Skeleton Key(118)

“What was odd about it?” Gregor asked.

“Well, it was like Craig told me later,” Eve said. “When he called in, you know. And he was really very upset because when he got out there it was a real mess and he’d had to spend hours, and it looked like it was going to be some kind of vandalism. They all hate vandalism. Nobody wants to be out of bed and running around in the woods somewhere at two o’clock in the morning just because some kid got stupid. And with power lines involved, you’ve always got the problem that somebody could get killed.”

“Yes,” Gregor said patiently.

“Anyway,” Eve said. “The thing is, Craig said later that when they got the SNET guys out there, they—the SNET guys—they said that it looked to them as if somebody had taken a vehicle and just rammed the pole over and over again. That somebody was trying to knock it over. And Craig said to me that it really didn’t make any sense. To knock the pole over you’d have to do a lot of damage to your car. Even if you had a truck, it would end up a mess. And nobody would do that on purpose, you know? Unless you were trying to mess up the vehicle. Which really didn’t make a lot of sense.”

“The Jeep,” Mark Cashman said.

“Exactly,” Gregor said.

“You see,” Grace Feinmann said. “I told her over and over again that it wasn’t stupid, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”

“But it is stupid,” Eve said suddenly. “I mean, it must have been a big deal. They were out there all night, the crews were, getting it fixed. They might have been out there even the next morning. You know how long things like that take to fix. The news must have been just everywhere. If it was important, why didn’t they—”

“The news on Saturday was all about Kayla Anson being murdered,” Grace Feinmann said firmly. “If Saddam Hussein had landed in Washington and offered to join the United States Marine Corps as a regular recruit, it wouldn’t have made a dent.”

This, Gregor Demarkian thought, might possibly be true—but it was probably going to turn out to be mostiy his fault. They would look at the records and the records would be there, clear and obvious on the page. The problem would come down to the fact that he did not know where things were up here. He hadn’t been able to put two and two together.

Now he downed the rest of his coffee and started to shove papers into his big yellow folder.

“You were not stupid to come here,” he told Eve Wachinsky. “In fact you performed a very valuable service. Sometimes, the answer is staring you in the face but you don’t know it’s there. It takes somebody with a different perspective to point it out to you.”

“Oh,” Eve said, blushing. “Oh, dear. Well. I mean. Thank you.”

“I told you so,” Grace Feinmann said.

“I take it you want to go out to Capernaum Road.”

“As soon as you can get me there,” Gregor said. “And I want Miss Feinmann here to take Mrs. Wachinsky back to her apartment and put her to bed. Immediately. She’s, in no shape to be out. Are the rest of you gentlemen going to come with us?”

“I’m just so glad I didn’t do anything stupid,” Eve Wachinsky said. “I don’t know why it is, but I seem to spend all my time doing things that are stupid.”

Gregor Demarkian knew how that felt but at the moment he didn’t have time to think about it.





3


Out on the Capernaum Road, it was as if nothing had ever happened. No telephone pole had ever come down. No live wires had ever lay stretched across the road. As soon as Stacey Spratz’s car pulled over to the shoulder—if you could call the start of wild-growing grass a shoulder—Gregor got out and looked around. There wasn’t much to it. The road was only a few hundred feet long. On one end was Route 109. On the other was Route 63. The dirt was well-tamped and packed solid, probably because a lot of people used this road as a shortcut between the two routes. It would be faster than going all the way out to the intersection.

There were five telephone poles along the road, all on the side away from the hill that led to the Fairchild Family Cemetery. Gregor walked from one to the other of them, carefully inspecting each of them at their bases. They all looked as if they had been smashed into and knocked over, that was the problem. He came back to the police car and looked up the hill.

“That hill is rocky like that, all the way up?” he asked Stacey Spratz.

“All the way up,” Stacey agreed.

“Meaning the Jeep could have been driven straight up and into the Fairchild Family Cemetery without leaving a trace.”