Skeleton Key (31 page)

The problem with the way people lied in murder investigations, though, was that they lied about specifics. They
said they were places they hadn't actually been, or weren't in places they had been. They fudged times. They invented emotional attachments to the deceased that had never existed, or put indifference in the place of what had been a hot and angry connection. Some of them were like Margaret Anson, clear enough about the reality that had been but not exhaustive. You got one part of the story and nothing else.

At the McDonald's on Straits Turnpike, Stacey Spratz insisted on getting out to eat.

“I don't like to eat in the car,” he told Gregor. “It's too much like—I don't know. Some movie about some loser who couldn't get a wife, I guess.”

Gregor didn't like eating in cars, either. It reminded him of kidnapping detail. Everything about driving always reminded him of kidnapping detail. He was sure that kidnapping detail had been the most miserable experience of his life, although not the most painful. The most painful had been watching his Elizabeth die.

He got out of the police cruiser and followed Stacey Spratz into the McDonald's. It was a big, airy space with a sunroom built onto the end and furniture made of blond wood. There had been a fair number of cars in the parking lot, but the restaurant was almost empty. There were no lines at the registers at all.

“I always get a Big Mac,” Stacey said helpfully. “But some people prefer a double Quarter Pounder with cheese.”

Gregor didn't want a double Quarter Pounder with cheese. He wanted a bowl of
yaprak sarma,
followed by a plate of something sweet, like those farina-and-honey cakes Lida was always making lately that he didn't know the name of. He wished he hadn't left Cavanaugh Street in such a hurry this time. When Lida and Hannah Krekorian knew he was leaving and going to be away for any length of time, they sometimes packed him big picnic baskets, full of Armenian food.

He ordered a crispy chicken sandwich and large everything. It startled him a little to find that instead of being
given a Coke, he was given a cup and sent to fill it up on his own.

“It's because you get free refills,” the young woman at the counter explained helpfully.

If Gregor had known he could refill his drink at will, he would have gotten a smaller one. He took his tray to the soda machine and pushed the button for ice. Something that sounded like a volcano opening up in front of his face started spewing little nuggets of cold into the air.

“I'll get that,” Stacey said, coming up behind him.

Gregor let him get it, too. He was not cut out for this sort of thing. He liked restaurants with waiters, even the kind of waiters who insisted on telling you their first names.

Stacey threw little packets of ketchup and a small mound of napkins on Gregor's tray. He got a cup lid and a straw for the Coke. Then he picked up the tray and headed for the sunroom in the back.

“This way,” he said. “I got us a table in the warm.”

The table was a large square. The chairs were just the kind Gregor liked, sturdy instead of ornamental. He sat down and looked at his food with uncertainty. Even when he and Bennis were traveling in the car, and going a long way, they brought their own lunch instead of stopping at fast-food places. The only people he knew who spent time in McDonald's with any regularity were Donna and Russ, and they did it so that Tommy could get the toy in the Happy Meal.

“So,” Stacey said, as Gregor said down. “Have you got it figured out yet? Do you know who killed Kayla Anson?”

“No.”

“Didn't you think that thing at the Swamp Tree was weird? I keep running scenarios through my mind. Somebody killed her and then went out to the country club and cleaned out her account. Somebody had already cleaned out her account and she found out about it and that's why they killed her. Somebody—”

“It was the blonde woman,” Gregor said, trying out his sandwich, which was, in fact, not actively bad, although it
had too much mayonnaise on it. “Sally Martindale.”

Stacey looked startled. “What was Sally Martindale?”

“The person who took the money. She's the—what? The bursar? Something like that?”

“Well, yeah, I know, but—”

“No buts,” Gregor said. “I'll guarantee it. My guess is that she's been stealing from quite a few accounts over an extended period of time. The question is if she's been careful or not. If she's been careful, they won't catch her, no matter how hard she tries. If she hasn't been, they will. That is, assuming that she manages to stop taking money now that she knows they're looking out for it.”

“But of course she'd stop,” Stacey said. “I mean, if she's really the one. Why wouldn't she stop? She an educated woman. We're not dealing with one of these west mountainers, you know, or the idiots down in Waterbury. Sally Martindale has an MBA.”

“She's also a compulsive gambler.”

“What?”

“Trust me. I know the signs. I know them backward and forward. Is she married?”

“She used to be. To Frank Martindale, this hotshot arbitrage lawyer. Except I've never known what arbitrage is, exactly. Just that he got paid a ton of money for it. But they got divorced a year or so ago—ah.”

“Exactly.”

“Jesus,” Stacey said. “Did she kill Kayla Anson, too? To hide the fact that she'd taken the money?”

“I don't think so,” Gregor said. “I wouldn't rule it out at this stage, but I don't think it's very likely. She doesn't have the nerve. It took nerve, killing Kayla Anson. And then killing Zara Anne Moss. In the garage like that.”

“Do you think Kayla Anson was killed in the garage?”

“No.” Gregor drummed his fingers on the table. It was a good table for drumming. It sent up a satisfying hollow-wood sound, even though the wood was probably not hollow. Gregor pulled the pile of napkins off his tray and his pen out of the inside pocket of his jacket. The trick to
writing on napkins was to write on them folded, not spread out. If you spread the napkin out, it tore with every movement of the pen.

“Look,” he said. “Kayla Anson had to have been killed sometime between the time that Zara Anne Moss saw the BMW driving down the Litchfield Road, followed by the Jeep, and the time you saw the same BMW speeding through Morris.”

“Why?”

“Because it doesn't make any sense to think that Kayla Anson herself would have been speeding. If she'd been willing to speed, why wouldn't she have been doing it when Zara Anne Moss saw her? What did Zara Anne say? The Jeep was following so closely behind that it was almost bumping into the BMW's bumper. But Kayla Anson did not speed up, or at least didn't speed up significantly. Which indicates to me, at any rate, that she didn't like putting the pedal to the floor.”

“Ah,” Stacey said. “I see what you mean. But that's still conjecture.”

“Yes, it is. But you've also got the body, which from everything I've heard about it had been dead at least some time before Bennis Hannaford found it. And you've got the garage, which showed no sign of anything in the way of evidence that a murder had been committed there. I read those reports you gave me. There was absolutely nothing.”

“Maybe there wouldn't have been anything, if the murder had taken place in the car.”

“In that case, the murderer must have been Margaret Anson. She's the only one who could have committed it in the car and in the garage and not have had to worry about leaving evidence of herself someplace on the property. And she's my favorite suspect at the moment. The most likely person, so to speak. But even if it
is
Margaret Anson.…”

“Yes?”

Gregor's drumming became a pounding. “There should be footprints.”

“What?”

“There should be footprints. Or something. The Jeep had to have been ditched first. Or ditched and then come back for. I wish I had a map.”

“I can get you maps—”

“Not that kind of map,” Gregor said. “I keep telling you, I want to draw a map that shows where everything is. How far it would be to walk. Because whoever killed Kayla Anson had to do a fair amount of walking on the night of the crime. He had to ditch the Jeep completely or ditch it and then come back for it. He had to get home. You ride around on these roads out here and you feel that everything is a million miles apart. The whole scenario seems impossible.”

“Things aren't millions of miles apart,” Stacey said. “But you keep saying ‘he.' Are you so sure it isn't Margaret Anson?”

“No, I'm not. I was just speaking the way we were taught to speak before political correctness. And Margaret Anson would have the easiest time of it here—ditch the Jeep, bring the body back in the car, park it in the garage, and walk across the drive to her own living room. Much the simplest possible sequence of events.”

“But you don't believe it,” Stacey said.

“I believe that I need to make that map,” Gregor said. “Let's go somewhere and do it. There has to be somebody around here who would understand the kind of thing I mean and has some decent information about distances. And after that, we can talk to Peter Greer.”

“Why Peter Greer?”

“I'll explain to you about Peter Greer later. Let's go.”

Stacey Spratz looked down at the table and blinked.

“But Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “You haven't finished your fries.”

The last thing Annabel Crawford wanted to do, this afternoon or at any other time, was to drive out to Margaret Anson's house. To
Kayla's
house, she kept telling herself, as if, if she said it often enough, she could stop thinking of that place as having nothing to do with Kayla at all. It was just a place for Kayla to die in, that's what Annabel thought. All that worried nattering on the television news was just so much nonsense. Of course Kayla had died there, in the garage, with the bats roosting in the rafters over her head. She had died there just the way that woman from Faye Dallmer's place had died there. It was a miracle that the bats hadn't had at both of them—or maybe they had. That was the problem with knowing so little firsth and, with not being able to see for yourself. It was impossible to get the whole thing straight in her mind. Maybe the bats had roosted in Zara Anne Moss's hair. Maybe they had pecked against the window of the car where Kayla's body was, desperate to get in.

Annabel had spent all afternoon at the club—again. Since Kayla had died, she seemed to hate the idea of being home. Jennifer was at home, treating this whole thing like one more soap opera, except that Jennifer didn't watch soap operas. Soap operas were not considered a good thing by the run-of-the-mill Litchfield County lady. They were too low-rent for one thing. They were the kind of thing that housewives in small Cape Cod houses with jobs at the local Kmart watched and thought they were getting a glimpse into the life of upper-middle-class suburban ease. The
clothes
were all wrong. That's what Jennifer and her friends always said, when they talked about the women in those Cape Cod houses, the women who contributed ten dollars in cash to the latest Cancer Society fund drive. Annabel
sometimes wondered what it was like, living the way those people lived, going to public schools, doing your own lawn, having a bedroom that was barely as big as her walk-in closet back home. She couldn't imagine it. She had always lived like this. She always wanted to. She didn't believe Mallory Martindale when she said that that other way was real life, and that this was all a fantasy that they were indulging in only because they could. Mallory Martindale said that she was going to go to nursing school and then get a job in a hospital somewhere. She was going to have one of those Cape Cod houses of her own, if she could ever afford to buy a house.

“I'm not going to kill myself to try to keep
this
up,” she'd said, and then she had pocketed Annabel's money, the money for the dress.

Annabel didn't know if she was happy to have the dress or not. She only knew that Mallory was happy to have sold it to her. She thought that what Mallory was doing was insane.

What she was thinking of doing was insane, too, but that was a more complicated thing. Deciding that you'd rather be rich than poor should have been a no-brainer. Annabel paused in the hall outside Ruth Grandmere's office and looked around. The administrative hall at the club was always mostly deserted. It was as if none of the members wanted to be seen in the vicinity of the actual work that had to be done to keep the club running. Annabel knocked on Ruth Grandmere's door and looked inside. The office was empty, but there was what seemed to be a propped-up white card at the end of her desk. Annabel went in and read it.

Mortimer,
it said.
I'm in Sally Martindale's office.

Annabel backed out into the hall. That was odd. She had seen Ruth walking around a little while ago, and she had simply assumed that something had happened to change the schedule. Ruth was never on duty at the same time as Thomas Mortimer.

Sally Martindale had the bursar's office. Something had
happened to her marriage, and now she had to work at the club. Annabel couldn't imagine that any more than she could imagine Mallory in nursing school. She went down the hall and found that the bursar's door was open. She stuck her head inside and saw that Ruth Grandmere was alone. She felt instantaneously better. She had to talk to someone. The situation was getting critical. She couldn't have talked to Sally Martindale to save her life.

Ruth Grandmere was sitting at Sally Martindale's desk, bent toward a computer screen, with a frown on her face. Annabel knocked tentatively on the open door. Then, when Ruth didn't budge, she knocked again.

This time, Ruth heard. She turned away from whatever was engaging her attention, but for a moment it was as if she couldn't recognize the person in the doorway. It made Annabel feel very strange, as if she had ceased to exist. Then Ruth seemed to snap to attention, and her gaze cleared, and she smiled.