Hearts of Sand(31)

Battlesea gave a little nod to the uniformed woman at the counter and led Gregor down the blank hall to an opening at the back, with elevator doors on both sides of it. The doors were wide enough to accommodate gurneys if they had to.

Battlesea pushed the call button, and as soon as one set of elevator doors opened, he ushered Gregor in and pushed another button.

The elevator bumped to a stop and Gregor followed Battlesea out and found himself confronted with what was, in a way, a more comforting atmosphere. It did look as if somebody had tracked dirt through here on and off, and there were people, many of them rumpled. Most of the rumpled ones were in the back, in open holding cells. They all looked tired.

There was another woman at another counter. She was also in uniform, and also looked crisply efficient, but she had strands of hair coming out of the shiny metal hair clip she was using to hold it all back. She looked up when Battlesea approached and said,

“They’re in the common room. They’ve got some files for you.”

“Thank you.”

Battlesea led Gregor through the hatch door in the counter and across the broad room with even more desks in it.

At the other end of the room, there was a door left slightly open. Battlesea pushed it in, and there were two men sitting at a cheap, wide table, drinking coffee.

Battlesea gestured at Gregor.

“Gregor Demarkian,” he said.

“Damn,” one of the men said.

The men were both white and in their thirties. They both had brown hair and brown eyes. They were so much alike, Gregor wasn’t sure he would have been able to pick one over the other in a lineup.

The one who hadn’t spoken stood up. “Mike Held,” he said, holding out his hand. “This is Jack Mann.”

Gregor shook Mike Held’s hand. Mike Held waved at the chairs around the table. Gregor sat down.

“We’re really glad you’re here,” Mike Held said. “We really don’t know what we’re doing.”

“We don’t even know where to start,” Jack Mann said. “And then there’s all that trouble with the state crime lab.”

“What trouble?” Gregor asked.

Now it was Jason Battlesea who sat down. “Not to put too fine a point on it,” he said, “they lost their accreditation.”

Gregor tried to take this in. “How did they lose their accreditation?”

“They say it’s mostly about not being fast enough and that kind of thing,” Mike Held said. “They haven’t had a full-time person over there for ages, and they weren’t getting the forensic evidence processed as fast as they should have. We’re beginning to think that even if we find the murderer and arrest him, even if you find him, it won’t matter, because the prosecutor will get into court and the defense will start going on about how you can’t trust any of the forensics because the lab is unaccredited, and that’s going to be that.”

“You said ‘the lab,’” Gregor said. “There’s only one.”

“There’s only one,” Jack Mann agreed. “For the entire state. And they couldn’t even put on a full-time person there.”

“Let’s leave that for a moment, all right? You are the two who have been investigating this crime up to now?” Gregor asked.

“Absolutely,” Mike Held said.

“And it was copies of your notes that were sent to me when I agreed to come out here?”

“We sent all the notes, not just ours,” Mike Held said. “We sent the notes of the uniform who responded at the scene.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Uniforms responded at the scene. These were—”

“A woman,” Mike Held said. “She was doing a patrol around Beach Drive. She saw what she thought was a light where there shouldn’t be any, and she pulled into the drive. You’ve got to wonder how stupid anybody had to be to leave a light on in that house.”

“Maybe not,” Jack Mann said. “The family has timed lights for security. It’s not impossible for there to be lights on there.”

“Maybe not,” Mike Held said, “but everybody on the force knows which lights those are. So if there are other lights, we’re going to go right ahead and check.”

“The uniform didn’t know what to think when she got in there,” Mike Held said. “She didn’t know it was Chapin Waring. She’s much too young, even Jack and I are much too young, to have been around when all that happened. So in the beginning, we just went at it like any homicide case. And then—”

“It was the ME’s office that figured out who it was,” Jack Mann said. “They got the body, and the guy who was supposed to work on it knew all about that case, and they called us immediately. And then we did what we were supposed to do to confirm it. It was bad enough having a murder case. Now we’ve got this, and we don’t even know where to start. Hell, the FBI doesn’t know how to solve this thing. How do they expect us to solve it?”