“I’ll get that,” Stacey said, coming up behind him.
Gregor let him get it, too. He was not cut out for this sort of thing. He liked restaurants with waiters, even the kind of waiters who insisted on telling you their first names.
Stacey threw little packets of ketchup and a small mound of napkins on Gregor’s tray. He got a cup lid and a straw for the Coke. Then he picked up the tray and headed for the sunroom in the back.
“This way,” he said. “I got us a table in the warm.”
The table was a large square. The chairs were just the kind Gregor liked, sturdy instead of ornamental. He sat down and looked at his food with uncertainty. Even when he and Bennis were traveling in the car, and going a long way, they brought their own lunch instead of stopping at fast-food places. The only people he knew who spent time in McDonald’s with any regularity were Donna and Russ, and they did it so that Tommy could get the toy in the Happy Meal.
“So,” Stacey said, as Gregor said down. “Have you got it figured out yet? Do you know who killed Kayla Anson?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you think that thing at the Swamp Tree was weird? I keep running scenarios through my mind. Somebody killed her and then went out to the country club and cleaned out her account. Somebody had already cleaned out her account and she found out about it and that’s why they killed her. Somebody—”
“It was the blonde woman,” Gregor said, trying out his sandwich, which was, in fact, not actively bad, although it had too much mayonnaise on it. “Sally Martindale.”
Stacey looked startled. “What was Sally Martindale?”
“The person who took the money. She’s the—what? The bursar? Something like that?”
“Well, yeah, I know, but—”
“No buts,” Gregor said. “I’ll guarantee it. My guess is that she’s been stealing from quite a few accounts over an extended period of time. The question is if she’s been careful or not. If she’s been careful, they won’t catch her, no matter how hard she tries. If she hasn’t been, they will. That is, assuming that she manages to stop taking money now that she knows they’re looking out for it.”
“But of course she’d stop,” Stacey said. “I mean, if she’s really the one. Why wouldn’t she stop? She an educated woman. We’re not dealing with one of these west mountainers, you know, or the idiots down in Waterbury. Sally Martindale has an MBA.”
“She’s also a compulsive gambler.”
“What?”
“Trust me. I know the signs. I know them backward and forward. Is she married?”
“She used to be. To Frank Martindale, this hotshot arbitrage lawyer. Except I’ve never known what arbitrage is, exactly. Just that he got paid a ton of money for it. But they got divorced a year or so ago—ah.”
“Exactly.”
“Jesus,” Stacey said. “Did she kill Kayla Anson, too? To hide the fact that she’d taken the money?”
“I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “I wouldn’t rule it out at this stage, but I don’t think it’s very likely. She doesn’t have the nerve. It took nerve, killing Kayla Anson. And then killing Zara Anne Moss. In the garage like that.”
“Do you think Kayla Anson was killed in the garage?”
“No.” Gregor drummed his fingers on the table. It was a good table for drumming. It sent up a satisfying hollow-wood sound, even though the wood was probably not hollow. Gregor pulled the pile of napkins off his tray and his pen out of the inside pocket of his jacket. The trick to writing on napkins was to write on them folded, not spread out. If you spread the napkin out, it tore with every movement of the pen.
“Look,” he said. “Kayla Anson had to have been killed sometime between the time that Zara Anne Moss saw the BMW driving down the Litchfield Road, followed by the Jeep, and the time you saw the same BMW speeding through Morris.”
“Why?”
“Because it doesn’t make any sense to think that Kayla Anson herself would have been speeding. If she’d been willing to speed, why wouldn’t she have been doing it when Zara Anne Moss saw her? What did Zara Anne say? The Jeep was following so closely behind that it was almost bumping into the BMW’s bumper. But Kayla Anson did not speed up, or at least didn’t speed up significantly. Which indicates to me, at any rate, that she didn’t like putting the pedal to the floor.”
“Ah,” Stacey said. “I see what you mean. But that’s still conjecture.”
“Yes, it is. But you’ve also got the body, which from everything I’ve heard about it had been dead at least some time before Bennis Hannaford found it. And you’ve got the garage, which showed no sign of anything in the way of evidence that a murder had been committed there. I read those reports you gave me. There was absolutely nothing.”