Death of a Second Wife

by Maria Hudgins

  “Now what? I mean since Stephanie is dead, what happens?”

  “Merz willed it to both of them, per stirpes, which is legalese for if one of them dies before the old man, his or her heirs become the beneficiaries. Another way of wording it would redistribute the estate to the old man’s remaining heirs. In other words, Juergen would have gotten everything.”

  “Did Stephanie have a will?”

  “Yep. We both made wills a few months ago, leaving our stuff to each other.”

  “A few months ago?”

  “January second. That was one of our New Year’s resolutions.”

  “Your will leaves nothing to the kids?”

  Chet stopped walking and turned around, squinting east toward the looming Matterhorn. I think he was embarrassed. “Just a temporary will. I meant to change it.”

  I looked at the lying son of a bitch. He probably hadn’t even thought about the kids. Probably didn’t remember what he’d told the lawyer. Probably only did it to get Stephanie off his back. I thanked God he hadn’t died before Stephanie. Poor Brian would have found himself working at Lamb’s Farm Equipment with Stephanie as his boss. I shuddered to think of all five kids saying, “We get nothing?” I watched his face carefully as I said, “So you get half of the Merz fortune.”

  “Right.” Chet tightened his lips and inhaled. He raised a hand to his nose, as if he were about to sneeze—an obvious ruse to hide the grin threatening to pop out. “Except the house in Zurich.”

  “So you and Juergen are now co-owners of the various Merz enterprises?”

  “Juergen says he’ll buy me out if he can raise the money.”

  “You’re rich.” I found a nice boulder and sat.

  Chet stuck one foot on the rock and leaned an elbow on his bent leg. “Yeah. I’m rich.” He finally let himself smile. “So to hell with it all! I’m officially retired as of right now.”

  “What about Lamb’s Farm Equipment?”

  “To hell with it. Who cares?”

  “You’re going to let it go down the tubes? What about Brian?” I jumped up and put distance between Chet and me.

  “I’ll take care of Brian, of course.” Chet was obviously making it up as he went. Brian hadn’t crossed his mind until I mentioned him.

  But perhaps I was being unfair. Chet had found out about his good fortune only this morning, and he hadn’t had time to think about a lot of things. The name Bolduc flashed across my mind. Francois Bolduc, Chet’s and Brian’s shadowy alibi for the time of the murders. Uh-oh. “Chet? Listen to me. Before you go off dancing around the house, you’d better go to your room and think about how this affects Detective Kronenberg’s view of who did and didn’t have a motive for killing Stephanie.”

  “They know who did it. Gisele’s boyfriend did it.”

  “Don’t get too cocky. No one’s been arrested yet.”

  * * * * *

  A grapevine in the Alps, I learned, worked as efficiently as any we had back home in the mountains of western Virginia, and our new cook, Odile, was well-connected. She let Lettie and me cut up vegetables while she filled us in on the local gossip. I got the impression she was lonely, holed up in the kitchen all day, and eager to talk. She no longer seemed to consider me a suspect in the double murder, a change I attributed to her getting to know me better and seeing what an honest and respectable person I was. She told us Milo, Gisele’s boyfriend, had been seen going into Gisele’s parents’ house every day since the murders and had been seen drunk more than once. She told us Gisele’s parents had retained a lawyer.

  She told us about the tapes.

  How the police had let this information leak out I couldn’t imagine, but they had questioned quite a number of folks in the village. My opinion of the quality of Kronenberg’s work rose several notches as Odile ticked off the names of locals she personally knew had been questioned. She turned down the heat under a pot on the stove and took a seat at the butcher-block table. “Ja! Herr Merz gave three videotapes to the police. This house has a security system.” She waved one pointer finger around in a big circle. “Three cameras and they were turned on the night of the . . . you know. This is how they know exactly when Herr Lamb came back to the house. They know that you”—she pointed to both Lettie and me—“did not leave your room all night except to go to the bathroom.”

  “They watched us going to the bathroom?” Lettie slapped her paring knife down on the table. “That’s an invasion of privacy!”

  I put my hand on hers. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist. She said three cameras. I doubt that any of them are inside our bathroom.”

  “Let’s go look.”

  “Later, Lettie. I want to hear the rest of this.”

  Odile’s head had been swiveling from one face to another, apparently confused, but with my encouragement she went on. “The door to Herr Merz’s bedroom was open all night. He got up several times, they said, and looked out the window in the hall but he did not leave the upstairs the whole night. The door to Herr and Frau Lamb’s bedroom was closed all night. Herr Lamb came in at two in the morning, but he did not go upstairs!” Odile smacked her hand on the table. “Ja! You tell me why not! Why did he not go to his room?”

  “He told me he didn’t want to wake Stephanie—Frau Lamb—up. Because he’d been drinking.”

  “Ja. Maybe. Or maybe he knew she was not there.”

  * * * * *

  I walked Lettie around the house until we located all three cameras and I convinced her none of them would have seen us inside the bathroom.

  I said, “If what Odile told us is a hundred percent correct—and these things do tend to get warped if they pass through several people—the tapes show two things. One, Juergen couldn’t have committed the murders because we all know where he was from eleven-thirty until he went to bed, and if he didn’t leave the house after that, he couldn’t have done it. But two, he knew something bad was about to happen.”

  “I see. Why else would he have kept jumping up and going to the window?”

  “And why was he in a panic when he couldn’t find Gisele?”

  “Maybe because she’d promised to sleep with him?”

  “That’s what I think,” I said, “and I wonder if he knew about her fight with Milo.”

  Twenty-Two

  “This must be Milo,” Sergeant Seifert said, leaning back in his chair and craning his neck to see around the corner. Two local cops had the skinny young man by the arms, seemingly not to keep him from fleeing but to keep him from falling down. He wobbled and his head nodded while the two cops checked in at the front desk.

  Kronenberg and Seifert had taken over a small room next to the reception area in the LaMotte police station, a room with exterior walls of bare logs and with ruffled curtains on the windows. On one of the interior walls, a large whiteboard bore a messy diagram with names, circles, and arrows in three colors of dry erase marker.

  “Finally! Tell them to bring him in.”

  Milo was brought in and seated, or rather dropped, into the lone empty chair. Limp, dark hair falling over a finely chiseled face, he would have been handsome but for the dark circles under his blood-shot eyes. His hair needed washing.

  “We’ve been looking for you for two days,” Kronenberg began, tapping the butt of his two-way radio against the table. “Where have you been?”

  “Around. Drunk, actually. I didn’t know you were looking for me.”

  “Or anything else much, right? You haven’t been showing up for work.”

  Milo muttered agreement, sat up straighter.

  Kronenberg slowly worked his way around to the critical question, coming at it like a lion stalking its prey into a corner. “Where were you between eleven-thirty last Sunday night and two a.m. Monday morning?”

  “Eleven-thirty?” Milo studied the floor. “I might have still been in the Black Sheep at that point. But from midnight on, I know exactly where I was. Here. In the nice little cell they have in the back.”

  The book back
ed him up. Police, called to the Black Sheep bar by its bartender, had picked up the completely paralytic Milo and booked him in at twelve-eighteen a.m. After breakfast Monday morning he had been released, no charges filed.

  The concierge on duty at the hotel where Brian said he had spent that night, did recall his asking how he might get to Chateau Merz the next day and remembered showing him the house’s approximate location on an area map. The time, he thought, was around one a.m. The hotel registry showed a Brian Lamb had been their guest that Sunday night. But no one from Ukraine had been there for ages.

  Minutes after Milo left, Kronenberg was delighted to receive a call from another man he’d been trying to reach for days, Francois Bolduc. Responding to Kronenberg’s voice mail message, Bolduc said he’d left his cell phone in his car and flown to Paris for a couple of days. Only just got back. Brian Lamb? Never heard of him. You have the wrong person. Sorry.

  “So Brian lied to us again?” Seifert asked when Kronenberg hung up.

  “Not necessarily. He told us he’d promised to keep Bolduc’s name out of the sensitive investigation he’d asked him to conduct. It might be Bolduc who’s lying.” Kronenberg exhaled noisily through his teeth. He put his feet on the table and leaned back in his swivel chair, his hands behind his head. His gaze darted from one name to another on the whiteboard diagram. Words like motive and opportunity were written in green across black arrows. “If Juergen Merz killed his sister for money, he’d have definitely told his father she was dead. Give him a chance to change his will. I doubt if old man Merz would’ve cared to have Chet Lamb inheriting half his money. They didn’t even know each other.”

  “Do you think Juergen already knew the terms of the will?”

  “I know he did. He told me all the details the first day I questioned him.”

  “Why do you think the will was worded that way to begin with?”

  “Think, Seifert. If it was worded so that if one child died, the other would get the whole thing, it would give both of them a strong motive to bump the other one off. This way, there’s no motive.”

  “Surely their father didn’t really think one of them would bump the other one off!”

  “Juergen and Stephanie had never gotten along. Why not?”

  “But brother and sister!”

  Kronenberg clucked his tongue and gave his junior officer a paternalistic look.

  “As it stands, Juergen’s inheritance wasn’t affected by Stephanie’s murder,” Seifert said. “And as for Gisele’s murder . . .”

  “No motive there either.”

  “Sir? What about the timing on Brian Lamb?” We know he was in the hotel at or around one, but we don’t know that he went to his room. Who’s to say he didn’t talk to the concierge to establish an alibi and then pop out another door, dash up to Chateau Merz, and kill Stephanie?”

  “Who just happened to be hanging out in the bunker in the wee morning hours?”

  “Why was she there at that time of night? For that matter, why was Gisele out wandering around the field at that time of night?”

  “That’s a question we must ask ourselves no matter who the killer was. I think one or the other of them was there at the killer’s request.”

  “But not both of them?”

  “Can’t see how. Three’s a crowd.”

  “What about the others in the house? The tapes don’t show any of them leaving the house after they went to bed, but the tapes also don’t show any of them not leaving the house. If you see what I mean.”

  “Very good, Seifert. You’re right. The cameras only show us three narrow views.”

  “So no one is eliminated.”

  “By the tapes? Only Juergen.”

  “What did you mean when you asked Milo where he was between eleven-thirty and two? Didn’t you mean, between eleven-thirty and four?”

  “No. I’ve been thinking about that. By the time they did the autopsy, there was no way to make a good estimate about time of death. We knew that. Body cooling rate was no help. Both were cold. We’ve been saying eleven-thirty to four because the last call Stephanie made on her cell phone was at eleven-thirty, and because we know it started snowing at four. And Gisele’s body was covered with snow. Therefore, according to the Law of Superposition, her body was there before the snow was.”

  Seifert grinned at Kronenberg’s faux-scholarly tone.

  “But how long before? That’s what I’ve been thinking about. If the snow started falling on a warm body, it would have melted—at least the first snow that fell on it would have melted. So the snow on top of the body would have been much thinner than the snow on the ground.”

  “So the snow fell on a cold body?”

  “Or at least a body that had been cooling for some time. So Gisele must have been killed at least an hour or so before four. Two o’clock or earlier, I think.”

  “That would tend to exonerate Brian Lamb. He’d hardly have had enough time.”

  “I agree.”

  “Makes Chet Lamb our best possibility.”

  “Makes Chet Lamb our only possibility. I’ve been telling you that all along.” Kronenberg stood up, grabbed a red marker and circled the name “Chet” on the whiteboard, tracing around it again and again. “Chet Lamb. Motive. Wife was ruining his business. Wife was on his back constantly. But if she’s dead, he inherits millions. Means. Gun is right there in the bunker. He could’ve gone out earlier that day and made sure it was loaded. Opportunity. Seen on tape entering the house at two-eighteen, very close to the time of the murders.”

  “And killed Gisele because . . .?”

  “Because, for whatever reason, Gisele was out wandering the meadow, probably thinking about that fight with Milo. Chet spots her, knows she saw everything, has to kill her, too.”

  Seifert stared at the whiteboard and, after a long pause, nodded.

  Kronenberg slapped his marker on the table. “We have enough for an arrest. Let’s do it.”

  Twenty-Three

  Marco called me back. “I have a little idea about the Ag and the Au on the notepad. You told me Stephanie also wrote Jo burg or Jo bury on the paper and we thought that might mean Johannesburg. With Johannesburg and the words gold and silver, I searched those three terms in our police data bank and came up with something very interesting.” He paused too long for a mere breath. He was prolonging the suspense.

  “Tell me!”

  “Gold is being smuggled out of South Africa in large amounts. Here’s what they are doing. When workers in the gold mines manage to smuggle out a small amount of gold, they save it until they have enough to melt it down into gold bars. Then they dip the gold bar in melted silver so it looks like a silver bar. Now it can be exported and imported into another country, like Switzerland, with only a small fraction of the customs fees and no questions asked about where the gold came from.”

  “Wow. It makes sense.”

  “And also, there is no record of gold missing from the mines, because it has been sneaked out a little at a time.”

  “Any connection to Russia or Ukraine?”

  “The Russian mafia is behind this. They have numbered Swiss bank accounts. Ukraine? Well, there is not much difference, is there? The same gangsters are there as well. Did you go to the air strip as I suggested?”

  “Yes, and I have a name. Anton Spektor. He owns the glider and the launch plane. Mean anything to you?”

  “No, but I will check.” He asked me how to spell the name. “Have you seen the red Italian shoes again?”

  I laughed. “No, but we have plenty of other stuff going on.” I told him about Juergen’s father, about how Chet stood to inherit millions, and about Francois Bolduc, Brian’s absent alibi. I repeated the gossip Odile had passed along to Lettie and me—about Milo and about the videotapes.

  “I am coming there. I will take a few days off.”

  “Don’t do that, Marco. If I need you, I’ll call.”

  “You need me. If the Russian mafia is involved, I do not want you the
re alone.”

  “I’m not alone, and I have no reason to think the Russian mafia is connected to the murders. The murders, I’m sure, were a local thing.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  He argued with me for a few more minutes, then promised he’d wait a while before heading to Switzerland if I promised to call him every day.

  * * * * *

  The village grapevine crackled with the news. I was standing at the refrigerator, pouring myself a glass of orange juice when the phone on the wall rang and Odile answered it. The ensuing conversation was in German, but I could tell by her voice and by the volume of the caller’s voice punching through the back of the receiver that something big was up. I caught a few words: Herr Lamb, polizei, haus. Odile glanced at me and turned her back, frowning.

  I dawdled, slowly left the kitchen sipping my orange juice, and then returned when I heard the click of a replaced receiver. I acted as if I had forgotten something. “What was that about, Odile? It sounded like someone was in trouble.”

  “Ja. Someone is in trouble for sure. Herr Lamb.”

  “Herr Lamb? Do you mean Chet or Brian or Patrick?”

  “Chet. Chester. Your ex-husband. They are coming to arrest him. The police are on their way right now.”

  I heard a thunk in the stairwell behind me. A thunk, a series of scrambling noises, and the crackle of an opening door. I dashed out the kitchen door and saw Chet high-tailing it up the slope toward the bunker. Into my head flashed the worst possible, but likely, scenario. Chet holes up in the bunker, armed to the teeth with weapons and ammo from World War II. Kronenberg and his posse arrive, also armed to the teeth. They demand he come out. He’s in there with . . .

  I worked out more details as I ran after him.

  Chet’s in there surrounded by granite, God knows how many feet thick. He’s in there with enough stored food to last weeks and enough wine to fortify his nerves to the point of stupid. My mind’s eye saw military helicopters careening over the ridges. I saw international news people with cameras. I saw what was left of my family, torn to shreds.