Skeleton Key (41 page)

Bennis scurried into the examining room. The examining
table was too high up. She sat down on the little wooden chair instead.

“What is it?” she heard Sheryl Lynne ask.

Gerald Harrison sighed. “Pneumonia, for one thing. What else is the matter in there, I can't tell at the moment. You'd better call me an ambulance.”

“No,” Bennis said. “I've got—I've got my car.”

“Tell the hospital I'm going to want an immediate admission. I'm going to need an IV and I'm going to need a ton of antibiotics. There's no way she came down with this yesterday. She must have been walking around with it for days. Get the ambulance, Sheryl Lynne. Do it now.”

“My car,” Bennis said.

“Shut up,” Gerald said. “What it is you have against consulting a doctor when you get sick, I'll never know. It's like you've got a vested interest in creating emergencies.”

Not quite, Bennis thought, as she drifted into oblivion—but then she did drift into oblivion. The world was dark and endless, and the only person in it besides herself was Gregor Demarkian.

By the time the ambulance showed up, Bennis was thinking of nothing at all.

What Gregor Demarkian really wanted to do was to find some form of public transportation and go right back to Philadelphia, and to Bennis, as soon as possible. What he had to do was to find some way to give the Connecticut State Police hope that they might be able to arrest a person who had already committed three murders in four days, and who seemed to have no interest whatsoever in stopping. That, Gregor knew, was a misperception. This murderer was not a lunatic—a “homicidal maniac” as some people liked to call them. Gregor had known a few homicidal maniacs in his time, and taken an interest in a few he had not been professionally involved with. The truth was, none of them had seemed very much like maniacs to him. Some of them had been the kind of person one expected to find accused of serial murder—drifters, loners, badly dressed, badly smelling, with a history of lost jobs and erratic behavior. Some of them had been far more ordinary men. There was Ted Bundy, who could have had a life if he'd managed to keep his sexual impulses on track, or if he'd even wanted to. There was Frederick West, in England, just a few years ago, who had had a life, and a wife and a job and a house, and used all of them to murder young girls who happened to be waiting for a bus at the stop on the street just outside his front door.

Serial murderers were odd people, in ways which were not all that obvious. Gregor had spent ten years of his life trying to understand them, and he still went over the problem in his mind from time to time, and kept up on the research. By now he was convinced that there were probably at least two kinds, which he privately labeled the smart ones and the stupid ones. In reality, it was probably a difference between the ones who were otherwise sane and the
ones who were full-blown schizophrenics. In every case he had ever known, though, the bottom line had been about sex. The eroticization of death. The sexuality of violence. The confusion of orgasm and anger. If nothing else about the murders here in Connecticut proved that they were not committed by a serial killer, there was the fact that they had nothing to do with sex.

Crazy people kill for sex. Sane people kill for money.

As a motto, that was terrible. It wasn't even true. At four o'clock in the morning, when he couldn't get hold of anybody on Cavanaugh Street and those people he could get hold of didn't know what was happening to Bennis, when he wanted to sleep so badly he could scream and yet he couldn't make himself do it, when it seemed as if all the radio played was the Beach Boys singing “Fun, Fun, Fun”—it would have to do. Eventually, he gave up and watched television, which consisted of bad movies on one channel and ads for Jeff Fox doing the weather on another. The channel with Jeff Fox was the one Bennis liked to watch. It started its morning news at five. Gregor left it there. Eventually, he fell asleep sitting up in a chair, thinking about the British police with their wrecking crew, going into Frederick West's house and taking down the walls, digging up the cement foundation in the basement, finding bodies everywhere.

Asleep, he dreamed about Bennis, alone and in trouble, somewhere he couldn't get to her.

In the morning, when Stacey Spratz had picked him up and deposited him in the big conference room at the back of the Washington Police Department's building, Gregor was not only depressed, but just as depressed as everybody else. The table in the middle of the room was now even more full of papers than it had been the first time Gregor had ever seen it. Reports were everywhere, succinct and legalistic
at the same time, describing time of death, cause of death, accompanying circumstances. Gregor could have recited the evidence by rote. He thought Stacey Spratz, Mark Cashman, and Tom Royce could, too. None of it mattered unless they could get this case into a courtroom, and at the moment they couldn't have done that if they'd done nothing else but try.

“This is why I never wanted to be part of a big-city police department,” Mark Cashman said. “This and getting shot. But there must be a lot of this in a city, cases you can't close even though you know how to solve them, cases you can't prove. It would drive me nuts.”

“You'd think there would be something,” Tom Royce agreed. “I mean, how many times can someone commit murder and not leave a piece of solid evidence around? Just one piece.”

“Did anyone go out to Margaret Anson's house and try the back door to that garage?” Gregor asked them.

“I did,” Mark Cashman said. “There was no go. You could tell that somebody had tramped around back there, but once you get past the bush at the very top of the hill, right next to the garage, there's a path. It could have been anybody.”

“Doing anything,” Stacey Spratz said.

“You'd think there would be something,” Tom Royce said again. “A coat sleeve caught on a branch and torn. A footprint preserved in the mud.”

“What about the bank accounts,” Gregor said. “Have those been checked out yet? After all, a deposit of over a hundred thousand dollars is at least a start—”

“We're getting there,” Stacey Spratz said. “We had to get some kind of court order. We ought to have that information some time later today.”

They all looked at each other. The bank accounts would at least be something, assuming they showed what they ought to show. There was a large urn of coffee in the middle of the table. Gregor stood up and got himself some. He'd drunk so much coffee by now that he felt like an
electrical outlet. He was wired to the hilt. When this was over and the adrenaline went down, he was going to fall over like a tree.

They had just begun to go over it all again—the paths, the bank accounts, the distance from the Litchfield Museum to the Fairfield Family Cemetery—when there was a knock on the conference room door and a young woman stuck her head in.

“I know you said you didn't want to be disturbed,” she said, “but there's a woman outside who says she has to see Mr. Demarkian. I mean, there are two women together, but it's just the one who has to see Mr. Demarkian. She says it's important. She says it's about a telephone pole.”

“What?” Mark Cashman asked.

“Send her in,” Stacey Spratz said.

“Maybe we should try not to intimidate her,” Gregor said.

He could have been talking to the air. The young woman had disappeared. A few seconds later, she appeared again, this time with two other women in tow. One of them was middle-aged and distinctly pudgy and tired-looking. The other was young, thin, and somewhat New York-ish, complete with the sort of wiry shock of hair people used to call a Jewish Afro. The pudgy one looked around the room and started to panic.

“Now,” Gregor said, getting out of his seat and going over to her. He knew without question that the pudgy one was the one who wanted to talk to him. The young one had been brought along for moral support, or for courage. Gregor took the pudgy one's arm and guided her to a seat. “Now,” he said again, “if you'll just sit down, Mrs—”

“It's Eve Wachinsky,” Mark Cashman said. “She's from Watertown. She was a couple of years ahead of me in high school.”

“Oh,” Eve Wachinsky said. “Maybe I shouldn't do this—”

“She's worried that you're all going to laugh at her,” the young woman with the Afro said. “But I've listened to
what she has to say, and I think she ought to tell you. She really should. So if it's not important, just blame it on me.”

“Who are you?” Gregor asked.

“My name is Grace Feinmann. I'm her neighbor across the hall. We both live in the same building out by Depot Square in Watertown. And you've got to be careful, because she just got out of the hospital yesterday. She had meningitis.”

“If I hadn't been sick, I would have said something sooner,” Eve said. “It's just that I was—it's just that I was—”

“On Friday night when Kayla Anson was murdered, she worked the night shift at Darla Barden's answering service,” Grace said. “She got back home about six in the morning and just collapsed in the hall. Because she was sick. So you see, she didn't even hear about the murder and then she was in the hospital—”

“I had a fever,” Eve said. “It was a big fever and I couldn't think. And now I have medical bills, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars in medical bills and I don't know how I'm going to pay them—”

“You're going to apply for patient assistance,” Grace said. “I'm going to help you fill out the forms. You've got to tell him what happened at Darla's.”

“Oh,” Eve said. “Yes. I know. Only, the thing is, they must have made a record of it. At the time, you know. And you must have seen the record. So you must know all about it So you must not think it's important. But Grace said maybe you don't know at all, maybe something slipped up.”

“What is it we might not know about?” Gregor asked patiently.

“The telephone pole,” Eve said.

“The telephone pole,” Gregor repeated.

Eve nodded. It wasn't just that she was scared, Gregor realized. It was that she was still weak from sickness. She shouldn't be out in the open like this. She ought to be home in bed.

“On Friday night, there was a telephone pole,” she said. “It went down on Capernaum Road. I'm not sure about the time, but I think it might have been between eleven and twelve. That I got the call, I mean, not that the pole went down.”

“Capernaum Road,” Gregor said. “Why is the name so famillar?”

“You're probably thinking of the Bible.”

“No he's not,” Stacey said. “Capernaum Road is the dirt road at the back end of the Fairfield Family Cemetery.”

It was going to be a while before the adrenaline drained completely. Gregor could feel it. This was something far more dramatic than a second wind.

“How far is it from the cemetery?” he asked.

“About as far as the Litchfield Museum is in the other direction,” Stacey Spratz said.

“Right.” Gregor turned back to Eve Wachinsky. “A telephone pole went down. How did you hear about it?”

“Darla does the emergency calls for thetown,” Eve said. “And Rita Venotti called me and told me to call Craig and get a crew out there to, you know, fix things up or get SNET to fix them, because there are all kinds of wires on those poles or else the poles are close to the electrical wires or something. I dotft know how it works. But anyway, there had to be someone to take care of it. But it should be written down somewhere. That the crew was sent out. And that something happened. Especially since it was so odd.”

“What was odd about it?” Gregor asked.

“Well, it was like Craig told me later,” Eve said. “When he called in, you know. And he was really very upset because when he got out there it was a real mess and he'd had to spend hours, and it looked like it was going to be some kind of vandalism. They all hate vandalism. Nobody wants to be out of bed and running around in the woods somewhere at two o'clock in the morning just because some kid got stupid. And with power lines involved, you've always got the problem that somebody could get killed.”

“Yes,” Gregor said patiently.

“Anyway,” Eve said. “The thing is, Craig said later that when they got the SNET guys out there, they—the SNET guys—they said that it looked to them as if somebody had taken a vehicle and just rammed the pole over and over again. That somebody was trying to knock it over. And Craig said to me that it really didn't make any sense. To knock the pole over you'd have to do a lot of damage to your car. Even if you had a truck, it would end up a mess. And nobody would do that on purpose, you know? Unless you were trying to mess up the vehicle. Which really didn't make a lot of sense.”

“The Jeep,” Mark Cashman said.

“Exactly,” Gregor said.

“You see,” Grace Feinmann said. “I told her over and over again that it wasn't stupid, but she wouldn't listen to me.”

“But it is stupid,” Eve said suddenly. “I mean, it must have been a big deal. They were out there all night, the crews were, getting it fixed. They might have been out there even the next morning. You know how long things like that take to fix. The news must have been just everywhere. If it was important, why didn't they—”

“The news on Saturday was all about Kayla Anson being murdered,” Grace Feinmann said firmly. “If Saddam Hussein had landed in Washington and offered to join the United States Marine Corps as a regular recruit, it wouldn't have made a dent.”

This, Gregor Demarkian thought, might possibly be true—but it was probably going to turn out to be mostiy his fault. They would look at the records and the records would be there, clear and obvious on the page. The problem would come down to the fact that he did not know where things were up here. He hadn't been able to put two and two together.