27 Blood in the Water (16 page)

“Jen Connolly didn’t try to commit suicide just because Waldorf Pines got built in Pineville Station,” Ken said. “And it went up when she was something like two years old. You can’t blame everything on Waldorf Pines just because you don’t like them.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Delores said. “Go have your meeting. Go do something. I’m tired of talking myself hoarse.”

Ken held open his door and said, “Come right on in, Mr. Demarkian. I’m Ken Bairn.”

2

Ken Bairn’s office was, Gregor had to admit, not bad. It had high ceilings and a tall window that looked down on Main Street. Gregor could see the car he’d been driven up in sitting in the Pineville Station Police Department’s parking lot. He could also see across the empty space that was most of the town to what looked like a small complex of school buildings. He thought that they would have to be new, too, or close to it. Even as late as his parents’ generation, school buildings were built in the centers of small towns, where most of the students could walk to them.

Buck Monaghan noticed what he was looking at and nodded. “Those are the Pineville Station public schools,” he said. “One elementary school, one middle school, and one high school. Except they didn’t start out that way. They were built in the late Sixties, and nobody had ever heard of a middle school. Or at least, nobody around here had. We ended up having to do some renovations to make the new system work back around nineteen eighty.”

“It’s not that big a complex,” Gregor said. “Or is that an illusion created by the distance?”

“It’s no illusion,” Buck Monaghan said. “Last year’s high school graduating class was under a hundred and fifty. A lot of towns with schools that size go in on consolidated regionals. It makes sense, on a lot of levels. There’s more money to go around. You can buy more equipment, not strain so much with teacher salaries no matter what the state unions come up with, participate in elaborate class trips and field programs—”

“Pineville Station has what every parent wants in an education for their child,” Ken Bairn said. “It has a school system where every teacher knows every student. It has small classes where every student gets individual attention.”

“Ken can talk such a good game, you’d even think we’d planned it all this way,” Buck said. “But it was inertia, really. We’d always had public schools right in town. We went on having public schools right in town. Even when the town started shrinking. And we have been shrinking. There’s not much to do here if you’re ambitious.”

“Pineville Station has the perfect mix of friendly small-town values and access to upscale shopping and entertainment,” Ken said.

“He means it’s not that far from here on the interstate to the King of Prussia Mall,” Ken said. “It’s also the reason why people like Delores and Sue Connolly are opposed to Waldorf Pines and all it stands for. If it can be said to stand for anything. Well, maybe I just mean all it brings with it. If your high school class numbers only a hundred and forty-five students, and one of them gives a party and invites everybody but maybe fifteen of you, then it’s suddenly a big deal in a way it would not have been if your school was bigger.”

“Crap,” Ken Bairn said. “You are not going to get me to believe that little Jen Connolly tried to kill herself because she didn’t get invited to a party. I’ve known that girl all her life. She’s not that much of an idiot.”

“It would have been different if what was coming into town was really rich people,” Buck said. “Really rich people send their children to private schools. They live their lives as far out of the limelight as they can get them. They settle in. They keep to themselves. They try to avoid their taxes. They don’t get in anybody’s way as long as nobody gets in theirs. With these people, though—let’s just say they make a point of getting in everybody’s way as much as possible, and their children have absolutely taken over the school.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ken Bairn said.

Over in the back, Larry Farmer coughed. “Not to make too much of a big deal about it,” he said, “but we do have a limited time frame here. We’ve called a press conference. We have to know what we’re saying in the press conference.”

“That’s right,” Ken Bairn said. “And this has nothing to do with that. That party was a year ago. It’s already been on television.”

“They had some wonderful shots of LizaAnne Marsh shopping for dresses in Philadelphia,” Buck said. “She bought two, so that she could change halfway through the party. One of them cost three thousand dollars.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Ken Bairn said firmly. “Larry’s right. We’re going to have to concentrate. We’re going to have to have something to say when we get to that press conference. And it’s not going to be as easy as you think. How we could have made a mistake of this kind is beyond me.”

“The body was burned to ashes,” Larry Farmer said. “I saw it myself. There was nothing to use to identify it with. And as for dental records—well, forget it. We didn’t find half the teeth. What were we supposed to do?”

“Not jumping the gun might have been a good thing,” Ken said. “You could have said the body was unidentifiable.”

“Wait,” Gregor said.

They all turned to look at him.

“Are you saying you had nothing to identify the body with?” he asked. “Nothing at all? Nothing left over in the ashes?”

“No, of course we didn’t,” Larry Farmer said. “If we’d had something like that, we wouldn’t have gone off and identified it as Martha Heydreich’s.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, “I know. But you’re actually talking about nothing at all here. Absolutely nothing.”

“Yes,” Larry Farmer said. “I mean, what can you possibly—”

“Jewelry,” Gregor said. “Mrs. Heydreich was a married woman. Didn’t she have a wedding ring that she wore regularly? Would she have taken that off when she was having sex with her lover?”

“Oh, wonderful,” Larry Farmer said. “He gets here and the first thing he does is make us all look like idiots. Of course she had a wedding ring. And no, we didn’t find it. Not that we were specifically looking for it, mind you, but we sifted through everything. If it was there, we would have found it.”

“It’s worse than you think,” Buck Monaghan said. “We should have found a lot of jewelry, not just a wedding ring. From everything we’ve been told about Martha Heydreich, she was usually decked out like a Christmas tree. Necklaces. Bracelets. Rings. She wouldn’t have taken them all off just to hop into bed with somebody.”

“Was there any indication that she had hopped into bed?” Gregor asked. “Or, I should say, that the corpses had?”

“Well, one of them was charred beyond recognition,” Larry said.

Buck Monaghan was shaking his head. “They did check—I have the case files back at my office, you can look at them sometime—there wasn’t anything on Michael Platte to say that he’d had sex that night with anybody. I think I can see where you’re going with this. The misidentification of the body affects more than the misidentification of the body.”

Gregor nodded. “You’ve got two bodies. I take it they weren’t in the same room.”

“They weren’t even close,” Buck Monaghan said. “Michael Platte’s body was in the pool room, and in the pool. Directly in it. In the water. And he’d gone into the water alive, because he bled into that pool for hours. The water was full of blood. The other body was in the locker room—”

“The men’s locker room or the women’s locker room?” Gregor asked. “Or is there only one of them?”

“Oh, there are two,” Larry Farmer said. “And now that you mention it, that’s odd. The other body was in the women’s locker room. But it was the body of a man. So what was it doing in the women’s locker room?”

“Let’s worry about that later,” Gregor said. “What I want to know now is how close that locker room was to the pool.”

“It was close enough,” Buck Monaghan said. “It’s across a big foyer with a trophy display case in it, but the display case didn’t have much in the way of trophies. Or maybe any. I’ve got some pictures of it. It got partially destroyed in the fire. You had to cross that foyer to get from the pool to the locker rooms and back again. It wasn’t too far but it wasn’t right there, if you know what I mean. I remember thinking it was a silly way to design a pool facility.”

“It sounds like it,” Gregor said, “but what bothers me is this. What evidence do you have that these two people died at the same time?”

“What?” Ken Bairn said.

“Well, as far as I can see,” Gregor said, “there’s no reason to assume that these two people ever met each other, never mind that they were killed together for the same reason. It’s different if you assume that what you’ve got is the wife and her lover, because then it makes sense that they’d be there together. And it makes sense that somebody, certainly the husband, might come along, find them engaged in sex, and have at them. After that, the circumstances are rather elaborate but they’re not out of the question. The guy finds himself with two corpses and tries to cover his tracks. He hauls one body across the foyer, lets the other one drown where it is and then sets the fire. There would be a few problems, but you could solve practically all of them by assuming that the murder was planned.”

“I thought you just said that the murder was not planned,” Buck Monaghan said. “I thought you said he came in and found them in a tryst—”

“Yes,” Gregor said, “but he wouldn’t have had to go there and find them unexpectedly. He could have known the tryst was about to take place and gone there deliberately. With a plan, as I said. That way, he would have brought an accelerant with him. I’m making a sloppy job of this, but you must see what I mean. If you assume that what you’ve got are the bodies of Michael Platte and Martha Heydreich, then you can make everything else fit. But once you assume that the bodies you’ve got are not Michael Platte and Martha Heydreich everything starts to come apart, and not just the case against Arthur Heydreich.”

“We had noticed that,” Ken Bairn said sardonically. “That’s why you’re here.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “It’s just begun to occur to me, however, just how much of a tangle this all is. You have two bodies, one of which you can’t identify. They’re not in the same room, and you have no way to tell if they’ve both been killed in the same way. Or have you?”

“No,” Larry Farmer said.

“Which means you also have no way to tell if they were both killed at the same time,” Gregor said. “One of them was left perfectly recognizable and, at the time, not even dead in a swimming pool, which sounds like the work of panic. The other was found so completely disfigured and so completely stripped of identifying articles that there was no clue as to identity, which sounds like the work of not only careful planning, but emotionless planning. You’ve got a possible motive for the murder of one of them, but no idea what the motive might be for the murder of the other. You have, in fact, no evidence at all that these two murders are in any way connected to each other.”

“Oh, my God,” Ken Bairn said.

Larry Farmer looked a little wild. “But that doesn’t happen, does it?” he demanded. “You don’t get two completely unrelated murders like that in practically the same place at practically the same time. Maybe you get them in Philadelphia, where there’s crime all over the place, but there’s practically no crime at all in Pineville Station. And there really isn’t any murder.”

“You know that isn’t true,” Buck Monaghan said patiently.

“We’re not talking about domestic violence cases,” Ken Bairn said. “We’re not talking about some idiot getting liquored up or those fools in the trailer park trying to make crystal meth. We’re talking about two completely separate people committing murder on the same day, or at least in the same twenty-four hours, and in Waldorf Pines of all places. Why Waldorf Pines?”

“Sue Connolly would say those are just the people who’d commit them,” Buck Monaghan said. “Ask Delores out there. She’d say the same thing.”

“Don’t be a complete idiot,” Ken Bairn said.

“There’s one more thing,” Gregor said. He hated to interrupt them. As it was, they all turned in his direction at once, and stared. He cleared his throat. “Are you sure the murders were committed by somebody or more than one somebody from Waldorf Pines?”

“What do you mean?” Buck asked.

“Well,” Gregor said. “You keep telling me this Waldorf Pines is a gated community. Gated communities are gated. They have guards. They have fences. They almost always have video surveillance cameras. In fact, I’m pretty sure one of you mentioned those. Lots of video surveillance cameras in lots of places. I’ve got to assume somebody on the police force looked at the footage from those cameras for the times in question. And yet none of you has mentioned a single thing about those cameras, or a single thing about the video footage. So—”

“Oh, God,” Larry Farmer said.

“We did look at the footage from the morning the bodies were found,” Buck Monaghan said. “There was nothing on it that we didn’t already know. There was Arthur Heydreich driving around and entering the pool house. There was Arthur Heydreich in the foyer.”

“Was there footage of Michael Platte’s body in the pool?” Gregor asked.

“There are no direct video surveillance cameras in the pool room itself,” Buck Monaghan said. “You should ask Horace Wingard to make sure I’m remembering this right, but I think the deal was that there had been cameras in there, but the wet kept ruining them. Cheap equipment, I suppose.”

“What about the women’s locker room?” Gregor asked.

“No, there isn’t one in there, either,” Buck Monaghan said. “There are cameras in the men’s locker room, but the women complained, and Wingard apparently thought they had a point.”

“But there are cameras in the foyer,” Gregor said. “So there should be footage of Arthur Heydreich going into the locker rooms if he went.”

“Well, there’s footage of him stumbling around in that direction in the foyer,” Larry Farmer said. “But there weren’t any lights on in that building anywhere. So—”

“This is awful,” Ken Bairn said. “They’re going to crucify us. Didn’t we do any of the investigating we should have been doing? Didn’t we use any common sense at all?”