“She might have done it with somebody else,” Kyle said slowly. “Chris might have. She might have known something about somebody else. About one of the, you know, uh, popular crowd.” He blushed. “She might have kept it quiet if it was somebody she cared about.”
The body was already beginning to smell, and it hadn’t been long dead when he’d first seen it. Give it another hour, and there would be insects all over it.
The state trooper was looking toward the house. “Did you say Jimmy Card was in there? You mean like Jimmy Card the rock star?”
“It’s hard to think of Jimmy Card as a rock star these days,” Kyle Borden said. “He does all this classical stuff.”
“Whatever,” the state trooper said. “That Jimmy Card?”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“Jesus,” the state trooper said. “This is going to be a zoo. I saw a case in Pittsburgh once, happened in this hotel to some girl seeing somebody in the Rolling Stones. It was insane.”
They all turned to look at the back of the house together, but this time nothing could be seen in the lighted windows of the kitchen. They went back to looking at each other. Gregor thought it was always hard to understand motive, because motive often made almost nothing in the way of sense. People killed for money, and for love, but in the end they almost always killed out of either too much heat or too much coldness. Gregor was inclined to go with Mark’s assessment and say that this was heat, if only because he could see no other reason for killing in the way it had been done. It would have been so much easier just to stab. It would have been less bloody, although it might not have been as sure. It wasn’t just a question of why Chris Inglerod had come here—it might be perfectly true that she’d come to invite Liz Toliver to something, and decided to do it in person because she’d have a better chance of getting Liz to say yes—but of why Chris Inglerod had gone around to that side of the garage. It wasn’t the side closest to the house. She hadn’t parked in the garage, where she might have been confused as to which door to take and taken that one, just as Gregor had. He hated things like this that seemed to make no sense to begin with, and then made less and less as he tried to straighten them out.
Finally, in the distance, there were more sirens. Gregor supposed they must be coming either from state police headquarters, or from some regional office able to supply not only a crime lab but a real medical examiner. As far as Gregor could tell, Hollman didn’t have one of its own.
“Oh, thank God,” Kyle said, turning toward the noise. “You have no idea how glad I’m going to be to hand this whole thing over to a real cop.”
3
It was after midnight before they were finished, and even then there was a tape up around the place where the body had been found and a single state trooper left to guard it. In the last hour, two unknown young men had shown up and tried to mingle with the police officers, but there was no one to mingle with, and nobody willing to talk to somebody they didn’t know with no known reason to be at the scene. Gregor was sure that at least one of the young men was stringing for the tabloids, or hoping to. He not only hung around far too long, but kept walking out to the front of the house and coming back again. Gregor meant to ask Kyle Borden if he knew who the young man was—Kyle seemed to know everybody who lived in town—but he got too involved in talking to one of the newest state troopers. By the time he looked up, the young man was gone. There was no way to cordon off the property. Sawhorses and police guards were all well and good, but they could be sneaked past, and if they could be they would be.
He waited on the back lawn until everybody but the one state trooper delegated to guard the crime area was gone. He said good-bye to Kyle Borden and promised to phone him “in the morning,” although he knew it was already morning, and that neither one of them was likely to be worth much until well after ten. He walked back to the tape cordoning off the crime area and looked over it at nothing much. It was far too dark to see anything. Even the grass looked like a black hole. He turned around and walked back to the house. The air felt heavy and thick, the way it did right before a rain.
Gregor let himself in through the back door of the house and went through the little pantry-cum-mudroom into the kitchen. He’d fully expected to find the place full of people—Liz and Jimmy and Mark and Maris Coleman, at least, and maybe the mother’s nurse—but instead, the only person there was Liz herself, sitting at the round breakfast table with a book open in front of her. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks was playing somewhere. Liz did not appear to be reading.