Skeleton Key(116)

Serial murderers were odd people, in ways which were not all that obvious. Gregor had spent ten years of his life trying to understand them, and he still went over the problem in his mind from time to time, and kept up on the research. By now he was convinced that there were probably at least two kinds, which he privately labeled the smart ones and the stupid ones. In reality, it was probably a difference between the ones who were otherwise sane and the ones who were full-blown schizophrenics. In every case he had ever known, though, the bottom line had been about sex. The eroticization of death. The sexuality of violence. The confusion of orgasm and anger. If nothing else about the murders here in Connecticut proved that they were not committed by a serial killer, there was the fact that they had nothing to do with sex.

Crazy people kill for sex. Sane people kill for money.

As a motto, that was terrible. It wasn’t even true. At four o’clock in the morning, when he couldn’t get hold of anybody on Cavanaugh Street and those people he could get hold of didn’t know what was happening to Bennis, when he wanted to sleep so badly he could scream and yet he couldn’t make himself do it, when it seemed as if all the radio played was the Beach Boys singing “Fun, Fun, Fun”—it would have to do. Eventually, he gave up and watched television, which consisted of bad movies on one channel and ads for Jeff Fox doing the weather on another. The channel with Jeff Fox was the one Bennis liked to watch. It started its morning news at five. Gregor left it there. Eventually, he fell asleep sitting up in a chair, thinking about the British police with their wrecking crew, going into Frederick West’s house and taking down the walls, digging up the cement foundation in the basement, finding bodies everywhere.

Asleep, he dreamed about Bennis, alone and in trouble, somewhere he couldn’t get to her.





2


In the morning, when Stacey Spratz had picked him up and deposited him in the big conference room at the back of the Washington Police Department’s building, Gregor was not only depressed, but just as depressed as everybody else. The table in the middle of the room was now even more full of papers than it had been the first time Gregor had ever seen it. Reports were everywhere, succinct and legalistic at the same time, describing time of death, cause of death, accompanying circumstances. Gregor could have recited the evidence by rote. He thought Stacey Spratz, Mark Cashman, and Tom Royce could, too. None of it mattered unless they could get this case into a courtroom, and at the moment they couldn’t have done that if they’d done nothing else but try.

“This is why I never wanted to be part of a big-city police department,” Mark Cashman said. “This and getting shot. But there must be a lot of this in a city, cases you can’t close even though you know how to solve them, cases you can’t prove. It would drive me nuts.”

“You’d think there would be something,” Tom Royce agreed. “I mean, how many times can someone commit murder and not leave a piece of solid evidence around? Just one piece.”

“Did anyone go out to Margaret Anson’s house and try the back door to that garage?” Gregor asked them.

“I did,” Mark Cashman said. “There was no go. You could tell that somebody had tramped around back there, but once you get past the bush at the very top of the hill, right next to the garage, there’s a path. It could have been anybody.”

“Doing anything,” Stacey Spratz said.

“You’d think there would be something,” Tom Royce said again. “A coat sleeve caught on a branch and torn. A footprint preserved in the mud.”

“What about the bank accounts,” Gregor said. “Have those been checked out yet? After all, a deposit of over a hundred thousand dollars is at least a start—”

“We’re getting there,” Stacey Spratz said. “We had to get some kind of court order. We ought to have that information some time later today.”

They all looked at each other. The bank accounts would at least be something, assuming they showed what they ought to show. There was a large urn of coffee in the middle of the table. Gregor stood up and got himself some. He’d drunk so much coffee by now that he felt like an electrical outlet. He was wired to the hilt. When this was over and the adrenaline went down, he was going to fall over like a tree.

They had just begun to go over it all again—the paths, the bank accounts, the distance from the Litchfield Museum to the Fairfield Family Cemetery—when there was a knock on the conference room door and a young woman stuck her head in.

“I know you said you didn’t want to be disturbed,” she said, “but there’s a woman outside who says she has to see Mr. Demarkian. I mean, there are two women together, but it’s just the one who has to see Mr. Demarkian. She says it’s important. She says it’s about a telephone pole.”