Deadly Beloved(40)

Jackman nodded. “The guy at the garage I talked to myself. She pulled in there and made him sell her an all-day ticket in spite of the fact that the day was half over. Gave him a complicated financial argument, according to him, which probably means she talked common sense for ten minutes. This is not a rocket scientist we’re dealing with here.”

“Then she parked her car and left the garage,” Gregor said. “Then what?”

“Then she went to the bank,” Dan Exter said. “At least, the times are right that she didn’t do anything between the parking garage and the bank.”

“Where she cashed a check for fifteen thousand,” Gregor said. “Then what did she do?”

“She had a big pocketbook,” Dan Exter said. “Something called a Coach bag, according to the bank manager—”

“Coach is a brand,” John Jackman sighed. “I keep telling him.”

“She had the money packed into this Coach bag and left the bank,” Dan Exter said, “and that’s the last we know until the pipe bombs blew a couple of hours later. Which, by the way, is all I think we’re going to know.”

“Somebody will have seen her,” John Jackman said confidently. “Just wait. Somebody always does.”

“Listen.” Dan Exter appealed directly to Gregor Demarkian. “This is a plain, ordinary middle-aged lady we’re talking about here. Not in spectacular shape. Not unusual in any way. Not dressed to be noticed—”

“No?” Gregor asked.

“She was wearing a thin silk blouse and a skirt that was ‘kind of beige,’ according to the bank manager,” Dan Exter said.

“That’s interesting,” Gregor said.

“Anyway,” Exter went on, “the point is, she wasn’t much to look at and she wasn’t a memorable kind of woman. We may find her eventually, but I don’t think she’s going to jump right out and bite us.”

Gregor turned around in a small circle, looking at the big house, looking at the driveway, looking at the other big houses up and down the street. He could see a head at a window on the second floor in the brick Federalist, but otherwise the place seemed deserted. Even the joggers had disappeared. Gregor scratched the back of his neck and wished he hadn’t worn a suit—but he always wore a suit, even to the beach, he didn’t own anything else to wear. He brushed sweat away from his suit collar and started up the drive, knowing that John Jackman and Dan Exter would follow him.

“We might as well get started,” he said. “The longer we hang around, the worse it’s going to be.”





2.


In a routine police investigation—the kind that involves poor people who live in ghettos, and drug deals, and domestic violence—crime scene investigation takes a few hours at best and half a day at worst. The lab people come in and do their dirty work as quickly and efficiently as possible. The police come in and talk to half a dozen people with conflicting stories and another half dozen who want to turn state’s evidence. But this was not an ordinary crime scene. In the first place, there were elements here that were honestly mysterious, even though they would probably turn out to be not so mysterious in the end. In the second place—well, Gregor knew the drill. You had to be careful when you were dealing with rich people, even quasi-rich people, like the ones who lived at Fox Run Hill. Rich people had lawyers and—more important—knew when to use them. Rich people knew their rights. They thought they ought to have more rights than the Constitution already allowed.

Gregor walked through the cavernous garage and into the mudroom. He checked out the wooden pegs artfully hammered into one wall and the bench that had been machine-cut to look rough-hewn. There would probably be a lot of that sort of thing in a place like this. He looked under the bench and found three pairs of shoes: Topsiders; Gucci loafers with pennies in them; Nike running shoes. All three pairs were the same size and made for a man. There were no clothes of any kind on the pegs. There were two baseball-style caps on a shelf over the bench. One of the caps had the words CAPITALIST TOOL printed on the crown. The other had the symbol for the New York Mets.

“Fieldstone,” Gregor said, kicking at the floor.

“This house is big on fieldstone,” Dan Exter told him, “also on beams and dark wood. It’s like a signature.”

“You ought to check out the shoes,” Gregor said. “Just because they’re all the same size doesn’t necessarily mean they all belong to—what was his name again?”

“Stephen Willis,” John Jackman said.