It took Kyle Borden and the state trooper who had shown up to help him exactly thirty seconds to decide they were out of their depth and call for reinforcements. It took the ambulance men less than that to decide they were going to have nothing to do with the bodyâor the pieces of the bodyâon the ground in the hedges beside Elizabeth Toliver's garage. Kyle did the intelligent thing and went back to the car to get sick on the floor of the front passenger seat. The state trooper began to pace back and forth along the edge of the lawn, as if the most likely danger was that somebody would drive right up from the street to snatch the body and spirit it away. Gregor went up to the car where Luis was now sitting behind the wheel, staring straight ahead, and asked the man for a flashlight.
Luis rummaged in the glove compartment and came up with a flashlight. He handed it to Gregor and went back to staring out the window.
Gregor flicked the flashlight on and off. The light hiccuped in the darkness. He walked back to the side of the garage and turned it on full blast. Now that he had a chance to really study the scene, instead of just react, he could see that there was more to what had happened to the body than he had originally thought. The cut in the belly was very much like the cut in the belly of the dog the night before, at least as the dog's injuries had been described in Kyle Borden's report and as Gregor himself had been able to see them. There was a slit either up or down the stomach in a single vertical line, or a line that would have been vertical if the victim had been standing. The slit was deep and savage enough to let everything behind it spill out, but it was not the only slit. Gregor let the light from the flashlight roll up the body and stopped at the neck. There was, quite definitely, another slit there, although it was not as easy to see as the one in the belly, and not as dramatic. The line was unmistakable, though, and in at least one place at the front, it gaped. Above it, the face was a jagged white mask, topped with thick dark hair that looked fake. There was no sign of graying at the roots. Either Christine Inglerod was a very lucky woman, or a very careful one.
Gregor snapped off the flashlight and walked back across the lawn to Kyle's police car. Kyle was standing just outside of it, leaning against the side, while the trooper paced by him. The door to the front passenger seat was open. The night was very warm, but very humid.
When Gregor got to the driveway, he stopped, and both Kyle and the trooper moved toward him.
“Well?” Kyle said.
Gregor shrugged. “You need a forensics lab, a good one. This is going to be a little complicated.”
“Wonderful,” Kyle said. “This isn't Philadelphia, you know. It isn't even Pittsburgh. The state police will help us outâ”
“We've got excellent forensic capabilities,” the state trooper said stiffly.
“âbut the fact of the matter is that when it comes to crime technology, this is hicksville.” Kyle sighed.
“In all probability,” Gregor said carefully, “she moved after she was cut. She moved herself, I mean.”
“She was alive?” Kyle blanched.
The state trooper moved uneasily from one foot to another.
“You need a good forensics lab,” Gregor repeated, ignoring Kyle Borden's protestations about “hicksville,” “but my guess is, yes, she was alive after she was cut for at least a few minutes. It looked like she tried to drag herself across the ground. That's when the intestines probably spilled out. They're too widely distributed to be the result of gravity alone. She may have tried to call out, too, but it wouldn't have done her much good.”
“Why not?” the state trooper said.
“Because she was also cut across the throat,” Gregor told him. “Straight across. I think the phrase in the pulp fiction of my childhood was âfrom ear to ear.'”
“Christ,” the state trooper said. “What was that?”
“He's trying to say she had her throat slit like Michael Houseman did. Michael Houseman wasâ”
“I know,” the state trooper said. “Kid got killed in a park up here, thirty, forty years ago.”
“Thirty-two,” Kyle Borden said.
“The dog didn't have a slit in his throat, did he?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Kyle said.
“It would be interesting to know which cut came first, in this case,” Gregor said.
“Why?” Kyle Borden demanded. “And how could anybody know that?”
“A decent forensics lab could make a good guess,” Gregor said patiently. “And why is because it would tell us something about the killer, and about the intent here. I remember Mark saying something to me this morning about
how killing the dog was an angry thing to do.”
“You think this was a mistake?” Kyle said. “You think whoever it really was didn't intend to kill Chris?”
“He or she might not have, at the time it started. Obviously, the intent was there by the time it was overâ”
“Thank you for that,” the state trooper said.
“But you can't simply assume,” Gregor said, “that whoever did this planned it. I'm told that one of the cars in the driveway belonged to the victimâ”
“The Volvo,” Kyle said.
“âso let's say she got here under her own steam. I'm also told that she was intending to invite Ms. Toliver to some kind of social function, apparently in an effort to make up for what went on here all those years ago.”
“Who told you this?” Kyle asked.
“Somebody named Maris,” Gregor said. “Maris Coleman, I presume.”
“There's only one I know of.” Kyle Borden looked toward the house.
“She was just giving us a rundown as to why Ms. Toliver is the most likely person to have murdered Christineâ”
“Chrisâ”
“Inglerod.”
The state trooper nodded. “I can see that,” he says. “There was a murder here all those years ago, and a bunch of people were involved in it, and most of them have been around the area for years without another murder happening, and then the one that's been away all that time comes back and another murder happens andâ”
“And crap,” Kyle Borden said. “Betsy Toliver was nailed into an outhouse at the time Michael Houseman was killed.
Nailed
. Literally. They'd taken a hammer and nails and nailed the door shut on her. She was in there screaming her head off when the cops got to the scene and when they did Michael had been dead less than twenty minutes and Betsy had been in that outhouse long enough to have stripped the skin off her arms from pounding on the walls.”
“Oh,” the state trooper said.
“I think the inference would be unwarranted for a number of reasons,” Gregor said. “It's true that anybody might be capable of anything, but it's also true that Liz Toliver doesn't seem to have much of an incentive to commit murder in this case. It's not enough just to have a motive for murder, there has to be an incentive, something to set it off. What's the incentive here? Yes, she and this woman did not seem to be friends in high school, but Elizabeth Toliver and Maris Coleman weren't exactly friends in high school either. If Elizabeth Toliver wanted to kill somebody, or revenge herself on somebody, why not on Maris Coleman?”
“It would have been a better choice anyway,” Kyle Borden said. “Chris was part of that crowd, but she wasn't a ringleader. Maris was a ringleader. And a nastier bitch you did not want to meetâ”
“I got that impression,” Gregor said dryly. “No, my point is, the murder has to be worthwhile for the murderer, or it has to be a spur-of-the-moment, thoughtless thing. That's why I said that it would be good to know in what order the wounds were inflicted. Because if we have here a spur-of-the-moment, sudden burst-of-passion thing, then Liz Toliver might be a credible suspect. But if we have something planned, something thought out, then I don't see it. Jimmy Card is in there, making her tea right this moment. The woman teaches at Columbia. She's got a fullblast public career. What could Chris Inglerod have possibly done to Liz Toliver to be worth the risk of being caught, or even of being definitively suspected, of a brand-new murder?”
“It would make sense if Ms. Toliver had killed the kid,” the state trooper said, “and this woman could prove it.”
“Absolutely,” Gregor agreed. “But that lands us in all kinds of trouble. First being, of course, that one of the few things we know about Michael Houseman's murder is that Liz Toliver didn't commit it. The second being that if Chris Inglerod had had evidence of Liz Toliver's guilt, there's no
reason why she wouldn't have said so long ago. These women were not friends. It wasn't a question of one close friend trying to cover up for another. As far as I can tell, Chris Inglerod belonged to a group of girls who would have thrown Liz Toliver to the wolves if they'd been presented with the slightest chance. Since she didn't do that, I'd say she didn't have what she needed to do it. If you see what I mean.”
“She might have done it with somebody else,” Kyle said slowly. “Chris might have. She might have known something about somebody else. About one of the, you know, uh, popular crowd.” He blushed. “She might have kept it quiet if it was somebody she cared about.”
The body was already beginning to smell, and it hadn't been long dead when he'd first seen it. Give it another hour, and there would be insects all over it.
The state trooper was looking toward the house. “Did you say Jimmy Card was in there? You mean like Jimmy Card the rock star?”
“It's hard to think of Jimmy Card as a rock star these days,” Kyle Borden said. “He does all this classical stuff.”
“Whatever,” the state trooper said. “That Jimmy Card?”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“Jesus,” the state trooper said. “This is going to be a zoo. I saw a case in Pittsburgh once, happened in this hotel to some girl seeing somebody in the Rolling Stones. It was insane.”
They all turned to look at the back of the house together, but this time nothing could be seen in the lighted windows of the kitchen. They went back to looking at each other. Gregor thought it was always hard to understand motive, because motive often made almost nothing in the way of sense. People killed for money, and for love, but in the end they almost always killed out of either too much heat or too much coldness. Gregor was inclined to go with Mark's assessment and say that this was heat, if only because he could see no other reason for killing in the way it had been done. It would have been so much easier just to stab. It
would have been less bloody, although it might not have been as sure. It wasn't just a question of why Chris Inglerod had come hereâit might be perfectly true that she'd come to invite Liz Toliver to something, and decided to do it in person because she'd have a better chance of getting Liz to say yesâbut of why Chris Inglerod had gone around to that side of the garage. It wasn't the side closest to the house. She hadn't parked in the garage, where she might have been confused as to which door to take and taken that one, just as Gregor had. He hated things like this that seemed to make no sense to begin with, and then made less and less as he tried to straighten them out.
Finally, in the distance, there were more sirens. Gregor supposed they must be coming either from state police headquarters, or from some regional office able to supply not only a crime lab but a real medical examiner. As far as Gregor could tell, Hollman didn't have one of its own.
“Oh, thank God,” Kyle said, turning toward the noise. “You have no idea how glad I'm going to be to hand this whole thing over to a real cop.”
It was after midnight before they were finished, and even then there was a tape up around the place where the body had been found and a single state trooper left to guard it. In the last hour, two unknown young men had shown up and tried to mingle with the police officers, but there was no one to mingle with, and nobody willing to talk to somebody they didn't know with no known reason to be at the scene. Gregor was sure that at least one of the young men was stringing for the tabloids, or hoping to. He not only hung around far too long, but kept walking out to the front of the house and coming back again. Gregor meant to ask Kyle Borden if he knew who the young man wasâKyle seemed to know everybody who lived in townâbut he got too involved in talking to one of the newest state troopers.
By the time he looked up, the young man was gone. There was no way to cordon off the property. Sawhorses and police guards were all well and good, but they could be sneaked past, and if they could be they would be.
He waited on the back lawn until everybody but the one state trooper delegated to guard the crime area was gone. He said good-bye to Kyle Borden and promised to phone him “in the morning,” although he knew it was already morning, and that neither one of them was likely to be worth much until well after ten. He walked back to the tape cordoning off the crime area and looked over it at nothing much. It was far too dark to see anything. Even the grass looked like a black hole. He turned around and walked back to the house. The air felt heavy and thick, the way it did right before a rain.
Gregor let himself in through the back door of the house and went through the little pantry-cum-mudroom into the kitchen. He'd fully expected to find the place full of peopleâLiz and Jimmy and Mark and Maris Coleman, at least, and maybe the mother's nurseâbut instead, the only person there was Liz herself, sitting at the round breakfast table with a book open in front of her. Bob Dylan's
Blood on the Tracks
was playing somewhere. Liz did not appear to be reading.
Gregor cleared his throat. “Where is everybody?” he asked. “I thought I'd come in here and find a horde of angry civilians, all wanting to know when the police would let them go home.”
“We are home,” Liz said reasonably. “Except for Maris, of course, and she's passed out on the couch in the living room. My mother is asleep. The night nurse is with her. Geoff is asleep, too, but Mark's in with him reading something or the other. Jimmy's taking a shower.”
“It might be best if you got him out of here,” Gregor said. “It might be best if you got yourself out of here, too, and your mother, as soon as you can manage it. There's no way to cordon off this house. When the press hits, you're
going to be overrun and there isn't going to be much you can do about it.”
“I know.” Liz got up. “I'm going to make myself some tea. Do you want some?”
“No, thank you.”
“Coffee? Wine? Maris has a Chanel No. 5 bottle full of Gordon's gin, if you want me to make you something stronger. One thing you have to say about Maris. She never stoops to cheap liquor.”
“She's also a disaster waiting to happen. Mr. Card is probably right about her feeding stories to the tabloids. I'm sure you already know that.”
“Oh, absolutely. She's probably getting paid for it, too. It would explain how she could afford to buy some of the things she does. Steuben glass. All those Ann Taylor dresses. Unless she's running up her credit cards again. Which she probably is.”
Gregor cocked his head. “Doesn't any of this bother you? You must know she doesn't have your best interests at heart. Why do you put up with her?”
Liz opened the refrigerator door and got out a large glass tray. When she put it down on the table, Gregor saw that it was piled with sandwiches, some ham and cheese, some turkey and Swiss, some tuna fish. The kettle went off on the stove and she took it and poured water into the cup she'd left at her place.
“I've tried to explain it to Jimmy,” she said as she put the kettle back and sat down, “and I've tried to explain it to Mark, and I think maybe it's a girl thing. Or maybe it's just that I ran into Maris for the first time in years just after Jay had died.”
“Jay was your husband?”
“Exactly. Anyway, I don't know if I can explain it. It's just that, I can remember her, Maris, our first day of school, ever. Kindergarten, Center School, 1956. I remember sitting at this table in the middle of all these other children I didn't know, and Maris walked through the door with her mother and she wasâperfect. I don't think I'd had a definition of
perfect before then. She was so perfect I wanted to cry, and the more I watched her, the more perfect she got. She was beautiful and smart andâgolden. If that makes any sense.”
“It makes sense that you felt that way. It makes sense that there are children like that. I don't see how it explains the present situation.”
“Yes, well.” The sandwiches on the tray were cut into triangular quarters. Liz picked up a triangle of tuna fish on whole wheat and looked it over. “She was like that all through school. Oh, there were other girls who were prettier, really. Belinda Hart was phenomenal when she was young, all huge china-blue eyes and blond hair. But Maris, you see, Maris was smart as well as pretty. Very smart. She could do anything. She was salutatorian of our class. She was president of half a dozen clubs, and not just social nonsense, either. She was a championship debater.”
“But you must have been a good student, too,” Gregor pointed out.
Liz shook her head. “Not really. For one thing, I was too recalcitrant and contrary. One year they gave us an assignment to write an essay to submit to the Veterans of Foreign Wars for their Memorial Day essay contest. The winner got to read his essay in front of the whole town at the end of the Memorial Day parade. I wrote an essay about how evil war was and how we should never allow the government to draft anybody. If it had been a couple of years later, I might have gotten away with it, but it was 1965.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Yes, exactly. Anyway, I was always getting myself into that kind of trouble, so my grades were up and down. And my class rank was mediocre. I squeaked into the National Honor Society at the very bottom of the list.”
“But Vassar took you,” Gregor said.
Liz smiled. “I aced my boardsâperfect scores on both aptitude tests and all three achievements. And I got a National Merit scholarship. I actually made the Philadelphia papers for it. So Vassar took me. They were, by the way, the only one. I got turned down at everything from Yale to
Tufts. If Vassar hadn't come through, I'd be waiting tables at JayMar's right this minute.”
“Somehow, I doubt it.”
“I don't,” Liz said. “The thing is, I've always been like that. My record at Vassar wasn't all that good, either. I got into graduate school on the strength of my Graduate Record Exam and some recommendations. I wasn't ever like Maris. I didn't shine, you know. I wasn't brilliant. I didn'tâearn any of it.”
“What?”
“I didn't earn any of it,” Liz said. “If you're going to tell me I'm crazy, don't bother. Jimmy's already done it and so has Mark. But it's true. Everything that happened, you know, CNN and Columbia and the doctorate, I didn't earn any of it. They just sort of happened. I can think of a dozen people who are better than I was at all these things who just didn't make it, and there's no sensible reason for why. It's all chance and circumstance and sheer dumb luck. Like Jay getting some weird cancer that nobody had ever heard of and dying at forty-four. Like Maris, really. Chance and circumstance.”
“You know,” Gregor said slowly, “that's a very dangerous attitude for somebody in your position to have.”
“Is it?”
“I'd say so, yes. You leave yourself open to a lot of nastiness that way, and you aren't in a position to protect yourself.”
“I don't see that I have anybody to protect myself from.”
“Don't you?'
Liz waved a hand in the air. “Oh, Maris. All right. Maris. But none of you understand. She really doesn't mean any harm by it. She's just upset, and depressed, and ashamed, I suppose, and so she lashes out at me because I'm convenient. I don't understand why it is that people can't see that she's in so much pain. It's like watching a child who's been run over by a truck and is taking a very long time to die. That's an image, isn't it?”
“I think it's a faulty analogy. From what I saw, Maris
Coleman isn't a child, and she hasn't been run over by a truck. She's a middle-aged alcoholic with a mean streak.”
“I know. But she's still a child who's been run over by a truck, and if the world were a just and honorable place, she'd be the one in this position and I'd be the one in hers. I don't know why things don't work out the way they're supposed to. I just know they don't.”
“And if things had worked out the way they were supposed to,” Gregor said, “what would have happened to you?”
“I'd still be an editorial assistant at Simon and Schuster.” Liz laughed. “Except I wouldn't be. I was a terrible editorial assistant. I was disorganized. I was stubborn. I was a mess. Listen, I think that's Jimmy getting out of the shower. I'm going to go check on him. Get yourself whatever you want. Finish the sandwiches. Rummage through the refrigerator. You must be starving.”
“I'm all right,” Gregor said.
Liz stood up. “And don't worry about Maris,” she told him. “Maris is not somebody you have to worry about. She's helpless, really. And harmless, in spite of all that nonsense with the tabloids. I'm just trying to make sure she doesn't disintegrate completely.”
Gregor thought about saying that it wasn't Maris Coleman's disintegration he was worried about, but he didn't. A moment later, Liz Toliver was gone, her footsteps almost inaudible on the back hall carpet. Gregor picked up a triangle of ham and Swiss on rye and wished, for the hundredth time since he'd arrived in Hollman, that he had Bennis with him to hold his hand. In some ways, he was even beginning to wish he'd never left Cavanaugh Street. He looked at the ham and Swiss and thought about Chris Inglerod's body lying out on the lawn with the intestines strung out on the grass like ribbons. He put the sandwich back on the tray and stood up.
He would go down to his room and get ready for bed, and then he would call Bennis again to see if she would talk to him until he could go to sleep.