“I agree,” Gregor said. “But the problem remains, at the moment, why she told this particular lie. There’s always the possibility that she killed Zara Anne Moss herself.”
“But you don’t think so,” Stacey said.
“No, I don’t. Take a look at those hands, the next time you see her. How do you strangle somebody—how do you strangle a vigorous young woman—and have hands that look like that when you’re done?”
“If she didn’t kill her, why is she lying?” Mark Cashman asked.
“Oh,” Gregor said, “people lie all the time. They lie to hide what they think is discreditable in themselves, so that you won’t know that they knock wood or cross their fingers or refuse to walk under ladders. Or because they’ve maxed out their credit cards and are ashamed of it. Or because they spend their spare time imagining themselves being interviewed by Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes and they’re just too embarrassed to tell you about it. No, what I want to know is, why this particular lie? Why pots and herb gardens?”
“I’d say she was lying to protect somebody,” Mark Cashman said, “but I can’t see that woman protecting anybody but herself. You should have seen her Friday night, when we found the body of Kayla Anson. I mean, it was her daughter, for God’s sake.”
“She’s a cold woman,” Stacey agreed.
“Cold doesn’t mean murderous,” Gregor said. “Do they have anything in the way of preliminary findings around here? Did they find one of those shoelaces, like the one they found on Kayla Anson?”
“Just a minute,” Mark Cashman said.
He disappeared momentarily, and came back with Tom Royce. Tom looked dispirited and cold. He also looked angry.
“It had to be set up,” he said. “Don’t you agree? It had to be set up for the time of the press conference. It was done on purpose.”
“Murder is usually done on purpose,” Stacey Spratz said. “That’s what makes it murder.”
“A white shoelace,” Gregor Demarkian said.
Tom Royce sighed. “It was lying half under the body. We found it when we turned her over. I don’t know how it got there. It had to have been taken off. It wouldn’t have just fallen off. If it was the murder weapon.”
“Why not?” Stacey Spratz asked.
“Because it would have gotten embedded in the skin,” Gregor answered. “What about signs of struggle? You said that with Kayla Anson—”
“In this case, there’s no way to tell, assuming she was actually murdered in that garage. Which I think is a very good assumption, this time. Kayla Anson could have been murdered anywhere and then her body could have been driven home. This one, though, with all those reporters outside—”
“There would have been a very small window of opportunity when she could have been brought here, or come here, without being noticed,” Gregor said. “Has anybody checked with the press to find out if somebody did see her?”
“I’ll get somebody on it,” Stacey Spratz said.
“How about what she got here on,” Gregor said. “Or in. She lived—where? You’ve mentioned her before, but I didn’t quite get the geography.”
“On the Litchfield Road,” Mark Cashman said. “In Watertown.”
“And that’s how far from here?” Gregor asked.
“About ten, fifteen miles,” Stacey Spratz said.
Gregor stared at the two of them in astonishment. “Ten or fifteen miles? But how did she get here? There isn’t a car in the place that doesn’t belong to the Ansons that I can see. Did she hitchhike? Did somebody give her a ride? How did she get all the way out here?”
Two
1
On the day that Peter Greer was formally admitted to the Swamp Tree Country Club, he came into the clubhouse bar at exactly six o’clock and had a double Glenfidditch whiskey, neat. That was two years and four months ago, and now, sitting alone in a booth in the bar’s far corner, he could remember it in perfect detail. That was the day my life changed, he had sometimes told himself. The thought did not embarrass him, even though he knew it would sound overdramatic to anyone who might hear it. It was the day his life changed, the day he had passed through an invisible barrier that separated that part of Litchfield County from this one. It had been the day he had started thinking of himself as something other than a poor boy making good. Later that week he had gone down to South Street in Litchfield and walked it from one end to the other. He had a fantasy of living in the big white-columned house there, the one that almost looked like the White House transplanted—except that it was better. Now he thought it might be just as well if he didn’t think of the White House, because it also made him think of bimbo eruptions, which he was somewhat prone to himself. He had five messages from Deirdre on his machine back at the house. He knew that if he were to go back there now, he would find her in his hot tub, floating naked in the swirling water and ready to cut his throat.