“I’m pretty sure the shots weren’t fired right next to the back of the house,” Tammaro said. “The reports would have been louder.”
“What about much farther way, all the way up to where that house is on top of the hill?”
“No.” Tammaro was adamant. “The reports would have been much too faint. We wouldn’t have paid any attention to them. Hell, Mr. Demarkian. This is the country. People fire guns. They fire shotguns. They fire handguns. They fire rifles. I know this is pretty close to town, and that’s not as usual, but still. I’m willing to bet almost anything that those shots came from the middle of that mess of trees or close to it. And Canton felt the same way.”
“Canton is the other officer?”
“That’s right. And I’ve known him a long time. He’s a good officer.”
Gregor was sure he was. He was also sure that it was not possible for somebody to have fired shots from those trees and made it out clean before Tammaro and Canton showed up. And yet the shots had been fired, and the fired shots had brought the two officers around to the back of the house, and in the short space of time in which they had been back there, a woman had been murdered. And not just murdered any which way. She’d been smashed to Hell with something like a bat, which was not an easy way to kill someone, or a way that was guaranteed to take no time at all.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “The two of you came around back here, and I suppose you spent at least some time checking out what might have been going on.”
“Some time, yes,” Tammaro said, “but not very long. We were telling the truth to Dale back there, Mr. Demarkian. We really were. We came back here and there was nothing. Not a single thing. And we only looked around a little to make sure that nobody was hiding behind a bush with a shotgun, out to get us, or something. And we didn’t see anybody, so Canton went back to the front of the house and I started looking through the wood. We couldn’t have both been out here together for more than two or three minutes, tops.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “That tells us one thing. It’s unlikely anybody would have had the time both to murder Shelley Niederman and to get into the house to search.”
“Nobody went into the house,” Tammaro said positively. “I can guarantee it for the time we were both out front, and Canton can guarantee it for the time he was there. And we weren’t gone long enough for somebody to get in and get out again.”
Gregor thought about it. “There had to be a second time when nobody was in front of the house, isn’t that true? Didn’t Canton come back here and get you when he found the body?”
“No,” Tammaro said. “He shouted, and I came around the front. And the house is locked up tight. We made sure of it when we came on duty. Nobody was in that house today, Mr. Demarkian, except for you, when you came in this morning and looked around. You could go back in there right this minute and you wouldn’t find a single thing disturbed.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Then let’s go back and look at the house.”
2
The front of the house was still full of emergency vehicles and police officers, and probably would be for hours, but they had been joined by a thin line of cable news vans now parked on the road just outside the driveway. Gregor had wondered when that would begin to happen, and now it had. He walked over to the other officer, the one Tammaro had called Canton, and introduced himself. Somebody had put a floodlight on, in spite of the fact that it was the middle of the afternoon. The light hurt his eyes.
“Canton is my first name,” Canton said. “Weeks is my last. Nobody ever calls me that. They ought to do something about the way they name children. Nobody ever seems to like their own name.”
Gregor actually liked his name just fine, but this was just small talk. Shelley Niederman’s body had been taken out of the doorway, which was now in the process of being taped up as a crime scene. Shelley Niederman’s body was on a stretcher near the ambulance, in a body bag, as anonymous as garbage put out on the curb for pickup.
“Just tell me one thing, if you could,” he said. “When you found her, she was dead. Not when the both of you checked her, but when you found her. Because you were by yourself in the beginning, right?”
“Right. I came back around front because we didn’t want the front left unguarded for very long. As soon as I know there wasn’t anybody out there meaning to shoot us dead, I came back around and let Tammaro go on investigating. Not that I left him there for long. I came around and there she was, and I called for him before I even started trying to check her out. I don’t mean any disrespect for Dale Vardan—”