Skeleton Key(128)
“Things are very close around here,” Peter said.
“Yes, they are. Much closer than I’d realized, when I started. The roads make it confusing. But you weren’t limited to the roads. So you stole the Jeep, and you parked it off to the side someplace, and you waited for Kayla Anson to come through. And when she did, you pulled out onto the road and followed her, as closely as possible, until you got to Capernaum Road. At that point, you forced her off to the side and onto Capernaum Road. Then you forced her off to the side again on the dirt access road. It wouldn’t have been hard. You only needed to do some ordinary crowding and to not care if the Jeep got hurt. And she wouldn’t have had anyplace to go but where you wanted her to go.”
“And?”
“And,” Gregor said, “you got out of the Jeep and she got out of the BMW, and then you hit her over the head and shoved her into the passenger seat of her own car. And then you strangled her. Because she wanted the money repaid. And when she wasn’t getting satisfaction from you, she’d decided to tell her lawyers about it and let them handle the collection. I take it you’re more or less flat broke.”
“Everybody who runs a small business is more or less flat broke.”
“You didn’t want anybody to know you’d borrowed the money. You never wanted anybody to know that. Because you like all this. You like people like these to be your friends. And you couldn’t borrow money from your teen-aged, over-rich girlfriend without giving yourself the kind of reputation the people here would not forgive. They would have winked at sex, or even at drugs and drinking. But they have no mercy on people they think are out to take their money.”
“It’s like walking over the Grand Canyon on a tightrope,” Peter said. And then he smiled, and shook his head, and drank his scotch.
“You strangled Kayla Anson in the front passenger seat of her own car. Then you got into the driver’s seat of that car and drove out to Margaret Anson’s place. You left the car in the garage. If Margaret heard it, she’d just think Kayla was coming home. After you dumped the body there, you got out of the car and left by the garage’s back door. You went through the little woods there to One-oh-nine. And then you walked back to the Litchfield Road.”
“That’s a long walk,” Peter said. “Have you any idea how long a walk?”
“Sure. It’s just about ten miles even. I checked. But that explains the times, you see. Because a number of other things happened that night, but they didn’t happen until nearly midnight. They couldn’t happen. You were walking back, and taking your time about it, too. There was no reason to be in a hurry. Nobody ever goes onto that access road, and if they did, what would they find? Your car and the Jeep. As far as you knew, nobody could connect the Jeep to Kayla Anson anyway.”
“I must have been cold.”
“In more ways than one. When you got back to Capernaum and the access road, I think you had to move the Jeep in order to get your own car out. On that part, I’m not completely sure. But whatever the reason, you got into the Jeep and started to move it and miscalculated in the dark, because you were trying to do all this without lights. You didn’t want anybody coming by on Capernaum to see you on that road. And while you were moving the Jeep, you smashed into your own car and caused a lot of damage. A fire engine red Ferrari Testarosa. That’s why you’re driving a rental car at the moment I noticed it when we came to your house to talk. We have the Testarosa, by the way. We impounded it this morning.”
“Marvelous.”
“You needed to do something to erase the traces of the Testarosa from the Jeep. You did the only thing that might have a hope in hell of accomplishing that You staged another collision. You drove the Jeep down to Capernaum and rammed it into a telephone pole, several times. You knocked the pole over. Then you took the Jeep up the hill into the Fairchild Family Cemetery. But you still didn’t think you were safe.”
“Obviously.”
“So you went around back and up to the hill, trying to see if there was anything you could find that would help take our attention away from Capernaum, to move it in the other direction. Just in case. What you found was the Litchfield Museum, complete with a brand-new skeleton exhibit and doors left unlocked and security system left turned off. So you took what was on hand—the skeleton—and went and put it down on the Chandling brothers’ front porch. And it worked. Everybody worried about the skeleton. Everybody concentrated on how that and the Jeep were connected. It didn’t occur to anybody, then, that they weren’t connected, at least not in any straightforward sense. It didn’t occur to anybody, then, that the skeleton wasn’t the point.”