Zhondra said. “But I think you’re wrong anyway. I think it becomes something worse than a habit. It becomes a conviction in the blood. I think I’ve put up with it for as long as I have any intention of putting up with it. If Clayton or any of the rest of them are looking for me, you can tell them I’ve gone back up to the house.”
“What are you going to do?”
Zhondra Meyer smiled her little cat smile. It made her face look feral. “I’m going to do what I should have done in the beginning, Mr. Demarkian. I’m going to call my lawyers in New York and make sure they get somebody down here to raise holy hell. There are very few things that are more satisfying in this world than being extremely rich when somebody is trying to push you around. I think it’s time I took advantage of my advantages.”
“Somehow,” Gregor said, “this doesn’t sound like the Zhondra Meyer of the American Communist Party.”
“It’s called the Communist Party U.S.A. And you’re wrong, Mr. Demarkian. This is very much the Zhondra Meyer of the Communist Party. But that is hardly the point. Tell Clayton that if this place isn’t cleaned up when he goes, I’ll sue him for what it costs me to get it cleaned. Good afternoon, Mr. Demarkian. I’m in a hurry.”
It wasn’t afternoon yet. It was barely eleven o’clock in the morning. Gregor didn’t mention it. Zhondra was walking away from him, down the path and out through the clearing. A couple of the media people started toward her and then stopped. Even the reporters could sense that she wasn’t going to be gracious and forthcoming this morning. The photographers didn’t care so much. Gregor counted three separate minicams aimed in Zhondra’s direction. He felt every flash that went off in the dark of the trees.
Zhondra Meyer disappeared into the shadows. Gregor looked back at the knot of women and noticed that none of them was talking. They all looked pasty and a little ill, each and every one of them, whether they were wearing makeup or not. Gregor felt cold. The air was nippy. He should have worn his sweater.
He got his mind off his sweater, picked Clayton Hall out of the crush of police officers standing around the stone circle, and headed in that direction.
2
CLAYTON HALL LOOKED NOT only tired, but exasperated. The corpse was gone, the tech men were doing their jobs, but everything still seemed to be confusion. Gregor picked up the air of chaos as soon as he got in the middle of the uniforms. Nobody challenged his right to be there. He would have been flattered, but he had a feeling that the explanation was not what he would want it to be. These policemen didn’t recognize him. They just knew by looking at him that he was not a reporter—mostly, of course, because he was so obviously too old.
Clayton Hall was standing off to the side a little, talking to a man in blue jeans and a white lab coat. The lab coat was unbuttoned down the front, showing a plain white shirt and a fancy Western vest, leather with carvings and studs. Gregor seemed to remember having been introduced to this man when he’d first arrived. This was the one private doctor in town, the one who worked as a medical examiner in the few cases that required it.
“It’s not that we’ve got a lot of murders in Bellerton,” Clayton had explained at the time. “We don’t. What we have is a lot of drunks splattered across the highways on Saturday nights.”
Gregor thought that that was probably an exaggeration. How many drunk driving deaths could a small town have in a single year? Then he remembered all the tourists who came to Bellerton in the summers and changed his mind.
Clayton Hall was shifting from one foot to the other. Gregor walked up beside him and waited.
“Let me try to get this straight,” Clayton was saying. “She wasn’t killed here. And you’re sure of it.”
The man in the white lab coat looked exasperated himself. “What I’m trying to say,” he said, in the first truly pronounced drawl Gregor had heard since coming to North Carolina, “is that her throat wasn’t cut here. Her throat was cut before she was dead—”
“You’re sure of that.”
“Yes, Clayton, I’m sure of it. It doesn’t take a state police tech lab to figure that out. What it takes a state police tech lab to figure out is whether she died from having her throat cut or whether there was some other reason.”
“Why in hell would there be any other reason?” Clayton demanded. “There looks like there’s a gouge four inches deep in that woman’s neck—”
“More like one and a half—”
“Whatever. Enough. Getting her throat cut like that would have been enough to kill her.”
“Yes, it would have, but that still doesn’t mean that’s what she died from. We can’t know what she died from until we get the lab to check what has to be checked. What I’m trying to get across here, though, is that you’ve got this problem for the second time. The baby wasn’t killed here. This woman wasn’t killed here. You’ve got to figure out what it is about here that makes it so damn popular for—I don’t know what. Misdirection, maybe.”
“But the baby never was here,” Clayton said. “Ginny said she was here.”
“Yeah, well, there’s one more thing you better think about. Far as I know, Ginny’s
been locked up in the town jail for weeks now. She wasn’t out here killing this woman. And if this woman died of having her throat cut, Ginny couldn’t have done it under any circumstances. She isn’t big enough.”
“The woman could have been drugged first,” Gregor said.
The man in the white lab coat turned to him and looked him up and down.
“Oh, Gregor,” Clayton said. “I was wondering where you were. This here is John Chester. He serves as—”
“Coroner when you need one,” Gregor said. “I remember.”
John Chester nodded his head. “I know who you are, too. The Great Demarkian. The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. Do you think you can explain to Clayton here the difference between knowing she didn’t have her throat cut here and knowing she was killed here?”
“I think I’ve got it, John. Really. I think I’ve got it.”
“Maybe.” John Chester didn’t sound convinced.
“Where have you been?” Clayton asked Gregor. “I was looking all over for you a little while ago.”
“I was talking to Zhondra Meyer,” Gregor said. “And trying to stay out of the way, too, of course.”
“You don’t have to stay out of the way.” Clayton looked distracted. “I tried to talk to Zhondra a little while ago. I didn’t feel like I was getting through. If you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean. I think Ms. Meyer is on the warpath.”
“Really?” Now Clayton looked pained. “Well, it was coming, wasn’t it? I suppose we got off lucky to keep her calmed down up to now. She threatening to call her lawyers?”
“I think she’s already calling them.”
Clayton threw his head back and looked up into the pines. “Well, that just about tears it, doesn’t it?” he said. “All of this and Zhondra Meyer’s New York lawyers. And in the end, she’ll turn out to be right and here we’ll all be, looking like hicks with egg on our faces.”
John Chester looked like he had heard this lament before. “Listen, Clayton,” he said. “I’ve got work to do. Why don’t you drop over to my house this afternoon and we can go over what I’ve got?”