Cheating at Solitaire(145)

“Kendra Rhode was driving,” Gregor said. “Mark Anderman was in the front passenger seat. Arrow Normand was in the backseat.”

“Yes.”

“They went over onto the beach and you stopped to check them out,” Gregor said. “But you had the gun. You’d brought the gun.”

“I told you. I always had the gun. I’d had it for weeks,” Jack said. “I hadn’t thought about what I was going to do with it. The truck was on its side. A purple truck. Who buys a purple truck? I went down there and I helped Kendra get out. The driver’s side was up. I got her out and then I stuck my head in to see the two of them, and there he was, on the other side. He’d been banged up a little, and he was pissing and moaning, and suddenly I thought, here I was, here we all were, it was the perfect opportunity. Because they would never give me up. They couldn’t. And they knew I knew it.”

“So you got out the gun and shot Mark Anderman in the head,” Gregor said, “and the blood went back, into the backseat, all over Arrow Normand.”

“I’d forgotten she was there,” Jack said. “I got out of the cab and opened the back door and pulled her out and she was screaming her head off. And Kendra—Kendra was just standing there. I’ve never seen anybody so still in all my life. And Arrow was screaming and screaming. And Kendra turned around and slapped her, hard, so that the sound was louder than the sound of the bullets had been. Arrow stopped screaming. And Kendra looked at me and said, ‘If you think this is going to get you anything you want, you’re out of your mind.’ And then she just walked away. Down the beach. That was the second to the last time I saw her in person.”

3

In the rest of the room, there was a sort of buzz, not really conversation, just an under-the-breath, not-exactly-articulate hum of dissatisfaction. Linda Beecham had stopped talking. She was not a stupid woman. Clara Walsh, Bram Winder, and Jerry Young had started talking, but Gregor knew they would stop at any moment. They were all probably ready to brain him.

“All right,” Clara started. “You said, not half an hour ago, that there were four problems that had to be solved, and the next one after the murder of Mark Anderman was the mess somebody made of Jack’s hand. You’re not trying to tell me that Jack made a mess of his own hand? And he couldn’t have put that gun in Annabeth Falmer’s house. And—”

“I want to know about the truck,” Bram Winder said. “When Stewart Gordon took his pictures of the truck, it had been cleared off, or a lot of it had. The windshield had, and the door, and most of the hood.”

“I cleared the truck off,” Jack said. “Right after I fired the shots, I went off down the beach. I was just sort of running in the bad weather, and I tossed the gun, and then I thought about it, about the pictures. And I came back and took them. A couple of dozen pictures. And then Mr. Gordon came down with some woman and I had to run.”

“He took the bullet, too,” Gregor said. “It wasn’t hard to find. It was stuck in the glass. Look at the official pictures one more time. You’ll see the hole. It isn’t big enough for the back of the bullet to go through.”

“But that wasn’t the gun Annabeth Falmer found,” Clara said. “What was that gun doing in her house? It was Jack’s gun.”

“Linda Beecham thought it was the gun,” Gregor said. “She knew Jack must have killed Mark Anderman. She was trying to make sure he wasn’t suspected.”

“By putting his gun where Annabeth Falmer could find it?” Jerry Young said.

“She didn’t put the gun where Annabeth Falmer could find it; she put the gun where Arrow Normand had been. Which she knew, just the way everybody else on the planet knew it, because that was one of the details that’s been all over the Internet and the tabloids. But she did a much more important thing to make sure Jack couldn’t be arrested, never mind convicted, of that murder. She got rid of the fingerprints on his right hand.”

“What?” Bram Winder said.

“She didn’t have to worry about his left hand,” Gregor said, “because when he’s out in the cold, Jack wears gloves. But when he’s photographing, he wears only the glove on his left hand, because he needs his right hand to operate the cameras.

So she was fairly sure that on the afternoon of the murder, Jack would have had the glove on his left hand and no glove on his right. But since he’s right-handed, that meant that the hand without the glove, the hand free to leave fingerprints on the gun, would be the hand he would use to fire the gun. So she dumped a bunch of Rohypnol into Jack’s coffee one day in the office, asked him out back on some pretext or the other—”