Hearts of Sand(36)

“There was a reason you couldn’t get in from where you were?” Gregor asked.

“I probably could have, but we’ve got keys to the security system at the front door, and it causes a lot less fuss if I do things officially,” Angela said. “I went around to the front and let myself in.”

“The front door was locked?”

“Yes, it was,” Angela said. “I had to jimmy it to get it open, and then I had to do a sprint to keep the alarm system from going off.”

“But the alarm system was on?”

“Yes, it was,” Angela said. “I stood in the foyer for a while and there was nothing to see. I called out and nobody answered. Then I went toward the back of the house, and there it was.”

“It?”

“The body,” Angela said. “She was lying on the floor, the knife was sticking out of her back, and the place was a complete mess. She had a gun in her hand. The whole room was shot up, the mirrors, the chandelier, everything. There was glass everywhere. But that isn’t the detail you want.”

“What detail do I want?” Gregor asked.

“She wasn’t wearing espadrilles,” Angela Harkin said. She sounded almost triumphant. “These two have been telling me I must have been mistaken about the espadrille I saw when I looked in from the back, but I’m not. It was an espadrille I saw. But the body of Chapin Waring was wearing tennis shoes. And they weren’t anything like the same color.”

The door to the room opened up, and the uniformed woman from the front desk looked in. “You haven’t been answering your beeper,” she said to Jason Battlesea. “You’re needed out here for a minute.”

Jason Battlesea got up and left the room. Gregor turned his attention back to Angela Harkin.

“This foot you saw,” he said. “Was it the foot of somebody standing up? Lying down? What?”

“Not standing up,” Angela said. “It was up off the floor.”

“Like somebody was sitting on the couch or on a chair?”

“Something like that,” Angela said.

“But there was glass everywhere?” Gregor asked. “You said everywhere. There was glass on the furniture, too?”

“Yes, there was glass on the furniture,” Angela said. “Lots of it. Lots of it everywhere. Furniture, rug, floor, hearth, the body, everywhere.”

“So that if somebody was sitting or kneeling on a piece of furniture, they would have to have been sitting or kneeling on glass?” Gregor said.

“They’d have to have been sitting or kneeling on a lot of it,” Angela said.

The door opened and Jason Battlesea came back in, looking harassed.

“Here’s something,” he said. “The burglar alarm has just gone off at the Waring house.”





PART TWO

A genius is the one who is most like himself.

—Thelonius Monk





ONE

1

The Waring house turned out to be one of the ones with a high hedge near the road, so that Gregor couldn’t have seen it if he’d wanted to while he was being driven to and from town. It was yellow.

They climbed out of the almost unmarked town car now parked in the driveway of the Waring house.

There was a young patrolman in full uniform standing near the side of the house, looking uneasy and very inexperienced. He had the palm of his right hand resting on the butt of the gun in his holster. He was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“Stewart!” Mike Held called.

“This is Stewart Crone,” Jack Mann said. “Stewart, this is Gregor Demarkian.”

“Are you guys going to want to come in and look around?” Stewart asked. “I’ve been in already once and there isn’t anything. I mean, there really isn’t anything. It’s spooky.”

“We got a call from the security company?” Mike Held asked.

“Oh, yeah, exactly,” Stewart said. “And I didn’t expect to find anything. We get calls all the time. People come snooping around and trip the alarm, or the help does, or sometimes it’s animals. But this time the front door was open. It was just open. Maybe an inch or two.”

“Had it been forced?” Gregor asked.

“It doesn’t look like it,” Stewart said. “I was very careful. I moved it back and forth with a pencil so I wouldn’t smear much in the way of prints. And the other thing is, I’m pretty sure it’s unlocked.”

Gregor thought about it. “Could it have been left unlocked after the investigation?”

“No,” Jack Mann said. “Every time we’ve come to this house, I’ve locked and unlocked it myself. And I’ve always been careful to check.”