Somebody Else's Music(131)

“I think it would be a fair guess to say it was probably a linoleum cutter,” Gregor said.

“Yeah?” Kyle brightened. “Jeez, you are good. I called a friend of mine up in Connecticut because I knew he’d met you up there and he said you were. Good, I mean. But, what are we talking about here? A serial killer? I thought you said that the murder of Chris Inglerod and the murder of Michael Houseman were connected.”

“They are.”

“So what have we got? A serial killer who just went out of business for thirty years until Betsy Toliver came back to town? Or maybe it’s Betsy Toliver who’s the serial killer? But that doesn’t make any sense. I don’t care about Hannibal Lecter. The guys who are serial killers are messes, most of them. They don’t go running off to succeed on television. What about those murders? Did they find the perpetrators? Did they find the weapons?”

Gregor glanced back over the pages with actual report findings on them. “No and no,” he said. “Not at the time the police filed the report, at any rate. They could have found both later, and we’d have no way of knowing from this. We’d have to check the files in Kennanburg itself.”

“Well, then,” Kyle said. “They could never have found either, right? And Michael Houseman would have been one of this guy’s victims—but why come out here for that? I mean, why not just stay in Kennanburg? If you were this guy, would you come out to some small town? Except maybe he did, and maybe it’s just not on the report. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

“It’s a possibility, yes.”

“You don’t sound very happy,” Kyle said. “I’d be ecstatic, if I were you.”

Gregor put all the fax papers together and folded them up again and stuck them in his jacket pocket again. He was suddenly aware of the fact that it was raining outside again, slowly and steadily, without thunder. He felt as if he had conducted this entire case in Noah’s flood.

He pushed back the chair and stood up. “So,” he said to Kyle, “are you ready to come to the hospital with me and arrest Peggy Smith Kennedy for the murder of Chris Inglerod Barr?”





SIX





1


After two and a half hours of waiting, Maris Coleman was more than merely nervous, except that she wasn’t, because she was anesthetized. “Anesthetized” was what they used to call it at Vassar, when they’d run off to Pizza Town right after their last final exam. She was in an odd floaty state that she couldn’t quite keep hold of. It was like the state she got into when she “did something” about the bills, which usually meant turning the ringer off on the phone so that she didn’t have to hear the people from the credit-card companies tell her that it was really important that she did something about her account as soon as possible. The credit-card companies. The telephone people. The mortgage people never bothered her, because Betsy had done something about that, Maris couldn’t remember what. She did remember that she resented the fact that she had had to buy that apartment. It was a good location, but the apartment itself was so very small, and really only one room, when Betsy had that entire town house on the East Side and didn’t even live in it. It was Jimmy Card who was messing things up and, of course, Debra, who had been scheming to get her out of the way since the day Betsy had hired her. Hired me, Maris thought, but now her head was starting to pound the way it did sometimes when she had too much to drink too fast or tried to get over a hangover more quickly than she had a right to. She should never have given up cocaine. She wanted to take an aspirin, but she was afraid to. It could be dangerous to mix alcohol with aspirin, or with anything. Karen Quinlan had ended up in a coma by taking acetaminophen with alcohol, and then her family had fought to take out her feeding tubes. In the year that that had been the big story, Maris had been working for a Wall Street law firm as a paralegal. That was the job that she had kept the longest, and for years she had believed—honestly believed—that she was indispensable. She should have gone to law school. She should have—she couldn’t think of what she should have done. The universe seemed to her to be a huge conspiracy aimed directly against herself. The game had been fixed from the start. It wouldn’t have mattered what she’d done. Even back when they were all in high school, there were forces working behind the scenes. She was flying high, but it was only a matter of time. She should have killed Betsy when she had the chance. She should have done something about Debra, too. She wanted to cry, and when she didn’t want to cry she wanted to smash things. Would Betsy disappear without ever seeing her again? She’d left the house this morning without remembering that Maris had been there the night before, and was likely to be there still. Ever since she’d met Jimmy Card, she’d been more and more distracted, more and more distant. Maris knew the signs. She had known them every single time she’d been fired. She had seen them coming for months. She really did want to cry. It was like Belinda said. It wasn’t fair.