Skeleton Key (18 page)

And never mind the fact that Faye Dallmer hadn't been in love with anybody since her marriage went bad, or maybe even before.

Zara Anne was up at the house, wrapped in a quilt, watching television.

Faye just wondered what it was she really knew.

In the next day or two, they would release the body from the morgue and bring it to the Hitchcock Funeral Home in Watertown. That was where Margaret Anson had arranged to have the funeral, in spite of the fact that Kayla's lawyers were very much against it. Kayla's lawyers wanted the funeral to be in New York. In this one thing, Margaret had had the moral authority to resist. They couldn't very well tell a mother where and how to bury her own daughter, even if they thought the mother had never liked the daughter at all. In fact, Margaret knew, they knew that. They had all been thoroughly briefed by Robert, before he died. They all considered her the prime bitch of the Western world. It didn't matter, in this case. They didn't want to see them-selves on the pages of
People
magazine, charged with persecuting the grieving mother.

Funerals and bank accounts—that was what this was going to come down to. That, and the reporters already camped outside her door, sitting there stretched along Sunny Vale road like a dismembered centipede. It was all over the place already, as she knew it would be, but she was ready for them. She had locks for the windows as well as the doors, and shades she could pull down tight. Right now the whole house was closed off. The gate at the bottom of the drive was locked. She could sit here in the big keeping room off the kitchen with her glass of sherry and not be bothered by them at all.

What kept coming back to her, what she couldn't get rid of, was the day of Kayla's delivery, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. By then, the hospitals had given up using twilight sleep. They were committed to using nothing at all.

“We want a drug-free delivery,” her doctor had told her confidently. “It's what's best for the baby.”

It was always what was best for the baby. The whole long stretch of that pregnancy, it had been as if Margaret herself had ceased to exist. No pain was supposed to be too great, no inconvenience too shattering, if what resulted was what was best for the baby. Margaret thought she had hated that baby from the third month of its gestation. She had hated the morning sickness and the bloating. She had hated not being allowed to take Contac when she had a cold or allergy medications when the pollen got high. She would have had an abortion if she could have done it without Robert knowing about it—but that would have been impossible, because Robert knew about everything. She would have gone ahead and taken the Contac and the antiallergy pills, except that she was afraid of the birth defects. She was afraid of what it would do to her life, to her self, if the baby she was carrying was born with too much damage. By that time she had hated Robert, too, of course. She had come to see him for what he was. She had come to understand that he would never mean anything more to her than money.

In Margaret Anson's perfect world, money and merit would go together. The people who really understood opera and art and history would be in charge of everybody else, and recognition would come for taste instead of for overwhelming effort. The truth was, Margaret didn't really have it all worked out, what she would like the world to be instead of what it was now. She only knew that she hated almost everything about what it was now, and what it had forced her to become. She was with the feminists on at least one thing, although she thought of most feminists as lower-class and overly fond of talking about their genitals. Marriage and prostitution were one and the same thing. You sold your body for money. You handed it over for sex and procreation. Robert hadn't been much interested in sex, in the end. He had wanted another child, to try for a son,
but he could have gotten that much by presenting her with a loaded turkey baster.

When Kayla was small, she had raced around their big apartment in the city, falling from things, jumping on things. Nannies had despaired of her. Maids had tried to stay out of her way. Margaret had seen from the beginning that she was Robert's daughter and not hers. She had been born with all the vitality and all the crudeness of her father's less-than-admirable social class.

I will not have her here, Margaret thought now. It was the only thought she could hold in her head. Even this one glass of sherry was making her wobbly. These last two nights of not getting enough sleep had made her something worse.

The body could stay at the funeral home; that's what it could do. The body could stay there until it went to rot. Margaret had no intention of ever seeing it again. If there was a hell, she hoped that Kayla was in it. She hoped that the flames licked up from the molten lava on the ground and burned great blisters in that stupid girl's feet. At least she would no longer have to open
Town and Country
to see her daughter's face.

Life was not fair, that was what the problem was. Life had not been fair to her, to Margaret Anson.

And if life wasn't fair, somebody had to pay for it.

All murder is random.
That was what Gregor Demarkian's most formidable instructor at Quantico had said, when Gregor was young enough to think that murder was rare, except in war. Maybe the truth was that in those days murder
was
rare. It was the year before John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas. Television was full of happy families. Television news was careful to report only on those people who could be considered “significant.” If the denizens of the local trailer park got liquored up and slaughtered each other at will, nobody in the nicer subdivisions on the other side of town would ever hear about it. If children were beaten to death by their mother's boyfriends, if they were left to starve and die by their mothers themselves—well, it all happened
over there,
in that part of town, and there was nothing more you could expect from those people. It didn't make any difference to
you.
Gregor remembered sitting at a small desk with a little writing-desk extension on one side, trying to take notes in a spiral notebook. He was not only young enough to still think that murder was rare, but young enough to still be uncomfortable with his size. He sometimes thought he was still growing taller, in his sleep, and that every morning when he woke the world around him was a little smaller. He imagined himself as Alice, growing larger. Any minute now, he would grow too big for his own apartment. His arms and legs would push through the windows and leave him trapped.

All murder is random.
At the time, he had thought the man was insane. Murder was deliberate. That's why people were executed for it. He couldn't remember how many years it had taken him to understand what had been meant, or how thoroughly he had to agree with it.

Now he let Bennis pull her car up in front of the tiny white clapboard house on Caldwell green, and felt again how foolish it was not to be able to drive. He was an urban animal, but all those years in the Bureau should have egged him into it at one point or another. Lord only knows, he had spent enough of his career as an agent in cars. The problem was that somebody else had always had a car. Now he felt oddly silly—the Important Consultant, being chauffeured around like a ten-year-old with a Little League game.

Bennis put the car into park and leaned toward the windshield to take in the green and what surrounded it. Gregor was fascinated with it all himself. It was so—New England. So exactly what it was supposed to be. The not-quite-rectangular patch of brown grass at the center. The churches on each of the four sides: Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal. The Congregationalist and Methodist churches were white. The Presbyterian and Episcopal were made of flat gray stone. The whole collection looked forbidding and completely empty.

“You'd never know that the Methodists are discussing holding blessings for same-sex marriages,” Bennis said.

Gregor got his coat out of the little well behind the two front seats.

“I'll see you for dinner at the inn. I think we're going around and looking at lab work. At any rate, I don't think we're staying here. You ought to try to stay out of trouble.”

“You ought to get a driver's license. Although I don't think you'd really be safe. Are you sure you don't want me to come in with you? Just to make certain that somebody's here?”

“Somebody's here.” The tiny white house with the sign in front of it that said
RESIDENT TROOPER
had a driveway. Gregor pointed down the flat cut of it to the garage at the back, in front of which a state police car was parked in full view of whoever wanted to look. “The rest of them will be here in a few moments, I'm sure. Unless they're already
here and parked somewhere out of sight. To make sure we don't all get caught doing this.”

“You make it sound like you're about to rob a bank.”

“We've been very lucky to avoid all the media nonsense that's going on out there,” Gregor said. “They haven't caught up to you at the inn. They haven't caught up to me. It isn't going to last forever. You might try being careful with yourself this afternoon.”

“I'm going to the mall. There's a new one in Waterbury. Gregor, do you know the JonBenet Ramsey case?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“Yes.”

“And you're not going to tell me who it is? Why not?”

“For the same reason that the Denver police aren't making an arrest. They know who did it, too. They just can't prove it. Cases like that aren't really all that difficult, Bennis. They're sort of standard operating procedure. Every police detective anywhere who deals with homicide on a regular basis has half a dozen like it in a drawer some--where, all of them officially unsolved. You have to be careful with them. More careful with them than you are with the others.”

“Why?”

“Because juries want to bring back convictions in child murder cases. They don't like findings of not guilty when a child is dead. Even if the defendant doesn't look to be guilty. Even if they don't think the defendant is guilty. They want to convict somebody. What's got you started on JonBenet Ramsey?”

“I don't know,” Bennis said. “I was wondering about this, I guess. About Kayla Anson. I was wondering if you knew who had killed Kayla Anson.”

“I've only just got here, Bennis. I don't even know who the suspects are.”

“Her mother.”

“Who, as far as I know at the moment, was sitting with you at the time that the murder occurred, making conversation
about lesbian painters in Paris in the twenties. Why are you in such a hurry to convict Kayla Anson's mother?”

“I've met her. Never mind. Are they all going to be there today, all the police officers from all the towns?”

“I don't know. But you're not going to be.”

Gregor opened the car door and climbed out. There was a jack-o'-lantern on the tiny clapboard house's front stoop. It was the only sign of Halloween on Caldwell green. He leaned back into the car and gave Bennis a chaste peck on the lips. It was the best he could do. Contorted into that particular physical position, it was all he could do to get his lips properly puckered.

“Go to the mall,” he said. “I'll talk to you later. Nothing is going to go on for the rest of today but procedure. You'd be bored if you were here.”

“I know.” She gave him a peck on the cheek to go with the one he had given her on the lips. “Take care of yourself.”

“My biggest problem is going to be finding myself some decent food.”

Gregor stepped back out of the car. He slammed the door shut after himself. Bennis rolled down her window and stuck her head out.

“I'll talk to you later,” she said.

Then she drew her head back into the car and rolled the window up again. A moment later, the car was moving away from the curb and out onto the narrow country road. What did it say about this place that even its main roads were narrow?

Gregor put his coat over his shoulders and went up to the resident trooper's front door.

The resident trooper's name was Stacey Spratz, and he was very young. Gregor had noticed that the night before, when they had met for the first time under Bennis's watchful eye.
It hadn't been much of a meeting. Gregor had been too tired, and strung too tight, to be much help, or even to make much sense. All he and Stacey had been able to accomplish was to make it clear that, yes, Gregor would not mind looking into this particular case if the law enforcement agencies involved wanted him to—and no, Gregor did not charge fees for his work, although he did appreciate it if the people he helped out gave a donation to Foodshare or Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. This business about not paying him always held people up. They had contingency funds in their budgets for this kind of thing. Why wouldn't he want to get paid? Gregor always found himself going into a long, convoluted explanation of something that should have been very simple. To be legitimately paid, he needed a private detective's license. He had no intention of getting a private detective's license.

That stopped them, too. Why wouldn't he want to get a private detective's license?

He went up to Stacey Spratz's front door, found the bell, and rang. You did not go from being a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—from being the founder and head of the FBI's behavioral sciences unit—to being a private detective. It was like starting out as Picasso and then going to work painting Mickey Mouse on clock faces.

Stacey Spratz opened the door and looked out. His face was tense. When he saw Gregor, he relaxed.

“Oh, it's you. I keep expecting to be invaded. They
have
been invaded, out in Washington Depot. Cam Borderman called and told me they've set up a press room right there on the premises. It was either that or have reporters crawling all over the building at all hours of the day and night. And they still find the idiots all over the place.”