“But you don’t know that that was what the guy intended,” Larry Farmer said. “He could have meant the whole pool house to have burned up. Or she could have. You know what I mean. You start the fire meaning for it all to go up in flames, and then somebody comes along and calls the fire department too early, and there you are.”
“Possible,” Gregor admitted, “except for the fact that in order for that body to have been in the condition in which you found it, the murderer would have had to start the fire directly on the body to begin with. He’d have had to douse that body with enough accelerant to make sure it went up and went up good, and he’d have had to light the match almost directly under it. That’s a lot more forethought than you would have put into it if you’d wanted the entire pool house to go up, and not at all what you would have done if you’d wanted to disguise both of the bodies. The swimming pool was full. Michael Platte’s body was floating in water. No fire would have disguised what happened there under any circumstances. There’s only one reason for that fire to have been started where and how it was, and do you know what that reason is?”
“No,” Larry Farmer said.
“That reason,” Gregor said, “is the fact that the identity of the second body is the most important point. If you know the identity of the second body, you know who committed the murder, and you can figure out why without working too hard for it. The second body was the key, because the second body was the reason there was a murder at all. And that brings us to the stupid thing,”
“Nothing seems all that stupid so far,” Buck Monaghan said. “In fact, this whole thing is beginning to sound like something out of one of those detective novels you’ve been complaining about.”
“No, no,” Gregor said. “The whole thing is incredibly simple. It was so simple, I almost missed it. But here’s the thing. Two things in this case happened because the murderer knew that the first thing you were going to do when you discovered the bodies was to arrest Arthur Heydreich for the murders. The first thing was the burning of the bodies. The second thing was the depositing of a small garden hose on Walter Dunbar’s porch.”
“Walter Dunbar?” Larry Farmer exploded. “I can’t believe it. Walter Dunbar is an ass. He’s a prick. He’s one of those guys who runs around making himself important any way he can. We don’t even know somebody put that garden hose on his porch. He could have made it all up. It could have been his own garden hose. He just wants to act like he knows everything and have an excuse to call us all hicks and idiots.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “That’s exactly why that garden hose was thrown onto his deck. It was, in case you can’t see it, nearly perfect. Anything that happened, no matter how trivial, would have gotten Walter Dunbar up in arms and telling the world, but something that happened on a night when murders were being committed—well, it was the perfect thing. Walter Dunbar is Walter Dunbar. He’d be sure to tell everybody he met about it, his neighbors, the police, the newspapers if they asked. That was exactly the point.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Larry Farmer said.
“I think you ought to get those two police officers and take me out to Waldorf Pines,” Gregor said. “I don’t believe in murderers who run around doing extra murders to keep people quiet, or whatever the reason’s supposed to be, but I don’t like the idea of letting this person run around loose. He’s entirely too good at this.”
3
The drive out to Waldorf Pines felt as if it took forever, and it took longer because Larry Farmer spent it talking to Horace Wingard on his cell phone.
“Nobody’s trying to ruin your life,” Larry kept saying. “Nobody’s trying to ruin anybody’s life. We’re just trying to do our jobs … yes, I know what my job is … yes, I know what Waldorf Pines means to Pineville Station … well, why do you have six news vans parked in front of your gate?”
The news vans were, most definitely, parked in front of the gate. There were so many of them that Gregor was afraid they wouldn’t be able to get inside. And it wasn’t only the news vans that were causing the problem. There were also sightseers, people who had shown up in their cars for no good reason Gregor could tell, plus sightseers from Waldorf Pines itself on the other side of the gate. Reporters were trying to climb Waldorf Pines’s low stone wall. People with phone cameras were climbing trees and taking pictures of the people milling around in the clubhouse parking lot.