“Abu, come on.You seriously think some hunter’s going to cross a crime scene tape to take a shot at you? That’s not going to happen.”
“I’ll tell you what I do know.Nobody’s going to shoot me in my lab.”
At that moment Danny came running back from the woods off to the left of the parking lot.Grabbing the binoculars from Abu, he shoved them at me.He looked excited and had forgotten to be angry.“Look over there! Somebody drove a car over those bushes, like today.”
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I trained the glasses where he was pointing.At the far edge of the lot, where it circled back to the gravel road, a mungo pine was crushed down.
The three of us hurried over.The breaks in the branches looked fresh.
Danny squatted down, his face inches from a faint squiggly rectangular indentation in the dirt about four inches long.After a while he said,
“That’s a Pirelli high-performance tire.”
I crawled over beside him.“From the Jaguar?”
“Nope.Jag had Michelins.”
“Would you use those on a Mercedes SL600?”
“If I had one, I might.Take some photos, Abu.” He turned to me, his face mocking apology.“I’m sorry.Is that all right, Detective, if I ask Abu to photo that tread? I mean, you’re senior.”
Danny Ventura was a jerk but he knew his cars.
AT RIVER BEND, Naoko and Bill searched Barclay’s gun room and found a crossbow hanging on a wall.They bagged it and brought it in.
But it had dust all over it, plus it used a smaller arrow than the one that had killed Amanda.Barclay hadn’t been home when they’d served the warrant.Meredith Ober had followed them into the gun room, outraged on her son’s behalf to see his “private possessions” being “manhandled”
by the Gloria police.
Barclay was, Meredith told us, already upset enough, having awakened to find his Mercedes SL600 stolen.He was, she told the officers, at the Dixon Building right this minute, reporting the theft.
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AFTER DANNY DROPPED ME OFF,I drove straight to River Bend while he went to the garage to help them check out Amanda’s Jaguar.It was around two o’clock, clouds gathering.Barclay’s mother, wife and son met me in a living room large enough to have a grand piano, three separate clusters of silk couches and chairs and a ten-foot mirror over the fireplace mantel.Of the eight high windows, two were blocked by a Christmas tree the size of the one on the town green.In an elegant wool suit similar to the one her daughter-in-law wore, Barclay’s mother offered me a Bloody Mary, which I declined.
No one knew where Barclay might be now, or so they said.They thought he was off somewhere in his second car, a convertible BMW, looking for his first car.Clay appeared to be quietly happy about his father’s difficulties.As if she were hypnotized by it, Tricia stared at the oil painting of Meredith Ober that hung behind the grand piano.In the painting, 1 6 3
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Meredith was playing the same piano, though I had never heard her or anyone else play it in all the times I’d visited River Bend.
My phone rang.I stepped outside on the terrace to talk with Rod, who said that Barclay had reported the Mercedes missing just before noon today.Rod had run the registration and had put out an APB; now he added the BMW’s numbers to the call.
Slouched in a brocaded Chippendale chair, in clothes so baggy he looked like the Incredible Shrinking Man, Clay actually showed a little animation when I questioned him.He said that he’d stayed up late in his room playing video games, and hadn’t heard his father return last night.
“But he had to be totally wasted.”
“Why’s that?”
Clay sat up straighter.“That SL’s got ‘Keyless Go.’ So Dad says he figures he dropped the transponder somewhere between the car and the cottage ’cause he couldn’t find it this morning.He went ballistic.So somebody got his car and blasto gone. ” The idea made Clay cheerful enough to be willing to explain that a transponder was a wallet-sized card coded with a special ID that allowed the possessor to open the doors of the coded car and even to start its engine.
I said, “But you didn’t see your dad so you don’t know he was wasted, do you?” Clay and I looked at each other.
“Barclay wasn’t ‘wasted,’ ” Meredith interjected.“I spoke to him briefly last night and he was perfectly normal.”
“Yeah, right, Grandma.Around this fuckin’ shithole, wasted is normal.”
“Do not curse in my presence.” Meredith had a look that would stop a forest fire.
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Clay crumpled but tried to hide it.“Fine.Like that’ll make everything great.”
“It will certainly make things less offensive.” They glared at each other.Clay lost the stand-off.Lowering his eyes, he turned to me to say that in fact he hadn’t seen his father “for days, but what else is new?” The teenager himself had slept till one in the afternoon; since then he had been just hanging around because there was nothing else to do.
“What are you after Dad for?” Clay asked.When I replied, “Just a few questions,” he shut down and went back to listening to his iPod.He knew I was lying.
Tricia hadn’t seen much of Barclay either.She’d left at nine thirty to host a Catholic teens breakfast in the parish hall at Immaculate Conception.She’d stayed there to go to eleven o’clock Mass, the largest service and the one at which Father Connie had preached.Her husband had not appeared at church.In fact she hadn’t been with him since their early dinner on Saturday night, after which she’d attended a performance of the Messiah with friends.Returning home, she’d retired to her room.
She’d assumed that Barclay had slept in the guest cottage.Mrs.Ober kept her eyes on Tricia as the latter admitted that her husband “occasionally”
did stay out in the cottage at night.
“How about you, Meredith? When did you last see Barclay?”
“Are you concerned about him?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Why? Has he been in an accident?”
“No.When did you last see him, Mrs.Ober?”
Barclay’s mother ate the celery in her Bloody Mary.She looked as if drink garnishes were all she ever ate.“Last night.I was still up when he 1 6 5
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came home.And yes, he went to the guest cottage because he didn’t want to disturb Tricia, who had complained of a migraine.” Another hard glance at the younger woman.“And this morning he slept late.He was still in bed when I brought him coffee at eleven.”
I didn’t believe Meredith Ober had brought anybody coffee in bed, even her son, but I didn’t say so now.I told them to have Barclay call me the minute they heard from him.“We need to talk to him as soon as possible.”
“I’m sure he’ll be back shortly.We’re having a little cocktail party tomorrow.I believe you’re invited.”
“I don’t think I can make it.”
Tricia nervously felt the small, tasteful gold cross at her neck.“What’s this about, Jamie?”
“It’s about Amanda Morgan being dead.”
WE GOT A PRELIMINARY REPORT on the Jaguar.Among the evidence collected, there were multiple hair samples, multiple fingerprints, and there were traces of semen on the front passenger seat.
After trying for hours, I still couldn’t reach Pudge.Every time I called the Salerno home, Eileen told me not to worry, that she was used to this: Because Dante’s was closed on Sundays, Pudge often went to visit his older sister in Camden.His sister’s husband had left her and she was lonely.They were undoubtedly out somewhere in Philly or King of Prus-sia Christmas shopping now; he rarely had his cell phone with him, hated to talk on the phone anyhow because of his father’s deafness (a congeni-tal handicap inherited by their daughter).His sister didn’t even have a 1 6 6
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cell
phone.Eileen was glad Pudge was out shopping instead of obsessing about this morbid Killing Club stupidness.I didn’t tell her about Amanda and let her go on cheerfully about how Pudge was going to surprise her with a diamond tennis bracelet for Christmas because she’d had their daughter point one out to him in a jewelry catalog.
“Eileen, just make sure Pudge calls me before he comes back to Gloria.Okay? Before. ”
Connie and Debbie were easier to reach and they had to be told about the homicide because Channel Four was going to have it on the early news.There were already three news vans with satellite dishes atop them outside the Dixon Building and on the steps reporters moiled around like a restless pack of stray dogs.Amanda had been rich, beautiful and, as the news would describe her, “a prominent socialite, active envi-ronmentalist and prize-winning sportswoman.” She would have loved the synopsis, I suspect.
I caught Connie in the parish house at Immaculate Conception.Two women parishioners appeared to be congratulating him, but I didn’t know about what.I saw Debbie as she was leaving her apartment for work.Both looked shocked at the news of Amanda’s death and asked for more details than I could give them.I arranged for us to meet the next day at Deklerk’s, where Debbie would be bartending.
But a lot happened before I saw them again.
I had a phone call from Dino.Distracted by everything else going on, I didn’t take time to argue with him when he said he was calling from a Trailways station in Virginia, having gotten a “fantastic” chance to fill in for two shows in Richmond, Virginia, as lead guitar with an “excellent” band called First Offenders.All I got to say was, “Get your ass back 1 6 7
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here, Dino! You blow off that community service and Judge Voisey will put you away.I’m not kidding and neither was she!”
“Hey, Jamie, you think I’d miss Christmas? Bye, love you.” He hung up.
THE CASE TOOK A TURN on Monday when Rod suddenly got word from the New Jersey Highway Patrol that they’d just caught the “Expressway Shooter.” He’d been seen with a 7mm Remington rifle and a scope on an overpass bridge only a few miles south of the bridge from which someone had blown out Shawn’s tire.The shooter had been laid off from another job and dumped by another girlfriend and once again was taking it out on the world.He confessed.
So unless the man was lying, Shawn’s death turned out to have been a freakish twist of malign luck, but not “personal.” Not like Amanda and Ben.
I PAID A BRIEF CALL on Lyall’s parents in their modest saltbox home in the first Ober subdivision—which had been named by its builder, Barclay’s father, Eden (I didn’t know whether he’d been a simplistic man or a megalomaniac).The Hilliers were watching a right-wing political talk show on television and didn’t turn it off until I asked them to.It was difficult to believe these bland people were lying to me when they expressed astonishment at any suggestion that they’d been secretly meeting with their son Lyall for more than a decade, or, worse, that he’d been alive all those years and had never let them know.Reluctantly, they showed me 1 6 8
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his bedroom, completely untouched since his death, a kind of shrine.
Textbooks still in their Hart High wrappers sat on his desk.I took Algebra and World Civilizations to have them dusted for fingerprints.My questions about Lyall’s drug use produced a total shutdown except for the request that I leave their house.
Back at Dixon, I called Dad to say I wasn’t going to be able to come home to eat dinner, much less cook the fegato Veneziana that kept getting postponed.He wanted to know if I’d heard from Dino.I said Dino was fine.
Rod and I ran Lyall’s prints through AFIS (automated fingerprint identification system), but nothing showed up.If he was alive, he’d never been arrested or worked for the government.Dead end.
But Saturday night, Amanda had let the Killing Club know that she thought Lyall Hillier might still be alive and the next morning someone had killed her.It was enough for me to do a computer check of all drowned bodies recovered over the past eleven years within a fifty-mile radius of Gloria.
There were seven of them.Only one corpse had remained unclaimed.A female prostitute in her forties with a long arrest record.Dead end.
NAOKO CAME BACK with Ben’s key ring, which she had finally located in the Tymosz basement.The house, still boarded up, was now officially (to Megan’s dismay) a crime scene.Ben’s keys had probably been in his pants pocket; they’d been found in the area where the body had lain.
Blackened, the keys were so burned that two had fused together.Megan said there’d also been a plastic disc on the key ring, with a photo in it of their daughters.The photo disc had completely melted.There was, of 1 6 9
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course, no red yarn there.But I could still tell that the Yale key on the ring matched the one on Amanda’s silver hoop and the one I’d taken from the Death Book.The Killing Club key.
THE NEXT NEWS I got somehow felt the saddest.Gert called me from the autopsy room in the morgue to tell me that Amanda Morgan had been approximately eight weeks’ pregnant when she died.
Gert was heading out the door from her small medical examiner’s office when I walked over there to ask, “Can you test the paternity for me?”
“Medically? Ja. For sure we could, if we had the semen samples.
Legally? That, Jamie, you would need to find out.”
“I’ve got a semen sample for you, Gert.From the car seat.And I don’t think it’s Jim Morgan’s either.”
AT DEKLERK’S BAR that Monday night Debbie stood leaning on the counter.She looked as if all the light had gone out of her, despite the brightness of her blue bead necklace and her lime-green Lycra top.Her face was chalk-white and the circles under her eyes were black.Back in high school, Debbie had always defended Amanda.And although Amanda hadn’t given her the time of day since then, she mourned her now.
Across from her, Connie sat on a stool; he was drinking scotch, and drinking less slowly than he usually did.He looked as bad as Debbie; ex-hausted, though he said that of the four Masses done at Immaculate yesterday, he’d presided only over the High one at eleven.The church was packed.Christmas, he said, “brings people back.”
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Both of them asked a lot of questions, but had few answers for me.
They’d seen neither Amanda nor Barclay (nor, for that matter, Pudge) since our meeting on Saturday night at Dante’s.Connie, who’d stayed behind that night to help Pudge clean up, confirmed what Eileen had already told me—that Pudge had said he was planning to visit his sister in Camden.
I told them we were pursuing Amanda’s death as a homicide and that I was 90 percent sure that, like hers, Ben’s death had been a deliberate copy of the corresponding “murder” in the Killing Club Death Book.
Someone (maybe even someone who’d once been in the club) had now killed two of its members.
Debbie and Connie just kept staring at me as I said we had to face the facts: Everyone in our group was not only a potential victim, but also a possible suspect.The only one of us I knew to be innocent was me.
Both immediately said that the same was true of them.They hadn’t killed anybody, nor did they think it possible that anyone else they knew was capable of it.
“Then Pudge has to be right,” Connie said.“A crazy person.”
Debbie handed me an amaretto.“It can’t be one of the club, it just can’t be.”
I pointed out that it was even conceivable that Wendy or Jeremy had flown in from Portland or Atlanta to commit the murders, though I doubted it.I doubted it was Pudge or Garth either.And that left Barclay.
“Barclay has a crossbow,” Connie said.
“Saturday night,” Debbie added, “Amanda kept trying to get away from him.”
Connie nodded.“Pudge and I could hear him from all the way inside the restaurant.”
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I asked the priest again what Garth and he had been arguing about in the church garden when Barclay had joined them there.
Reluctantly he answered.“Whether Ben had committed suicide.I don’t want to think so.”
“You’re right,” I told him.“He didn’t.”
“Maybe Amanda was right about Lyall,” Debbie finally said.“Maybe he’s out there planning to murder me in one of those sick ways I dreamed up back in that crap high school.”
Connie didn’t see how anyone could seriously believe that.He repeated that we had to accept Pudge’s theory: Somehow a disturbed outsider had gotten hold of the Death Books and was mimicking them.
“Garth made copies.Remember that? Anybody could have them.”
Debbie chewed at her thumbnail.“But why? Why would they choose us to kill?”
“I’ll find out, Debbie.”
My vow didn’t seem to reassure her.“Great.I hope I’m still alive when you do.And, Jamie, you know what? I’m outta here till that happens.” Debbie explained that she was leaving town. “My friend Tara?
We’re taking a trip to Cancún I’ve been planning for a year! And I don’t want some psycho butchering me before I’m sitting by a pool with some Latino hunk bringing me a drink! Christmas Day, I’m in a bikini.”
I nodded.“It’s a good idea.You should leave Gloria.Both of you.”
Connie held out his arms.“During the holidays? This is the busiest time of the year for me.”
“Well, Connie, it won’t be so busy for you if somebody shoots you full of insulin or drops an electric hair dryer in your tub or fucking crucifies you!” (All imagined murders of Connie’s.) 1 7 2
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Debbie grabbed the drink I’d almost knocked over.“Hey, Jamie, take it easy.This Amanda thing’s got us all freaked.”
Connie kept shaking his head.“I’m sorry.I can’t leave Immaculate.
We’ve got a dozen special services coming up this week!”
Wiping up my spill with a dirty bar apron, Debbie threw the cloth in a bin under the counter.“Well, I can leave.Screw this.Sam’ll just have to double shift for a while.Or maybe he can get Megan Tymosz to help him.
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