Act of Darkness(52)

“You don’t understand,” Gregor said. “It was all wrong. The maids had been in. Or maid. I don’t know which it is. Victoria Harte usually travels with a lot of servants, but there’s a curious lack of them here this weekend. The whole place, my room, Bennis’s room, the hallway, was hospital clean. The windowsills had been dusted. The bedsteads looked polished. The floors were vacuumed. The maid wouldn’t have left the pantyhose like that. If she hadn’t carted them off, she would at least have stuffed them all the way into the wastebasket. And then, of course, Bennis’s room had been locked, from the inside, because the rooms here can only be locked from the inside.”

“The maids might have locked it,” Berman said, “to keep people out while they were working. They could have forgotten to unlock afterward. You did say Miss Hannaford’s room connected to yours.”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“And? Is that all? You don’t want to tell me what all you people are doing here?”

Gregor hesitated. There were, on the one hand, the promises he had made to Dan Chester and Carl Bettinger. There was, on the other, the body of Kevin Debrett, lying on a bed no more than ten feet from where he stood. At the moment, Debrett seemed the most urgent problem, but Gregor was not a naive man. Carl Bettinger had not been telling the truth when he said he was only here because the Director was doing a favor for Dan Chester. Carl Bettinger was building a cover, and the computer squint and the calls to Berman’s office for background information gave Gregor a good idea what that cover was for.

Instead of answering Berman, Gregor went to Kevin Debrett’s door and opened it. Because he had had his naked hand on the knob earlier, and in all likelihood destroyed any useful prints at once, he didn’t bother to ask for gloves. He did ask for gloves to turn on the lights in Debrett’s room.

“Look,” he said, as the track lighting began to glow, making the room look eerily like a morgue in a movie made from a Robin Cook novel. “Look at him.”

Berman came to the door and looked. “You sure he’s dead?”

“Very sure. I checked twice.”

“What could make somebody die looking like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long’s he been dead?”

“I don’t know that either,” Gregor said. “But when we found him, it hadn’t been too long. He wasn’t warm but he was still—pink.”

“Ahh.”

“I can tell you what he didn’t die from,” Gregor said. “He didn’t die from a heart attack. There’s none of the convulsive residue there would have had to have been if he’d had a coronary massive enough to kill him at his age. If he’d been eighty something instead of forty something, I could see it. Not now. He didn’t die from an illness in any ordinary sense, either. He wasn’t ill. Everyone staying in this house saw him today. He was fine. Not even sneezing. He looks too fit to have been in an advanced stage of cancer or AIDS. You don’t die from those like this, anyway. And then—”

“Just a minute,” Berman said. “I can see where you’re getting to. Poison. You’re telling me it’s got to be poison.”

“No,” Gregor said, sighing. “I wish I could. I wish even more that your medical men would get up here and turn him over and find a stab wound in his back—”

“There’s no sign of blood.”

“I know. There’s no sign of abrasions on his throat, either. There’s nothing wrong with his neck that I can see. It doesn’t look broken, and if it were broken badly enough to kill him it would. If I could pin this down as murder and I had to come up with a method, what I’d like is suffocation. I just can’t figure out how it could be suffocation.”

“Why not?” Berman said. “Maybe somebody got to him in his sleep—”

“He would have woken up,” Gregor said. “He wasn’t a baby. He was a relatively young man in better than relatively good shape. He would have put up a struggle. He didn’t put up a struggle.”

“Assuming he died here,” Berman said.

“Assuming he died anywhere.” Gregor was adamant. “No bruises. No contusions. No scratches. I suppose all that could be on the back side of him, but if it is, it’ll be the first time I ever heard of anything like it.”

“He might have been drugged,” Berman said.

“He might have been,” Gregor admitted, “but I wouldn’t count on it. I’d check for it, but I wouldn’t count on it. At least not on the ordinary run of drugs you’d use to do something like that.”