A Great Day for the Deadly(46)

“What about his suit?”

“It’s wool.”

“So?”

“You ever see wool with a major water stain that hasn’t been treated? It puckers and it darkens. I just took a long look at that suit while your boys were getting the body to the floor. There isn’t a water stain on it.”

Pete Donovan frowned, working his way through it. “That doesn’t make sense, does it?” he asked. “That’s a sink he was in. He should at least have been wet from the sink.”

“I thought of that,” Gregor said. “I asked Sister Scholastica. She says the sink gets wiped down after every use, the faucet has never been known to leak, and this particular sink probably hasn’t been used for a week or two. There hasn’t been anyone sick or in the infirmary in that time, and this utility room isn’t convenient to much of anything else. It’s perfectly possible that that sink was bone dry when the body was put into it. And when I looked in for the first time, the faucet was turned away, over by the backboard instead of over the well. It wasn’t available to drip on the body even if it did drip. I don’t think Neila Connelly moved it.”

“You think we should ask Neila Connelly if she moved it,” Pete Donovan said. “I still don’t see your point. How does a lack of water stains on the suit translate into Bollander being alive when he got to the utility room?”

“Not necessarily the utility room,” Gregor said, “just the convent. And not just alive, either. Walking under his own power.”

“What?”

“Look at this.”

Gregor grabbed Donovan by the wrist and led him across the hall to the doorway that led outside, directly across from the one that led into the courtyard. It opened onto a narrow path bordered on each side by tall evergreen bushes. Beneath the evergreen bushes were evergreen ferns. Above them were the bare, spreading branches of trees reaching out from farther back on the lawn. Everything was crusted with snow, three or four inches thick.

“I dare you,” Gregor said, “to carry anything down that path without getting snow on it—a lot of snow on it. Those branches stick right out over the path. Anybody who tried to carry Don Bollander up this path dead or unconscious would have ended up with Don Bollander coated in white. Look at that out there. Nobody has so much as walked that way, single and alone and alive, since the last good fall.”

Donovan shook his head. “Maybe they brought him in by another door,” he said. Maybe they brought him in by the front door. I don’t see how you can tell.”

“What about the other doors?” Gregor asked him. “Are they close to here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are they kept open? Do the nuns lock up at night?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“I know something,” Gregor said. “To bring a dead body into this building and walk it through the halls to get to this particular utility room would have been crazy.”

“The nuns do go to bed early,” Donovan pointed out.

“The nuns are human beings like anybody else,” Gregor told him. “They get restless. They have insomnia. You couldn’t count on them staying in their beds. You couldn’t count on them all being heavy sleepers. You couldn’t count on not being heard. It would be much too risky, and what would you be taking the risk for?”

“Murderers,” Donovan started.

Gregor waved it away. “Murderers are always consistent,” he insisted, “internally consistent. They aren’t always rational—they’re almost never that—but they are always logical. There is only one logical reason why Don Bollander’s body should have ended up in that sink, and that was that was the most convenient place to put it. There is only one logical way for Don Bollander’s body to have been where it would have had to be to make putting it in that sink convenient, and that is if Don Bollander was already here while he was still alive. There is only one logical way that Don Bollander could have been here while he was still alive without any of the nuns knowing, and that is if he was being very careful to stay quiet. And that means—”

“I know what that means,” Donovan said. “Either Bollander came here to meet someone out of normal visiting hours, which would have been clandestine. Or Bollander came up on his own with the intention of breaking in—which would have to mean that one of the nuns was Bollander’s murderer. Or Bollander came to meet a third party, and the third party convinced him that they had legitimate reason for doing what they were doing—”