“It’s the hydra-headed monster, isn’t it?”
“Yes. You have to aim for the heart, not cut off the heads.” She got up, extended her hands to pull him up. “But I haven’t told you a single thing you don’t already know,” she said, going kitchenward.
He went to wash his hands, laid the table and slid into his side of the booth as she loaded their plates.
“We don’t know enough about John Hall’s life before he turned up in Holloman, and the death of Wendover Hall was a bad blow,” he said, watching her. “Today I sent Liam Connor to the West Coast to find out what he can. There was some kind of psychiatric illness in John’s late teens involving a halfway house, and it’s always possible Liam will track down someone who was at Caltech at the same time as John and the Hunters. Wendover Hall didn’t employ a domestic staff except for a cleaning woman, but that’s not to say there aren’t people in Oregon who know all kinds of things about John Hall.”
“Concentrate on his links to Jim Hunter,” Desdemona said, putting his plate in front of him. “Hunter’s a secretive man.”
TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 1969
Edith Tinkerman had left a message for Sergeant Delia Carstairs with the police switchboard to the effect that she had something further she wished to discuss: she would be at home on Tuesday.
The second bombshell! thought Delia exultantly, rather glad that she had worn this fabulous new coat of shaggy synthetic monkey fur with a glittering gold thread woven through it to match the thread in her mustard-and-orange suit. She drove out to Busquash to arrive around ten a.m. The correct hour in Mrs. Tinkerman’s mind for morning tea.
Surprised to find the front door a little ajar, Delia knocked on the jamb and called out. “Hello? Edie? It’s Delia!”
When no one answered after several successively louder calls, she pushed the door open and entered. No lights on; the hallway was dim, gloomy even, and the air was cold. As if the heat had not been turned up in the evening, when the outside temperature plummeted. A Tinkerman economy?
Edie wasn’t in the kitchen, the living room or her bedroom; best check the study, a room she didn’t associate with Edie in any kind of mood.
She was sitting in Tinkerman’s chair behind Tinkerman’s desk, her head down and resting with its brow on her hands, folded on the slab of blotting paper sheathed in a chased Morocco holder.
Death was in the room too. Delia felt its hairless leathery wings brush past her, flap away bearing its prize.
Even the sockets of her teeth crawled with horror; she stepped around the desk and looked down. Because Edie hadn’t tried to stem the floodtide of grey, the blood showed up clearly in the matted home-permed hair. Someone had shot her KGB style, a bullet through the base of the brain — over and done with in a split second. The blood had ceased welling but was still very fluid: no more than half an hour ago. Broad daylight on a Busquash street that would have been full of cars taking people to their places of work.
Her tears couldn’t be let fall. Delia leaped away quickly and groped in her bag, past her 9mm Parabellum pistol and her tiny .22 Saturday night special revolver to find her lace-edged handkerchief, sop up the grief. Oh, this wasn’t fair! Twice she had wept for women cut short. Oh, how dared he! To cheat this poor little woman of her hard-earned Arizona retirement — it didn’t bear thinking of.
“But at least he was merciful,” she said to Carmine minutes later as Gus and Paul went to work. “With any luck, she never even saw it coming. Her light would have just — gone out, poof! Though the way she’s lying suggests to me that perhaps he went one step farther toward mercy by drugging her heavily.”
“What brought you here, Deels?”
“She said she had something to discuss.”
“Something to discuss with someone else as well. If she’d confined herself to you, she wouldn’t be dead.”
“Whoever it was, she trusted, saw no danger involved.”
“So whatever she had to say can’t have appeared significant to her beyond a niggle,” Carmine said. “Oh, Jesus, four deaths! He did this one himself, couldn’t cope with the thought that she might suffer. However he tricked her, I’m convinced she didn’t know it was coming. I wonder whose is the gun?”
“A .22 by the look of the entry wound,” Delia stated, still very upset. “Dainty little thing. No one would have heard the report.” She gazed around. “Why was she in Tinkerman’s chair? Carmine, Abe has to inspect this room. We missed something.”
“It has to be behind the icon — It’s so valuable I thought Tinkerman would never fiddle with it, so I put it off-limits for the search. Stupid! He had no respect for art, even worth mega-bucks.” Carmine’s eyes rested on Delia’s coat. “You look really delectable today, too. Promise me you won’t take against the coat — it’s fantastic.”