Hearts of Sand(37)

“There aren’t dead bolts or that kind of thing for backup?” Gregor asked.

“You don’t use dead bolts when you leave a house,” Stewart said. “That’s for when you stay in. Anyway, this door has one of those locks that turn with a little half circle key. I’m pretty sure horizontal is locked and vertical is unlocked, and it was vertical when I got there.”

“Anything disturbed?” Mike Held asked.

“I wouldn’t know how to check,” Stewart said. “I did a quick tour and nothing seemed out of place, but any number of things could have been taken that I wouldn’t notice.”

“Tell me you took an inventory the night of the crime,” Gregor said.

“It was the day after,” Mike Held said, “but we took it. And we’ve got a copy at the station and another one we gave to Mrs. Holder.”

“Mrs. Holder is—?” Gregor said.

“Caroline Waring Holder,” Mike said. “She’s the youngest sister.”

“We get your drift, Mr. Demarkian,” Jack Mann said. “We should double-check against the inventory. We will.”

“Let me just make sure I have this part straight,” Gregor said. “The security company called in to the police station to say that the alarm had gone off in this house. When Officer Crone got here, he found the front door open and probably unlocked. The door had been locked by the police when they last investigated the scene of the crime. Could anybody else have been in this house legitimately between then and now?”

“The sister could have,” Mike Held said. “Mrs. Holder.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Then we’ve got two possibilities: Either this Mrs. Holder came into the house for reasons of her own over the last few days and accidentally left the front door unlocked when she left, or somebody with a key to the front door let himself or herself in and then let the alarm go off, and then left.”

“Why does that sound ridiculous when you say it?” Mike Held asked.

“Because,” Gregor said, “you have to assume that anybody who legitimately has a key to this house must also have the code for the security system. Without it, the key is pretty much useless. There is always the possibility that somebody has an unauthorized key to this house, but then we run into the same roadblock. The key without the security code is worthless. And anybody who actually knew anything about this house would know that.”

“So, what are you saying, exactly?” Jack Mann said. “Nobody tried to get into the house? Because somebody seems to have tried to get into the house.”

“Why?” Gregor asked.

“To tamper with evidence,” Mike Held said. “Isn’t that why people usually do these things?”

“Yes, that’s why they usually do them,” Gregor said, “but in this case, we’re back to the problem. Anybody who knew anything about this house would know there was a security system here. I’d assume that most of the houses on this road have security systems.”

“All of them,” Mike Held agreed.

“But on top of that,” Gregor said, “this is a house with a history. Everybody in town knows about it. People five states away know about it. Even someone who stole a key, or managed to get a copy, would at least be able to guess that there was a security system here. And that means that if somebody who didn’t have the security code wanted to get in to tamper with or remove evidence, they’d have to know exactly where that evidence was and it would have to be easy to tamper with it or remove it. There wouldn’t be any time for mucking around, looking for it. The alarm would go off in a minute or two, and the police would be here sooner rather than later.”

“Maybe whoever it was was desperate,” Jack Mann said. “Maybe he decided to take a chance because it was now or never.”

“He’d have to be desperate enough to get stupid,” Gregor Demarkian said, “and that’s a lot of desperate for a case that, until now, has generated not a single suspect that I know of. Unless I missed that part in the notes.”

“There are suspects,” Mike Held said, “sort of. But not—you know what I mean. We know a lot about the people Chapin Waring knew when she was here thirty years ago. Those people are at least possible suspects.”

“My point exactly,” Gregor said.

He took his cell phone out of his pocket and used it to push the front door open. He walked into a high-ceilinged, expansive foyer. A staircase with a heavy carved wood banister rose up to the right. The walls on the left had a small cluster of framed prints on the clean white wall. The prints looked like copies of things by Braque.