“And?”
Clayton Hall walked around the body, to see if he could get a better look from the other side. “You think that woman Alice had it right,” he said. “You think Zhondra Meyer was actually murdered.”
“I think she didn’t die by hanging,” Gregor said. “And I think she didn’t get up there on her own.”
“But I thought you said that you thought the confession was genuine.”
“I did. I do.”
“But what’s all this about then? Was she killed like the others? Was her throat cut?”
Gregor tried walking all the way around the body in a big circle. Usually it was terrible to look at the corpses of people who had been hanged. Their tongues stuck out. Their eyes protruded. Zhondra Meyer’s face was almost as smooth and undamaged now as it had been in life.
“You can’t tell,” Gregor said finally. “The rope gets in the way, and she’s just too far up. But I don’t see any blood on the rope, and that’s probably significant. My guess is that she’s had her neck broken. Either she broke it herself or it was broken for her.”
“Do people commit suicide by breaking their own necks? Except by hanging, I mean.”
“It didn’t have to be suicide. It didn’t have to be murder. It might just have been an accident.”
“That woman didn’t end up swinging from a chandelier hook by accident.”
“I didn’t say she did. I said she might have broken her neck by accident. A very lucky accident for somebody. The chandelier hook would have come later.”
“You can’t tell me you really believe that,” Clayton Hall said. “You sound like one of those murder mysteries from the twenties, with a million and a half coincidences and then one big blowout of a revelation scene at the end.”
Gregor Demarkian looked up at the body one more time and sighed. “No, I don’t really believe that. I just don’t understand—I wish we had some gloves. We should have brought them with us. I want to start looking for things.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know.”
The door to the bedroom opened and the first of the ambulance men came in, a very young man in a white uniform with a cocky manner. He took one look at Zhondra’s body hanging on the hook and went white.
“Ah,” he said. “Oh.”
“Jesus Christ,” another ambulance man said, coming in behind the first.
The second man was older, though, and better at controlling his emotions than the first. He brushed by the younger man and put the chair at Zhondra’s feet upright.
“You two need me not to touch anything so you can keep your crime scene?” he asked.
“You shouldn’t touch anything you don’t have to,” Clayton told him, “but you can get her down. Do you have gloves so you don’t—”
“—mess up the fingerprints on the chandelier or the hook. Yeah, I know. I’ve got gloves and we’re not going to have to touch the hook anyhow. Hey, Sheldon. Get ahold of yourself.”
Sheldon was the younger man. He didn’t look as if he was going to get ahold of himself anytime soon, but he did break out of his trance and start fumbling at his uniform, looking for the requisite gloves.
Gregor stepped away from the body, giving the ambulance men room to move and himself room to wait.
3
IT TOOK NEARLY HALF an hour of waiting, but eventually the time came. What had to be done had been done. The tech men had their hair samples and fingerprint possibilities and little pieces of dust that could only be picked up in special, miniature vacuum cleaners. This was the kind of evidence the FBI almost never had anything to do with—or at least not in the cases Gregor had been asked to handle. Over the last few years, Gregor had found that he liked this routine. There was something steadying about it, the way funerals were steadying. It took the apocalyptic and whittled it into shards, making it manageable.
The tech men had just gone over the dresser and the big wardrobe for fingerprints. There seemed to be little piles of dust everywhere. Gregor put on the gloves Clayton brought him, and tugged at the fingers, trying to make them stretch. The gloves were made of cotton and wouldn’t budge.
“All right,” Clayton said. “What do we do now? I suppose you’ve got a mind to make a search.”
“Yes, I have.”
“Somebody will search this place even if we don’t. The Staties will search it.”
“I’m looking for something in particular.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“You can’t just go on saying you don’t know like that, Gregor. It doesn’t make any sense.”