Where Monsters Dwell (9 page)

The instructor had said something else that really stuck in her mind: “Maybe that’s why serial killers are such good material for filmmakers and writers. The actions of serial killers are fiction gruesomely brought to life.” The murder they were investigating had the air of fiction about it, as if it had been imagined beforehand.

She turned left a few blocks farther along, and then right at the traffic circle around the Robert E. Lee monument. From there she followed Monument Street out of the downtown core. She liked Monument Street. It reminded her that Richmond had once had ambitions to be a city of significance.

*   *   *

The secretary at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum was named Megan Price. Her address on Canterbury Road out by Windsor Farms told Felicia that the salary from her job wasn’t the only income at her disposal. Presumably she was married to a doctor or lawyer who made enough to support them both, and she probably viewed her job at the museum as a good alternative to charity work. Felicia turned onto Lafayette toward Windsor Farms. Most people would have chosen Malvern Avenue, but she never drove down that street unless she had to. It would mean having to pass the house where her life had been split in two.

She hadn’t called Megan Price in advance. When you were investigating a homicide, it was seldom a good idea to give people time for reflection. She trusted that Mrs. Price had followed Reynolds’s orders for all museum staff to go home and wait for the police to contact them. Naturally the cops didn’t call right away, and sooner or later most people would leave their homes and take up their normal, everyday activities. But it was significant to find out how long someone would wait and what he did when he got tired of waiting for something to happen. With a little luck, that knowledge might give the police a new lead.

Before Felicia left police headquarters, she got a brief description of Megan Price. For the time being there was no reason to suspect that she had anything to do with the murder, but Stone had a rule: At the start of a case, suspect everyone. Once, when she was out with her colleagues, drinking cola while they drank beer, she said, “An investigator needs to follow a rule opposite to the one used by the courts. Everyone is guilty until proven innocent. Even then they’re exempt only from those specific allegations that have been dropped. They still have to be considered guilty of everything else.” As far as she could remember, Laubach was the only one who had laughed with the same heartiness and cynicism. But humor with a hint of truth to it was one thing; letting rules of thumb overrule common sense was another. Megan Price had an absolutely airtight alibi for the night of the murder. She was at home asleep with her husband, and earlier in the evening, she’d had dinner guests who didn’t leave till midnight. According to Reynolds, she was a petite lady of sixty-three. They hadn’t worked out any profile of the perp yet, but Stone doubted it would fit Mrs. Price very well.

Stone was really only interested in asking Megan Price about one thing: the piece of leather from the bookbinding that they still hadn’t tracked down. She parked outside a Victorian brick house with four chimneys, as big and magnificent as she had imagined. There was plenty of room in the driveway for at least ten police cars, but she always got a better impression of a house and its owners if she approached on foot. On her way to the dark front door—was it mahogany?—surrounded by heavy white molding, she ascertained that she had been right about the Price family: They didn’t live on only what the wife earned at the museum. Parked in the driveway was a Jaguar, which Patterson could no doubt tell her a lot about. To Felicia it was nothing more than an unnecessary, expensive tin box on wheels. The garden was well kept, and the scent of magnolia blossoms hinted at a hired gardener. The house itself was immaculate, with new windows and freshly painted trim. It was over a hundred years old, and would stand for another hundred if the Price family continued to take care of it with equal parts love and craftsmen from south of the border.

The doorbell had a deep, worthy resonance, followed by a silence that almost swallowed the sound of the light traffic in the residential neighborhood behind Stone. She noticed that she was clenching her fists involuntarily. She was so eager to get started that even an unimportant witness felt significant.

After a moment, the door opened.

Megan Price’s hair had undoubtedly turned gray long ago, but she dyed it a reddish hue that set off her rust-brown eyes. It looked as though she’d had some work done, a few wrinkles removed here and there, but it had been carefully and discreetly done, so it wasn’t obvious. Not even when she smiled a bit uncertainly, as she did after opening the door and seeing Felicia Stone, who was quite obviously a cop. Stone held out her ID without saying a word.

“That was quick,” said Mrs. Price. She was wearing casual, loose-fitting clothes that still looked elegant. Her expression changed from uncertain to serious. “Good to see that you’re giving high priority to this terrible case. Who would do a thing like that to poor Bond? He was such a good and cautious man.”

“My condolences,” said Stone. “And if we knew who did it, I can promise you I wouldn’t be standing here right now.”

“No, of course not. But do come in.” Mrs. Price opened the door wider and stepped aside to let her into a hallway the size of Stone’s apartment.

“You can keep your shoes on. I’m expecting the cleaning lady this afternoon,” said Megan Price, leading the way into the kitchen. It was oak-paneled, had stone flooring, and all the appliances were black. Mrs. Price asked her to have a seat on a stool at the kitchen island and went to get two flowered Wedgwood cups and saucers from one of the many cupboards.

A phone rang. She pulled out a cell phone from the big floral-patterned pocket of her off-white jacket. She listened for a moment, then spoke. Her voice was businesslike.

“Tell me, Mr.… excuse me, what was your name again? Gary Ridgeway, yes. Tell me, Mr. Ridgeway, how much are we paying you for this job? I understand. And why can’t you finish tomorrow? Well, I’ll have to tell my husband.” She sighed and ended the call. “Workmen!” she said, throwing out her arms in resignation.

“Was there something important that had to be done?”

“No, just repainting my car. I have a little VW Beetle. It’s taken more than a few days, and I hate driving the Jaguar.”

Felicia Stone nodded and registered vaguely that Mrs. Price had mentioned her husband, although the call had concerned her car. They always had to drag their husbands into it, these housewives from the rich suburbs, as if the man was the center of the universe.

“I’ve just made some tea,” said Mrs. Price. “Green. It’s supposed to be so healthy. I don’t know about you, but I’m too restless to drink coffee.”

“Green tea is supposed to be excellent for the digestion,” said Felicia with a smile. That was exactly what she needed.

The tea was served in a pot from the same china set as the cups. Mrs. Price also served madeleines, home baked, but perhaps not by her.

“I’ll get right to the point,” she said, after tasting the shell-shaped French pastry. “You mentioned in an earlier interview that Efrahim Bond had sent a leather sample to the university. Was it the University of Richmond or VCU?”

“VCU. My husband is the head of the Philips Institute. They conduct research into diseases and genetics; you’ll have to ask Frederick about that. They’re mostly concerned with the head, jaw, and throat region at the institute, but my husband said he knew where to send the leather to have it tested, so I gave it to him. Is it important? Do you think it has something to do with the case?”

“For the moment we’re just checking into every possible connection.”

“I could call Frederick,” said Mrs. Price.

She took out her phone and dialed the number without waiting for an answer from Stone. Mrs. Price explained what she was calling about. Then she said “yes” a few times, almost as though she were bored. Stone got the feeling that she was often bored when talking to her husband on the phone.

She ended the call. “He says that the test results are ready and were supposed to be sent to the museum today. But he held them back for the time being, in view of what happened. If you like, you can pick them up at his office.”

“How long will he be there?” Stone asked.

“He said he’d wait until you get there,” said Mrs. Price.

Stone stood up. On the way out she stopped and looked at some photos on a table in the hall. They were mostly of Mr. and Mrs. Price. In some of the pictures, which all looked like they were taken by amateurs with expensive equipment, they were standing with a boy who had dark hair and a self-assured smile. In other pictures the boy was alone. He was playing baseball or sitting in a sailboat. Some of the snapshots could have been taken at a summer house, probably on the Chesapeake Bay. Felicia noticed that the boy was no older than ten in any of the pictures; there were no photos on the table of a young man with a family, or of any grandchildren. That might explain the unpleasant feeling of emptiness she’d had since entering the Price home.

She turned away from the pictures and looked at Mrs. Price, who was following her to say good-bye. Felicia thought she looked so frail and thin. She asked: “By the way, do you happen to know anything else about that scrap of leather? Which book it came from?”

Megan Price looked at her and thought.

“Bond wouldn’t tell me,” she said. “But I think I know. A few weeks ago I noticed that the leather had been removed from the spine of one of the books in Poe’s private collection. Those are the volumes in the bookcase in Bond’s office: first editions of Poe’s own works, and a number of other books Poe himself owned, or belonged to his family when he died. I saw a book lying open on Bond’s desk when I dropped off his mail the other day. He wasn’t in the office, so I peeked to see which book it was. I know all the books well and had never seen any of them with leather removed from the spine. It was a first edition of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
by Lord Byron. We don’t know much about it. Some people think that Poe bought it from a European immigrant in New York, along with a number of other books, but there are no reliable sources to confirm that theory.”

“Why do you think Bond had removed leather from that book? He must have been the one who did it, right?”

“I’m sure he did, but it was in good condition, so I can’t think why. The only reason I can think of would be that Bond had discovered something written on it.”

“What do you mean?”

“That book was apparently bound sometime in the eighteenth century. Parchment is made of calfskin and calfskin was hard to come by. People often reused sheets of parchment from old books that were considered obsolete. That’s why even today we can find fragments of unrelated texts inside the spines of old books. Sometimes they are important historical or literary sources. And to make it all even more complicated, occasionally these parchments turn out to have several layers of texts, written on top of each other. In the Middle Ages it was not unusual to wash a parchment that had a text written on it, and then use it again. It’s known as a palimpsest. Today, using modern techniques, we can often decipher what was in the underlying text.
Scripta inferiori,
it’s called.”

Stone nodded, rather impressed at Mrs. Price’s extensive knowledge.

“And you think that Bond may have made such a discovery?”

“I don’t know. I’m just speculating. But maybe that’s why he was so secretive in recent weeks.”

“But you mentioned calfskin. Do you have any idea why Bond would want to have a piece of it tested? Can books be bound, or for that matter can parchment be made, from anything besides calfskin?”

“Calfskin was considered the best, but parchment was also quite often made from the skins of goats and pigs.”

“But why do you think it was important for Bond to find out exactly what kind of skin had been used on that book?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” said Mrs. Price with a deep sigh.

Felicia Stone thanked her and left.

*   *   *

The Philips Institute was located on North Eleventh Street, right in the heart of Richmond, not far from the Capitol District and the city’s venerable old buildings and monuments. Right here in this city the Founding Fathers had reeled off mighty pearls of wisdom such as “Give me liberty or give me death!”

Today’s concept of freedom was more along the lines of being able to choose what flavor syrup to have in your caffé latte or what logo to have on your jogging suit. Regardless of the logo, however, it had been sewn by a Chinese worker who wasn’t free. Still, Felicia liked to be reminded that freedom actually meant something, and that in her own way she was working to preserve it. She always took the opportunity to roam about the Capitol District whenever she could. She parked a few blocks away, walked through the park with the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial, and from there headed toward the institute.

Frederick Price was a broad-shouldered, gray-haired man with a few touches of black still left in his eyebrows. He was friendly but businesslike.

“I have the results of the tests here,” he said as soon as she had introduced herself, and sat down on the chair in front of his big modern beechwood desk. He held up a sealed envelope. “If you like, I can open it and read it for you. It can be a bit difficult to understand the scientific language.”

She felt like saying that she wasn’t stupid, and many people on the force could read “scientific language” as competently as the head of the Philips Institute. Instead she nodded, smiled, and let him read the report. It was a good investigative tactic to let people do as much as possible on their own initiative.

He opened the envelope and read the report in silence. Then he said: “I don’t know what sort of answer you were expecting from this analysis, and I don’t know where the leather sample came from.” Frederick Price leaned over the desk, planted his elbows on the desktop, and looked sincerely concerned. “But I think you may be surprised by this.”

Then he explained the contents of the report. The moment he told her the results she realized that the little piece of skin was not a minor detail of no consequence. It was absolutely crucial to the case. The analysis showed that it was a scrap of human skin. And it was five hundred years old.