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Fountain of Death(84)

By:Jane Haddam


“Find the bathroom,” Gregor said.

One of the patrolmen made a comment about how a place like this ought to have an outhouse. Gregor ignored him and went through the only other door beside the outside one that he could see. He found himself in a small square space with two other doors opening onto it. Gregor shone his flashlight into the closest of these doorways and found the bedroom. He shone his flashlight into the other and found the bathroom. It wasn’t much of a bathroom. Half the floor appeared to be rotted out.

“It’s cold as hell in here and it still smells bad,” Philip Brye said.

Gregor shone his flashlight in the direction of the toilet, and then into the toilet and then onto the walls next to the toilet.

“There,” he said finally. “In that corner.”

“What’s in that corner?”

“Vomit,” Gregor said. “Considerably dried, of course. There should be more on his clothes.”

“On what clothes?” Roger Dornan sounded confused.

“Tim Bradbury’s,” Gregor said. He backed out of the bathroom. “They’ll be in here, I expect,” he said, meaning in the bedroom. “Left in a heap, probably, unless our murderer was smart enough to get rid of them right away. I don’t see that there would have been any need to bother, though. It wasn’t like there was any danger of anyone coming out here any time soon.”

“I would think there would be,” Philip Brye said. “If I were a cop, I’d come here practically right away. After all, it was his mother’s house.”

Gregor played his flashlight from one corner of the room to another. The room was small, but it was crammed with stuff. There were discarded clothes everywhere. Gregor turned his attention to the floor. The floors in the living room and the hall were carpeted. The floor in the bathroom was covered with linoleum. This floor wasn’t covered at all. It was made of wood, but not wood planks. It was composed of cheap sheets of plywood. The whole house was made of plywood, Gregor thought. If somebody put up a shack just like it today, it would be made of pressboard.

The plywood floor was dirty and warped, but otherwise untouched,

“Do you think the two of you could move the bed?” Gregor asked the patrolman nearest him. “I want to see what’s underneath it.”

“Probably rat droppings,” the patrolman said, but he got to work.

The bed wasn’t hard to move, in spite of all the clothes and bottles piled on top of it. When it was out of the way, Gregor got down on his knees and shone the flashlight on what had been uncovered. The plywood was dirty and warped here, too.

“We’re going to have to go through all the clothes in this room until we find Tim Bradbury’s,” he said absently, looking at the seams between the boards. “We aren’t going to absolutely need them, but they wouldn’t be bad to have. Wait a minute. There it is.”

“There what is?” Philip Brye asked.

“The difference,” Gregor said. He stood up and pointed his flashlight at the floor. “Right there,” he said. “If these two officers would be kind enough to pull up the floor starting right there—”

By now the two Derby patrolmen were no longer interested in asking questions. They got right down on their knees and went at the relevant place on the floor with hammers and crowbars. This wood didn’t splinter as easily as the wood that had covered the door had. It was newer. One of the patrolmen got up a corner of the board and tugged at it. It bent in his hand, but it didn’t break.

“It’s the river,” he said apologetically. “Everything this close to the water gets wet.”

“I’ve got it,” the other patrolman said.

The board was made of very good plywood indeed. It came off in a piece, barely splintered where the nails had been driven into it. Gregor was willing to bet that the nails were of a better quality than the ones used in the rest of the shack, too.

“What the hell is that?” the patrolman asked, peering into the hole left by the discarded plywood board. Then he blanched. “Oh, Christ,” he said.

Gregor Demarkian bent closer. What “that” was was a now fleshless skeleton, curled into the fetal position and still wearing a locket necklace—turned green with age—around its neck.

What “that” was was all that remained of the body of Alissa Bradbury.

A single bullet was lodged in the bone in the center of its chest.





FOUR


1


THE ENVELOPE FROM JIMMY Fleck did not contain a prescription for Demerol. It contained copies of her x-rays, with little notes written on them in green felt-tipped pen. “Hairline fracture,” several of the notes read. Others were more complicated, containing words Magda only vaguely knew’ the meanings of, the names of bones, the designations of injuries. If I had injured a muscle, I would have understood it better, Magda told herself when the package came. Then she put the package away in the long center drawer of the antique desk in her bedroom.