“What is that?” Christopher Hannaford asked sharply.
That broke the spell. Gregor started running. Christopher Hannaford ran after him. Christopher was younger and therefore faster and got to the stairs first. They both went pounding up to the second floor.
The second floor landing was empty and dark. The only light to be seen was at the end of the hall, spilling out of an open door. Christopher went down there and stopped dead in his tracks. Gregor ran up to him and pushed him out of the way. Candida DeWitt was standing just inside the doorway. Her arms were wrapped around her waist and she seemed catatonic with shock.
The shocking thing was lying on the floor in front of her, right at the foot of Hannah Krekorian’s king-size bed.
There was the body of Paul Hazzard, the face turned away from the door, half a dozen savage black punctures piercing the shirt at the center of the chest.
There was Hannah Krekorian herself, the front of her dress sodden with fresh blood, her hands holding a fancy curved-handled dagger that was covered with blood too.
Gregor didn’t know what was making him colder.
The scene he was looking at.
Or the breeze that was coming in through the open bedroom window.
Part Two
Bows and Arrows…
One
1
A SINGLE PEARL STUD pierced earring was caught in the high pile of the carpet in Hannah Krekorian’s guest room, just in front of the tall bureau next to the guest room bathroom door. Gregor Demarkian nearly stepped on it. He was pacing, as he had been pacing for nearly two hours, up and down the second floor hall and in and out of the guest room and the bathroom and around and around wherever he could find free space. Hannah’s room was off-limits and the upstairs hall was full of people. One of the advantages of having an assistant commissioner of police in the house was the quickness of the service you got from the uniformed branch, and from Homicide too. Hannah’s apartment had been full to the rafters of police less than ten minutes after Bob Cheswicki had put in the call. A mobile crime unit had pulled up to the curb outside in less than fifteen. Now the place was humming and buzzing and rumbling and exploding in flashbulbs. It would have been infested with reporters too, except that there was a police guard at the door downstairs. The medical examiner’s people had brought an ambulance with them. Gregor had never understood why an ambulance was required to take a body to the morgue.
There was more than a pearl stud earring on the floor of Hannah’s guest room. Obviously, this was a room she did not enter often, and that her cleaning lady felt free to ignore. There were all sorts of things twisted into the carpet down there. Bobby pins. Safety pins. Bits of paper and half-inch lengths of string. Gregor picked the earring up and left the rest alone. It wasn’t evidence.
Gregor went back out into the hall. Bob Cheswicki was standing at the top of the stairs, looking flushed and tired. Beside him was a young officer in plain clothes, looking flushed and tired too.
“Gregor,” Bob said. “Come here. This is Detective First Grade Russell Donahue. He’s going to be our beard.”
“Beard?”
“Mr. Cheswicki is going to conduct this investigation,” Russell Donahue said, “and I’m going to pretend I’m conducting it, so that we satisfy protocol.”
“Well,” Bob said, “not exactly.”
Gregor held out his hand with the pearl in it. “I found this in the guest room. Caught in the carpet all the way on the other side of the room from the hall door. Near the bathroom.”
Bob Cheswicki and Russell Donahue looked at the pearl. “All right,” Bob said. “Was Mrs. Krekorian wearing pearl earrings tonight?”
“No,” Gregor told him.
“Was anybody else?”
“Not that I remember.”
“I don’t see that it would matter if anybody was,” Russell Donahue said. “Even if somebody came upstairs on pretext of using the bathroom and went snooping around instead and lost an earring, so what? People do that all the time. And even if it was the murderer who did it, it wouldn’t help us catch him. It wouldn’t matter that he’d been in the guest room. The murder took place in the bedroom.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said.
“My guess is that Mrs. Krekorian lost it once, she doesn’t even remember how long ago, and now you’ve found it,” Bob Cheswicki said. “Give it back to her.”
Gregor put the earring in his pants pocket. “Have you checked out what I asked you to?” he asked Bob. “I know it’s very farfetched—”
Bob Cheswicki turned away, embarrassed. Gregor didn’t blame him for being embarrassed. This was a mess of the first water. There was no way getting around it. It wasn’t a case that could be hushed up. For one thing, Paul Hazzard had just been murdered at least apparently with exactly the weapon his wife was supposed to have been killed with all those years ago, and that had been a very sensational case. For another thing, Gregor himself had been on the scene—and the woman holding the bloody weapon had been Gregor’s friend. Gregor could just imagine how the Inquirer was going to react to this one—and he had no illusions that the sensation was going to stay local for very long. Even if they managed to clear the case up in twenty-four hours, they were all going to end up on the cover of People before the month was out.