He went in and out of another room, and another, and another. There was one more that had been slept in. Gregor assumed that that was where the grandnephew was staying. The rest of the rooms were all perfectly made up and perfectly clean—museum pieces, really, exhibits on How We Lived Then. When he had seen the last of them, he went out into the hall and looked around.
“What about upstairs?” he asked. “Are there servants’ quarters?”
“You must be joking,” Tom Fordman said. “Nobody in Snow Hill has servants’ quarters. It’s not that kind of place.”
“But this house is clean,” Gregor said, “and Annie-Vic can’t have been cleaning it herself. And I can’t imagine her mother cleaning it herself, either. Not a family with enough money to send a daughter to Vassar. They’d have had somebody in to clean.”
“Had somebody in, sure,” Tom Fordman said. “There’s a woman from out at the trailer park, you know, one of those, came in to do stuff for Annie-Vic. But she didn’t live here. You couldn’t get somebody to live here.”
“All right. What about an attic? A house this old would almost certainly have one.”
“Yeah,” Tom Fordman said. “I think it’s got an attic.”
“Has anybody looked into it?”
“I don’t get what all this is supposed to be about,” Tom Fordman said. “Nobody was killed in the attic, and nobody could hide out around here for long without somebody noticing. What is it you expect us to find?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said, and that was true. He had no idea. He just wished that things were being done more thoroughly, because in the long run thoroughness mattered.
There were sounds outside. Gregor could hear them through that partially opened window at the end of the hall. He went to look and saw the ambulance pulling in. It hadn’t had its siren going. There was another police car, too, which Gregor assumed meant the arrival of Gary Albright. The Volvo that had been there when Gregor first arrived had not moved.
“We’d better go down,” he said, gesturing to the driveway below them. “There are going to be some questions to be asked. Who is that woman who called us, the one we talked to? Who is she exactly?”
“I don’t know about exactly,” Tom Fordman said, “but she’s from the development. I think she was that Cornish woman’s friend.”
Gregor sighed. He was sure that the woman in the driveway was Mrs. Cornish’s friend, too, it was just common sense, but that wasn’t what he was asking. He stayed at the window for a moment and watched as men got out of cars and milled around.
“We’d better go down,” he said. “We’ll find someone to do a better search here later.”
3
Gary Albright was leaning up against the driver’s-side door of Snow Hill’s other police cruiser while a tangle of EMT people went back and forth into the house, without getting anywhere. Someone had reminded Eddie Block of the rules of procedure for a crime scene, or Eddie had known them already and suddenly remembered them under the pressure of events. Yellow crime scene tape now surrounded the body. Shelley Niederman was still sitting in the Volvo, crying. Nobody looked as if he knew what he was doing.
Gregor went up to Gary and looked around, one more time. “You do realize that you’ve got no choice but to call in the state police,” he said. “I know you’re reluctant to do it, but you don’t have the equipment for a proper crime scene investigation, and your people aren’t behaving as if they’ve got the training. If you don’t get some experts in here, you run the very real risk of going to trial against a murderer and losing. And once you’ve lost, you’ve lost. It doesn’t matter if somebody shows up with a photograph of the guy caught in the act.”
“What did we do before we had all these forensics?” Gary Albright said. “I watch old television, Perry Mason, old cop shows from the fifties, old movies. No forensics, yet we still caught murderers.”
“Now that the forensics exist,” Gregor said, “defense counsel can and will use your lack of them as reasonable doubt.”
“You know how to run a crime scene investigation,” Gary said. “You’ve run dozens of them. I looked you up.”
“I knew how twenty-five years ago,” Gregor said. “We didn’t have ‘all these forensics,’ as you put it, even then. And it might be longer than that, because my last ten years at the Bureau I had a desk job. You’ve got a dead woman in there. I don’t know if you’ve been in to look, but she’s bloody as Hell, and so is the scene. Assuming we’re looking for the same person in both cases, our guy decided he wasn’t going to miss the second time, and he didn’t. There’s somebody walking around who doesn’t mind doing a lot of brutal physical damage, and somebody like that is very dangerous. Call the state police.”