Skeleton Key (35 page)

To call what was going on in the road outside Margaret Anspn's house a circus would be to make it sound more dignified than what it was. What was going on in the road outside Margaret Anson's house was a form of lunacy. Gregor Demarkian had never seen anything like it, not even in the days after the Monica Lewinsky case started to go nuclear—and that, at least, had involved a president of the United States. It was hard to tell what it was people thought they were doing here. Vans that had been politely in the road only a few hours ago were now parked up on the grass. Reporters who had stayed where they belonged on the public pavement were now creeping up the long gravel drive, only to be turned back by one or another of the state police sentries who had been posted to deal with just such a problem. There were police everywhere, more police than Gregor had seen in one place since coming to Connecticut. Some of them were state police and some of them belonged to the Washington Police Department. Their cars were everywhere, parked on the sides of the drive, crammed into the roundabout in front of the barn. Their uniforms were the one consistent feature of the landscape.

Stacey Spratz pulled carefully into the drive, waving at the sentry there to make sure he understood that they were official and therefore allowed to pass—but instead of passing he found himself stopped, and the car beginning to rock.

“What the
hell,” he
said.

Gregor could see what was happening. There were two people nearly plastered to the window at his side. There were people everywhere.

“We're being rocked,” he said. “From the back.”

Stacey Spratz looked into the rearview mirror. Gregor
turned around in his seat. There were two men back there, leaning against the left side of the car and pushing. Every time they surged forward, the car swayed and shuddered.

“Jesus Christ,” Stacey said. “They're going to turn us over.”

Gregor didn't think it was impossible. The rocking had picked up momentum. Stacey didn't dare rev the engine, for fear he would end up killing someone—and in the long run that would ruin him, even if the death were accidental, even if it were entirely justified. The car was now sometimes lifting off the ground on the left side. It wasn't lifting very far off, not yet, but it would get farther. Gregor tightened his seat belt.

“I'm going to make a break for it,” Stacey said.

“No.” Gregor leaned across the front seat and hit Stacey's horn, as long and as loud as he could. He didn't know what make of car this was—he didn't know what make of car any car was, unless somebody told him—but he knew in no time at all that this one had a very loud horn.

“You're breaking my eardrums,” Stacey said.

The two men who were rocking the car had not been deterred by the noise. They were still rocking. Gregor looked up the drive and saw what he had hoped to see. Four tall state policemen were heading in their direction, coming at a run. It took them a couple of seconds to assess what was going on. Then they ran at the two men rocking the car as if those men had been boxing dummies.

“Get ready to get out of here as soon as they peel them off,” Gregor said.

“I'm watching,” Stacey said.

The two men gave one last heave. It was as if they were willing to risk anything to get the car turned over. It didn't work. The car went up dangerously on one side, but it came down again. Seconds later, Gregor saw the crowd of state policemen pull the two men off and away.

“Go,” he told Stacey Spratz.

Stacey didn't need the advice. He hit the gas, hard. The car jerked forward as if it had been launched. Ahead of
them, the next sentry stood back to let them pass. They shot up the drive in the direction of all the police cruisers. They came to a stop just in time.

“Jesus,” Stacey said.

Gregor opened his door and swung his feet out. He was surprised to find that he was shaking. He wasn't sure why. These were reporters he was dealing with. They wouldn't have torn his arms off. He looked back down the drive and saw that both of the men who had been rocking the car where now in handcuffs, and surrounded by a large part of the crowd. Absent any other kind of a story, their story would do.

“Mr. Demarkian?” Stacey Spratz said.

He was standing in the drive next to Mark Cashman, who looked as ashen as Gregor had ever seen a man look in his life.

“She's in the barn,” Mark Cashman said. “Just like Zara Anne Moss. She's been dead—I don't know. For a while.”

“Maybe we ought to go in and look around,” Stacey said.

“Tom Royce is in there,” Mark Cashman said. “Along with a million other people. Except it's different from the last time. I don't know what I mean.”

“I do,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“I was thinking maybe I wasn't cut out for this,” Mark Cashman said. “I didn't sign on for—I don't know what. You can go fifty years in a town like this and never see a single murder.”

“Could we get down to practicalities here?” Gregor asked. “Could you tell me who was murdered?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Stacey Spratz said. “I didn't even think about that. I just came hauling out here and I thoughts-Christ.”

“It was Margaret Anson,” Mark Cashman said. “Is Margaret Anson. I don't know how to put it.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “How did the police find out she was dead?”

“We got a call. From Annabel Crawford. She's—her
parents have a place in New Preston. She's sort of famous around here for having more fake IDs than an international terrorist. We've all picked her up at one time or another. But—”

“But?” Gregor prodded.

“Well, there's no harm in her,” Mark Cashman said. “She doesn't drive drunk, and she never drinks more than about two beers, so she usually manages to keep the guy she's with from getting behind the wheel and killing somebody else. She's always with some guy. I mean, she would be. Wait till you see her.”

“She's one of those debutantes,” Stacey Spratz said.

“She's still here?” Gregor asked.

Mark Cashman nodded in the direction of the house. “She's in the living room. She's a mess, really. And I don't blame her.”

“I'm going to go talk to Mr. Royce,” Gregor said. “Unless either of you mind?”

Neither of them minded. Mark Cashman seemed as if he would never mind much of anything again, and Stacey Spratz was obviously reluctant to go anywhere near the barn. To Gregor, police work had always had some connection with violent death. In the last ten years of his career, it had had no other connections at all. It seemed strange to think that there were men who wore police uniforms who had never seen violent death at all—and didn't even want to.

Gregor left Mark and Stacey standing where they were and walked over to the barn. The state policeman on duty on the door nodded to him politely and let him pass. Gregor walked into the dark building and saw the body on the floor. It was right inside the bay, as if Margaret Anson had been on her way out into the drive when she'd been caught from behind. Because Gregor was fairly sure she had been caught from behind. He could see Kayla Anson being tricked by a murderer who came at her from the front, and certainly Zara Anne Moss, but Margaret Anson would have known better than to turn her back on anyone.

Tom Royce was bagging things. Gregor had never understood much about that part of police work. He went to stand in the circle around the body. This time, the white athletic shoelace was clearly visible. It was dug into the soft skin of Margaret Anson's neck, like a cookie cutter half-pressed into dough. Margaret Anson had not been an attractive woman in life. She was even less of one in death.

Gregor cleared his throat. Tom Royce looked up and then stood up, visibly stretching.

“It's you,” he said. “I thought you'd be along.”

“And?”

Tom shrugged. “And what? My guess is that it's the same person, with the same method, but you'll have to wait for the lab analysis and the autopsy. But it blows my favorite theory all to hell.”

“What was your favorite theory?”

“That this was a serial killer we were dealing with. Somebody who liked to off young women. Young women with long brown hair, specifically. That's the way serial killers work, isn't it?”

“There are elements to these crimes that don't fit the pattern,” Gregor said. “The use of the garage, for one thing. Unless you meant that you thought Margaret Anson was the serial killer in question.”

“No. No, I didn't. We had one, you know. A serial killer. Up in Hartford last year. Killing prostitutes. Why do you think so many of them kill prostitutes?”

“Prostitutes are available,” Gregor said. “They're supposed to go to dark places alone with strangers.”

“I guess. She hasn't been dead all that long, by the way. Not as long as Zara Anne Moss had been. The girl who found her said she was still twitching.”

“The girl was twitching, or the body was?”

“The body was.”

“That could have been an illusion,” Gregor said. “Somebody who wasn't used to seeing dead bodies. Somebody who wasn't really thinking straight.”

“Absolutely,” Tom Royce said. “But you know what it's
like. We have to listen to everybody. We have to know what everybody is saying.”

“I'm surprised you listen at all. I didn't think it was customary for deputy medical examiners to sit in on interrogations. Or even casual inquiries.”

“I eavesdropped. Everybody eavesdropped. You couldn't help but eavesdrop. She was hysterical.”

“This was Annabel Crawford?”

“Right. I felt sorry for her. I still feel sorry for her. I wish—”

“What?”

Tom Royce shrugged. “Nothing that makes any sense, I guess. That none of this had happened. That I was back in Hartford checking out the latest drug hit. That's where you expect dead bodies. Not in places like this.”

This was nonsensical, but Gregor didn't say so. People said a lot of nonsensical things in murder investigations. Besides, he knew, in a way, what Tom Royce meant.

“I think I'm going to go talk to this Annabel Crawford,” he said. “Unless you've got something else I need to know. Something unusual for once.”

“No, not a thing. Well, except for the door, and I don't think that's really unusual.”

“What door?”

Tom Royce pointed across the barn, to the far corner at the back. “That door. I think she must have left it open all the time. At least, it's been open all three times we've been here. Although why, I'll never know.”

“Why not?”

“Well, there's nothing out there, that's all. You run right into a wall of trees. The only thing I can think of is, when the door was put in there was yard back there and then it got grown over. If that makes sense to you.”

“It makes sense to me. Just a minute.”

Gregor crossed the barn and stood in front of the door. It was still open—the forensics people would be careful not to change anything they didn't have to change in the barn, just in case—and he could see that Tom Royce had been
exactly right. There was literally a wall of trees out there, although there was probably a way through them if you worked at it. Gregor could see no signs that anybody had worked at it.

He went back to the bay where the body was. Tom Royce was down on his haunches again, putting something into a plastic bag with tweezers.

“I'm going to go see about Annabel Crawford,” Gregor said.

“Good luck,” Tom Royce said.

Gregor almost pointed out that their luck was already bad. If it hadn't been, Margaret Anson would be more than a body lying on the floor of her own garage.

The back hall of Margaret Anson's house was just as dark as Gregor had remembered it, and the ceilings in the rooms were just as low. It struck him again how odd it was, that someone with Margaret Anson's money would have wanted to live cramped up like this. A sense of history was all very well and good, but this was taking it much too far. Even the colonial settlers would have jumped at the chance to live in a redwood modern, after having to live for any amount of time in something like this.

Mark Cashman led him through the house, although this time he didn't need leading. As they walked, Gregor could hear the muffled sounds of crying. Mark Cashman could hear them, too. He nodded in the direction of the living room and said. “She's been like that since we showed up. At least. In fact, she's a little better now. For a while there, she was completely hysterical.”

“How old is she?”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen and brought up in a nice family in a nice world. I don't think hysterical is out of line under the circumstances.”

“I don't, either. But it has meant that she hasn't been easy to deal with.”

They got to the living room and Mark Cashman stepped back to let Gregor enter first. Gregor went through the door and found a small blonde woman sitting on the long main couch, one fist pressed to her lips and her eyes red. Even with the mess her face was in, though, it was easy to see that she was a very pretty young woman, all porcelain skin and big china blue eyes. She had on the flowered skirt and crewneck cotton sweater that Gregor had come to think of as a Litchfield County uniform.

She looked up when he came in. As soon as she saw him, she straightened up and put her hands in her hair. Her hair was a mess. The attention she gave to it didn't help.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, it's Mr. Demarkian, isn't it? I saw your picture in the newspaper. And on television. A couple of nights ago. Maybe yesterday.”

It would almost have to have been yesterday. Gregor sat down in the high-backed wing chair to the side of the couch and leaned in her direction.

“Would you mind answering a few questions for me?” he asked. “It wouldn't be like answering regular police questions. It wouldn't be on the record for anybody but me.”