Skeleton Key (38 page)

In the media atmosphere that now existed, it was going to be almost impossible to get anything done. Gregor had known that, vaguely and subconsciously, when Stacey's police cruiser had been rocked on Margaret Anson's drive. He knew it sharply and without question when it came time for them to leave, and he saw that they would still have to face the reporters massed into a knot in the road. Standing on Margaret Anson's front steps, Gregor thought the route to 109 was completely impassable. A couple of the vans had been parked sideways across the road, blocking it to all through traffic. Reporters on foot were everywhere. The state police guards that had been stationed at the end of the drive were proving to be completely inadequate. The words
feeding frenzy
didn't begin to describe what was going on.

“They're mad at us,” Stacey Spratz said, sounding puzzled.

“We're not telling them anything,” Gregor said. “Never mind that we don't have anything much to tell them.”

“We don't have anything.”

Gregor shook his head. “It's the skeleton. That's the key. The skeleton had to have been put there for a reason.”

“You're sure? It could just have been kids. Really. That museum thing is left unlocked all the time. And the kids always know where stuff is.”

“If it hadn't been for the Jeep, I'd agree with you. But the Jeep was there, and the skeleton was there. We have to assume that the point was to divert our attention from something, but what?”

“It didn't divert our attention from the Jeep,” Stacey Spratz said. “We went over it with a microscope.”

“And?”

“And, the report was in that stuff I gave you. Some paint
flecks here and there. That's all. The paint flecks didn't belong to the BMW.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “they wouldn't. The BMW wasn't hit by anything, as far as I know.”

“Not as far as we could tell.”

“So that takes care of that. But if it wasn't the Jeep, it had to be something. The murderer wouldn't take the risk of dragging that skeleton through the brush just for kicks, even if it is only ten or fifteen yards. Ten or fifteen yards and up to the right of the house. What's to the left of the house?”

“To the left and to the back, the cemetery. We went that way.”

“Right. We'd better get out of here, then. There has to be something, but I don't know what it is. And I desperately need some coffee.”

Gregor also desperately needed some food—for some reason, the McDonald's hadn't really managed to stay with him; it seemed odd, considering the fact that everything had been fried—but he didn't want to suggest it and find that Stacey knew yet another fast-food place he was dying to visit. Taco Bell. Kentucky Fried. Gregor missed Cavanaugh Street more than ever. At least on Cavanaugh Street he could get something decent to eat.

Stacey Spratz was more worried about the logistics of the situation.

“Maybe I can get them to form a wedge that would get us out. If they don't do that, I don't know how we're going to
get
out. Have you ever seen anything like this?”

As a matter of fact, Gregor had seen things like this, on a number of occasions, but before they had always involved serial killers who had targeted young children, or high political figures. He didn't know what was going on in Washington, Connecticut, except, perhaps, boredom. Why the national media were behaving the way they were, he couldn't have said. Someday he was going to have to sit down and think through the entire idea of celebrity. Why some people had it. Why other people paid attention to it.
Why so many people thought it was important. Sometimes he thought he was looking at an addiction, or a mania.

“Let's do what we have to do,” he told Stacey Spratz. “But let's do it fast.”

In the end, Mark Cashman came with them, too.

“It counts as work,” he said. “And I'm officially off-duty. And I need to talk to somebody.”

Gregor and Stacey didn't complain. Instead, with Mark at their side, they headed for Waterbury, where the Barnes & Noble had a Starbucks.

“It's far enough away so that we won't be tripping over reporters,” Mark said, “and I can get a café mocha.”

There was a danger that they would have to trip over reporters anyway. At least two tried to follow them, pulling out behind them on 109 and sticking close enough so that one of them bumped the back of Stacey's cruiser at least twice. On a major highway, they could have picked up speed and tried to outrun them. On the back roads of the Northwest Hills, it was impossible. What Stacey did was dodge. Down one side street and up another, onto dirt roads, around the bends of hills that seemed to rise and fall without sense or reason. It took nearly half an hour, but they lost both the cars that were following them.

“And now that they're lost, they'll really be lost,” Stacey said. “You can drive around all day up here and never see anything but more trees, if you don't know where you're going.”

“Well, I don't want them so lost they can't go home,” Mark Cashman said. “The last thing I want is a bunch of New York reporters wandering around for the winter, with me supposed to be taking care of them.”

“I think the CNN reporters are from Atlanta,” Stacey said.

Gregor ignored them both, and headed straight for the
doors of Barnes & Noble as soon as Stacey parked the car. Inside, he went to the fenced-off area where Starbucks had its tables and pushed two small square ones together. Then he sat down on a rickety chair and got out his notebook. He was usually very organized about his work. It made him half-crazy to be in a situation like this one, where it seemed impossible to organize anything at all.

Stacey went to the counter to buy coffee. Mark went to the desk and bought all the local papers.

“Here we are,” he said, throwing them down on the table so that they covered Gregor's notebook. “They're old news now, of course, but they're all paying attention to us. To you, Mr. Demarkian, I guess. The
Torrington Register-Citizen
doesn't like you.”

“The
Waterbury Republican
loves you,” Stacey said, putting the coffees down. “Does this sort of thing happen to you all the time? ‘The Touching Story of Gregor Demarkian's No-Longer Unrequited Love.' I mean, I know it's at the bottom and everything, but it's the front page.”

“They'll have one of those features in the
LCT
next thing you know it,” Mark Cashman said. “Big picture of Gregor here. Big picture of Miss Hannaford. Big story about how fascinating his life is that he gets to look into all these murders.”

Gregor pulled his notebook out from underneath the papers. “Can we get down to business? Because the problem is, gentlemen, that although by now it ought to be perfectly clear who did it, I don't think there's any way to prove it. Not any way at all. Which does lead us to a certain amount of difficulty.”

Stacey and Mark looked at each other.

“I don't know about anybody else,” Mark said carefully. “But it isn't obvious to me. It isn't in the least bit obvious to me. So maybe you just ought to tell us—”

“No,” Gregor said. “Pay attention for a while. Think. Kayla Anson died because of the money—”

“How can you know that?” Stacey demanded. “How can you possibly—”

Gregor held up his hand. “Think,” he said again. “Anything that ever happened to Kayla Anson happened about money. It almost had to. She inherited, what, a couple of hundred million dollars? Almost a billion dollars? Like it or not, for someone like that, the bottom line is always going to be about money. But in this case, Kayla Anson did something that rich girls are taught never to do. She loaned money to a friend. She loaned a great deal of money to a friend. A hundred and thirty thousand dollars.”

“She might have loaned it to a friend,” Mark Cashman said slowly, “but she might not have. The cashier's check was in her name. She might have been paying a blackmailer.”

“A single payment of one hundred thirty thousand dollars? Have you ever known a blackmailer to ask for only one payment?”

“There may have been more payments,” Stacey said. “We don't know until we check. Maybe she'd been paying blackmail for years.”

“She couldn't have been paying it for years,” Gregor said. “She only recently turned eighteen. Before that, she wouldn't have had access to very much, except for her allowance. But by all means check. I think you'll find there was only the one check. The really significant thing here is that she had the check made out to herself, rather than to the person she was giving it to.”

“I don't get that,” Stacey said. “Does that mean she had to get the money in cash and hand over bills?”

“No. She could have endorsed the check on the back and handed it over. It's done all the time when people buy cars.”

“Then what difference would it make?” Mark asked.

“The bank would have a formal record—and Kayla would have a receipt she would need to hand over for her tax record—of the actual person to whom the check was made out. But when the check was cashed with the endorsement, the bank would simply file it away. There would be no way for Kayla's lawyers, for instance, or her mother,
to find out anything about the check except that she had it made out to herself. They couldn't know just by looking who she had given the money
to.”

“You mean she didn't want anybody to know who was getting the cash,” Stacey said. “But why not? It was her money.”

“Maybe the person getting the cash didn't want anyone to know,” Mark said.

“Very good,” Gregor said. “And there might have been some of that. But I think that the real reason was that she didn't want to face ridicule, or censure, from her advisors or from Margaret. The person she gave the money to was not exactly a good credit risk. Among other things.”

“So this was six months ago,” Mark said. “What happened next? Was the money supposed to be paid back?”

“I think Kayla Anson decided she wanted to get the money back, yes,” Gregor said. “That she wanted it more or less immediately. I also think—do you remember what Annabel Crawford said? She asked Kayla about the money and all Kayla would say was that it wasn't her problem anymore. If it wasn't her problem, then it must have been somebody else's. My guess is that she was intending to turn over collection efforts to her lawyers.”

“Intending to?” Mark asked. “You mean you don't think she actually did?”

“If she had, there would have been no point in killing her,” Gregor said. “Never mind in killing two other people. And it's more than that. The original murder—the murder of Kayla Anson—was incredibly elaborate. I don't care what you read in Agatha Christie. Murderers in real life do not tie themselves into pretzels creating complications just for the hell of it. Murderers do what they have to do. Which means everything that's happened so far has been necessary.”

“The Jeep,” Stacey said. “Why was the Jeep necessary? Why not just use his or her own car and get to Kayla that way?”

“Because the car would be recognizable. Far too recognizable.”

“Why follow her at all?” Mark asked. “Why not just arrange a meeting out at wherever and go from there?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “possibly because Kayla would not have agreed to a meeting wherever. What's more likely, though, is that our murderer didn't want Kayla casually telling someone else that the meeting was going to occur, or worse, just bringing along a friend, like Annabel. The idea was to leave no trace.”

“For somebody who wanted to leave no trace, this murderer sure created a lot of fuss,” Mark said. “Skeletons. Overturned Jeeps. Whatever.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “Obviously, there's something about the Jeep, or about the area around the cemetery, that made the diversion of the skeleton necessary. I just don't know what yet. Maybe we ought to go back there again later this afternoon.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Stacey said. “It's going to be dark now anytime. It gets dark early here in the fall.”

“But wait a minute,” Mark said. “What about Zara Anne Moss? Why all that fuss? I still don't believe she saw who was driving that Jeep. She couldn't have. All she would have seen is a dark rectangle and a blur of white for the body. That's it.”

“Absolutely,” Gregor said. “What Zara Anne Moss saw was obviously the murderer on foot.”

“What?” Stacey said.

Gregor sighed. “On foot,” he repeated. “Think about it. The murderer used Faye Dallmer's Jeep. In order to do that he or she had to get Faye Dallmer's Jeep. Nobody connected with this case lives in walking distance of Faye Dallmer's place—”

“No,” Stacey said. “Nobody does.”

“—although it is in walking distance of the Fairchild Family Cemetery, if you go across a field. Whoever it was had to drive out there to the Litchfield Road, walk to the Dallmer place, steal the Jeep, and then wait, on a side road
along the way, for Kayla to come along in that BMW of hers. But in order to do all that he or she first had to walk, and the walk made the murderer vulnerable. If Zara Anne Moss hadn't been stupid, if she hadn't been so much in need of calling attention to herself, we'd have our evidence, our murderer would be in custody, and two people would still be alive.”

“Where was the third car?” Mark asked slowly.

“I don't know,” Gregor said.

“How did the murderer get Zara Anne Moss out to Margaret Anson's house?” Stacey asked.

“The murderer asked her to go and the murderer came by to pick her up. Maybe it was a question of having Zara Anne walk down the Litchfield Road a ways to a meeting place. You might want to check that out. Somebody may have seen them. But don't think that Zara Anne wouldn't have gone. She was so desperate to be important. Isn't that what everybody says about her? She wanted it so much. All the murderer had to do was to make her feel important She would have gone anywhere.”