Skeleton Key(119)

“After it had been smashed into a telephone pole hard enough to knock the pole over?”

“Why not? It still runs. It was returned to Faye Dallmer banged up but still going. That’s what the report said.”

Another car pulled into the road and up onto the grass. Mark Cashman got out and walked over to them.

“I talked to SNET. It was the second one in from Sixty-three. And it fell toward Sixty-three, too.”

“That way.” Gregor pointed away from the part of the hill that led up to the cemetery.

“Right,” Mark Cashman said.

“I had it backward, you see, that was the problem,” Gregor said. “I thought that the murderer must have hit Kayla Anson’s BMW with the Jeep. The murderer was following Kayla close enough to bump her, according to Zara Anne Moss. I thought that what must have happened was that something from the BMW got onto the Jeep, and then it needed to be disguised. But if you think about it, that doesn’t make much sense. The Jeep was being driven very oddly some of the time. People would have seen it. People might have remembered it and commented on it. In fact, people did see it and comment on it. And so what? The Jeep didn’t belong to the murderer anyway. The murderer could leave any evidence on it at all, and it just wouldn’t have mattered.”

“Then why smash up the Jeep?” Stacey asked. “Why knock over a telephone pole.”

“Because the Jeep smashed into something else,” Gregor said. “It smashed into the murderer’s own car.”

“The Ferrari,” Mark said.

“The problem,” Gregor said, “was that the Jeep, which lots of people could have seen and remembered, and would know was following Kayla Anson’s BMW, the Jeep now had trace evidence of the murderer’s own car. There’s an efficient area of police work for you—we can get all kinds of things off a car that’s hit something. So the idea was, I think, to have it hit something else and far more violently. To layer evidence on top of evidence. To give the impression diat we had found the source of the crash, on the assumption that we wouldn’t go looking for another one.”

“There’s still a chance that something is left on that Jeep,” Mark Cashman said. “We can get it from Faye for a couple of days and check it out.”

“You do that,” Gregor said. “What about the Ferrari? Can we get to that?”

“I don’t see why not,” Stacey said. “It can’t have disappeared.”

“It’s likely to be someplace not immediately available,” Gregor said. “At somebody else’s house. Or in the garage. If the Jeep smashed into it, there may have been some damage.”

“Well, there’s only one place in this part of the hills that fixes Ferarris,” Stacey said. “That ought to be easy enough.”

“Did the telephone company people take pictures?” Gregor asked.

Mark Cashman turned on his heel and went back to his car. Gregor looked around the Capernaum Road one more time. There really wasn’t anything much to it and yet there had to be more than he could see. The need to walk, and the need for secrecy, required it.

“Stacey?” he said. “Is there any road branching off this road? Not the routes on either end. A road.”

“Go on up to about the fourth pole,” Stacey said. “You’ll see it going into the woods on the left. On the pole side, I mean. It isn’t really a road anymore. The town doesn’t maintain it. There used to be a house up there back about fifty years ago, but there’s nothing now. Why?”

Gregor walked up to the fourth pole. He had been there before, and he hadn’t noticed it, but it was there—a road in the process of self-destruction. The weeds were high in the center of it. There were rocks everywhere. Still, the edges of what had once been a traveled pathway were clearly visible, if you took the time to look.

“What’s wrong?” Stacey asked, coming up behind him.

“You need to get some people up there,” Gregor said. “That’s where Kayla Anson died. Up that thing. That’s where the BMW and the Jeep and the Ferrari were parked. Nobody would ever have known they were there.”

“Taking a four-hundred-thousand-dollar Ferrari up that thing is asking for trouble.”

“Under the circumstances, I think that was a minor consideration. But you can see what happened. The murder venue had to be out of the way. So did the places where the switches were made. Capernaum Road itself wouldn’t do. It was too well-traveled. People probably use it for a shortcut—”

“All the time.”

“—and that means the chance of getting caught at any moment. So you come up here instead, and it’s quiet and out of the way, and nobody will see you. But you have to keep your lights low or off. If you don’t, somebody might see them. So you come barreling back up here after you dump the body, you need to move the Jeep for some reason, and instead you smash into your own car. If that hadn’t happened, I think the Jeep would still be on this road.”