Blood in the Water(48)

“Was there any indication that she had hopped into bed?” Gregor asked. “Or, I should say, that the corpses had?”

“Well, one of them was charred beyond recognition,” Larry said.

Buck Monaghan was shaking his head. “They did check—I have the case files back at my office, you can look at them sometime—there wasn’t anything on Michael Platte to say that he’d had sex that night with anybody. I think I can see where you’re going with this. The misidentification of the body affects more than the misidentification of the body.”

Gregor nodded. “You’ve got two bodies. I take it they weren’t in the same room.”

“They weren’t even close,” Buck Monaghan said. “Michael Platte’s body was in the pool room, and in the pool. Directly in it. In the water. And he’d gone into the water alive, because he bled into that pool for hours. The water was full of blood. The other body was in the locker room—”

“The men’s locker room or the women’s locker room?” Gregor asked. “Or is there only one of them?”

“Oh, there are two,” Larry Farmer said. “And now that you mention it, that’s odd. The other body was in the women’s locker room. But it was the body of a man. So what was it doing in the women’s locker room?”

“Let’s worry about that later,” Gregor said. “What I want to know now is how close that locker room was to the pool.”

“It was close enough,” Buck Monaghan said. “It’s across a big foyer with a trophy display case in it, but the display case didn’t have much in the way of trophies. Or maybe any. I’ve got some pictures of it. It got partially destroyed in the fire. You had to cross that foyer to get from the pool to the locker rooms and back again. It wasn’t too far but it wasn’t right there, if you know what I mean. I remember thinking it was a silly way to design a pool facility.”

“It sounds like it,” Gregor said, “but what bothers me is this. What evidence do you have that these two people died at the same time?”

“What?” Ken Bairn said.

“Well, as far as I can see,” Gregor said, “there’s no reason to assume that these two people ever met each other, never mind that they were killed together for the same reason. It’s different if you assume that what you’ve got is the wife and her lover, because then it makes sense that they’d be there together. And it makes sense that somebody, certainly the husband, might come along, find them engaged in sex, and have at them. After that, the circumstances are rather elaborate but they’re not out of the question. The guy finds himself with two corpses and tries to cover his tracks. He hauls one body across the foyer, lets the other one drown where it is and then sets the fire. There would be a few problems, but you could solve practically all of them by assuming that the murder was planned.”

“I thought you just said that the murder was not planned,” Buck Monaghan said. “I thought you said he came in and found them in a tryst—”

“Yes,” Gregor said, “but he wouldn’t have had to go there and find them unexpectedly. He could have known the tryst was about to take place and gone there deliberately. With a plan, as I said. That way, he would have brought an accelerant with him. I’m making a sloppy job of this, but you must see what I mean. If you assume that what you’ve got are the bodies of Michael Platte and Martha Heydreich, then you can make everything else fit. But once you assume that the bodies you’ve got are not Michael Platte and Martha Heydreich everything starts to come apart, and not just the case against Arthur Heydreich.”

“We had noticed that,” Ken Bairn said sardonically. “That’s why you’re here.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “It’s just begun to occur to me, however, just how much of a tangle this all is. You have two bodies, one of which you can’t identify. They’re not in the same room, and you have no way to tell if they’ve both been killed in the same way. Or have you?”

“No,” Larry Farmer said.

“Which means you also have no way to tell if they were both killed at the same time,” Gregor said. “One of them was left perfectly recognizable and, at the time, not even dead in a swimming pool, which sounds like the work of panic. The other was found so completely disfigured and so completely stripped of identifying articles that there was no clue as to identity, which sounds like the work of not only careful planning, but emotionless planning. You’ve got a possible motive for the murder of one of them, but no idea what the motive might be for the murder of the other. You have, in fact, no evidence at all that these two murders are in any way connected to each other.”