Gregor went back outside and looked at the door again. Stewart Crone was right. There was no sign that the lock had been jimmied. Of course, it was also possible that the front door was not the point of entry. That idea opened up yet another can of worms.
He started to walk toward Mike Held and Jack Mann, to explain the alternate-entry idea, when there was a noise on the road and a long, black Volvo Cross Country station wagon came barreling up the drive, screeching to a halt just millimeters from the back of Jack and Mike’s municipal car.
A second later, the driver’s door opened and a tall, thin woman with wild hair jumped out, looking ready to kill somebody.
“For God’s sake,” she said. “Can you people get anything done right?”
2
There was a small moment when Gregor felt as if he’d seen this woman a hundred times before—and then he knew, of course, that she was Chapin Waring’s sister. What he was looking at was mostly Chapin Waring’s face, but much older than it had been in the newspaper photographs and memorabilia from the time of the robberies. There were four sisters. He wondered if the two he hadn’t seen resembled each other as closely as these two did.
This one was loaded for bear.
“The one thing in the entire universe that you’re supposed to do,” she said, advancing on Mike Held and Jack Mann, “is to keep people away from this God damned house. You were supposed to do it before, but by God, you’d think that with a murder in the living room, and having to haul Gregor Demarkian out here to save your asses from not being able to detect tapioca pudding, you’d think you’d be able to do it now. What’s wrong with you? I thought you were supposed to have a guard out here twenty-four/seven.”
“Now, Mrs. Holder, you know we weren’t going to do that,” Jack Mann said. “We explained it to you. The department doesn’t have the kind of manpower we’d need to keep this place under surveillance twenty-four/seven. If that’s what you want, you’re going to have to hire your own man.”
“I’m going to have to hire a good lawyer to sue your asses off sooner rather than later,” the woman said. “I’m going to do something, because I’m sure as hell Fed up. First Chapin turns up out of nowhere when all of you were supposed to be looking for her—”
“We weren’t looking for her,” Mike Held said. “It’s the feds that have been looking for her.”
“—she turns up here when you were supposed to be looking for her. She’s seen by half the people in town. You do absolutely nothing about it and then she turns up dead. And do you know what’s happened to me, seriously? My life has become one long defense against my telephone. I’ve got reporters staking out my house. I’ve got my children being asked God only knows what at school and now it’s all over the television again. And you can’t even keep the tourists out of the house.”
“We don’t know it was a tourist,” Mike Held said.
The woman looked at him as if he were pond scum clinging to her Wellingtons. “For God’s sake,” she said. “Who else would it be?”
Gregor gave a little cough. The group all turned their heads to him. The woman blinked.
“Who’s this?” she asked.
“This is Gregor Demarkian,” Mike Held said. “He just got in this morning.”
“He doesn’t look like much,” she said. “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Maybe if you don’t look like much, people tell you things they shouldn’t.”
“Mrs. Holder—” Mike Held said.
Caroline Holder ignored him. “Are you actually going to do something about this mess?” she asked Gregor Demarkian. “Or will you say you’re going to do something about it and then you never do?”
“I’m going to try to do something about it,” Gregor said. “I’d like to know why you’re so sure the alarm was set off by tourists.”
Caroline Holder looked infinitely tired. “Because it always is tourists,” she said. “Even before the murder, it was tourists—there were just fewer of them. God, I hate those cable channels. It was bad enough before, what with ‘retrospectives’ and all that other crap every few years. And then there was America’s Most Wanted, which for a minute or two I was stupid enough to think might do some good. Now there’s American Justice and City Confidential and Deadly Women and all the rest of them, rehashing the case and rehashing the case and rehashing the case until you’d think it had become some kind of cult. And then there was the murder, and the town is full of people who just want to get a look. Even Darlee Corn’s full up, and the prices she charges ought to be illegal.”