Skeleton Key(109)

“Intending to?” Mark asked. “You mean you don’t think she actually did?”

“If she had, there would have been no point in killing her,” Gregor said. “Never mind in killing two other people. And it’s more than that. The original murder—the murder of Kayla Anson—was incredibly elaborate. I don’t care what you read in Agatha Christie. Murderers in real life do not tie themselves into pretzels creating complications just for the hell of it. Murderers do what they have to do. Which means everything that’s happened so far has been necessary.”

“The Jeep,” Stacey said. “Why was the Jeep necessary? Why not just use his or her own car and get to Kayla that way?”

“Because the car would be recognizable. Far too recognizable.”

“Why follow her at all?” Mark asked. “Why not just arrange a meeting out at wherever and go from there?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “possibly because Kayla would not have agreed to a meeting wherever. What’s more likely, though, is that our murderer didn’t want Kayla casually telling someone else that the meeting was going to occur, or worse, just bringing along a friend, like Annabel. The idea was to leave no trace.”

“For somebody who wanted to leave no trace, this murderer sure created a lot of fuss,” Mark said. “Skeletons. Overturned Jeeps. Whatever.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “Obviously, there’s something about the Jeep, or about the area around the cemetery, that made the diversion of the skeleton necessary. I just don’t know what yet. Maybe we ought to go back there again later this afternoon.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Stacey said. “It’s going to be dark now anytime. It gets dark early here in the fall.”

“But wait a minute,” Mark said. “What about Zara Anne Moss? Why all that fuss? I still don’t believe she saw who was driving that Jeep. She couldn’t have. All she would have seen is a dark rectangle and a blur of white for the body. That’s it.”

“Absolutely,” Gregor said. “What Zara Anne Moss saw was obviously the murderer on foot.”

“What?” Stacey said.

Gregor sighed. “On foot,” he repeated. “Think about it. The murderer used Faye Dallmer’s Jeep. In order to do that he or she had to get Faye Dallmer’s Jeep. Nobody connected with this case lives in walking distance of Faye Dallmer’s place—”

“No,” Stacey said. “Nobody does.”

“—although it is in walking distance of the Fairchild Family Cemetery, if you go across a field. Whoever it was had to drive out there to the Litchfield Road, walk to the Dallmer place, steal the Jeep, and then wait, on a side road along the way, for Kayla to come along in that BMW of hers. But in order to do all that he or she first had to walk, and the walk made the murderer vulnerable. If Zara Anne Moss hadn’t been stupid, if she hadn’t been so much in need of calling attention to herself, we’d have our evidence, our murderer would be in custody, and two people would still be alive.”

“Where was the third car?” Mark asked slowly.

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

“How did the murderer get Zara Anne Moss out to Margaret Anson’s house?” Stacey asked.

“The murderer asked her to go and the murderer came by to pick her up. Maybe it was a question of having Zara Anne walk down the Litchfield Road a ways to a meeting place. You might want to check that out. Somebody may have seen them. But don’t think that Zara Anne wouldn’t have gone. She was so desperate to be important. Isn’t that what everybody says about her? She wanted it so much. All the murderer had to do was to make her feel important She would have gone anywhere.”

“Even though she had good reason to believe that this person had killed somebody and she had evidence that could send him or her to jail.” Mark Cashman shook his head.

“I doubt if that occurred to her,” Gregor said. “She was very naive, really, in a lot of ways. She was also somewhat detached from reality—again, given what everybody says.”

“Everybody says right,” Stacey said. “She was spacey as hell. Talking all the time about having visions and being able to see into the heart of evil and auras coming from the Jeep. None of us took her seriously.”

“The murderer did,” Gregor said. “The murderer probably also realized that he or she had been spotted. The murder of Zara Anne Moss would have been easy, as long as there’s a back way into that barn, which I think there is. There’s a door, remember?”