Skeleton Key (19 page)

Stacey was headed toward the back of the house down a long narrow hall that went through the middle. The place was just as cramped as Gregor had expected it to be, with the added discomfort of having very low ceilings. Old, Gregor thought automatically. Probably as old as the churches. He had to duck to go through doorways.

Stacey Spratz did not have to duck. He was very short, for a man, and on top of that he was used to the house. He led Gregor into the kitchen and then motioned him to sit down at a round kitchen table. The table was covered with papers and file folders and Post-it notes stuck all over everything.

“Let me get you a cup of coffee,” Stacey said. “Then I'll tell you where we're at. I talked to my captain this morning. You're officially on as a consultant as of this morning at eight o'clock. We had to get five people out of bed to authorize it, but nobody wants a mess on this one. Washington and Watertown are formally giving up jurisdiction to the state police—we don't know where she was killed yet anyway. It could even have been Morris. Morris will give up jurisdiction, too. I think we've got everything settled that has to be settled.”

“I think so, too.”

“The thing is,” Stacey put a mug of coffee in front of Gregor, in spite of the fact that Gregor hadn't actually said he wanted any. “I mean. Well… I tried to head them off. But they want to have a press conference. A big press conference. With the governor.”

Gregor thought this over. “Isn't the governor in Hartford?”

“Yeah, but he's from Middlebury. That's right next to Watertown. Anyway, he'll come out here. That's not the thing. The thing is, this is going to be one hell of a press conference. We've got people out here from the networks. From CNN. I don't know if you mind that kind of thing or not, but it scares the hell out of me.”

“It's probably inevitable,” Gregor pointed out. He tried the coffee. It was as bad as Father Tibor's. It might be worse. He put the mug down.

Stacey Spratz rubbed his hand across the side of his face. In spite of the youngness of it, Gregor could see where the lines would be, when they came. Stacey had the sort of pale skin light blonds often do in their teens and twenties. It went quickly to hell as they aged. Gregor's guess was
that Stacey Spratz was not very bright. His virtues ran to loyalty and honesty and the desperate need to do good in a world he found inherently confusing. It was not a personality type Gregor would have chosen if he were doing the hiring for his own police force. Maybe it was just what was needed in the way of a resident trooper.

“Mr. Demarkian?” Stacey said.

“Sorry,” Gregor said. “I was thinking about what you do. About what it consists of, being a resident trooper.”

“Mostly it consists of getting Mark Wethersfield off the road when he's been drinking. And checking out break-ins. Which always turn out not to be break-ins. Not a lot goes on out here, Mr. Demarkian. We did have a murder out in Morris, back in ninety-one or ninety-two. At Four Corners. At the gas station there. This kid went in and shot his girlfriend and then he shot himself. Ex-girlfriend. She wanted to break up. They were both seventeen.”

“We get that kind of thing in Philadelphia, too.”

“I know. And they get it in Waterbury, too. The point is that we don't get much else. And we're all very—conscious, I guess the word is—we all know that we're in way over our heads. That this thing is beyond us. If you know what I mean.”

“I know the feeling of being in over my head,” Gregor said.

“I'm supposed to lay all this out for you and then take you out to Washington Depot for the press conference. If that's okay with you.”

“That's fine with me.”

This seemed to be not quite fine with Stacey Spratz. He was hesitating, as if he were expecting Gregor to do something else, want something else, make some objection. When that didn't happen, Stacey got up and got himself a second cup of coffee. Gregor didn't understand how he'd managed to drink the first.

“All right then,” he said, coming back to the table and sitting down facing Gregor on the other side. “This is what we have, then.”

This was the part about a case that Gregor liked best—the part where you could put the pieces on the table and make order out of chaos. Gregor was a very orderly man. That had as much to do with his success as a detective as any trained intellect he could be said to have, or any talent, either. Life was never completely orderly. There were always loose ends. Still, a crime had a narrative, if it was any kind of crime at all. The kind of crimes that were really something else—the violence of too much dope or too much liquor—didn't interest him at all.

Stacey Spratz was not an orderly man. He couldn't even be said to be reasonably neat. Before he could get started telling Gregor what had gone on the night Kayla Anson was murdered, he had to hunt through the papers on the kitchen table three times to find his notes.

Gregor abandoned his coffee, stood up, and began to put the papers on the table in neat stacks, sorted by type. He did it as much to give himself something to do as to be any great help to Stacey Spratz. He had no idea if this case would be furthered or hindered by having a stack he thought of as “Watertown police reports” separate from the one he thought of as “Washington police reports.”

“Okay,” Stacey said. “The thing is, earlier that evening, around four-thirty or five, Kayla Anson went into Water-bury. She went out to the Brass Mill Center, which is the new mall. It's actually in the town of Waterbury, right in the middle of it, right off Main Street. Not out in the country the way malls usually are. You see what I mean?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. He just didn't see why it was important.

“Anyway, she went out there and did some shopping. She stopped at Waldenbooks. We talked to the manager. The manager knew her. Actually, most people did. She got
around town a lot the past few months. Did I tell you she'd been expelled from her boarding school?”

“No.”

“Well, she had. Christmas last year. Actually, I think what it was was that she was asked to stop out for a year. She was supposed to go back this January. She and her friend Annabel Crawford got thrown out together. From the Madeira School, out in Virginia.”

“What for?” The Madeira School was the one Jean Harris had been headmistress of, before she drove up to Westchester and murdered Dr. Herman Tarnower.

“This Annabel Crawford was going to elope. Or said she was. With some local kid. And they'd been friends forever, so Kayla Anson helped her out by getting her horse out of the stables and parking it where Annabel could ride off on it. Do you know that some of these girls bring their own horses to boarding school with them?”

“I'd heard of it.”

“Well, they got caught. Actually, if you ask me, I think Annabel was pulling some kind of stunt and got Kayla Anson involved in it. We all know Annabel out here. She's got more fake IDs than an Iranian terrorist. And she's something of a rip. I don't think she'd marry some local boy with no money and no prospects. He couldn't keep her in shoes.”

“But they both got expelled.”

“Annabel got
expelled expelled
—don't ever darken our door again. Kayla got held out for a year. Annabel had it coming. It wasn't the first time she'd pulled something. She was suspended for a term the year before, but I don't remember what that was about. Anyway, they came out here, because their families have houses here. Annabel's actually live in Washington Depot practically full-time. And Kayla's mother has that big yellow thing out on Sunny Vale Road. So they've been around almost full-time for nearly a year now.”

“And they made friends?”

“Out at the country club their parents belong to, yeah, I
think so. The Swamp Tree Country Club. Out on Swamp Tree Road. They've all got names like that up here.”

“Did they have jobs?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Were they doing anything in particular? Volunteer work? Writing memoirs?”

“This fall they were coming out. Being debutantes. There was a big write-up about it in the
Litchfield County Times.
I don't understand much about that, but it seems to mean they had to go to a lot of parties. And give a lot of parties. I'm from out by Manchester. We don't do a lot of that kind of thing out there.”

They did do a lot of that kind of thing in Philadelphia, but Gregor's understanding of it was hazy at best. He supposed that if he needed to understand it better than he did, he could always ask Bennis. Bennis had been a debutante.

“So,” he said, “on the night of the murder—”

“Oh. Well. She went to Waterbury. She went to Walden-books. She stopped at the salad place at the food court and got herself some kind of veggie sandwich in a pita to go. The girl there remembered her, and we found the wrapping paper in the car when we found her. She bought a bunch of stuff at Sears. They didn't remember her there, but the bags were in the car. A pair of running shoes, good ones, Nikes. Three packages of white athletic socks. Three pairs of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. Plain solid gray. Nothing fancy.”

“Was that like her? To buy clothes at Sears?”

“Well, it wasn't clothes exactly. If you see what I mean.”

“Yes.” Gregor did see what Stacey meant. “What happened next?”

“Well, that was it, really. She headed back to Washington Depot, except that she didn't take Route Eight, which she could have. She came back the regular roads through Watertown. Route Sixty-three, that would be, to One-oh-nine. A lot of people do that. They don't like the highway. Or they don't like it in the dark.”

“All right. She was seen on the trip home?”

“She was seen on Route Sixty-three by a woman named Zara Anne Moss. You'll get to meet Zara Anne Moss. She's not exactly a reliable witness. She's not—you ever know anybody who claimed to be a witch?”

“You mean this woman says she saw Kayla Anson in tea leaves?”

“No, no. With ordinary eyesight, going by on Route Sixty-three sometime during the six o'clock news. Which fits, time wise. The thing is, Zara Anne Moss lives with Faye Dallmer—”

“I know Faye Dallmer,” Gregor said. “She's the one—the organic everything woman. Who writes the books. And does the advice thing on the
Today
show.”

“Right. She lives out here. Has a place on Sixty-three with a vegetable stand and sells quilts. That's how she started, actually. The other stuff came later. Anyway, she's, um, she's uh—”

“Gay.”

“Right. And Zara Anne is her latest live-in. There have been a lot of them. They've all been a little flaky, but this one is way flaky. Anyway, Faye Dallmer has this refitted Jeep she uses to do truck farming stuff, and it looks like a monster but it goes fast, so kids like to steal it and drive it around. It happens all the time. And Friday, it looked like it had happened again. And Faye was out back somewhere doing some work, and Zara Anne noticed that the Jeep was gone, so she went out on the porch and looked around, and saw it coming, bad-assing down Sixty-three, going really fast. And following Kayla Anson's BMW.”

“Following it?”

“Well, here's what we're not sure of. Zara Anne says following, but it might just have been behind there accidentally. There's no way to tell. She might actually have seen them half an hour apart. Anything.”

“What happened to the Jeep?”

“Well, that's an odd thing. What usually happens is that the kids just bring it back. Faye doesn't even bother to call anybody anymore. But Friday it was a long time, hours,
really, so about eleven Faye called the police in Watertown and they sent somebody out.”

“And?”

“And they finally found it up in the Fairchild Family Cemetery in Morris. Turned over on its side way up on the hill. It's one of those really old cemeteries. Goes back before the Revolutionary War. They've always got trouble up there. Besides the Jeep that night there was a skeleton up there, sitting right on Martin and Henry's front porch, turned out it came from the anatomy exhibit at the Litchfield County Museum. But in case you're wondering, there was nothing in the Jeep that had anything to do with Kayla Anson, as far as we could tell. Although it was smashed up a lot, like it had been run into something.”

“Kayla Anson's car?”

“More like a tree. But we're going to check that, too.”

“What did happen to Kayla Anson's car?”

“That's a good question,” Stacey Spratz said. “I saw it, like I told you, going through Morris like a bat out of hell around eight-ten and I let it go. And that's it. That's all anybody saw of it until your friend Bennis found it in the Anson garage and Kayla Anson in it.”

“Was Kayla Anson in it when you saw it in Morris?”

“I've got no idea. I didn't get any kind of look at all at whoever was driving, and I didn't see if there was a passenger, either.”

“So Kayla Anson could have been driving. Or she could have been being driven. Or she could have' been dead in the car. Can you remember, where was she sitting in the car when her body was found?”

“Front passenger seat.”

“Passenger seat.”

“I know what you're thinking,” Stacey said. “I've been thinking the same thing myself. She could have been alive when the car went by me in Morris. If I'd chased it instead of let it go, she could be alive. I've been over and over it. But I just can't figure out what else I could have done. The car was going at least ninety. It might have been a hundred.
I'm surprised everybody in the thing didn't end up dead on the road somewhere.”

“But you called ahead to the Washington police.”

“Yes, I did.”

“And what did they do?”

“There wasn't much they could do. They sent a car out to the Morris line, but if the BMW was going like that, it would have been long gone by the time they got there.”