“The bathroom door is all the way down there,” Gregor said quickly.
“I know. It doesn’t matter. What matters is if Paul Hazzard was standing here in the bedroom, talking to Hannah Krekorian through the bathroom door, which is what one of the witnesses said, I don’t remember who—”
“Mary Ohanian,” Gregor said. “She was the first one to go up and check. She came running down the stairs—”
“I remember,” Bob Cheswicki said.
“You know,” Gregor said thoughtfully, “that means the door to the bedroom must have been open, then. Later, when Helen Tevorakian went up, it was locked.”
“Yeah. We’ll get to that later. Thing is, you’ve got Paul Hazzard standing here, staring at the bathroom door, and that would put him sideways to the window. It would have been in his peripheral vision. Do you see what I mean?”
“You mean if someone came through it, he would have noticed.”
“Exactly,” Bob Cheswicki said, “and that’s where we’ve got a problem with the window theory, because if Paul Hazzard had noticed someone coming through that window, one of two things would have happened. Either Hazzard would have called out, warned the rest of us that there was an intruder coming into the house—and we’d have heard it—or he would have fought his attacker, and we would have heard that.”
“If it was someone he knew,” Gregor proposed.
“He’d have cried out in surprise. He would have said something. There would have been some kind of noise, if not when the person first entered the room, then later when, what’s her name, Helen Tevorakian, went up. I remember what she said as well as you do. She said it was completely quiet up here. All she could hear was Hannah Krekorian crying and Paul Hazzard pacing.”
“And the door was locked,” Gregor said.
“We’re going to have to talk to all of these people again.” Bob Cheswicki sighed. “In a formal capacity. You should talk to them too. In a formal capacity or otherwise. My point is simply that no matter what may or may not have happened in any other respect, what definitely did not happen was that a thief or other stranger came through that window and killed Paul Hazzard, or that someone Paul Hazzard knew came through that window and killed him. Not while he was standing here, talking to Hannah Krekorian, at any rate, and as far as we can make out, he did nothing else from the time he came upstairs to the time he was killed.”
“Except pace,” Gregor pointed out.
“That makes the window scenario even more unlikely.”
“I suppose it does,” Gregor said.
“I’ll tell you something else.” Bob was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. “Paul Hazzard wasn’t killed by a stranger. At least, he wasn’t killed by a street thief or any other kind of stranger he might have been worried about on the face of it.”
“Why not?”
“Because we would have heard that too,” Bob Cheswicki said. “He would have put up a fight. The only way anybody got six stab wounds into Paul Hazzard’s chest like that is if they started from right up close, practically leaning into his arms. I know nothing is ever a hundred percent until you get the tech reports, but Gregor, I’ll stake my life on it. It’s the only way it could have been done. If it had happened any other way, we would have heard something.” Bob Cheswicki burst out in a sharp little laugh. “Good God, do you know what I was just thinking of? All that touchy-feely stuff people like Paul Hazzard are into. All that trading around of hugs. Well, somebody gave him a hug this time, all right.”
“I don’t think that’s fair,” Russell Donahue put in faintly. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with a hug. I guess. I mean, just because this guy wasn’t a, um—”
Russell trailed off. Gregor contemplated him seriously. Donahue was very young and a little more hip than police officers tended to be. He seemed unhappy with what he was doing and as if he wanted to be somewhere else. As Gregor watched, he took an aimless tour around the room and then returned to them, looking glum.
“I guess there isn’t anything we can do here,” he said. “We should get downstairs and talk to the people.”
Gregor had never been in Hannah’s bedroom before tonight. He had never had any reason to be. It was a pleasant, faintly expensive place decorated in gray and pink with a touch of white here and there. Looking through the bathroom door, he could see that the mirror in there was tinted pink too. There was a reason for that. Bennis had explained it to him once. Mirrors tinted pink made your skin look younger.