The Unquiet Dead (32 page)

“Maybe someone took his gun and forced him to go on that walk,” Nate suggested.

“His are the only prints on the gun. He left it behind on purpose. I just can't figure out why.”

“If Chris really was pushed, someone must have followed him on his walk. Dennis Blessant?”

“Whoever followed him would have had to wait until Melanie returned to her own house. They'd have to wait until Dennis drove away. Neither Melanie or Dennis reported any cars or noise on the street. As far as we know, there were no silent watchers in the undergrowth.”

“Melanie's too self-involved to have thought about the presence of others. Dennis was probably distracted by the argument.”

“And Drayton's house is secluded from the rest of the street. So there could have been someone there.” She balled up her fists in disgust. “Again, that leaves us with nothing conclusive. Just the same old question of the gun. Did Drayton fall, or didn't he? I doubt we'll ever know.” She faced her boss squarely. “So where do we go from here, sir?”

“Perhaps we need to widen our net. Find other suspects.”

“No one has a greater motive than David Newhall. His parents, his brothers. Can we really afford to take his testimony at his word?”

“Hasanović worked for fifteen years to identify his parents' bones. What does that say about his patience? This isn't the end he wanted for Dra
ž
en Krstić. You won't convince me of it.”

Rachel was afraid to dispute it. It was the first time she'd heard Khattak speak with such emotion. He wasn't a man who dealt in ultimate truths; as she did, he traversed the underground cities of doubt and discrepancy where human frailty revealed itself in layer upon layer of incongruity. She owed it to him to try, regardless.

“Maybe he didn't see it as murder. If I were standing in Newhall's shoes, Drayton's fall would look a lot like justice to me.”

Khattak's face closed down. If he couldn't convince Rachel, what hope was there? She was only arguing what everyone would think once Newhall's true name was revealed, as it would be. And just like that, the decades of Hasanović's struggle for justice would be washed away, the tragedy of Bosnia swept aside for the cheap titillation of scandal. Khattak was determined not to let that happen.

“Sir,” Rachel said, reading his resistance in the stiffness of his posture, his slightly bent head. “You said we should widen the field. I still think it's possible there's a museum connection here. The average person doesn't walk away from that kind of money.”

She flinched from Khattak's look, as cold and remote as if he'd never worked with her, never known her loyalty or perseverance at his side.

“Mink won't take the money—not when she knows where it came from.” His tone suggested an implicit faith in the librarian. He turned away. “I need some air. I was planning to walk over to Ringsong. Maybe there's something more Mink can tell us about Drayton or the girls, something she hasn't thought of yet.”

This was worse, Rachel realized. Worse than misunderstanding each other over a war in a place that meant little to most people. It was worse that he couldn't separate his work from his desire to return to the museum like a touchstone.

“We're not done here, sir.”

“I am. Finish with Nate if you like.”

Rachel knew she couldn't change his mind. “Be careful, sir. Let's not give too much of our case away.”

Khattak's gaze disquieted her. “I'm not sure what it is you fear from Mink Norman. Whatever it is, you're wrong.”

She'd been slapped down but she had to risk saying it. “Then would you ask her about the meeting on the night of Drayton's fall? Because that's where Newhall claimed he was. At least we should know if that much is true.”

Khattak didn't argue. His assent was somehow worse than any rebuttal he could have made.

*   *   *

She drove home, avoiding Nate's sympathy, his assiduous offer of help. Slowly through cantering drifts of rain, past the outline of Newhall's house in the gloom and the van parked in its driveway, straight down the highway until an hour later she was home, her thoughts churning, her stomach aboil. It was how her body coped with anxiety. Or with fear and shame. She hadn't done anything to deserve Khattak's rebuff, yet she yearned for his good opinion. Of her work, nothing more, she insisted to herself.

It would have been companionable somehow to review the photographs with Nate, but not after Khattak's cool dismissal. He'd seen into her. Recognized her weakness and exploited it, making her seem feeble and possessive. She shrugged it off. What did her feelings matter when set against Hadley's or David Newhall's? Or the girl who had hanged herself. Perhaps the answer had been here all along.

She spread the photographs she had taken at Drayton's house across her bed.

The gun that lay on the floor. The puddles of wax. The atlas opened to the Drina River. The papers he'd collected: some stored in the safe, some jammed into his filing cabinet, some taken by Hadley Blessant. The yellow-headed lilies. The Adagio in G Minor.

The music made her think of Zach, although not because he'd had the chance to play any more than she had. In her head, she lumped the arts together. Someone who loved music adored art and vice versa. Look at Nathan Clare. A man of letters whose home was filled with exquisite paintings and objets d'art. Who was willing to fund a museum about a long-ago time in a faraway place. The beauties of Andalusia: literature, history, cultural synthesis. A place of learning and libraries, those palaces of memory. The ring songs of Andalusia, the music of a dazzling civilization.

Music, history, art, and lore.

A long ago time in a faraway place—the golden palaces of memory.

Her fingers arranged the photographs she'd taken at Drayton's house in a circle. The music. The photograph. The lilies. The gun. She peered closer.

And now the coagulum that had clouded her perceptions evaporated into discovery.

I feel as though I'm in a pantomime.

Was it the Blessants?
she had wondered. From the beginning, the Blessants had been an occlusion.

The music. The photograph. The lilies. The gun.

It had to be. It could be nothing else.

She was playing a hunch, the kind Khattak would discard without a word, but it didn't matter. She had finally grasped the nature of Christopher Drayton's death. She needed to meet the survivors the imam had told them about.

Once she'd taken care of two small matters.

With gut-churning certainty, she found her phone and dialed her brother. When he'd listened to her request and made his promise to help, she made another call, this time to schedule a meeting with Audrey Clare.

The woman who had been at the periphery of Drayton's murder.

The woman who held the key to the truth.

 

32.

This was the city's still center, the very essence of Islam: in a walled courtyard, water, a tree, and the warm geometry of stone. In the deep blue velvet sky by the minaret hung a sliver of incandescent silver light: the first moon of spring.

There were things he wanted Mink to say, things he wanted her not to say.

Was he there as Esa Khattak, director of Community Policing? He thought not. He thought he was there to listen to the sound of water murmuring through rooms of stone. He was there to cup his hands over the sweet globe of her face. He was there to share the hard things within himself. Things he could not say to Rachel, the language absent between them where words were quietly necessary.

“It's late, Esa,” she said, opening the door.

He made excuses, lied to them both. “Something's happened. I must speak with you about Hadley.”

The door gave way. The first fresh sails on his personal ship of joy began to unfurl. He followed her, heedless of the tension that narrowed her shoulders, shortening the smooth sweep of her neck.

“Esa,” she said, drawing the name out over her lips. “Is it wise of you to come here on your own?”

“I thought we were beyond pretense.”

“Aren't you here to ask me questions about your case? About Christopher Drayton?” She sounded angry.

With an effort, he made himself remember Hadley. This was Andalusia, not a garden of bones. Not the darkling meadows of Srebrenica. “May we sit in the courtyard?”

She'd stopped at the forecourt. He stood close, inhaling the scent of oranges from her hair.

“Ask me what you've come to ask.”

He thought for a moment of one of the verses Hadley had lettered for the display.

We see
/
that things too quickly grown / are swiftly overthrown.

“Did Hadley ever speak to you about Drayton? Did she suggest that she may have been frightened of him?”

“Frightened? Why?”

“That's what I'm asking you.”

“Yes. I see that you return here time and again to ask me questions.”

He studied her face, seeking a clue as to her anger.

“Don't look at me like that. You've come for your work, why else should you come?”

“Mink, I have a duty—”

“I don't care about your duty. Why do you come to Andalusia? What do you want from me?”

He began to feel angry himself. “Isn't it a place of welcome?” He didn't say, as he'd thought so many times, of belonging. “I've come because Hadley is close to you. She was worried about Drayton—I thought you might have known.”

“So you've come to taunt me with my imperfect sheltering of my charges. You say Drayton was a fugitive, a
war criminal
, and you accuse me of having left the girls in his path.”

“I'm not accusing you of anything. I thought perhaps she may have told you something that would help with our questions about Drayton's death.”

“You told me about him, Esa. If I knew something that would have helped you, wouldn't I have said so by now?”

“Not if it was a confidence from a young girl.”

“So you expect me to break that confidence.”

He stared at her helplessly. Her pale eyes were like moonstones in the delicate light of the forecourt. She wore her hair loose. It fell in soft gold waves that made him want to banish the subject of Hadley altogether. “I thought you'd want to help me. As you did before.”

She pursed her lips. The skin around her eyes tightened. “You're pulling me into something ugly. Something that has no place here. Something that defiles this space.”

His heart thumped in the silence. Was she right? No matter how virtuous its goal, his work contained within it an unalterable ugliness. Drayton's photographs were visceral proof of that. It was a place Khattak spent his days in, a place his thoughts lived. It would always be so with him. It would always be part of him.

A sense of remoteness closed about his heart. He'd thought more of her than she was, reading into her erudition the same strength and compassion that were second nature to Rachel. Rachel was neither graceful nor poised like this woman. She was blunt, straight as an arrow, and all too human in her personal failings.

Mink was—what was Mink? The illusion of a moment? His heart's long-delayed awakening? He rejected the thought as an unnecessary indulgence.

“I can return in the morning with my sergeant, if you prefer, but I must ask you all the same. Did Hadley Blessant confide in you about Christopher Drayton?”

Her face altered, went soft. “I've made you angry, I'm sorry. I've been so worried about the opening. The girls weren't at the dinner tonight and I didn't know why. They didn't call me so I cut things short, rushed home. And earlier today I received such a distressing call. I'm sorry, Esa,” she said again. “These are not your problems. Will you come in?”

She couldn't have said anything more calculated to wipe away his anger. His sense of mistrust faded. He took the hand she held out to him. In moments she was curled up beside him beneath the palm trees' overlapping shade.

“I don't know anything,” she went on. “Hadley didn't tell me anything. I wish she had, you've made me worry. What happened tonight?”

Rachel's voice sounded in his head. He discounted it.

“Drayton's interest in the girls was far from fatherly. I thought Hadley might have talked to you about it.”

A sharp line formed between her brows. “What do you mean? That he— Was he preying upon the girls? Is that it?”

He held her hand within his own, feeling the rapid beat of her pulse at her wrist. From his touch? He hoped so. “He intended to. The fall interrupted his plan.”

“My God. Those poor girls. Why didn't Hadley tell me?”

“She may have feared that her father was involved somehow in Drayton's fall. She may not have wanted to give him a motive.”

Mink laced her fingers through his. “That explains why she wouldn't have told you. It doesn't explain why she didn't come to me. You were right. We are close.”

“She's a self-contained young woman who's used to managing for herself. With a mother like Melanie Blessant, that's not surprising. Tell me about your call.”

“It was nothing. You've more important things to worry about.”

She was still caught up in his news about Hadley.

“Tell me.”

“A lawyer called me today. He told me about Christopher's will. About the money he left the museum. He also said his assets were frozen.”

“Does that pose a problem for Ringsong? Are you in financial difficulty?”

“I would never take his money.” Her voice rang with conviction. “Not after what you've told me about him. How would I know where that money came from? It's blood money.”

The tightness in Khattak's chest unclenched. He'd expected her to refuse the money, and she had. Why had he expected that this subtle woman whose work celebrated a world both beautiful and fragile would step without a qualm into the dark realm he inhabited?