28 Hearts of Sand (12 page)

There was another woman at another counter. She was also in uniform, and also looked crisply efficient, but she had strands of hair coming out of the shiny metal hair clip she was using to hold it all back. She looked up when Battlesea approached and said,

“They’re in the common room. They’ve got some files for you.”

“Thank you.”

Battlesea led Gregor through the hatch door in the counter and across the broad room with even more desks in it.

At the other end of the room, there was a door left slightly open. Battlesea pushed it in, and there were two men sitting at a cheap, wide table, drinking coffee.

Battlesea gestured at Gregor.

“Gregor Demarkian,” he said.

“Damn,” one of the men said.

The men were both white and in their thirties. They both had brown hair and brown eyes. They were so much alike, Gregor wasn’t sure he would have been able to pick one over the other in a lineup.

The one who hadn’t spoken stood up. “Mike Held,” he said, holding out his hand. “This is Jack Mann.”

Gregor shook Mike Held’s hand. Mike Held waved at the chairs around the table. Gregor sat down.

“We’re really glad you’re here,” Mike Held said. “We really don’t know what we’re doing.”

“We don’t even know where to start,” Jack Mann said. “And then there’s all that trouble with the state crime lab.”

“What trouble?” Gregor asked.

Now it was Jason Battlesea who sat down. “Not to put too fine a point on it,” he said, “they lost their accreditation.”

Gregor tried to take this in. “How did they lose their accreditation?”

“They say it’s mostly about not being fast enough and that kind of thing,” Mike Held said. “They haven’t had a full-time person over there for ages, and they weren’t getting the forensic evidence processed as fast as they should have. We’re beginning to think that even if we find the murderer and arrest him, even if you find him, it won’t matter, because the prosecutor will get into court and the defense will start going on about how you can’t trust any of the forensics because the lab is unaccredited, and that’s going to be that.”

“You said ‘the lab,’” Gregor said. “There’s only one.”

“There’s only one,” Jack Mann agreed. “For the entire state. And they couldn’t even put on a full-time person there.”

“Let’s leave that for a moment, all right? You are the two who have been investigating this crime up to now?” Gregor asked.

“Absolutely,” Mike Held said.

“And it was copies of your notes that were sent to me when I agreed to come out here?”

“We sent all the notes, not just ours,” Mike Held said. “We sent the notes of the uniform who responded at the scene.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Uniforms responded at the scene. These were—”

“A woman,” Mike Held said. “She was doing a patrol around Beach Drive. She saw what she thought was a light where there shouldn’t be any, and she pulled into the drive. You’ve got to wonder how stupid anybody had to be to leave a light on in that house.”

“Maybe not,” Jack Mann said. “The family has timed lights for security. It’s not impossible for there to be lights on there.”

“Maybe not,” Mike Held said, “but everybody on the force knows which lights those are. So if there are other lights, we’re going to go right ahead and check.”

“The uniform didn’t know what to think when she got in there,” Mike Held said. “She didn’t know it was Chapin Waring. She’s much too young, even Jack and I are much too young, to have been around when all that happened. So in the beginning, we just went at it like any homicide case. And then—”

“It was the ME’s office that figured out who it was,” Jack Mann said. “They got the body, and the guy who was supposed to work on it knew all about that case, and they called us immediately. And then we did what we were supposed to do to confirm it. It was bad enough having a murder case. Now we’ve got this, and we don’t even know where to start. Hell, the FBI doesn’t know how to solve this thing. How do they expect us to solve it?”

Gregor was getting that feeling he had sometimes, that it was going to take infinite patience to get through the next fifteen minutes.

“Solve what?” he asked them.

2

The scene would have been funny, if Gregor had been in a mood to laugh. The three men sat around their cheap table, staring at him as if he’d just told them that something they’d always believed to be true—that the world was round, for instance—wasn’t. Two of them actually had their mouths open. Jason Battlesea’s face had gone more than a little red.

Gregor took the attaché case he’d been carrying and put it on the table. He snapped it open and went through the four bound stacks of paper he had there.

He found the bound sheaf he was looking for. He had written “Alwych PD” across the front of it. He took it out and put it on the desk.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked.

Jason Battlesea looked a little uncertain. “You had us investigated?” he asked. “Do you do that with all your clients?”

“I did not have you investigated,” Gregor said. “I did ask around, because that’s only sensible. If I’m going to take a case, I want to be sure that the people I’m working with are capable of being worked with. But this is not that. This is a hard-copy printout of the computer files you sent me outlining this case. And do you know what’s wrong with it?”

“Did we leave something out?” Jack Mann asked. “We went over it and over it. We really did.”

“You may have left something out,” Gregor said, “but it would be hard for me to know what. What’s wrong with this is this: Four-fifths of it concern the robberies, or Chapin Waring disappearing at the very moment when she was identified as one of the people involved in those robberies, or about the people Chapin Waring did or didn’t know in the period when those robberies were taking place. There are even six solid pages about debutante parties.”

The three men looked more and more bewildered. It wasn’t stupidity. They were all bright enough. It wasn’t even entirely lack of experience. There were experienced agents of the FBI who were making this same mistake, but they had the excuse that this case was not actually theirs. Jason Battlesea, Mike Held, and Jack Mann had no excuse at all.

Gregor tried very hard not to let his exasperation show.

“No matter what happened with those robberies,” he said, “you have a case here and now. You have a body in the morgue. You have a crime scene. You have an act of violence. A woman was murdered in a house on Beach Drive. She was stabbed in the back with—with what? I presume a knife, but your report to me doesn’t actually say so. I can find out more about a thirty-year-old bank robbery in these pages than I can about your actual case.”

“But,” Jason Battlesea said.

“Yes?” Gregor said.

“But aren’t they connected?” Jason Battlesea said.

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

“But they have to be connected,” Jason Battlesea said. “She disappeared because of the bank robberies, and because those two people got killed in the last one. She wouldn’t just come back here for no reason. She knew the FBI was looking for her. And why would anybody kill her if it didn’t have something to do with the robberies? It’s not like she’d been here all the time, making enemies.”

“Maybe,” Gregor said, “but I don’t know, and you don’t know either. What if this hadn’t been Chapin Waring who’d been killed? What if it had been some unknown woman? How would you have gone about it then?”

“Well, we’d have tried to identify her,” Mark Held said. “But we have identified her this time. There were fingerprints and that kind of thing. The identification isn’t in doubt.”

“If it had been an unknown woman,” Gregor said, “I presume you would have gathered all the forensic evidence and sent it to the lab. And yes, I know the state lab lost its accreditation. But you’d have done that. Have you done that?

“All right,” Gregor said. “Then I would presume you’d cordon off the scene and keep going over it. You’d check out the rest of the house. You’d talk to the neighbors.”

“We did all those things,” Mike Held said.

“And you didn’t put that into your report,” Gregor told him. “She was stabbed. I assume with a knife. Where did the knife come from? Was it part of a set in the house? Was it brought in from outside?”

“It wasn’t part of a set from the house that we could see,” Mark Held said. “We looked in the kitchen, and there were three or four knife sets in those wooden blocks, but they were all full. It could have been in the house in a drawer or something, not part of a set, but we’ve got no way of knowing. Nobody has lived in that house for decades.”

“It’s still owned by the Waring family?”

“Owned, but not occupied,” Jack Mann said. “The parents up and moved away less than a year after Chapin disappeared. The impression I get talking to people is that they couldn’t stand it. People were always coming around, invading their privacy.”

“And the parents are now—?”

“Dead,” Jason Battlesea said.

“And the house still isn’t sold. And nobody lives in it.”

“There are three other sisters,” Mike Held said. “Caroline lives right here in town. She and her husband have a place over in the Sheepwoods section of town. The other two—”

“Charlotte and Cordelia,” Jack Mann said.

“Right,” Mike said, “Charlotte and Cordelia. They’re not local anymore. I think one of them lives in Chicago, but I’m not sure.”

“And the house has never been up for sale?”

“Not that I know of,” Jason Battlesea said.

“Well,” Gregor said, “did you ever ask yourself why?”

The three men looked nonplussed.

“But aren’t you doing the same thing?” Mike Held asked. “Aren’t you just concentrating on the old crime? I mean, okay, they kept the house like that all these years and it’s really odd, but isn’t the reason they did that something having to do with the older crime?”

“Maybe,” Gregor said. “But unlike reports of the witness statements of the bank robberies, it’s also something that has an immediate relevance to this crime. Chapin Waring was found dead in her family’s home, which has been maintained—has it been maintained?”

“If it hadn’t been, there would have been complaints from the rest of Beach Drive,” Jason Battlesea said. “I’ve driven by that place dozens of times, and the lawns always look really great.”

“What about inside the house?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, that looks really great, too,” Mike Held said. “Except for the stuff that was shot up when the murder happened. Or maybe later.”

“Do you know if the murder actually occurred in that house?” Gregor asked. “Do you know if Chapin Waring was stabbed there?”

“No,” Mike admitted.

“But you do know she had a gun?” Gregor tried to sound encouraging.

“She had a gun in her hand when the body was found,” Jack Mann said.

“And that doesn’t set off alarm bells in your heads?” Gregor asked.

“Alarm bells about what?” Mike Held asked.

“Well,” Gregor said, “here’s a woman who has been stabbed in the back. But she also has a gun in her hand. If somebody was trying to kill her, why didn’t she shoot?”

“She did shoot,” Jack Mann said. “She shot up the entire living room. She shot a bunch of holes in this big mirror. She took out most of a really huge chandelier.”

“Those were all bullets from the gun she was holding?”

“They were,” Mike Held said, “so maybe she was shooting at the person who stabbed her. Maybe that person snuck up behind her when she didn’t know he was there—or she was there—and then she turned around and tried to get them with the gun.”

“Okay,” Gregor said, “that’s not entirely implausible, but I don’t like it much. We have to presume she knew she was in a place where she was at least potentially in danger. I’d think she’d be on her guard. But let that pass for the moment. What time of day was the body found?”

“It was at night,” Jason Battlesea said. “Maybe nine o’clock at night.”

“And when she was found, she was dead? Do you know how long she’d been dead?” Gregor asked.

“You know better than that,” Jason Battlesea said. “This isn’t
CSI.
We can’t pull magic out of our hats.”

“You can usually tell if a body is a couple of minutes or a couple of hours cold,” Gregor said. “There’s nothing wrong with the state medical examiner’s office, is there? Isn’t that Henry Lee?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the medical examiner’s office, no,” Jason Battlesea said. “We must have all this information somewhere. I’m not sure why we didn’t send it to you. Why don’t we sit down and go through the computer files and see what we can find.”

“Didn’t you say the first person on the scene was a uniformed patrolman?” Gregor asked.

“Patrolwoman,” Mike Held said.

“I want to talk to her,” Gregor said.

“Of course,” Jason Battlesea said. “She’s—what, she’s still on night duty? She ought to be coming in around six.”

“I want to talk to her now,” Gregor said. “Even if you have to get her out of bed.”

3

It took Angela Harkin nearly twenty minutes to get into the station, and when she arrived she was not in uniform. What she was wearing instead was one of those sundresses whose tops were made out of something ruched and elastic, with thin spaghetti straps and a hemline that ended above her knees. Gregor noticed first that she did not have the kind of body usually associated with that kind of dress. She was stocky and short, built more like a man than a woman in many ways. The next thing he noticed was the way she walked. She kept her back very, very straight. She always looked straight ahead.

“Military?” Gregor asked her as she threw her huge tote bag down on the table in the middle of them.

Angela Harkin nodded. “Army, ten years. MP the last six. Then my knees gave out. I felt like an idiot, you know? I mean, what do MPs do if they’re not in a war zone? Mostly, they pick up drunks who’re overstaying their leave or causing some kind of trouble. You’d think anybody would be able to handle that kind of thing. Well, one of my drunks had a baseball bat and went right for my knees, and a couple of months later another one tried to drive over me, and here I am. Not that I mind being here. It’s a great place. It’s just that I always intended to make a career out of the service.”