“Fine,” Gregor said. “Then what the Hell is this woman doing here? How did she get in? Did someone let her in? If someone did, where is the someone? Could she have just walked in? Did Annie-Vic usually leave her doors unlocked? What about the relatives? Would they have left them unlocked if they went out?”
“Ah,” Eddie Block said.
“I don’t think the relatives would have left the doors unlocked,” Tom Fordman said. “I mean, they’re from out of town. They live in big cities and people don’t do that kind of thing there.”
“Do they do that kind of thing here?” Gregor asked. “Do people leave their doors unlocked in Snow Hill?”
“Oh, yeah,” Eddie Block said. “I can’t remember the last time I locked mine. Maybe when we went away on vacation last summer, but maybe not. But I’m with Tom. The relatives would have.”
“Fine,” Gregor felt as if he were swimming through molasses. “Then here’s what we’ve got. We’ve got a woman dead on the floor who has no reason to be in this house and, as far as we know, no way to get into it. We’ve got a woman outside who was with her but who didn’t come in, and if the murderer had run out the front door and down the front path, that woman would have seen him. Or her. Never mind. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“The murderer might have gone out the back way,” Eddie Block said.
“Is there a back way?” Gregor asked, although he supposed that there would have to be. “Never mind,” he said. “Yes, the murderer might have gone out the back way, or he might not have. He could still be in the house. The times are close enough that that’s not impossible. And there’s another thing to worry about. Something else might be in the house.”
“What?” Eddie Block said.
“More bodies,” Gregor told him. “Think about this for a minute. Annie-Vic was assaulted. This woman was murdered. We have no reason why any of it has happened, but we do know that it’s all in some way connected to Annie-Vic. Which means that there might be something here, something in the house, that’s triggering all this. And the relatives are staying in the house. And we don’t know where they are. For all we do know, they could be upstairs at this minute lying in pools of their own blood, because whatever is important enough to somebody to kill for is something they’ve been stumbling over since they arrived in town—”
Eddie Block and Tom Fordman looked at each other. Their expressions were still both blank.
That was when Gregor made up his mind. It didn’t matter that Gary Albright was a suspect in his own case, he could not be dispensed with. In Snow Hill, at just this moment, there was no other person who could make this case work at all. If they weren’t going to have Gary Albright, then they were going to have to call in the state police. Gregor was with Gary Albright on that one. You didn’t do that except as a last resort.
Gregor got out his cell phone. “Give me half a second to make a phone call,” he said, “and then we’ll go upstairs and search.”
2
Years ago, so many now that he couldn’t imagine what he had looked like then, as a newly minted special agent of the FBI, Gregor had been sent on a kidnaping detail with a veteran agent and a tech crew. The case was being worked out of a small town in eastern Massachusetts, close enough to Boston and the Cape to be the location of serious money, but far enough away to look rural and “unspoiled.” In those days, Gregor had not understood the concept of “unspoiled,” or why so many of the people he worked with seemed to worship it. Unlike most of the people he worked with, and most of the people he’d gone to college and graduate school with, he had not grown up middle class in a suburb. He’d been raised in what would now be called the inner city, except that instead of a racial enclave he’d come from an ethnic one. Tenements full of apartments that never had enough windows, schools that had been built in the 1920s and not updated since—the only thing that broke the routine of work and grind and hope was the trip, once a year, to visit relatives who lived in “the country.” The country was a farm somebody had bought after coming over from Armenia with a little extra cash, or after working a few decades in a factory somewhere. Farming was the big thing, because in Armenia a man who owned his own farm was a man of stature. The farms Gregor had visited in his childhood, however, had really been unspoiled, untouched by human progress. The bathrooms were out the kitchen door to the back, in little wooden sheds that had no heat. Gregor could only imagine what they would be like in the middle of the night in the middle of winter. They were bad enough in the middle of the night in the summer heat. Water came into the kitchen sink by a hand pump. The roads were dirt. The nearest approximation of civilization was a small town thirty miles away that consisted of a feed store and a dry goods store and a gas station with a single pump. Why anybody would want to live like that, Gregor didn’t know—but of course the people he worked with didn’t want to live like that. They wanted to build big modern houses in the emptiness of the countryside and then travel an hour to get to what they’d consider a “real” job, where they could complain about the hardships of having to drive on the dirt roads and the glories of buying only locally grown vegetables.