Skeleton Key (23 page)

“What about the state police?” a third person asked. “I thought this was being handled by the state police.”

The press officer ignored the question, and the statement, and everything else that was going on in the parking lot. He leaned into the microphone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the governor.”

The governor stepped up to the lectern, and Gregor let his mind drift. The press officer should have said “the governor of the State of Connecticut” instead of just “the governor.” It would have sounded better. This press conference should have been held inside someplace, at the town hall or in a movie theater. That way it would have been warmer and less chaotic. They should have announced a time limit for questions. It would have helped keep things from getting out of hand.

The governor stepped back. He did not sit down. The press officer went back to the lectern and announced, “Mr. Gregor Demarkian.”

Gregor went up to the lectern. He never took the canned statements he was offered before press conferences, but sometimes he thought he should. He never really knew what to say in situations like this.

“I have been asked,” he said, “by the governor's office and by the Connecticut State Police, to provide consultation and aid in the investigation into the murder of Kayla Anson, and I have agreed to do so most willingly. I will be serving in an advisory capacity only. I hope that my experience, both in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and more recently as a consultant to police departments faced with difficult
homicide investigations, will prove valuable for all the parties concerned in this case.”

Gregor stepped away from the lectern and sat down. He thought he'd sounded more bureaucratic than most bureaucrats. At the very worst, he'd sounded like a pompous ass. He wondered if Bennis was back at the inn, watching this.

The press officer had stepped up to the lectern again. “We'll bring the governor back and you can start your questions. If you could try to raise your hands instead of calling out, I'd much appreciate it. I—”

There was a sound from behind him, and he turned. So did the governor and Gregor and everybody else on the station steps. The people in the parking lot did not have to turn. The front doors of the station were opening.

“Excuse me,” a woman said—it took Gregor a moment to recognize her as the one who had come to the conference room to tell them that the governor had arrived. She looked, out at the sea of faces in the lot and nearly retreated. Her confusion was as plain as the bold red print on her dress. “Excuse me,” she said again.

The young woman with the hairband rushed up to her. “We're having a press conference here,” she hissed. “If you need to leave the building, go out to the back. You can't—”

“But I don't need to leave the building. I don't. I need to talk to Mark. I have to talk to Mark. He's the only one here who can do anything about it.”

“Whatever it is, it can wait,” the girl in the hairband said firmly, pushing the older woman forcefully back into the building. “Right now, we're having a press conference, and anything short of bloody murder—”

“But that's just
it,”
the older woman said, pushing back hard enough so that the younger woman stumbled. “It is bloody murder, it is. It's another bloody murder and nobody else is on duty right now but Mark and he's the one I have to talk to. He's the one I have to talk to right now.”

Suddenly, she seemed to realize that they were all frozen—the people on the steps, the people in the parking lot. They were as still as statues and they were all staring at
her.
She pushed her way out farther onto the steps, clear of the young woman with the hairband. Once she was out there on her own like that, her posture improved. She threw her shoulders back and stood up straight. She seemed to gain two inches in height.

“It's happened again,” she said, in a stentorian voice that needed no help from a microphone. “There's another body lying dead in Margaret Anson's garage.”

The first thing Gregor Demarkian noticed about Margaret Anson's house was that it was enormous, a parody of a big old house, with long one-story wings stretching out from a boxlike central two-story core. It looked more like an institution than a private house, except that the low white-picket fence that ran along the road in front of it was so studiedly domestic. The flowerpots in the windows near the front door were studiedly domestic, too, but they looked out of place. It was late fall and cold. The flowers were dead.

The second thing Gregor Demarkian noticed about Margaret Anson's house was that it was almost aggressively ugly. For one thing, it was painted a garish yellow color with black shutters. The color would have done well on the walls of the kind of nursery school that has become overanxious about its pupils' self-esteem. For another, the proportions were all wrong. The central core was clearly early eighteenth century. The additions were clearly later. The collection didn't match. Gregor looked up the long gravel drive to the long garage at the back. That had once been a barn, and it still looked like one. It was as out of place here as a pig would have been, penned up in a mudhole on the front lawn.

“CNN was faster than we were,” Mark Cashman said, turning the police cruiser into Margaret Anson's drive.

The drive was being guarded by two state policemen. The whole house was being guarded by state policemen. Calling in reinforcements was the first thing Mark Cashman and Stacey Spratz had done after that woman had made her dramatic announcement at the press conference.

“The word
zoo
doesn't even begin to describe what we're going to have,” Mark had said as he hit the phones
to make sure that there would be something like a crime scene left by the time they got to the house.

Gregor could see it was a good thing that he had done what he did, too, because the road in front of the big yellow house was clogged with reporters and camera crews, and they were being anything but cooperative. As Gregor watched, a woman in high spiked heels walked up to one of the state troopers and began stabbing him in the chest with her forefinger, over and over again.

“The public has the
right to know,”
Gregor could hear her saying.

“Crap,” Stacey Spratz said.

The troopers let the cruiser through. Mark pulled it up in front of the barn and got out to look around. Gregor got out, too. It was almost as crowded back here as it was down on the road, but everybody up here was a law enforcement officer of one kind or another. Even the men who weren't in uniform were law enforcement officers. Gregor knew the type. The bay doors that had been cut into the side of the barn were standing open. Gregor saw a succession of cars inside, all expensive. The barn was full of people, working with concentration—that meant that whoever it was must have died in the barn. But who? Margaret Anson herself? It suddenly struck Gregor as odd that nobody had yet said anything about who or what had died—male or female, old or young.

Gregor went up to one of the bays and looked inside. The body was lying out on the floor, presumably untouched. From where he stood, he couldn't quite make out its relevant features, but he was sure it wasn't going to turn out to be Margaret Anson. What he could see was a bright, garishly printed fabric—batik, the style was called, he was pretty sure. Margaret Anson didn't sound to him like the sort of woman who would wear batik.

Mark Cashman came up behind him, followed by Stacey Spratz. “All right,” Mark said. “I've got a handle on it. It's a woman, name of Zara Anne Moss. She—”

“She was the one who saw the Jeep following the BMW
on the night of the murder,” Gregor said. “I remember the name. It's an odd name.”

“It may turn out to be fake by the time we're done,” Stacey said. “I talked to her once. She was a littie—”

“Nuts,” Mark finished.

“Nuts,” Stacey agreed.

“Does anybody know what she was doing out here?” Gregor asked them.

“I haven't got the faintest idea,” Mark said. “I haven't talked to anybody yet.”

“Who found the body?”

“Margaret Anson did.” Mark nodded toward the house. “She's the one who called the police department, anyway. That much, I have been able to figure out.”

“Interesting,” Gregor said.

There was a sound in the driveway and they saw Tom Royce and his people come in in an unmarked car. Tom looked harried. Gregor could imagine what the guards at the bottom of the drive had put him through, just to make sure he was a legitimate player. Royce got out from behind the wheel and opened the door in the back so that he could get his bag from the backseat. The rest of his people seemed to grow equipment like centipedes grow arms. None of them were wearing coats. Gregor thought they must all be freezing.

“Can we talk to Margaret Anson?” Gregor asked. “Is she still here? In the house?”

“I'll check,” Stacey said.

He walked over to one of the uniformed state policemen standing near one of the house's many back doors, spoke for a few moments, and then nodded. He came back to Mark and Gregor.

“She's in the house. She's not against making a report. She's already talked to her attorney.”

“Already?” Mark asked.

“I guess you pay these guys eight hundred dollars an hour, they've got to do what you want them to do when you need them.”

Gregor went back over to the barn and looked inside again. Two of the bays were empty. One of them had probably held the BMW that Kayla Anson's body had been found in. That had been impounded as evidence, Gregor knew. He wondered if the other bay was usually left empty for guests or if there was something else that belonged there, in the shop for repairs now or out in the hands of a housekeeper or a driver. The house looked big enough to require a staff, but Gregor had no idea if Margaret Anson kept one. He looked at the closer side wall to the garage and saw that there was a narrow window there. There was no counterpart to it on the far side wall, but down at that end, on the back wall, was an ordinary egress door. Gregor backed out away from the garage.