Cheating at Solitaire(30)

“There,” Stewart said. “You see? That’s the kind of thing I need. The whole setup is just wrong. And the police aren’t listening.”

“I doubt that the police aren’t listening to that sort of thing,” Gregor said. “When they don’t, the prosecutors go fairly nuts because they end up looking foolish. Why couldn’t she have been standing behind him when it happened?”

“I don’t know that she couldn’t have,” Stewart said, “but when we found him, when Annabeth and I found him, he was in the passenger’s-side seat of the truck, lying against the side window, because the truck had gone down the slope to the beach and rolled onto its side. There was beach and rock behind him, and if a person had been there, she’d have been crushed.”

Gregor considered it. “All right,” he said. “Then the question becomes when he was killed, before or after the truck rolled onto the beach. Why were you and Annabeth Falmer on the beach?”

“We were looking for the truck,” Stewart said. “Arrow had shown up at Annabeth’s door a mess and babbling about how she was in the truck with Mark and there’d been an accident on the beach, and Annabeth got fairly convinced that Mark was still in the truck. She tried calling the emergency services to go out and find him, but we were in the middle of a major storm and she couldn’t actually confirm any of what she’d heard and Arrow was in no shape to talk, so they put her off. So, when I showed up, she was thinking of walking out that way herself and seeing if Mark was there, maybe still alive, maybe dying in the weather. It made sense, you know.”

“It made sense for somebody to go out there,” Gregor agreed. “I’m not so sure that it made sense for a woman to go out there accompanied by a geriatric old fart like you. Is she athletic?”

“Annabeth? Not really. She looks like—she looks like Judi Dench at fifty. Do you remember Judi Dench at the start of that tele vision series, As Time Goes By? It’s that kind of look. Not blond, you know, but that kind of look.”

“Hmm,” Gregor said. The only reason he didn’t have to bite his lip until it bled to keep himself from laughing was that he had had many years of training with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He moved a few more of the pictures around. “So,” he said. “You and Annabeth Falmer went out into the storm, and found this truck lying on its side on the beach. Was it easy to find?”

“Here’s another thing,” Stewart said. He pawed through the pile of photographs himself, found the one he wanted, and handed it across. “Look at this. What do you see?”

“The most violently purple vehicle that ever moved on wheels. Did you brush the snow off it?”

“Some. On the windshield.”

“The snow was coming down at the rate of what exactly?”

“Two inches an hour.”

Gregor looked at the picture again. He handed it back. “Do you have another one, close to the same shot but at a wider angle?”

“I’ve got two more.”

Stewart found them and handed them over. Gregor looked through them, but he wasn’t finding what he wanted. They’d been shot from too close in. “I don’t suppose that you took pictures of the area around the truck,” he said.

“No, I didn’t,” Stewart said.

“Or that you noticed anything?” Gregor prodded. “Say, for instance, footprints?”

“No,” Stewart said. “The police were going on about footprints too. Arrow’s footprints, I think. They couldn’t find them. Although, you know, I understand that there’s been a lot of technological progress in forensics, but I don’t see that not finding footprints tells you much of anything in a situation like this. The snow was coming down, the wind was fierce, and the ocean was no joke.”

“Assuming you’ve been accurate,” Gregor said, “and Arrow Normand showed up at Annabeth Falmer’s house about twenty minutes before you did, and it took you a while, say at least two or three minutes, to find the truck—”

“It was more like ten.”

“So we’re talking about half an hour. The only way the truck could have been clean of snow on its exposed side and part of the hood would have been if somebody had cleaned it off pretty close to the time that you arrived. There must have been somebody there. Right there. You must have just missed him. Or her.”

“There,” Stewart said. “You see? And whoever it was who did that couldn’t have been Arrow Normand, because she was passed out at Annabeth’s house. Although not as passed out as she was pretending to be, if you catch my drift. They’re not actresses, these girls, but they do know how to play dead.”