Hearts of Sand(32)

Gregor was getting that feeling he had sometimes, that it was going to take infinite patience to get through the next fifteen minutes.

“Solve what?” he asked them.

2

The scene would have been funny, if Gregor had been in a mood to laugh. The three men sat around their cheap table, staring at him as if he’d just told them that something they’d always believed to be true—that the world was round, for instance—wasn’t. Two of them actually had their mouths open. Jason Battlesea’s face had gone more than a little red.

Gregor took the attaché case he’d been carrying and put it on the table. He snapped it open and went through the four bound stacks of paper he had there.

He found the bound sheaf he was looking for. He had written “Alwych PD” across the front of it. He took it out and put it on the desk.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked.

Jason Battlesea looked a little uncertain. “You had us investigated?” he asked. “Do you do that with all your clients?”

“I did not have you investigated,” Gregor said. “I did ask around, because that’s only sensible. If I’m going to take a case, I want to be sure that the people I’m working with are capable of being worked with. But this is not that. This is a hard-copy printout of the computer files you sent me outlining this case. And do you know what’s wrong with it?”

“Did we leave something out?” Jack Mann asked. “We went over it and over it. We really did.”

“You may have left something out,” Gregor said, “but it would be hard for me to know what. What’s wrong with this is this: Four-fifths of it concern the robberies, or Chapin Waring disappearing at the very moment when she was identified as one of the people involved in those robberies, or about the people Chapin Waring did or didn’t know in the period when those robberies were taking place. There are even six solid pages about debutante parties.”

The three men looked more and more bewildered. It wasn’t stupidity. They were all bright enough. It wasn’t even entirely lack of experience. There were experienced agents of the FBI who were making this same mistake, but they had the excuse that this case was not actually theirs. Jason Battlesea, Mike Held, and Jack Mann had no excuse at all.

Gregor tried very hard not to let his exasperation show.

“No matter what happened with those robberies,” he said, “you have a case here and now. You have a body in the morgue. You have a crime scene. You have an act of violence. A woman was murdered in a house on Beach Drive. She was stabbed in the back with—with what? I presume a knife, but your report to me doesn’t actually say so. I can find out more about a thirty-year-old bank robbery in these pages than I can about your actual case.”

“But,” Jason Battlesea said.

“Yes?” Gregor said.

“But aren’t they connected?” Jason Battlesea said.

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

“But they have to be connected,” Jason Battlesea said. “She disappeared because of the bank robberies, and because those two people got killed in the last one. She wouldn’t just come back here for no reason. She knew the FBI was looking for her. And why would anybody kill her if it didn’t have something to do with the robberies? It’s not like she’d been here all the time, making enemies.”

“Maybe,” Gregor said, “but I don’t know, and you don’t know either. What if this hadn’t been Chapin Waring who’d been killed? What if it had been some unknown woman? How would you have gone about it then?”

“Well, we’d have tried to identify her,” Mark Held said. “But we have identified her this time. There were fingerprints and that kind of thing. The identification isn’t in doubt.”

“If it had been an unknown woman,” Gregor said, “I presume you would have gathered all the forensic evidence and sent it to the lab. And yes, I know the state lab lost its accreditation. But you’d have done that. Have you done that?

“All right,” Gregor said. “Then I would presume you’d cordon off the scene and keep going over it. You’d check out the rest of the house. You’d talk to the neighbors.”

“We did all those things,” Mike Held said.

“And you didn’t put that into your report,” Gregor told him. “She was stabbed. I assume with a knife. Where did the knife come from? Was it part of a set in the house? Was it brought in from outside?”

“It wasn’t part of a set from the house that we could see,” Mark Held said. “We looked in the kitchen, and there were three or four knife sets in those wooden blocks, but they were all full. It could have been in the house in a drawer or something, not part of a set, but we’ve got no way of knowing. Nobody has lived in that house for decades.”