28 Hearts of Sand (13 page)

“Angela gets a little bored,” Jack Mann said.

“There’s a lot to get bored about in a place like this, Jack,” Angela said. “Nothing ever happens here that can’t be cleaned up by a call to Bridgeport or a call to Hartford, and I much prefer Bridgeport.”

“There are always the calls to Washington,” Mike Held said.

Angela Harkin rolled her eyes and sat down. “I take it this is Mr. Demarkian,” she said, turning to him and holding out her hand. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you. You been over to Beach Drive yet?”

“He’s staying at the Switch and Shingle,” Jason Battlesea said.

“Good,” Angela said. “Then you know what it’s like. Great, big houses, set back, with their backs to the sea, and then on the other side with their faces to the sea. The ones that are right on the beach itself are more expensive. The Waring house is one of the expensive ones. So I patrol that, and I start at six o’clock. It was June, so it was light out. I made maybe three turns that night without seeing anything. And I mean not anything. I didn’t see any cars on the road. I didn’t see any people walking. Then I had to stop in at the Atlantic Club and check that out.”

“What was going on at the Atlantic Club?”

“Fund-raiser for Virginia Brand Westervan’s Senate campaign,” Angela said. “Virginia Brand Westervan is the congresswoman from this district, and now she’s running for Senate against an absolutely brain-dead jerk whose idea of fiscal responsibility is to eliminate homeless shelters.”

“That’s not true,” Jason Battlesea said, “and you know it.”

“All right, I’m exaggerating a little,” Angela said. “But not my kind of guy. Anyway, there was a huge fund-raiser over there and there was lots of security. We had a couple of guys on extra shifts, and Virginia had her own private security people. So I was supposed to stop in and look around and make sure everything was going okay. And I did.”

“And everything was going okay?” Gregor asked.

“Everything was fine,” Angela agreed. “Virginia came out and talked to me herself, and then she got this waiter to get me a bunch of these canapé things with lobster that were absolutely stellar. And I don’t want to hear one thing about what I was or wasn’t supposed to be doing on duty. I didn’t drink the champagne.”

“If this was a serious police department,” Jack Mann said, “you’d have been fired months ago.”

“I don’t like to hear that this isn’t a police department,” Jason Battlesea said. “This isn’t a high-crime area, but—”

“Trust me, this is a high-crime area,” Angela said, “it’s just Federal crimes and they’re all financial. We’ve already had five people from Alwych go to Danbury for fraud, three of them for mortgage fraud, which, as far as I’m concerned, is as bad as it gets. But anyway, I took a little time eating the canapés and then I got back in the patrol car and started another round.”

“And was it still light out?” Gregor asked.

Angela nodded. “It was a little,” she said. “It wasn’t full dark, and wouldn’t be for a while, but the lights in the Atlantic Club were all on, and the lights were on in most of the houses I passed after that.”

“That included the lights in the Waring house,” Gregor said.

“Absolutely,” Angela said, “but that didn’t mean much, because the lights there are on a timer. They go on and off at set intervals, and the intervals are changed every once in a while. I’m not sure what the Waring girls think they’re doing, though, because it’s not like everybody on earth didn’t know that that house was empty. It’s been empty for decades.”

“But well taken care of,” Gregor said.

“Oh, yeah,” Angela said. “Really well taken care of. If you didn’t already know, you’d never guess from looking at the place from the outside. They’ve got people who do the snow in the winter. They’ve got people who do the grass in the spring and summer. They’ve got a cleaning service that comes in once a month to dust things. They’ve got a repair service that checks every week. They repaint the house every three years. They take care of it as if they were going to move back in, but they never have.”

“Do they have a security system?”

“Yep, and a good one, too,” Angela said. “One of those private outfits you pay significant money to so that if the alarm goes off, they call the police.”

“But nobody called the police on this night?” Gregor asked.

“Nobody called the police from the security service,” Angela said, “and nobody called the security service. Those two checked. But somebody on Beach Road did call earlier in the night, to say she thought she saw odd lights there, and then heard something she was sure was a gun going off. If it had been anywhere but the Waring house, somebody would probably have been sent over immediately. But the Waring house is our own private haunted house. We get a lot of calls about that house that turn out to be nothing.”

“The way you get a lot of calls from people who think they’ve seen Chapin Waring?” Gregor asked.

“Absolutely,” Angela said again. “And it had been that kind of day, from what I’d heard. People calling in, saying they saw her, I mean. So, when I made the round, I slowed down and looked hard at the house.”

“And?” Gregor asked.

Angela looked uncomfortable. “And I don’t know,” she said. “There were different lights on than what I thought ought to be there, but it’s like I said. They’ve done this well, and it’s not always the same lights. It was just—I don’t know. It felt wrong. So I pulled into the driveway, way up until I was near the house, and I got out to look around.”

“There’s no security in the drive?” Gregor asked. “There’s no outside alarm system?”

“No,” Angela said. “I walked around the house for a while and there didn’t seem to be anything. I stood on the terrace in the back and looked at the beach. There were footprints on the beach, leading up to the house.”

“You’re sure of that?” Gregor asked.

“Yeah, positive,” Angela said. “There were footprints coming up, but none going down. And I didn’t know if I was supposed to think that was odd or not. People have private beaches here, but they’re not really private. They run into each other, and all you have to do to walk along the shore is just walk. There are chain fences, but they don’t go very far out into the water, and at low tide you’d have a great big open space to walk in. And I’d bet anything that people walk along those beaches and then come up to the Waring terrace to look inside.”

“But there were no footsteps leading away from the house,” Gregor said.

“No, there weren’t that I could see,” Angela said. “But I just might have missed something.”

“Do you really think you missed footsteps going away from the house?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Angela said.

“All right,” Gregor said. “That’s good. What next?”

“I didn’t want to jump the gun. The house is empty, but it has owners, and one of them lives in town. The family does come in on and off and check the place out.”

“They never stay there?”

“I don’t know,” Angela said, “but I wasn’t going to barge in there before I knew what was going on. I was on the terrace, and the terrace has this big wall of glass looking out onto the ocean. It’s also got curtains, but I went up to the glass to see if I could see anything at all, and it turned out I could. I could see a foot in a pair of canvas espadrilles. And right then, I thought it was going to turn out that I only thought I saw a foot, and it was really just an espadrille on the floor. So I looked again, and it still looked like a foot. So I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to check it out, that maybe somebody had gotten in there and started squatting, so I went around to the front door.”

“There was a reason you couldn’t get in from where you were?” Gregor asked.

“I probably could have, but we’ve got keys to the security system at the front door, and it causes a lot less fuss if I do things officially,” Angela said. “I went around to the front and let myself in.”

“The front door was locked?”

“Yes, it was,” Angela said. “I had to jimmy it to get it open, and then I had to do a sprint to keep the alarm system from going off.”

“But the alarm system was on?”

“Yes, it was,” Angela said. “I stood in the foyer for a while and there was nothing to see. I called out and nobody answered. Then I went toward the back of the house, and there it was.”

“It?”

“The body,” Angela said. “She was lying on the floor, the knife was sticking out of her back, and the place was a complete mess. She had a gun in her hand. The whole room was shot up, the mirrors, the chandelier, everything. There was glass everywhere. But that isn’t the detail you want.”

“What detail do I want?” Gregor asked.

“She wasn’t wearing espadrilles,” Angela Harkin said. She sounded almost triumphant. “These two have been telling me I must have been mistaken about the espadrille I saw when I looked in from the back, but I’m not. It was an espadrille I saw. But the body of Chapin Waring was wearing tennis shoes. And they weren’t anything like the same color.”

The door to the room opened up, and the uniformed woman from the front desk looked in. “You haven’t been answering your beeper,” she said to Jason Battlesea. “You’re needed out here for a minute.”

Jason Battlesea got up and left the room. Gregor turned his attention back to Angela Harkin.

“This foot you saw,” he said. “Was it the foot of somebody standing up? Lying down? What?”

“Not standing up,” Angela said. “It was up off the floor.”

“Like somebody was sitting on the couch or on a chair?”

“Something like that,” Angela said.

“But there was glass everywhere?” Gregor asked. “You said everywhere. There was glass on the furniture, too?”

“Yes, there was glass on the furniture,” Angela said. “Lots of it. Lots of it everywhere. Furniture, rug, floor, hearth, the body, everywhere.”

“So that if somebody was sitting or kneeling on a piece of furniture, they would have to have been sitting or kneeling on glass?” Gregor said.

“They’d have to have been sitting or kneeling on a lot of it,” Angela said.

The door opened and Jason Battlesea came back in, looking harassed.

“Here’s something,” he said. “The burglar alarm has just gone off at the Waring house.”

PART TWO

A genius is the one who is most like himself.

—Thelonius Monk

ONE

1

The Waring house turned out to be one of the ones with a high hedge near the road, so that Gregor couldn’t have seen it if he’d wanted to while he was being driven to and from town. It was yellow.

They climbed out of the almost unmarked town car now parked in the driveway of the Waring house.

There was a young patrolman in full uniform standing near the side of the house, looking uneasy and very inexperienced. He had the palm of his right hand resting on the butt of the gun in his holster. He was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“Stewart!” Mike Held called.

“This is Stewart Crone,” Jack Mann said. “Stewart, this is Gregor Demarkian.”

“Are you guys going to want to come in and look around?” Stewart asked. “I’ve been in already once and there isn’t anything. I mean, there really isn’t anything. It’s spooky.”

“We got a call from the security company?” Mike Held asked.

“Oh, yeah, exactly,” Stewart said. “And I didn’t expect to find anything. We get calls all the time. People come snooping around and trip the alarm, or the help does, or sometimes it’s animals. But this time the front door was open. It was just open. Maybe an inch or two.”

“Had it been forced?” Gregor asked.

“It doesn’t look like it,” Stewart said. “I was very careful. I moved it back and forth with a pencil so I wouldn’t smear much in the way of prints. And the other thing is, I’m pretty sure it’s unlocked.”

Gregor thought about it. “Could it have been left unlocked after the investigation?”

“No,” Jack Mann said. “Every time we’ve come to this house, I’ve locked and unlocked it myself. And I’ve always been careful to check.”

“There aren’t dead bolts or that kind of thing for backup?” Gregor asked.

“You don’t use dead bolts when you leave a house,” Stewart said. “That’s for when you stay in. Anyway, this door has one of those locks that turn with a little half circle key. I’m pretty sure horizontal is locked and vertical is unlocked, and it was vertical when I got there.”

“Anything disturbed?” Mike Held asked.

“I wouldn’t know how to check,” Stewart said. “I did a quick tour and nothing seemed out of place, but any number of things could have been taken that I wouldn’t notice.”

“Tell me you took an inventory the night of the crime,” Gregor said.

“It was the day after,” Mike Held said, “but we took it. And we’ve got a copy at the station and another one we gave to Mrs. Holder.”

“Mrs. Holder is—?” Gregor said.

“Caroline Waring Holder,” Mike said. “She’s the youngest sister.”

“We get your drift, Mr. Demarkian,” Jack Mann said. “We should double-check against the inventory. We will.”

“Let me just make sure I have this part straight,” Gregor said. “The security company called in to the police station to say that the alarm had gone off in this house. When Officer Crone got here, he found the front door open and probably unlocked. The door had been locked by the police when they last investigated the scene of the crime. Could anybody else have been in this house legitimately between then and now?”

“The sister could have,” Mike Held said. “Mrs. Holder.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Then we’ve got two possibilities: Either this Mrs. Holder came into the house for reasons of her own over the last few days and accidentally left the front door unlocked when she left, or somebody with a key to the front door let himself or herself in and then let the alarm go off, and then left.”

“Why does that sound ridiculous when you say it?” Mike Held asked.

“Because,” Gregor said, “you have to assume that anybody who legitimately has a key to this house must also have the code for the security system. Without it, the key is pretty much useless. There is always the possibility that somebody has an unauthorized key to this house, but then we run into the same roadblock. The key without the security code is worthless. And anybody who actually knew anything about this house would know that.”