“And Annie-Vic went looking for it,” Gary said.
“She saw the disclosure form and knew there was something wrong, and then she went looking for it,” Gregor said. “Exactly. And if she’d died when she was attacked, nobody else would have had to. You would have filed the case under ‘unsolved’ and put it down to juvenile delinquents in your head. Her family would have come in and boxed up all her stuff and put it in storage. Our murderer would have had all the time in the world to clean up the garbage, and that was that. As long as Annie-Vic was alive, those papers stayed put and anybody with access to them became a danger.”
“But Shelley Niederman didn’t have access to them,” Eddie protested.
“Our murder thought she did,” Gregor said. “Or maybe I’d better say that our murderer had no guarantee that she hadn’t, and it was better safe than sorry. So Shelley got a call from somebody she trusted. She went up to the Hadley house for what she probably thought was a meeting. The officers were diverted to the back by—”
Gregor’s phone went off. “There it is,” he said.
“That’s Molly and Evan. Thank God.”
2
They came trooping back to the Snow Hill Police Department, not just Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker, but two state police officers of the small platoon that had been left at the Hadley house.
“No more chances that two of us go missing at the same time again,” one of the officers explained to Gregor that morning, back when he’d told Tammaro and Weeks to find out what was in those woods behind Annie-Vic’s.
Gregor did not blame Dale Vardan for this one, although he still blamed Dale for a lot of things. Even Dale’s belligerent opportunism was serving some good today, though, and so he let it go.
Molly had the evidence bag when she came in, and she laid it down on Gary Albright’s desk in front of Gregor.
“There it is,” she said. “Or, I should say, they are. There are two of them. There was one about fifty feet or so behind the house. The other was right at the back. On the lawn. It was close enough to the house to have started a fire if something went wrong.”
“What are those?” Gary asked, holding up the evidence bag and looking at its contents in the light. “Are those caps? Like for cap pistols?”
“They’re caps,” Gregor said, “but not for cap pistols. They’re what special effects departments used to use to make the sound of rapid gunfire. They’re probably three or four hundred times as powerful as a cap pistol cap.”
“And all you have to do is light them,” Molly said, “because they’re primed to a delay when they go off. And they’re really loud. And they sound so much like real gunfire, I’ve never met anyone who can tell the difference if they haven’t been told.”
“But why two of them?” Eddie Block said. “It looks like they each make, what, three or four shots? Why put one so close to the house?”
“Oh, I know that,” Molly said. “To get the officers to come on back. I’ll bet there are more of these around somewhere, unpopped ones, just in case those two weren’t enough to get the officers to come looking.”
“Very good,” Gregor said. “There were two officers posted guard, both of them had to be away from the front of the house when Shelley Niederman arrived. Our murderer put one of these sets in the woods, then another closer to the house. Our murderer went around one way and the officers came around the other, and a few minutes later Shelley Niederman arrived and headed for the front door.”
“It was an awful risk to take,” Gary Albright said.
“It was,” Gregor admitted. “But there’s a lot of risk taking here. Judy Cornish died because the house wasn’t empty when she went inside. That was a bigger risk than the one with Shelley Niederman. For one thing, there was Shelley Niederman, sitting out there in that Volvo the whole time the murder of Judy Cornish was going on. But it was the only thing that could have been done, under the circumstances, so it was done. And that’s how we got here.”
“And we can make an arrest?” Gary Albright asked.
“Not quite yet,” Gregor Demarkian said. “There’s one more question I need an answer to. After that, you can arrest away.”
3
There was actually more than one question Gregor Demarkian needed the answer to, but those other questions did not need to be answered before they made an arrest. There were always loose ends at the close of cases, always things he had to keep hounding people for after the main action was over. In this case, he would want to know something of what happened to Alice McGuffie after her several hours in jail. He wished he could look inside that woman’s head and see what had finally sparked that small bit of intelligence, the one that made her realize that that picture she had had something important to say. He wondered if she knew what it was that was important there and decided she probably did not. Alice McGuffie’s hatred and resentment of Catherine Marbledale were so deep and so hot, she would have done anything she thought would get the woman in trouble. It frightened him, sometimes, how much bad emotion there was in the world, as if human beings could never completely accept happiness as a state of mind. So much of what went wrong everywhere, so much of crime, so much of violence, so much of murder, was just this: that human beings cared only about other human beings, and half the time that care was expressed as a wish for annihilation.