Skeleton Key (22 page)

“Glad to meet you.” Mark Cashman held out his hand.

Gregor took it. Mark released him and sat down again. Tom Royce didn't offer a hand, and didn't look like he wanted to sit down. Instead, he gestured at the pile of papers in the middle of the table and shrugged.

“Did anybody tell Mr. Demarkian that we don't actually have anything yet? Anything conclusive, that is? Is there a
point
to this charade beyond getting our esteemed governor's face in the papers right before the election?”

“I'll tell you what the
point
is,” Mark Cashman said. “The
point
is that I don't want to be left out to hang on
this by myself, that's what the
point
is. I don't have the firepower and I don't have the authority.”

“Any police detective has the authority,” Tom Royce said.

“You weren't here yesterday afternoon when those lawyers descended. Jesus God. It was like something out of a John Grisham novel. It was worse.”

“What lawyers?” Gregor asked, in as neutral a tone as he could manage.

Mark Cashman got out of his chair again. “Her lawyers. Kayla Anson's. From some big firm in New York. They handle her money.”

“And they were out here?” Gregor asked.

“You bet.”

“Why?”

“They closed her accounts at the banks and those places,” Mark Cashman said. “They just came in and shut it all down. The ones at the local banks, I mean. She had this checking account at Webster.”

“They could do that on a Saturday?”

“Well, they did it. That's the thing, isn't it? They did all kinds of things, on a Saturday, that maybe you and I couldn't do. And they don't talk worth a damn.”

Gregor considered this. “Did they say they were interested in anything else? Besides closing her accounts? Besides the money?”

“They asked to be kept informed on the progress of the investigation.” Mark Cashman's voice was dry. “I thought the whole time that they'd do better just bribing the hell out of somebody to feed them the news, and maybe they did. They were certainly well-heeled enough to manage that kind of thing.”

Gregor sat down at the table. The papers in the middle of it, unlike the ones on Stacey's table in Caldwell, were actually in use. Gregor saw several black-and-white photographs of what he was sure was the body of Kayla Anson, spilling out of her car. He pulled one of them toward him and looked at it. She had been alive when she had been
strangled. If she hadn't been, her eyes would not have protruded in that characteristic way.

“Those don't amount to much,” Tom Royce said. “We'll have better ones coming in a day or two. Those were—just to be going on with.”

“Tom wanted to have a little show-and-tell with the governor,” Mark Cashman said.

“Well, you'd think he'd take an interest, wouldn't you? Even him. This is going to be an enormous case. As big as JonBenet Ramsey. You'd think he'd at least pay attention.”

“He'll talk to Dr. Lee when Dr. Lee gets back,” Mark Cashman said. Then he turned to Gregor and explained, “That's Dr. Henry Lee. The state medical examiner. Big wheel. Testified in the O. J. trial. He's on vacation in Colorado. He's flying back tonight.”

Gregor had heard of Dr. Henry Lee. Now he put the photograph of Kayla Anson back on the table and said, “She was alive when she was strangled.”

Tom Royce shook his head. “That's my guess, too, but it's still a guess until we're finished running all the tests. And until Dr. Lee has had a chance to check over the work. This one isn't going out of the office without his personal say-so.”

“But you were the one who actually examined the body?” Gregor asked.

“Yesterday morning, yeah. I did an autopsy and set up the lab work.”

“And?”

Tom Royce sighed. “And it looks to me like she was strangled and strangulation was how she died. The cord was still around her neck, by the way.”

“What kind of cord?'

“A white nylon shoelace. New. The kind you use for athletic shoes.”

“She had a whole package of them in one of the bags from Sears,” Mark Cashman said. “You know she'd been to Sears?”

“Mr. Spratz told me.”

“Stacey,” Stacey said automatically.

“The problem with the shoelaces is that they're everywhere,” Mark Cashman said. “We ran across a half dozen of them in Margaret Anson's kitchen the night of the murder. They were sitting in a kitchen drawer right next to the mudroom. You couldn't go anywhere in the rich part of Litchfield County without finding them by the dozens. At the Swamp Tree Country Club. At Rumsey Hall and Taft. Everybody's athletic these days.”

“Rich people have always been athletic,” Tom Royce said.

“What about the strength required to get the job done?” Gregor asked. “Was she a strong young woman? Would she have struggled?'

Tom Royce shifted unconifortably from foot to foot. “Here's where we get into territory I don't like. I really couldn't tell you that unless I'd talked to Dr. Lee. There are things—”

“What things?”

“Well, for one thing, how much strength was required would depend on whether or not she was conscious when she was strangled. She could have been alive and not been conscious.”

“Do you have reason to believe she wasn't conscious?”

“Sort of. Maybe. But it's all speculation. Completely speculation. I don't have any proof of it at all.”

“Would you like to tell me proof of what?” Gregor asked.

Tom Royce started to pace. From the way Mark Cashman was staring at Tom, Gregor knew that this was the first of this Tom had mentioned to anybody. Holding back the information wasn't going to do him any good, at least with the Washington Police Department. Tom's pacing was jerky and uneven. He kept taking his hands out of his pockets and putting them back in again.

“Okay,” Tom said. “This isn't even speculation. This is a guess. A pure and simple guess. I think she was hit on the back of the head.”

“Why?” Gregor asked him.

“If you mean what makes me think so, it's because she had a bruise. On her forehead. Her left temple just above the eye.”

“And, that makes you think she was hit on the back of the head?'

“And fell forward into the steering wheel and got a bruise. Yes. That's it exactly.”

“But there was no mark on the back of the head?'

“No obvious mark, no. But there are ways to do that. You can knock somebody out cold without causing any visible damage. And that's a good place to go for, because it's effective but it's covered with hair. Especially in women. Lots of hair. So if you do some damage, it's not necessarily going to be seen.”

“But what about the autopsy? Didn't that reveal any evidence of concussion?'

“I don't know. What I have is inconclusive as hell.”

“I see.”

Tom Royce sat down abruptly. “If Henry responds the way you're doing, I'm dead in the water. But nothing else makes much sense. She was a young woman in good health and good shape. She played a lot of tennis. She worked out. There should have been—I don't know. More signs of a struggle. Something. She should have kicked out or hit at things—”

“Maybe she did,” Mark Cashman said. “Maybe she wasn't killed in the car. I've said before—”

“She was killed in the car,” Tom Royce said.
“I've
said before. She was killed sitting in the passenger seat of that car. If she hadn't been, there would have been other kinds of bruising that came from getting her in there, and there wasn't anything like that at all. Not a thing.”

“Not a thing,” Gregor repeated.

He was just about to ask them all the most obvious question—what was Kayla Anson doing in the
passenger
seat of a car she'd been driving when she left Waterbury?—when the door to the little conference room swung open
and a harried middle-aged woman came bursting in.

“The governor's here,” she announced dramatically, “and he's got about half the state with him, and I don't know what to do next. You guys had better come on out and take care of him before something goes wrong and I get blamed for it.”

“When Ella Grasso was governor of this state,” Tom Royce said, “she could get to a press conference with fewer people than Elvis's entourage in attendance.”

“Tom is a Democrat,” Stacey Spratz said. “Let's go.”

Gregor Demarkian had never seen the governor of the State of Connecticut in person before. The only time he had ever seen him in action on television was after the 1997 mass shootings at Connecticut Lottery headquarters in Newington, when a disgruntled employee just returned from medical leave had shown up for work armed to the teeth and then walked around the facility blasting away at one lottery corporation executive after another. Gregor could remember, in the aftermath of that case, thinking that for once the killer had got it right. He had gone after the people in power instead of the people he worked with, although that was going to be cold comfort to the families of the people who had died. All Gregor remembered about the governor was a round fair face at a press conference—that, and a very good suit.

“The governor doesn't really travel with an entourage the size of Elvis's,” Stacey Spratz said unnecessarily. “From what I hear, he's actually pretty easy to work with. You should hear some of the stories going around about some of the others.”

Gregor had a few stories of his own about various government officeholders, including two speakers of the House and a president, left over from his days at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He let himself be led down the narrow
corridor to the front of the building. The governor was standing with a small clutch of people near the station's front counter, enveloped in a very good winter coat. This governor seemed to like good clothes. Bennis Hannaford would have approved.

“Governor?” Stacey Spratz said, “I'm Stacey Spratz, of the state police. I'm the resident trooper in Caldwell? And this is Gregor Demarkian.”

The governor's face did not look blank, even for an instant. Either he'd been very well briefed for this meeting, or he liked reading true crime stories in
The New York Times Sunday Magazine.
He put his hand out and grabbed Gregor's.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “You have no idea how grateful I am that you agreed to come. We're all grateful. This is a terrible situation. The murder of any young person is a terrible situation, but the ramifications here—”

“Governor?” It was one of the men in the plain black suits.

The governor dropped Gregor's hand and turned away. “Are we ready?'

“You'd better be ready,” somebody else said. “They're ready to eat raw meat out there. And they're cold.”

“Does everybody know what it is we're doing?” the governor asked.

A young woman raced up to Gregor and brushed his hair out of his eyes. She had a clipboard and her hair held back in the kind of hairband Hillary Clinton had favored before the professional handlers had gotten to her.

“The governor's going to make a short statement,” she told Gregor, “and then he's going to introduce you and you're supposed to make a short statement. Just that you're glad to be here and that you'll help in any way possible. That kind of thing. You don't actually have to say anything. Would you like to have something written out for you?'

“No,” Gregor said.

“It wouldn't be any trouble. In fact, I've already got something. I took the liberty—”

“No,” Gregor said again.

“It will be all right,” the governor said. “Mr. Demarkian has handled press conferences before. I've seen him.”

“If they try to ask you any questions, don't answer,” the young woman said. “Or don't be too specific. Are you sure you're going to be all right?”

“Let's go,” the governor said.

Somebody opened the police station's front doors. Gregor wondered what a person would do if he actually needed police protection at this moment. Nobody who didn't know about the back door would even be able to get into the station. Was the dispatcher sending out cars when people called in? He hadn't seen a dispatcher.

The governor stepped outside first, followed by two men Gregor assumed to be either aides or security personnel. The young woman in the hairband pushed him out immediately afterward, followed by Stacey Spratz and Mark Cashman. Tom Royce stayed behind. As soon as the group of men filed out onto the station steps, the people in the minivans came to life. Men with cameras on their shoulders moved in close. Gregor saw that, between the time he and Stacey Spratz had left the car on the side of the road and now, somebody had put up extra folding chairs.

“Sit here,” the young woman in the hairband told Gregor. Then she nodded at the governor and retreated.

At a federal press conference, there would have been more of a sense of ceremony. Here, although there was a press officer to make introductions and serve as a sort of informal director of the proceedings, he seemed to be mostly making it up as he went along. He stood at the lectern, leaning toward the microphone, until the people in the parking lot started to settle down. Then he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the governor will speak first, followed by a short statement from Gregor Demarkian. When Mr. Demarkian is finished talking, the governor will take questions.”

“Will Mr. Demarkian take questions?” somebody asked.

“Yes,” the press officer said.

“What about somebody from the medical examiner's office? What about somebody from the police?” somebody else asked.

“The medical examiner's office has no statement to make at this time,” the press officer said, “and will not have such a statement until Dr. Lee returns from Colorado and can review the evidence. The Washington Police Department also has no statement to make at this time.”