Skeleton Key(107)

“You’re sure? It could just have been kids. Really. That museum thing is left unlocked all the time. And the kids always know where stuff is.”

“If it hadn’t been for the Jeep, I’d agree with you. But the Jeep was there, and the skeleton was there. We have to assume that the point was to divert our attention from something, but what?”

“It didn’t divert our attention from the Jeep,” Stacey Spratz said. “We went over it with a microscope.”

“And?”

“And, the report was in that stuff I gave you. Some paint flecks here and there. That’s all. The paint flecks didn’t belong to the BMW.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “they wouldn’t. The BMW wasn’t hit by anything, as far as I know.”

“Not as far as we could tell.”

“So that takes care of that. But if it wasn’t the Jeep, it had to be something. The murderer wouldn’t take the risk of dragging that skeleton through the brush just for kicks, even if it is only ten or fifteen yards. Ten or fifteen yards and up to the right of the house. What’s to the left of the house?”

“To the left and to the back, the cemetery. We went that way.”

“Right. We’d better get out of here, then. There has to be something, but I don’t know what it is. And I desperately need some coffee.”

Gregor also desperately needed some food—for some reason, the McDonald’s hadn’t really managed to stay with him; it seemed odd, considering the fact that everything had been fried—but he didn’t want to suggest it and find that Stacey knew yet another fast-food place he was dying to visit. Taco Bell. Kentucky Fried. Gregor missed Cavanaugh Street more than ever. At least on Cavanaugh Street he could get something decent to eat.

Stacey Spratz was more worried about the logistics of the situation.

“Maybe I can get them to form a wedge that would get us out. If they don’t do that, I don’t know how we’re going to get out. Have you ever seen anything like this?”

As a matter of fact, Gregor had seen things like this, on a number of occasions, but before they had always involved serial killers who had targeted young children, or high political figures. He didn’t know what was going on in Washington, Connecticut, except, perhaps, boredom. Why the national media were behaving the way they were, he couldn’t have said. Someday he was going to have to sit down and think through the entire idea of celebrity. Why some people had it. Why other people paid attention to it. Why so many people thought it was important. Sometimes he thought he was looking at an addiction, or a mania.

“Let’s do what we have to do,” he told Stacey Spratz. “But let’s do it fast.”





2


In the end, Mark Cashman came with them, too.

“It counts as work,” he said. “And I’m officially off-duty. And I need to talk to somebody.”

Gregor and Stacey didn’t complain. Instead, with Mark at their side, they headed for Waterbury, where the Barnes & Noble had a Starbucks.

“It’s far enough away so that we won’t be tripping over reporters,” Mark said, “and I can get a café mocha.”

There was a danger that they would have to trip over reporters anyway. At least two tried to follow them, pulling out behind them on 109 and sticking close enough so that one of them bumped the back of Stacey’s cruiser at least twice. On a major highway, they could have picked up speed and tried to outrun them. On the back roads of the Northwest Hills, it was impossible. What Stacey did was dodge. Down one side street and up another, onto dirt roads, around the bends of hills that seemed to rise and fall without sense or reason. It took nearly half an hour, but they lost both the cars that were following them.

“And now that they’re lost, they’ll really be lost,” Stacey said. “You can drive around all day up here and never see anything but more trees, if you don’t know where you’re going.”

“Well, I don’t want them so lost they can’t go home,” Mark Cashman said. “The last thing I want is a bunch of New York reporters wandering around for the winter, with me supposed to be taking care of them.”

“I think the CNN reporters are from Atlanta,” Stacey said.

Gregor ignored them both, and headed straight for the doors of Barnes & Noble as soon as Stacey parked the car. Inside, he went to the fenced-off area where Starbucks had its tables and pushed two small square ones together. Then he sat down on a rickety chair and got out his notebook. He was usually very organized about his work. It made him half-crazy to be in a situation like this one, where it seemed impossible to organize anything at all.