The Headmaster's Wife (50 page)

“I don't know exactly what we're looking for,” he said. “Something small, I'd guess. Something that could have been thrown or placed under those trees.”

“Danny Kelly looked under those trees an hour ago,” Brian pointed out. “He didn't find a thing.”

“Neither did the person who went looking the night

Michael Feyre died,” Gregor said. “That's why Michael Feyre
did
die. If our person had found what he or she was looking for, there would have been no need to kill Michael. At least not then.”

“You do understand that Michael Feyre's death was ruled a suicide,” Brian said. “And I don't see how you're going to explain it as murder—yes, yes, I know, sex. But you know what I mean. Explain it so a jury would buy it and a decent defense attorney couldn't get the jury to laugh at it.”

“Fortunately, I won't have to explain it that well,” Gregor said. “We don't need to bring it up if we don't want to. Your prosecutor can go at this from any angle he wants to. We
will
be able to prove who poisoned Mark. And we'll have at least good evidence for who poisoned Edith Braxner. Take your pick.”

“Her,” Brian said.

“Her who?”

“Our prosecutor. She's a her. Siobhan Clanahan.”

“Right,” Gregor said. If he had belonged to one of those civil rights commissions looking into racism and favoritism in police departments, he would have started to suspect that there was a definite bias in favor of Irish Americans in Windsor's municipal government.

“How are we going to find something that the person couldn't find a week and a half ago?” Brian said. “I don't know how long you think it's been there, whatever it is—”

“Since the night Michael Feyre died,” Gregor said. “Or the afternoon before. The same day. I don't think it would have been there any earlier. He was a sadist, and from all reports he didn't have much in the way of impulse control.”

“Michael Feyre? No,” Brian said, “he didn't. Was it Michael Mark saw?”

“No,” Gregor said. “It was Michael who put what we're looking for under those evergreens. My guess is that he threw it well back, as hard as he could. Look at them. They're very low to the ground. They scrape it in a couple of places. Of course Danny didn't find anything just looking. Neither did the person who was out here looking that night.”

“Did it occur to you that somebody else might have? Somebody might have seen whatever it was and picked it up before whoever it was got here.”

“I don't think so. I think if that had happened, it would have been turned in to lost and found or turned over to the administration.”

“So you
do
know what we're looking for,” Brian said.

“No,” Gregor said, “I know the kind of thing we're looking for. If this was real life, instead of a school, I'd know a lot better because then I'd have a limited number of options. I'm still flailing around where the school is concerned though. I'm never sure how they do what they do. Maybe I should have brought Mark with me.”

“His mother would have killed you,” Brian said. “But let's go over this one more time. Michael Feyre was blackmailing a faculty member—”

“Several, from what I can figure out,” Gregor said. “James Hallwood, definitely, no matter what he says. Philip Candor, not certain but possible. Marta Coelho. I don't know about what, probably buying some pot, but there's something. Nothing else explains how incredibly jumpy she is about this whole thing. If we combed the campus and really insisted on getting information, we'd find half a dozen more.”

“Right,” Brian said. “We should comb the campus. That would be interesting. So one of these people—”

Out near the pond, the last of the yellow tape had gone up and the uniformed patrolmen were backing off, trying to do as little damage as possible. Gregor thought it was a bit late to be worrying about that. They'd been tramping all over everything all afternoon.

“Look,” he said, “it's perfectly simple. The blackmail required evidence of some kind. I'm not sure what, but it required some form of physical evidence. Michael Feyre, in all likelihood, promised to give it back if the faculty member in question served as safety and gave him a blow job as part of an autoasphyxiation session.”

“Wasn't that risky?” Brian asked. “He was blackmailingpeople. He must have known some of them would want to kill him.”

“He was sixteen years old” Gregor said, “and sixteen year olds think they're immortal at the best of times. He was also, if the descriptions of him are accurate, and I think they are since one of them came from his own mother, a raving psychopath. Psychopaths think they're immortal, too. They think they're smarter than everybody else. They think they're braver. They think they're stronger. And most of all, they have supreme contempt for all other human beings. He may have suspected that some of his victims wanted to kill him, but I'll bet anything he didn't believe any of them would ever have the guts to actually do it.”

“And you think this one did,” Brian said.

“It's really very simple, if you look at it sanely,” Gregor said. “Michael Feyre was a sadist. We know that, too. We know it from everything everybody has said about him, again including his mother. He had whatever it was he had, something absolutely damaging to his victim, something his victim wanted back. He put it somewhere he or she couldn't get it.”

“He threw it under this stand of evergreens,” Brian said.

“Apparently, yes,” Gregor said, “and he told his victim that he or she could come here and get it or service him sexually so that he wouldn't talk. Or he'd come back and get it himself and turn it in. He made it damned near impossible to find, and he put a time limit on the whole enterprise. He had to have it by X hour or he'd do something about it. You've got to remember that the whole administration of this school, and a good half of the faculty, live on campus. He wouldn't have had to wait for the morning or the end of the weekend.”

“All right. Then what? Our murderer comes out here and tries to find whatever it is, and Mark is up on the catwalk and sees the operation, right?” Brian said. “But Mark didn't recognize the person.”

“No, he didn't,” Gregor said, “but the person didn't even know he or she was being watched. The murderer tried to getunder the trees and couldn't. The murderer tried for some time, which was why Mark could see the 'body,' as he puts it, lying on the ground for long.”

“Motionless, he said,” Brian pointed out.

“Stretching, I think,” Gregor said. “And he'd moved away when the murderer got up and left. The murderer then went to Hayes House and did what Michael required to keep his mouth shut. Michael got up on that chair. The ropes were put in place on his arms, on his legs, on his neck. The murderer unzipped Michael's fly and took out his penis—and then, instead of doing the expected, the murderer kicked the chair out from under Michael's feet and let him hang. All that was needed after that was to put the penis back in the pants and zip up. Then leave.”

“Everybody says Michael was a sadist, not a masochist,” Brian said. “Why did he want someone to tie him up?”

“Control,” Gregor said. “The idea that he was so completely in control of this other person that even hog-tied he could direct the scene and never once be disobeyed. I think Michael Feyre sincerely believed that that was what was going to happen. He wouldn't have put himself in the position he was in otherwise.”

“It sounds like Alice Makepeace,” Brian said, “doesn't it?”

“Yes,” Gregor admitted, “it does. She's always been the one with the most to lose in all of this, and she's always been the one ruthless enough to get whatever she wanted however she wanted it. And she would have known that the suicide of a student would not close the school or even bring on much in the way of an inquiry. Nobody wants an inquiry into a student suicide. The parents don't want it; it only rakes up memories they can't handle. The school doesn't want it; it makes them look bad. The police don't want it; there isn't much of any point to it and they only end up looking like insensitive asses. You're to be commended for doing as much of an investigation as you did.”

“Thanks a lot,” Brian said. “Now all we have to do is start rolling some people under there and find what you think they can find, even though you can't tell them what to lookfor because you don't know what it is. They pay you lots of money to do this sort of thing?”

“My best guess,” Gregor said, “is that it's going to be some kind of wallet.”

“A wallet,” Brian said.

Gregor kept his cell phone in the pocket of his sports jacket, not handy, because he never used it. Now he heard it ring, and for a moment he thought the sound belonged to something Brian Sheehy was carrying. When he realized it belonged to him, it took him long seconds first to find the phone and then to get it out where it could be useful.

He flipped it open and checked the call waiting. It was a magnificent phone, a gift from Bennis on his last birthday. It reminded him of weapons used in
Star Wars
movies, although he had to admit that he never paid much attention to
Star Wars
movies. If Tibor wanted company, Gregor went with him and half slept through a large popcorn.

There were only three people in the world who had this number: Bennis, Tibor, and Lida Arkmanian. Lida would only call if one of the other two had died. Tibor would only call in an emergency. Gregor stared down at Bennis's number showing in the identification window and said, “Excuse me. There's something I have to do.”

Gregor had never really reconciled himself to cell phones. He knew they were convenient, and that they could be life-savers in some circumstances. He would not like to be stranded on a deserted road with a flat tire without one, and he understood the value of them in radically traumatic events: the people who had called from the top of the Twin Towers, just before the towers themselves went down in flames, to say good-bye to the families they loved; the people who called from the edges of earthquakes and tornadoes and hurricanes; the people who called from the insides of banks during the progress of a robbery or a hostage situation. Gregor didn't think cell phones were a bad thing. He just didn't like the idea of standing out in the open where everybody and anybody could hear him, having a private conversation without even the small comfort of being able to sit down.

There was nothing he could do about that at the moment. There was no place close enough for him to retreat to. The library was several yards up the hill behind him. He didn't want to be that far from the action while the uniformed policemen moved in. He settled for backing up to just beyond the crowd of law enforcement, but not so far that he backed into the crowd of students, faculty, and onlookers who were being held back by even more uniformed police. He was surprised Windsor had this many people in its department. He wondered what crime was going unpoliced while what seemed to be the entire force was here tending to the scandal at Windsor Academy.

He turned the phone on and said, “Hello?” The wind was picking up, and although it wasn't as cold as it had been last night, it was still frigid. Gregor found himself wishing he'd worn a hat or even owned one.

“Hi,” Bennis said.

“Well,” Gregor said. Then he felt like an idiot. He'd known this woman for nearly a decade. He'd been living with her, officially or unofficially, for quite some time. There had to be something to say besides “well.”

“I'm watching you on the news,” Bennis said. “There's a camera right behind you, looks like at the top of some hill you're halfway down. They pointed you out a minute ago.”

“I've moved since then,” Gregor said. There were a lot of cameras behind him. He couldn't tell if one of them was aimed in his direction.

“They'll find you next time they look,” Bennis said. She seemed to be breathing very heavily into the phone. “Liz called,” she said finally. “She's worried about you.”

“About me? Why? I haven't done much of anything here except sit around and look at papers. And talk to people. You know what that's like. Talking to people.”

“I know what it's like,” Bennis said, 'but I'm surprised you do. You don't talk to people much, Gregor.”

“I'm using the phrase in a different sense,” Gregor said. “I was talking to suspects.”

“You were interrogating people, you mean.”

“All right, I was interrogating them.”

“You're good at interrogating people. I've seen you do it. You're not so good at talking to people.”

“I'm really not good at talking to people who aren't talking to me,” Gregor said. “You know, I'm not a clairvoyant. If you ask me, nobody is a clairvoyant. I can't understand what you want me to know unless you tell me first.”

There was a long silence on the line. “I don't know what I want you to know. And maybe this isn't the time for it. You're on television again. They've got you from the side this time. You should button your coat.”

Gregor's first impulse was to ask why she'd called if she didn't want to talk, but he wasn't entirely without the ability to understand women. He knew that she'd either go straight through the roof or descend into that icy coldness he'd had to put up with for days. He wanted neither thing to happen. He only wished that whoever was filming him would stop. There was something a little uncomfortable about the idea that Bennis could see him when he couldn't see her.

“Listen,” he said, “didn't you want me to go back to work? Back on the last day you were acting like yourself—”

“I always act like myself, Gregor. I don't have anybody else to act like.”

“Back then you were telling me I was driving you crazy and hurting myself by not being willing to take on a job, and here I am. I've taken on a job. I'm out. You told me I should get out. I'm not moping around.”