And One to Die On(67)

“Oh, God,” Geraldine Dart was saying, holding a package of pink-and-white-striped birthday candles in the air. “Look at these. Just look at these.”

Cavender did look at them, for a minute, but then he shut his eyes again. Geraldine was getting very close to the bureau mirror. He didn’t want her to catch him when he wasn’t ready for her. He heard her pitch the package of candles into the drawer and then pick up something else.

“Oh, God, oh, God,” she said again. “This is incredible.”

Cavender Marsh had always thought that Geraldine Dart was incredible. He thought she was incredible now, fussing over birthday things that didn’t matter anymore. Nobody was going to be having a birthday in this house any time soon. He listened to her going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. He listened to her moving things and opening and closing drawers. Finally, he listened to her walk past his bed to the door.

“This is absolutely unbelievable,” she said, very loudly, to no one at all.

Then she opened the door, went out, and closed the door behind her.

Cavender Marsh waited a little while, testing the atmosphere. There was no one in his room. If there had been, he could have felt them. There were no sounds in the hallway outside except for Geraldine Dart’s footsteps, and they were moving away.

Cavender Marsh opened his eyes. Geraldine had done a very thorough job. All signs of Tasheba’s impending birthday were gone. Even the little porcelain birthday cake music box had been whisked out of sight, and that had nothing to do with this birthday at all. It had been sent to Cavender himself by a fan from Tacoma five years ago. There had been a pair of red balloons near the window that were gone now. Cavender wondered if Geraldine had taken them with her or shoved them out into the weather to be battered into shreds.

The weather was really and truly awful. Cavender could hear it even if he couldn’t see it through the closed curtains. He had lived on this island off the coast of Maine long enough to know what it was all this wind and hail and thunder meant. It was going to be at least another day before they could get off this island, or get somebody onto it to help them out, and that was going to cause a major problem.

Cavender considered the possibility of going on with the pretense of being asleep for another twenty-four hours, but he knew it wasn’t feasible. Since he wasn’t actually asleep, he was very hungry. He also needed to use the bathroom and stretch his legs and do all the other things people did when they were alert and alive and expecting to stay that way.

A scene, Cavender Marsh decided, was his only way out.

Because he didn’t really care if that damned old bitch was dead.

But he did care if he stayed alive himself.





CHAPTER 5


1


THE PROBLEM IN CASES like these, Gregor. Demarkian told himself, was not in finding the solution. The solutions were easy, in spite of the confusion that surrounded them. From where he was sitting, he thought it would be only a matter of time. He knew (more or less) what had really happened in the death of Lilith Brayne. He knew what had happened in the death of Tasheba Kent, too. His suspect list was down to three people, and one of those remained under suspicion for purely aesthetic reasons. It never did to assume innocence where guilt was usually found.

The problem in cases like this was in knowing what they were really about, and understanding what was going to happen next. Criminals were not difficult to catch, only difficult to convict. Motives weren’t hard to fathom, even in the most pathological serial killer. It was details that tripped you up, every time. Gregor was fairly sure that they were safe now, that everything that was going to happen had already happened, but he wished he could be sure.

The next thing to do was to find Carlton Ji. Gregor knew that. Waking from a fitful nap to a vision of black storm clouds and smashing seas—he had left his window open when he’d fallen asleep this time; the weather was so black, there was no reason not to—he knew immediately that he should have insisted on looking harder when they first looked. Everybody else seemed to have forgotten about Carlton Ji, either accidentally or deliberately. Gregor didn’t blame them. The easiest thing to do, right now, with the whole bunch of them stuck together like this with no way to escape each other, was to demonize Carlton Ji as much as possible. Carlton Ji wasn’t around to protest. His disappearance was mysterious. They could blame him for everything and go on eating together, drinking together, and arguing with each other, without having to worry if someone was about to stick a tranquilizer in their drink or hit them over the head with a baseball bat. The second thing Gregor knew he ought to do was to look for the murder weapon, or at least for an instrument of the same kind as the murder weapon. Gregor would make himself look for the murder weapon itself eventually, because murderers were funny. If Gregor himself had committed a murder of this kind under circumstances of this kind, he would have dropped his weapon out a window and into the sea straight off, or gone out on one of the terraces and hurled it as far as it would go. There was no reason at all, on an island like this, to be caught with the equivalent of a smoking gun in your hand. Murderers got attached to their weapons, though. They began to feel about them the way short-breathed family men with too many obligations felt about their life insurance policies. Gregor sometimes thought that killing, outside of war, must be a very difficult thing, even for serial killers like Dahmer and Bundy. Murderers always seemed to want to use the same weapon over and over and over again, as if it were a magic wand given to them in trust by their fairy godmothers. There had been a time in his life when Gregor Demarkian wanted desperately to know why people killed each other. He could remember standing at the side of a shallow trench next to a rural road in southwestern Massachusetts, looking down at the bodies and skeletons of fourteen girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and wondering what it was, what started it, what made it continue, what brought it to an end. Murderers who killed like that were supposed to be different from other murderers. In Gregor’s experience, some of them actually were. Surely Ted Bundy had been a unique case. Most of the serial murderers Gregor had dealt with in his time at the FBI had been surprisingly similar to the nonserial, garden-variety murderers he had dealt with in his odd little retirement noncareer of sideline investigations. Serial murderers broke down into two main categories: crazies who belonged permanently in mental institutions and people (usually men) with practical motives that just weren’t the kind of practical motives most other people could identify with. The kind of murderer Gregor now dealt with also broke down into two categories: people who exploded in blind passion or heedless rage, usually helped along by alcohol or drugs, and people with practical motives that just about everybody could understand. Members of the general public insisted on believing that there was a fundamental difference between someone who killed his wife to get the insurance and someone who caused five babies in an emergency ward to go into convulsions—and one to eventually die—because she wanted to show what a good nurse she could be in an emergency. Gregor could see how the cases seemed different, but he was certain they weren’t fundamentally. Fundamentally, all murderers were alike, and their motives could be reduced to a single simple sentence: I can get away with it.