Blood in the Water(30)

“No,” Larry Farmer said. “The DNA did not match anybody in any database the lab could find. Apparently that’s not all that odd. Most people don’t have their DNA on file anywhere.”

“But if you don’t know whose DNA it is,” Gregor asked, “and you don’t have a sample of Martha Heydreich’s DNA for comparison, how can you be sure it doesn’t belong to Martha Heydreich?”

Larry Farmer put his head in his hands.

“Because,” he said, “whoever the other murder victim is, undocumented or not, he’s definitely and conclusively a man.”





THREE

1

Arthur Heydreich knew that something was going on from the first moment the lights went on in the corridor outside his cell. For one thing, the lights actually did go on, rather than flickering and wavering for half an hour until somebody came along to set them to their daytime levels. Arthur had spent a lot of his time in jail thinking about those lights, and all the other lights, up and down the small building that was the Pineville Station Muncipal Jail. There were the lights in the cells themselves, that shut off abruptly every night at ten. There were those lights in the corridor, that seemed to have many different settings, but a schedule that varied for no reason available to him. Then there were the lights far down at the end of the corridor where the guard station was. Everything was arranged as if the Pineville Station Muncipal Jail had a regular clientele of rapists, murderers, and terrorists, liable to go bezerk at any moment and take the building by sheer force of physical power, or maybe lunatic rage. Instead, all there really were were a couple of petty thieves, three teenagers who’d been caught with marijuana, and Arthur himself. Only Arthur himself had been here more than forty-eight hours.

First the lights went on in the corridor abruptly. Then there was the low murmuring hum of people talking way up by the guard station, talking quietly, so that nobody in the cells could hear. Arthur lay in bed and tried to listen to it for a while, but it was useless. Whatever people were finding it so important to say to each other was obviously not meant for him.

He listened because it was practically the only thing he had to do. He had a few books they’d allowed him to take from home, but other than that there was nothing. Jail was nothing at all like he’d expected it to be. He’d seen a million movies where jail cells had one wall made entirely of bars and prisoners talked to each other through them. The corridors were open and the cells were open and there was a lot of conversation back and forth.

Here, each cell held exactly one prisoner, and instead of bars there were solid metal doors with just a tiny peephole in the center toward the top. Farther down there were flat slats that could be opened from the corridor side to slide in food trays for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There was no prison cafeteria where hundreds of men would march together in a cafeteria line.

Of course, there were no hundreds of men, either. Maybe this arrangement was for small jails, and prisons were like what they were like in the movies. Arthur didn’t know, and he didn’t know why he was thinking about it. He only knew he was so mind-numbingly bored he could barely stay awake.

The murmurs were still coming from the other end of the corridor. He wondered what time it was. It had to be after six, but before seven, because at seven they brought the food trays around. The hum went on and on, spiking every once in a while and then falling back. Arthur stared at the ceiling of his cell and let himself drift.

He remembered the day they had come to arrest him, only two days after the fire in the pool house. He had been expecting them to come, but when he saw the cars pulling up outside his front door, he’d felt his stomach clench and his mind go numb. The only thing he’d been able to think of was the early warning system. At Waldorf Pines, no visitor was allowed onto the grounds unless the front gate had your permission first, and then, when the visitor did show up, he wasn’t allowed in until you’d been found and notified. Obviously, the police were not the kind of visitors that had been meant in the brochure, but they were visitors nonetheless. Maybe he would have a cause of action because he hadn’t been notified.

The murmurs went up again, and down again, and up again. There was the sound of shuffling feet in the corridor. There was another sound, farther off, that Arthur was sure was the breakfast cart bringing the trays in for the morning.

Arthur wanted to take a shower. He wanted to take a shower in his own shower in his own home, but right now he would have settled for the shower in the shower block next door. The idea that two showers a week were as many as anybody needed made him feel a little indignant. It was practically the only thing he felt at all.