What she needed to do now was to drive out to Margaret’s house and lay it all out on the table. She didn’t have to worry about Margaret Anson getting violent, because she was sure that Margaret would never do anything conspicuous in front of all those reporters parked in front of her house. There was a trait that all the Litchfield County ladies shared. They all hated publicity.
Of course, Zara Anne Moss had been killed in Margaret’s garage and at a time when Annabel supposed that there must have been reporters in the road, but for some reason that fact didn’t seem to change the equation in any way that mattered.
2
Martin and Henry Chandling were waiting on their front porch when Stacey Spratz drove up with Gregor Demarkian, and Martin thought immediately that he’d never in his life seen a less foreign-looking man than this one with the big shoulders and the much-too-heavy coat. It made him a little peeved. He had been expecting something a little more definite, someone like Peter Lorre, maybe, or like Yakov Smirnoff. He had most certainly been expecting an accent, which only seemed natural for a man with a name like Gregor Demarkian. If Gregor Demarkian was a real Amerlean instead of an Armenian, why hadn’t he changed that name? Any normal person would have become Gregory Marks by now.
The state police cars were a little larger than the ones the towns in the hills used for their local police department Gregor Demarkian didn’t have to unfold himself too thoroughly from the front passenger seat. Still, he was a large man, much larger than the ones Martin was used to. Martin guessed that he was at least six three, and he didn’t have to guess about the gut. It was pitiful, the way some men went to seed.
“Doesn’t look like much, does he?” Henry asked, as they watched the two men walk toward them. Neither of them moved. Neither of them would have moved even if they’d been offered money. There was a standard to maintain.
“Martin? Henry?” Stacey Spratz said. “This is Gregor Demarkian.”
“We see that,” Henry said.
“We were just up at the Litchfield County Museum,” Gregor Demarkian said.
“He brought that thing down here himself, that’s what we think,” Henry said. “That Jake what’s-his-name. He brought it down here just to make a fuss so that his museum would get in the newspapers. Then somebody came along and murdered that rich girl, and that took care of that.”
“We want to go up the hill and see where the Jeep tipped over,” Stacey Spratz said.
Martin tipped his chair back a little farther. He had to be careful, because he’d tipped himself over backward once or twice already this year. Now he thought, uncomfortably, that the rumors they’d been hearing were true. The Jeep was involved in the death of Kayla Anson, somehow. Whoever had brought it here had been dumping it after he’d used it to—what? Martin wasn’t very clear on that He thought Kayla Anson had been killed in a different vehicle altogether, possibly in her own car. He only knew that the Jeep had to fit in one way or another.
He let all four feet of his chair hit the floor and heard Henry do the same.
“Come on up,” Henry was saying as he got to his feet. “It’s right up the path. It isn’t far at all.”
“It seemed far on the night,” Martin said. “In the dark.”
“We thought it was kids,” Henry said. “We’re always getting kids. Kids like to muck around in graveyards.”
“They like to overturn the gravestones,” Martin, said helpfully.
In the full light of day, it wasn’t a long walk up to the cemetery at all. It didn’t seem treacherous, either. The path was well-packed and broad enough not to be claustrophobic. When you could see it, there was nothing to stumble over.
They got to the top of the hill. Martin and Henry stood back to let Stacey Spratz and Gregor Demarkian go before them. There was really not very much to see. The Jeep had been a heavy vehicle, so there was still some impression in the dirt, but not much. The grass had sprung back into place.
“If we’d have known it was going to have something to do with the murder,” Martin said, “we’d have been more careful. We just thought it was kids.”
“This was at what time?” Gregor Demarkian asked. “Do you remember?”
“Sure we remember,” Henry said. “It was just after midnight. That was part of the point. They always wait to midnight to get going. They think it’s funny.”
Gregor Demarkian was circling the few indentations in the ground that were left as evidence of what had happened to the Jeep. Martin thought he looked like a dog trying to get comfortable enough to go to sleep. He stopped and looked back in the direction of Martin and Henry’s house. Then he did another circle of the area and looked down the hill.