“Let’s just say the body was in bed when we found it,” Dan Exter said.
“Shot how many times?”
“Three.”
“Any stray bullets?”
“Not that we could find, no,” Dan Exter said. “She fired three shots, she hit him three times.”
“Good hits?”
“One of them was,” Dan Exter said blandly.
“What’s a good hit except that it kills the target?” John Jackman asked. “Jesus Christ, Gregor.”
Gregor walked around the bed to the night table on the right side. This was obviously Stephen Willis’s night table. It had a little brass golf statue next to the lamp. Gregor opened the night-table drawer and found a pack of cards that looked well used and a brown wood pipe with a pouch of cherry tobacco beside it. The pipe was not well used. Stephen Willis, Gregor thought, had been one of those men who wanted to smoke a pipe for the prestige, but who could never get the hang of it.
Gregor walked around the bed to the night table on the other side. There was nothing on this one except the lamp, and nothing in the drawer either, except that sawdusty debris that collects inside wooden drawers after a while. Gregor slid the drawer shut and turned to the line of closets that made up the facing wall.
“Are these all the closets in this suite?” he asked.
“No such luck,” Dan Exter said. “These are his closets, from what I’ve been able to figure out. There are other closets in the dressing room, which is back through there.”
Gregor went “back through there.” The dressing room was large, but mostly with a lot of wasted space. It held a wall of closets and a stationary bicycle that looked even less used than the pipe.
Gregor opened one of the closets. It was the size of a moderately spacious bathroom, and it was absolutely empty.
“Well,” he said.
“You can look at the rest of them if you want,” John Jackman said, “but I already have. They’re all like that.”
“Empty,” Gregor said.
“That’s right,” Dan Exter said.
“She took all her clothes,” Gregor said.
John Jackman walked to the other end of the room and looked out the large plate-glass window there. “There were clothes in the parking garage,” he said, “lots of them, thrown out by the blast. And a lot of stuff burned, of course. We couldn’t prevent that.”
“What kind of a car was it?” Gregor wanted to know.
“Volvo station wagon,” Jackman said. “There’s a lot of room in those station wagons.”
“There isn’t infinite room in those station wagons,” Gregor said. “What did she do? Kill him and then pack?”
“Maybe she packed before she killed him,” Dan Exter said. “We’re running all kinds of tests. We’re trying to find out if he was drugged. We’re trying to find out if he was poisoned. God only knows what.”
“The thing is that it all had to be deliberate,” John Jackman said. “Gregor, no matter how you look at it, it had to be deliberate. It had to be planned. She must have worked it all out beforehand—”
“Assuming she’s the one who planted the pipe bombs,” Dan Exter said. “Don’t let’s jump to conclusions.”
“Who else would have planted the pipe bombs? Who would want to?” Jackman had started to pace. “There’s a record of everybody who comes into this place and out of it. Into Fox Run Hill, I mean. It’s not like dropping a little something off in the ash can outside a brownstone in the middle of the city.”
“The pipe bombs might not have been planted here,” Dan Exter argued. “They might have been planted in the garage. You can’t tell me you trust that idiot from the garage to remember who went in and out all afternoon.”
“Of course I don’t,” John Jackman said, “but I don’t believe the bombs were planted in the garage either. Somebody would have noticed something. Maybe not the garage attendant, but somebody.”
“Maybe somebody did,” Dan Exter said. “We haven’t even started talking to people yet. Someone could come forward at any moment.”
Gregor Demarkian cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. “I wonder if you’ve noticed something.”
“Noticed what?” Dan Exter sounded exasperated.
“That it wasn’t just her clothes,” Gregor said. “It isn’t just that clothes are missing from this house. It’s that everything connected to a woman is missing from this house. At least, it has been so far. No women’s shoes in the mudroom downstairs. No women’s coats in the closet in the foyer. Nothing at all in the night table next to Mrs. Willis’s side of the bed—”