“You should talk to them,” Susan said. “It’s not good, what you’re doing to them.”
“They should have thought of that before they did what they did to me,” Caroline said. “Now sit down and have your breakfast and start behaving like a grown-up, or you’re going to blow this whole thing into the stratosphere. And you know you don’t want that. You’ve been there before.”
THREE
1
The key was waiting for him when he got to the Pineville Station Police Department, lying on what looked like a mouse pad. Larry Farmer paced and struggled back and forth in front of Miss Connolly’s counter. Buck Monaghan had left word to be called as soon as Gregor got in. Gregor himself had begun to feel a little foolish about the whole thing. There was always the chance that he could be wrong. There was always the chance that whoever had written the evidence descriptions couldn’t describe a basketball without making it sound like a toaster.
As it turned out, the person who had written the evidence descriptions had not been bad at the job, and the key lying there on the counter was almost certainly a key to a safe-deposit box. Gregor looked at it for a moment without touching it. Then he said,
“Tell me this has already been through the wringer. It’s been fingerprinted. It’s been tested for blood. It’s been—”
“Yes, yes,” Larry Farmer said. “We did all that. We may not have the kind of forensics you see on television, but we do get things done here. And we’ve got a mobile evidence lab.”
He leaned over the key as Miss Connolly picked up the phone to call Buck Monaghan. He turned the key over in his hand. It was like every other safe-deposit key he’d ever seen. It was small. It was blank. It was without identification. Gregor put it back down.
Buck Monaghan appeared from upstairs and looked over the scene. “Well?” he said.
“Mr. Demarkian thinks it’s a safe-deposit key,” Larry Farmer said. “I don’t see why he thinks that. It looks like any other key to me. It looks like one of those keys you lock luggage with. Why he’d think it was a safe-deposit key, that’s beyond me.”
Gregor picked up the key and handed it to Buck.
“Ah,” Buck said.
“I don’t see what the ‘ah’ is about,” Larry Farmer said. “It’s like there’s some secret code here and nobody’s let me in on it.”
“If it was a luggage key, it would have some identification on it,” Buck said. “It would have the name of the luggage company. It would have something. The point of safe-deposit boxes is that they need to be both secure and discreet. So the keys don’t have identification on them. They don’t have the name of the bank. They really don’t have the number of the box. The idea is that if you have a right to the key, you already know the bank and the box number.”
“Well, that helps us out,” Larry Farmer said. “We have a key. We have no idea what bank it came from and no idea what box it will open. And don’t you need two keys to open a safe-deposit box?”
“You definitely do,” Gregor said. “I don’t think a bank would have a great deal of trouble accepting that they ought to come forward on something like this when the box holder has been murdered, and even if the bank doesn’t want to do it, we could always get a warrant to open the box. But that assumes two things, neither of which I think is going to help us.”
“What two things?” Larry Farmer looked definitely put out.
“The first is that the box belonged to Michael Platte,” Gregor said. “Just because he had the key on him doesn’t mean he owned it. He could have stolen it. Which, given the things you’ve said to me about him so far, wouldn’t be a shock. He could have been given it by somebody else. In either of those cases, you might find that a bank would not come forward to admit that the key was theirs, if they even knew it. And you’d have a hard time convincing a judge to give you a warrant to open the box even if you could find out who it belonged to and what bank it was at.”
“If he stole the thing,” Buck Monaghan said, “then he had no right to it, and it’s not likely that whatever is in it is germane to his murder. Although it might be. But you must see how the banks will think. People keep all kinds of sensitive information in safe-deposit boxes. They wouldn’t do that if they thought their confidence could be violated for any excuse at all.”
“Two murders isn’t an excuse,” Larry Farmer said. “Even a judge should be able to figure that out.”
“Why don’t we worry about all that when we’re farther along,” Gregor said. “Right now, we’ve got Michael Platte dead, an unknown person dead, Martha Heydreich missing, and a safe-deposit key. Michael Platte has family at Waldorf Pines, doesn’t he?”