Skeleton Key(27)

This was beginning to sound like a college bull session going on inside his head—except that Gregor had never been part of a college bull session. He had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, but he had been a commuter student, living right here in a tenement on Cavanaugh Street, taking the bus across town.

If I’m going to go on thinking like this, Gregor told himself, I’d better start drinking. At least then I could blame it on the alcohol.

Then he bent toward the screen and concentrated on the cards, red queen to black king, three of hearts to the stack pile at the top.

He was still bent over the screen an hour later, when the phone rang.





2


It wasn’t until he heard the sound of her voice, going rapid-fire through all the details, that Gregor realized that he really had been worried about it—worried, on some level, that Bennis was just going to disappear. Now he knew he should be concerned about this mess she had gotten herself in, about the body she had found in the car, about the way she had had to, or felt she had to, pack up and move in the middle of the night. Instead, all he could feel was calm, and a certain light happiness at the sound of her voice. Even the cough didn’t bother him, although it had in the weeks before she left for Connecticut. That cough had been going on much too long. It seemed to have become harsher and more insistent in the less than a day she had been gone.

“So,” Bennis was saying. “That’s where we are. I’m at the Mayflower Inn. Which is beautiful, really, but it’s about two hundred and fifty years old.”

“You like old.”

“Not after Margaret Anson’s house, I don’t. God, that woman is unbelievable. And I’m not going to be able to get rid of her for weeks now. Not until this is over. If this is ever over. I keep reminding myself that the police fail to solve crimes all the time. Are you going to come out here and help?”

“I’ll come out and help you.” Gregor stood up and pushed himself away from the computer table. He couldn’t concentrate on the cards anymore, and he’d been losing so badly it was embarrassing anyway. Bennis sometimes said he had a learning disability that applied only to games of solitaire. He didn’t tell her how miserably he lost at poker. Now he sat down on the bed and switched the phone from one ear to the other.

“I can’t just go rushing in and disrupting a police investigation,” he said. “It’s not my investigation.”

“Well, it can be if you want. The thing is, they’ve got this police department, it’s maybe got two people in it. And then they’ve got the state police.”

“I think it’s the local police departments that investigate murders, Bennis. Not the state police.”

“Well, actually, that’s not exactly clear. You see, the thing is, there’s more than one town involved. There’s Washington Depot, but then there’s also Watertown, and maybe Morris.”

“Are these towns all close together?”

“Yes. Exactly. They all bump into each other. And about the first thing that happened, after we called the police, is that the call was picked up by the state police, because one of the towns has something called a resident trooper—”

“Resident trooper?”

“Right. That’s where, if a town is too small to be able to afford its own police force, the state pays to have a state trooper live in town and do the police stuff. And there isn’t usually a lot of it, because these are really small places and nothing much happens in them.”

“All right.”

“Anyway, one of these towns has a resident trooper, and he picked up the police call and checked on it, because it turned out that he’d seen the car.”

“The car?” Gregor was beginning to feel a little dizzy.

“Kayla Anson’s car,” Bennis told him. “It’s this little BMW. And according to this guy—the resident trooper—it went through the center of Morris about ten minutes after eight this evening, doing maybe ninety, ninety-five miles an hour on this road that’s narrow and all hills and twists and turns and—”

“Are you sure this woman didn’t die in an automobile accident?”

“Yes, Gregor, of course I’m sure. The point is, the resident trooper isn’t a resident trooper for the town of Morris, because Morris has its own police department. He works in—Cornwall Bridge, I think. I’m not sure. He just happened to be in Morris at the time. And he saw the car. And he was in his cruiser, but he couldn’t really chase it because he didn’t have jurisdiction, and also I don’t think he wanted to. I mean, that kind of behavior on the roads out here is suicidal.”