“He was headed to go straight to his office,” Larry Farmer said, “but he saw something that made him nervous. You’ve got to look at a map of Waldorf Pines sometime. The houses all back onto the golf course, and they front onto the one road in the place. It’s one road, one great big loop, and it’s one way. Arthur Heydreich lives in a house about halfway down the course from the clubhouse, but on the wrong side of the loop, so he has to go all the way around to get out the front gate. He says he got into his car, left his garage, and started around the loop. He says he was looking for his wife the entire time. Then, when he got almost all the way to the gate, he thought he saw something flicker in the pool house.”
“Flicker?”
“Like a flame,” Larry Farmer said. “He thought he saw the pool house on fire, except not really all the way on fire yet. He thought he saw a flame. And the place was all closed up, for the repairs, you know, and the kid who was supposed to be watching it wasn’t too responsible about it—”
“This was the same kid that was supposed to be having an affair with his wife?”
“Same one,” Larry Farmer said. “Anyway, he wasn’t too responsible, so Arthur Heydreich said he parked his car in the little lot next to the pool house’s back doors and went in to look around. There was still water in the pool—I don’t know why, you’ll have to ask the manager about that. He gave me an explanation, but it didn’t make any sense to me. Anyway, Arthur Heydreich says when he came in everything was dark, and he looked around in the lobby and then he looked in at the locker rooms. He just looked in and he says he didn’t see or hear anything. He thought he might have smelled something in the women’s locker room so he went in and stood there, but it was absolutely black and he didn’t see anything. Then he went back to the lobby and he heard the water sloshing and he went towards that because it was dark and he was having trouble finding his way around and he knew that way better than the way into the lockers. So he figured he’d check the pool first. And he went in there, and he found a switch that turned on a couple of low lights, and when those went on he saw a body in the water and dark stuff in the water with it. And then the next thing he knew, the building went up in flames.”
“Interesting,” Gregor said. “The body in the water?”
“That was Michael Platte. And the dark stuff was blood. He’d been hit hard on the back of the head, dumped in the pool, and left to drown.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Absolutely. Michael Platte drowned.”
“But you said there was another body,” Gregor said.
“There was,” Larry Farmer said. “In the women’s locker room somewhere. I can only say somewhere because the place didn’t just go up, it absolutely incinerated. It burned fast, it burned hot, and when we finally got firefighters out there to deal with it it was already all over and it still took another half an hour to subdue it completely. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. The body was in there.”
“And?”
Larry Farmer shrugged. “We assumed it was the body of Martha Heydreich. It was unrecognizable, you understand, but it made sense. Her lover’s body is dead in the pool. She’s dead in the locker room. Arthur Heydreich is right on the scene and he’s got stuff all over him, he smells of the damned propellant—and yes, I know, the whole building smelled of it and he was in the building, so that wasn’t conclusive. But still, you see, you’ve got to see, what it looked like to us. There’s the fire, for one thing. Something had to start the fire. Arthur Heydreich was right there. The easiest way to start that fire is to have him be there and just start it. We didn’t find any device for setting it off, or anything that could be that kind of device. We didn’t find anybody who saw anybody else go into the pool house. So there we were. Easy as pie. Cut and dried. We almost arrested him on the spot. We did arrest him two days later. And this morning we let him go.”
“Why?” Gregor asked.
“We sent samples from the body away for DNA testing,” Larry Farmer said. “We thought we might be able to find some of Martha Heydreich’s DNA on something. As it turned out, we couldn’t—there’s something that was gone, her toothbrush—but it didn’t matter anyway. The results came back from the lab yesterday evening, and what we definitely do not have is the body of Martha Heydreich.”
“How do you know?” Gregor asked. “Could you identify the body as somebody else?”