“No,” Annabel said.
Mallory shrugged. “I’d take fifteen hundred dollars for the dress. It cost my father nearly six thousand. And it wouldn’t be hard to get it taken in. It’s not the kind of thing that needs to be precisely fitted anyway. I thought vodka tasted-good in everything. I thought vodka didn’t have a taste.”
Annabel reached into her bag, got out another bottle of vodka, and handed it over. She was not drunk, but she thought she could get that way, if she worked at it. Now she thought she would like to see Mallory Martindale drunk.
“You’re different,” she said accusingly.
Mallory Martindale dumped vodka in her drink and smiled.
Eight
1
The press conference was due to be held at the Washington Police Department—Washington Depot, it turned out, was the unofficial name given to a part of the town, not the whole town itself. There were other sections of town with names. Stacey Spratz drove Gregor through at least one of them, called New Preston. He also drove Gregor past some of the most spectacular houses Gregor had ever seen, even more impressive than the big ones in the best parts of the Main Line suburbs. Large brown-and-beige Tudors and white clapboards sat high on hills so steep Gregor had no idea how anybody managed to mow the lawns. Blank-faced brick Federals with half a dozen additions sprawled across three hundred feet of frontage, looking more like institutions than private residences, but private nonetheless. No more than a third of the roads they passed had road signs.
“People steal them,” Stacey Spratz said when Gregor asked. “The theory is, if you don’t know where you are, you don’t belong here. And if you don’t belong here, you’ve probably got it in mind to steal something, so we’re not going to make it any easier for you. Although I don’t know why they think somebody’s going to come out here and steal something. Nobody like that even knows this stuff is here.”
This seemed true enough. It seemed unlikely that some ghetto gang from Hartford or New Haven would come all the way out here to rob a ten-thousand-square-foot house, when they could take the bus into one of the nearer suburbs and rip off something there. Still, Gregor found the effect unsettling. The Main Line was a rather straightforward place. Rich people lived there, in sight of one another, and nobody who entered the precincts of Bryn Mawr or Radnor expected anything different Out here the impression was given, possibly deliberately, that the area was nothing more than a country way station, an old New England outpost that had more in common with small towns in Vermont than pricey suburbs on the Gold Coast In some ways, the impression was very much wrong.
The Washington Police Department was in a small brick building on a side street in the middle of what Gregor was coming to think of as a moderate-sized town. Before he’d seen Morris, and Caldwell, he would have called Washington “small.” Stacey Spratz pulled up to the curb outside the parking lot. He had to, because the parking lot was full.
“Here we are,” he said.
He and Gregor both looked at the cars and minivans crowding the small space in front of the police station’s doors. A small podium had been set up on the steps, with a wooden lectern backed by half a dozen chairs. The lectern had a microphone on it, with cables running down and off to the side. A lot of the people in the minivans had microphones, too, big boom ones. Cables for camera feeds were everywhere, but Gregor saw few nationally recognizable faces. Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson were probably still enmeshed in presidential scandals. Dan Rather had. never had a taste for this kind of thing.
“I was hoping we’d get somebody famous,” Stacey Spratz said, “but none of the really big reporters came. You figure it’s the elections?”
“Probably,” Gregor said.
Stacey got out of the car. “There’s some guys in there want to talk to you. Mark Cashman. He’s on the PD here. Tom Royce. He’s with the ME’s office. You know we got a central state medical examiner’s office?”
“No.”
“Yeah, well, we have. Dozens of small towns like this. Each of them gets a murder maybe once every twenty years. I think if we go around back we can avoid all the cameras until the press conference starts. And it won’t start until the governor gets here.”
“How are you sure he’s not already here?”
“No limousines.”
This made sense. Gregor let Stacey Spratz lead him up the street past the parking lot and then around the back on the lawn. There was a door back there, but no path going to it. It made Gregor wonder if the door had been put there only to cover contingencies, like fires or raids. Who would raid the police station in Washington, Connecticut?