Not a Creature Was Stirring (11 page)

Making up her mind, she went down the hall to the door, pushed it open wide, and stepped into the study.

Her father was lying halfway across the room from his wheelchair, sprawled out on the fieldstone overlap of the fireplace base.

Her mother was sitting on the raised hearth, the broad skirt of her blue silk dress wet and heavy with very fresh blood.

Robert Hannaford’s head had been crushed into pulp.

A
T TWENTY-TWO MINUTES PAST
six, Gregor Demarkian, sitting in the back of Robert Hannaford’s custom stretch Cadillac limousine, passed through the front gates of Engine House. The main house was so far from the road, he couldn’t see it at first. The landscape around him reminded him of stories of the forest primeval. Every once in a while, a hailstone came down in the muck of thick snow falling from the sky. It struck the windshield or the roof of the car and disappeared into the surrounding white.

“This driveway’s heated,” the driver said, producing the observation in the smooth upbeat rhythm of a tour guide. “That’s why we haven’t been skidding since we got through the gate.”

Gregor said, “Mmmmm.” He hadn’t noticed they hadn’t been skidding since they got through the gate. He hadn’t even noticed they had been before they got through it. His mind was on a number of things, all of them anchored back on Cavanaugh Street. Donna. Lida. Those telephone calls. He sat a little forward, trying to see where they were going.

The drive was long and winding, twisting through a stand of trees as dense as a forest. The car did a dip and a turn and another dip and came out at the start of a broad lawn. In the distance, Engine House itself rose like the castle the society writers insisted it was, its stone-facaded wings stretching across the horizon like petrified snakes.

Haunted house, Gregor thought automatically. Just as automatically, he amended it. No house could be haunted when it was so dramatically lit up.

Lit up.

Gregor felt the breath go out of him before his mind had a chance to recognize what it was seeing.

It wasn’t Engine House that was lit up. There were lights on the terrace and other lights over the door and one more coming from one of the rooms on the house’s east side, but that was all. What was lit up was the ambulance, and the four police cars keeping it company.

He switched into the rumble seat, to be closer to the partition and therefore to the windshield. What he was seeing he had seen many times before. He knew it the way a classical dancer knew the choreography of a ballet. When they got up close enough, there would be a young patrolman guarding the door and a pair of medics waiting with a body bag. Inside the house, there would be a dozen men with nothing to do and one in an ordinary brown suit with a notebook. Somebody would be asking a lot of questions.

At the moment, Gregor Demarkian had only one question he wanted to ask: had old Robert Hannaford finally let loose and killed someone, or had someone decided to kill him?

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 24–TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27

THE SECOND MURDER

I
T WAS SOMETHING HE
would never have done, if he had still been with the Bureau. In fact, it was something he instinctively knew was wrong. If there was one thing he had learned in twenty years of federal police work, it was how to respect jurisdiction. He had no jurisdiction here. He didn’t even know if he had a technical right to be on the property. If it was Robert Hannaford who was dead, then the invitation to Gregor Demarkian had died with him.

On the other hand, there was no uniformed patrolman at the door, as there should have been. The door was wide open and the foyer was lit—and empty. The place looked deserted, as if a passel of guests had arrived and then gone underground.

You’re getting itchy, Gregor told himself. Then he thought he ought to feel guilty, but didn’t. For one thing, he was much too curious. For another, he was getting angry. If he had been the chief of police in this town and walked in to find the place in this unsecured state, he would have had somebody’s head.

Because there was nobody’s head he could have, he left the driver standing at the foot of the terrace and climbed the steps toward the front door. The driver was babbling, going on and on about how poor Mrs. Hannaford must have died of her illness, but Gregor paid no attention. It just proved what Gregor had thought in the car—that the man was singularly unintelligent. If this had been a natural death, there wouldn’t have been a whole pile of patrol cars and a medical examiner’s van cluttering up the drive.

He stepped into the foyer and looked around. There were doors to his right and directly in front of him, but they were both closed. The doors to his left were open. He peered down the long hall they opened on and found the first sign of activity: a young patrolman standing in the middle of the carpet at the far end, looking green.

“I’m not going back in there,” the patrolman was saying to someone out of sight. “That thing makes me dizzy.”

Gregor sighed. “That thing” was probably the corpse. Why did they let these people join police forces when they couldn’t stand the sight of an ordinary corpse? Gregor had no doubt this was just an ordinary corpse. If something really strange had been going on here, there would not only have been a patrolman at the door, the entire journalist population of the Philadelphia ADI would have been out there, too.

Fortunately, he had learned a few things besides the etiquette of jurisdiction in the Bureau. He was a middle-aged man beginning to run to fat, not Clint Eastwood, but he could make people think he was the president of the United States if he wanted to.

Gregor squared his shoulders, straightened his spine, and sailed toward the green young man. His strategem must have worked. The green young man came immediately to attention.

“Sir?”

“Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.

The green young man nodded sagely, as if he’d been hearing the name all his life. Gregor almost felt sorry for him. The boy was scared to death, thinking with fear instead of his brain—and here Gregor was, about to get him in a great deal of trouble.

Another young man came out of a room on the right, not scared this time but sullen and belligerent. He reacted to Gregor’s stiff-backed presence like a dog to a mailman. He didn’t question Gregor’s authority. He assumed it and hated it on sight.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Another one.”

“This is Mr. Gregor Demarkian,” the first patrolman said diffidently.

“I don’t care who he is,” the second one said. “Christ, but I’m tired. Tired to death.”

“You’re not the one that’s dead,” the first one said.

“Oh, shut up.”

Gregor edged past the two of them, to the door of the room the second young man had come out of. The desertedness of this place was beginning to make him a little nervous. It wasn’t right.

He stopped at the door and looked in. He’d half-convinced himself that this wasn’t the crime scene after all. The young patrolman had been talking about something else when he’d said he wouldn’t go back in this room. The medical examiner and the rest of the patrolmen were wandering around upstairs somewhere, where something serious was going on. But something serious was going on here. There was indeed a corpse, stretched out against the fieldstone hearth of the fireplace, its skull smashed. There was a corpse, but there was nothing else.

Gregor had almost decided he’d followed Alice down the rabbit hole, when he heard steps behind him. They were very forceful steps, nothing that could have belonged to either of the two patrolmen. He turned quickly—and found himself staring into the most physically perfect face he had ever seen.

Male. Black. Furious. Familiar.

And dressed in one of those matte-brown suits bought only by the heads of homicide squads of major suburban police forces.

Gregor Demarkian did not have an exceptional memory for faces, but he remembered this one. It would have been hard to forget it.

“Oh, damn,” Gregor said.

“I don’t know what you’re swearing about,” John Henry Newman Jackman said. “I’m the one who ought to be swearing. What the hell are you doing in here?”

Gregor had never thought about the problems of beautiful men—or even their existence—but standing in this hallway with the broken body of Robert Hannaford in the room behind him, it occurred to him that John Henry Newman Jackman had an unfortunate face. It might have been all right if Jackman had been an actor. As a policeman, he was doomed to be an inhabitant of the worst of memories, and with that remarkable bone structure he was further doomed to be unforgettable. Maybe that was part of what was making him so jumpy, although Gregor doubted it. He’d encountered that kind of jumpiness before. It was called FBI Fever, and its most common verbal expression was: Get off of my turf.

Gregor stepped away from the door, to make room, and said, “It’s all right, John. I’m retired.”

“You’re retired?”

“Two years. Over two years.”

“But what are you doing here?”

Gregor supposed he could tell the truth, but that seemed less than tactful. He’d met Jackman in Philadelphia during Jackman’s rookie year, on a case so gruesome it had given everyone involved in it nightmares for months. From what Gregor remembered, Jackman had been a smart rookie, what the Bureau would have called an automatic rise-through-the-ranks. Now he seemed to have done just that, although Gregor couldn’t be sure how he’d landed in Bryn Mawr. Built a reputation in the city and been hired away as a prize, most likely—and that made it all the more important that Gregor not say anything about the patrolman who wasn’t at the door and the medical examiner who seemed to have disappeared. God only knew what was going on here.

Instead, he said only, “I was invited to dinner. When I got here there were all the cars parked outside and nobody around, so I came in.”

“And straight to the crime scene?”

“It didn’t look like a crime scene, John. There were just these two patrolmen. I was looking for anybody at all.”

Jackman gave him a long look, angry and exasperated. “Crap,” he said. “You’re all I need. I mean that, Demarkian. You’re all I need.”

If you can’t fight, feint. That’s what they’d taught him in self-defense classes. Gregor remembered it, even though he’d flunked out of every one. He said, “Do you know yet why he was dragged so far across the room? Why somebody didn’t just use his wheelchair?”

Jackman stiffened. “What do you mean, dragged across the room?”

“You can see it on the carpet,” Gregor said. He went back to the door and pointed inside. “The nap is all flattened. It goes in an arch from the wheelchair—I assume this was Robert Hannaford?”

“Of course it was Robert Hannaford. I thought you knew him. I thought you said you’d been invited to dinner.”

“Hannaford was confined to a wheelchair. You can see it in the way his legs have atrophied. He couldn’t have walked across the room himself—”

“Why couldn’t he have been sitting in the chair?”

The chair was an antique wing back, standing against the hearth about a foot from where the head now rested—but not where the head had rested when it had been smashed. Gregor was sure of that. The raw facts of the case were easy to see, even at a superficial glance. There was the body with its shattered skull. There was the wheelchair in the far corner of the room. There was a large black bust of Aristotle, made of marble and smeared with blood along the base. A great deal of blood.

“The chair,” Gregor said, “is what he stood on.”

“What?”

“The chair is what he stood on,” Gregor insisted. “Or she. You can see it. It was in that corner before, where the indentations are. The bust was what killed him?”

“There has to be an autopsy, Demarkian. You know that.”

“Of course I know that. But there’s a lot of blood—a lot of blood. His heart must have been beating when his head was smashed. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be nearly so much. And look at what you can see of the wound. It’s nearly flat.”

“So?”

“So, if someone had picked it up and hit him in the normal way, they would have hit with the edge. There’d be an edge line. There isn’t one. Try picking up that thing and aiming it at something. See what it makes you do. It must weigh fifty pounds.”

“Forty,” Jackman said.

“It had to have been dropped right on top of him, John. That’s the only way the wound would be flat. Why was he moved?”

Jackman stirred uneasily. “We don’t know. The daughter found him—Bennis. She found them both.”

“Both?”

“Mrs. Hannaford was in here when Bennis Hannaford came in. She’d picked up her husband’s head and was cradling it in her lap. At least, that’s what Bennis Hannaford says.”

“What does Mrs. Hannaford say?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Gregor raised his eyebrows, but Jackman was turning away, looking back into the room and at the scene. There was so much blood soaked into the rug at the edge of the hearth that even from a distance that spot looked wet. Robert Hannaford didn’t bear looking at. Gregor put his hand on John Jackman’s arm and said, “He’d have been drugged. He’d have had to have been.”

“Drugged,” John Jackman repeated.

“As I said, I’d never met him. But I’ve talked to people who knew him, and I’ve talked to him. He was a vigorous old man. He wasn’t senile and he had a temper. Nobody could have dragged him out of that wheelchair and across the room if he wasn’t drugged.”

“Nobody around here looks like they’re on drugs,” Jackman said. “One of them looks like he has AIDS, but that’s not the same thing.”

“This is a house full of rich people, John.”

“Meaning they all go to psychiatrists and get Valium? Maybe.”

“And there are two invalids,” Gregor pointed out, “or were. There may be painkillers around. I don’t know the nature of Mr. Hannaford’s disability.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Jackman said, “you know entirely too much. Is there anything else, Mr. Demarkian? Mrs. Peacock in the conservatory with the candlestick? Anything?”