Baptism in Blood(116)

“So what was?” Minna asked.

Gregor picked up the manila envelope where Clayton was keeping the things they had found at the scene of Zhondra Meyer’s death. He looked through the papers until he found the photograph and then handed it to Minna. She stared at it for a full minute, unblinking, and then handed it back.

“The man is Stephen Harrow?”

“That’s right.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“We don’t know yet,” Gregor said. “We are meant to infer, of course, that the woman is Carol Littleton.”

“You mean Mr. Harrow knows somebody has this picture? Who? Where did you get it?”

“In Zhondra Meyer’s bedroom.”

“You mean she was blackmailing him?”

”No,” Gregor said, wishing that Minna had stuck to her original plan. “I have no idea if Stephen Harrow has ever seen this photograph. In the note, though, which he was trying to make look like a suicide note from Zhondra, he uses Carol Littleton as the other woman. And there was a woman. I think the report of what went on on the terrace is completely accurate. They did take the baby out there to worship the goddess. Stephen Harrow, at least, had no in­tention of doing anything—untoward. Something untoward happened, nevertheless. And Stephen Harrow, at least, panicked.”

“You keep saying ‘Stephen Harrow, at least.’ Do you think the woman kept her head? Do you think her motives were different?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I don’t know who she is. I’m not sure, at this point, that she’s important.”

“She’s important if she was part of the murdering of that baby,” Minna pointed out.

“But there was nothing to say that the baby was mur­dered. Ginny Marsh came out of the rain claiming to have seen her child sacrificed by worshippers of the goddess—which she might have done, depending on where she was when she witnessed what she said she witnessed—and we’ve all been running with that interpretation ever since. But the child might not have been deliberately killed.”

“The child had her throat cut from ear to ear,” Minna Dorfman said. “She was an infant.”

“I know. I know, I know, I know. But they were out there on that terrace and there was a lot of confusion and I’m not sure they really knew what they were doing. I’m not telling you that this is the way you would have to argue it in court, if you brought a case against Stephen Harrow. I’m trying to set this out so that it makes sense.”

“I’d like to bring a case against that woman, too,” Minna Dorfman said. “Are you sure you don’t know who she is?”

Clayton Hall shrugged. “She’s some woman from up at the camp, that’s all. Or some woman who spends a lot of time there. They all worship the goddess in that place.”

“It was Stephen who killed the other two,” Gregor said firmly. “Carol Littleton and Zhondra Meyer. They might not have been infants, but they should count, too.”

“And they do count, Mr. Demarkian,” Minna said. “I never said they didn’t. Are you sure it was Stephen Harrow and not his—friend—who killed Carol Littleton and Zhon­dra Meyer?”

“I think so, yes,” Gregor told her. “Assuming the woman he is involved with is somebody from town or from the camp, it’s difficult to see how she could possibly have killed either of them. We’ve been watching all those peo­ple. And as soon as anything happened, we took statements from each of them to determine where they had been and when. I don’t think we found any gaps anywhere.”

“If we had found gaps,” Clayton Hall said, “I would have called you people a long time before now.”

“Unless you’re going to believe that there are two people wandering around here murdering people,” Gregor went on, “which I, in this case, don’t, then you’re stuck with the fact that nobody else but Stephen Harrow seems to have had the opportunity to commit all three of these crimes. The one I’m most interested in, of course, is the first, because we’ve got better than usual testimony on that one. Believe it or not, the hurricane helped. It put every­body together in one room.”

“It put all the people in town together in one room,” Clayton corrected. “Most of the women from the camp were in the living room next door.”

“The women from the camp vouched for each other,” Gregor said firmly. “The only people missing who should have been in the living room were Stelle Cary, Carol Lit­tleton, and Dinah What’s-her-name. The three who went out to the circle of stones and had a ceremony to the god­dess. They got caught in the storm.”