Hearts of Sand(30)

Gregor could see Jason Battlesea looking at him as he looked around the room.

“Are you waiting for me to ask?” Gregor said.

“Sort of,” Jason Battlesea admitted. “There’s another entrance, around the back. It goes to the lower level. The holding area is there, and about a dozen cells, including two isolation cells. If we have to lock up people, we have a place to put them.”

“That’s good to know,” Gregor said. “Do you ever have to lock up people?”

“Sometimes. We have a fair amount of crime here in the good weather. Burglary and car theft mostly. We’re not all that far from Bridgeport, which means we get a fair influx of the kind of people who tend to make a career of that kind of thing.”

Gregor considered this. “You don’t get anything local?”

“Sure we do,” Jason Battlesea said. “Lots and lots of drunk driving, especially in the spring. That’s the party season here for the high school and the kids home from college. We get a lot of marijuana, although we don’t tend to pursue those.”

“Why not?”

“Because the town doesn’t want us to,” Jason Battlesea said. “The parents here, they don’t just want their kids to go to college, they want them to go to Harvard. And the kids are not going to get there if they’ve been busted for weed. When we catch them with it, we don’t make a big deal out of it, and we don’t make it official.”

“What about other drugs?”

“Other drugs, we get more serious about,” Battlesea said. “On that one, the parents are adamant. They’re scared to death of heroin and cocaine. But even with that, we have to go slow sometimes.”

“Was this the first murder you’ve had?”

“The first in fifty years, yes,” Battlesea said. “The two people killed in the last bank robbery weren’t killed here. None of the robberies were even done here. But I looked it up. About fifty years ago, a woman named Grace Lewison shot her husband on the front lawn of their house on Sands Street at eight o’clock in the evening. She’d caught him sleeping with the maid.”

“Is Sands Street a good part of town?”

“There isn’t really a bad part of Alwych,” Battlesea said, “but it’s no Beach Drive. In case you’re wondering, it was the definition of an open-and-shut case. It was a nice summer day and the neighbors were all out on their lawns. They saw the guy run out of the house, they saw Grace run out after him shooting, and then when she got him she stood there and kept plugging him until the bullets ran out. Of course, this is Alwych, so she tried to plead temporary insanity.”

“Do you have anybody here who’s trained in homicide investigation?”

“Oh, we’ve got them trained,” Jason Battlesea said. “The town funds the hell out of it. It funds the hell out of all its public services. The public high school here will give you an education to out-Exeter Exeter. It’s got Latin and Ancient Greek as well as Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Chinese. The hospital offers cancer services to rival Yale–New Haven. So, yes, we’ve got people here who are trained in homicide investigations. They’ve been sent on training courses. They’ve been sent on refreshers. They’ve done all that kind of thing.”

“They’ve done everything but work on an actual homicide investigation,” Gregor said.

“I’ve got two detectives,” Battlesea said. “Both of them did liaison advisory stints with the Bridgeport police. That means they went down there and spent three months apiece working for the Bridgeport PD and going along on homicide cases with seasoned homicide cops.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Gregor said.

“No, it isn’t,” Battlesea agreed. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t help us here. Bridgeport has a real police department, if you don’t mind my putting it that way. They deal with a lot of crime, and a lot of violent crime, and they deal with it every single day. The problem is that it’s not this kind of violent crime. They have carjackings. They have home invasions. They have gang murders. People get stabbed in the street and robbed at gunpoint, and you couldn’t get me to work in a liquor store or a convenience store in Bridgeport on a bet. But it’s not this kind of thing. To tell you the truth, Mr. Demarkian, I didn’t think this kind of thing existed outside of Murder, She Wrote.”

“Are your two homicide detectives here now, by any chance?” he asked.

“They’re downstairs,” Jason Battlesea said. “We can take the elevator.”