Fountain of Death(64)

THERE WERE REAL DETECTIVES in the real world who specialized in finding missing persons and filling in the backgrounds of people whose histories were suspect or sketchy. Gregor Demarkian had never been one of those detectives. Toward the end of his career in the FBI he had been very good at backgrounding, but then he’d had the resources of the Bureau behind him, and the resources of the Behavioral Sciences Department particularly. It was one of the truisms of work with serial killers, in the criminal justice system as well as in psychotherapy, that background was everything. The courts read a lot of details into the no-unreasonable-search and no-self-incrimination clauses of the U.S. Constitution, but the bottom line was that it didn’t matter what you did to get the information you needed, as long as you didn’t need to use that information in court. Gregor had never been part of the McCarthyite school of federal law enforcement. He didn’t use wire taps the way high school cheerleaders used dental floss or hidden cameras like Allen Funt. He wasn’t above petitioning phone and credit and bank records when he had to. He tried to keep it to cases where urgency was necessary. Urgency was necessary here, but he didn’t have the resources of the Bureau behind him anymore. Even if he had had them, he wouldn’t have had time to interpret them. What he really needed was an aunt or a mother or a sister or a husband—but like half the other people involved in this case, the late Stella Mortimer didn’t seem to have had them. Maybe it was Fountain of Youth that was to blame. Maybe, if you became a new you with a new body for every new year, you couldn’t have relatives, because they wouldn’t be able to recognize you from one change to the next.

Magda Hale had had to go out, and Traci Cardinale had had to leave a little early, but Magda handed Gregor over to a woman named Faith Keller and told Faith Keller to get Gregor what he wanted.

“It’s not that I ever really knew anything about Stella,” Faith Keller said as she led Gregor to the small room on the west side of the first floor where the records were kept. “I came here as her assistant about three years ago, but we weren’t close. Stella was never very close to anyone.”

Of course not, Gregor thought. It would be against the will of God if anybody involved in any way with the murder of Tim Bradbury was close enough to anyone else to actually tell them anything. The room where Faith Keller was leading him was small and crowded and chaotic. Papers were lined up in stacks on the desk and spilled out of the overstuffed metal files. Faith cleared a stack of papers off a chair and pushed it toward Gregor.

“You sit in that and I’ll sit on the desk.” I know it looks like a terrible mess, but it really isn’t too bad. You can always find what you need if you need it. And it’s all pro forma anyway.”

“Why pro forma?”

Faith Keller smiled wanly. “Because Magda Hale doesn’t hire on credentials, or records, or training. She hires the instructors after seeing them instruct a class. She either likes what they do or she doesn’t. She hires the rest of us on sight. When I came in to interview, she said I was wearing a lovely dress. And then I had the job.”

“You were Stella Mortimer’s assistant but Magda Hale hired you?”

“Oh, I talked to Stella first. I was only sent to Magda to be cleared. It was obvious what she wanted, nonetheless. When Traci Cardinale was first hired, she couldn’t even type.”

“When Stella Mortimer was first hired, could she direct videotapes?”

Faith Keller shrugged. “I think so. She used to make documentaries, you know, out in California. She was a student at the University of California film school in Los Angeles when she was younger. And she worked in New York for a while.”

“Do you know what she was doing in New Haven?”

“Oh, she was from around here, Mr. Demarkian,” Faith Keller said. “That’s the usual reason people move here from places like L.A. or New York. And you mustn’t think it happened the day before yesterday, either. Stella Mortimer had been with Fountain of Youth for fifteen years.”

Magda Hale had said something about this. Gregor thought she might even have said something about it to Tony Bandero on the afternoon that Stella died. “Did Stella Mortimer and Magda Hale know each other before Stella came to work at Fountain of Youth?” he asked.

“You’d have to ask Magda Hale, I’m sure,” Faith Keller said. “But if you want my impression, I’d have to say no. Oh, they might have met informally before Magda offered Stella the job or Stella asked for it, however that worked, but they were always saying how they had known each other for twenty years. That doesn’t sound like they knew each other before, does it?”