Fountain of Death(9)

“You haven’t been able to get hold of the financial records?”

Tony made a face. “This isn’t the FBI. We can’t just call up the IRS and demand to see a lot of tax returns. We have to have a whole lot of probable cause.”

“You’d have to have a whole lot of probable cause even if you were the FBI. You’ve got a dead body.”

“I’ve got a dead body, the one thing we know for sure about it was that it wasn’t murdered on the premises. This is not the kind of thing that looks good when you ask the judge for access to private files.”

“True,” Gregor said, “but you could milk the rumors. You could talk to the people who do business with them. Suppliers, those kinds of people. Isn’t there a local newspaper? The New Haven Register? You could talk to the financial reporter there.”

“We tried. Maybe you could talk to her. Maybe she’d be more comfortable with a man in a suit than she was with a cop.”

Gregor went over to look at one of the clusters of hunting prints. They were pen-and-ink reproductions, not originals. This Simon Roveter, whoever he is, hadn’t let himself go that far. Still. These reproductions were good reproductions. They hadn’t come cheap.

“I think one of the things we’re going to have to do pretty soon,” Gregor said, “before I start going off half-cocked myself and speculating about things I can’t begin to understand, is to—what’s that?”

That was the sound of something creaking, creaking and creaking, like a rusty hinge being pulled violently back and forth. Tony Bandero had heard it at the same time Gregor did. He had turned away from the scrollwork he had been examining at the front of the desk. He was frozen in the middle of Simon Roveter’s office, his head up, listening.

“What the hell—” Tony began.

The creaking changed to a sound more like wood splintering. Then there was an enormous creak, the creak to end all creaks, a screaming whine like a vampire whose heart had just been staked. Then there was a crash, and a woman started screaming.

“Traci Cardinale,” Tony said, just before he started moving.

Gregor started moving, too. He went out the door of Simon Roveter’s office and into the hall. He went down the hall to the doors that led to the balcony. The doors were standing open. So were the doors that led to the viewing section of the exercise studio where Traci had shown them the beginners’ class. Women were spilling out of that door and milling around in confusion.

“Somebody’s screaming,” one of the women kept saying—not Dessa Carter or the woman who had been leading the class. “Somebody’s screaming. Why should somebody be screaming?”

Gregor pushed past her and then past Dessa Carter. He went through the doors to the balcony without looking where he was going. He nearly plowed into Tony Bandero’s back. Tony was standing stock-still in the very middle of the balcony, his hands on his hips and his head thrown back.

“What the hell is going on around here?” he was demanding.

Gregor got around the side of him and saw what it was that was happening, as far as it was possible to see. A long low stretch of balcony railing was missing, gone from the center of the curved stretch that overlooked the foyer. When Gregor went forward a few steps, he could see what was left of it lying on the foyer floor below. A lot of the wood seemed to have been reduced to shards and splinters. There were raw nails sticking up out of the debris. Traci Cardinale stood with her back to the balcony wall. Her face was leached of color and the knuckles on both her hands were white. If she had been standing next to that balcony rail when it collapsed, Gregor thought, she would have been dead. At the very least, she would have been seriously hurt.

Traci Cardinale’s skirt was torn. She was screaming.

“I’m going to call into the office and get a car out here,” Tony Bandero announced to the assembled company.

Gregor thought that was a very good idea, although maybe not for the reasons Tony Bandero thought it was. Gregor walked to the raw open edge of the balcony rail and back to the doors that led into the second floor and back to the balcony rail again. It was a mess down there in the foyer. There were pieces of wood scattered across Traci Cardinale’s receptionist’s desk. There were more nails than Gregor had realized would be necessary for a balcony of this kind.

In the background, Traci Cardinale was still screaming. Tony had ceased hearing her because he was busy. Gregor had ceased hearing her because he was thinking. She was going on and on and on, letting out a thin high wail that was as even and unsubstantial as water from a lawn sprinkler.