Leah was shaking her head like a mother at a loss about what to do with a rebellious child. “I just wish you wouldn’t keep going down this road alone, without backup or anything.”
Rory put her hand over Leah’s. “I’m not alone. I can’t say any more about it than that, but you don’t have to worry.” If Leah only knew that her backup was a ghost, she’d probably be twice as worried, about her sanity as well as her safety.
W
hen Rory returned home and went upstairs to the study, she found the keys on her computer moving up and down like an old player piano. She stood in the doorway for a few bewildered seconds before she realized that an invisible Zeke was manipulating the realized that an invisible Zeke was manipulating the keys.
“Pardon, just conservin’ energy,” he said, materializing as soon as he noticed her there. “Come here, I want to show you somethin’.”
Rory walked over to the desk and stood beside him. “What did you find?”
He scrolled backward through the photo array until he found the picture he wanted. He’d clearly figured out the right amount of force needed to work the computer without destroying it in the process, for which Rory was grateful.
He pointed at the screen. “What do you think?”
She hunkered down to get a better view and instantly recognized the wall in the master bathroom where they’d run out of wallpaper.
“I already told you about that,” she said with a shrug.
“No, look closer.” He moved the chair to the side so that she could look at the screen head-on.
“I don’t see anything,” she said, impatient with herself as well as with Zeke. “Why don’t you just tell me what it is I’m supposed to be seeing?”
“Look at the two panels of wallpaper to the left of the unfinished section.”
“Yeah, so?”
“The flowers don’t line up right.”
Once he pointed it out, Rory could see what he meant. Something had definitely gone wrong there.
“How on earth did you ever notice that?” she asked in amazement. She’d been there in person and had completely missed it.
“Well, to be honest, I didn’t see it myself till the ninth or tenth time I went through the pictures. Now, while it might be interestin’ to find out exactly what happened there, I realize it don’t necessarily mean it’s got anythin’ to do with Gail’s death or Mac’s.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Rory said. “First you tell me not to overlook the smallest, most trivial detail, and now you’re telling me it probably has no bearing on the case.”
“No, darlin’, it’s like this,” Zeke said patiently. “Much as you need to look at everythin’, you ought not assign too much importance to anythin’ until you know its worth.”
“I don’t know,” Rory said, trying to throttle down the irritability that was creeping into her voice. “It sounds to me like you’re making up the rules as you go along.”
“Now that there’s the whole point. An investigation’s gotta change as it goes, and you’ve gotta bend and change with it. You’ve gotta be willin’ to throw out some notions and consider adoptin’ others or you might as well give up before you start.”
Rory was on the verge of asking him why he’d never found the fugitive he was after, if his theory worked so well. She caught herself at the last moment. Though she would have liked to hear his answer, she was pretty sure it would ignite a whole new round of sniping between them. Instead, she graciously thanked him for his help.
They spent the next twenty minutes making a list of the people she still needed to interview, what she had to ask each of them and the order in which she should try to see them. They agreed that Gordon Weatherbee would be the first.
Chapter 22
R
ory was at her desk an hour before her shift started on Monday. Fortunately, since the night squad was small, no one shared the desk with her. It had apparsmall, no one shared the desk with her. It had apparently been a quiet night, with two domestic squabbles, a drunk and disorderly, one stolen car, and a raccoon doing a Santa Claus in someone’s fireplace. As a result, her early arrival attracted more attention than she’d anticipated. The detectives, who still had an hour before they could leave, couldn’t imagine why anyone would choose to come in early.
Rory had responded to their raised eyebrows by saying that since she hadn’t been able to sleep anyway, she’d decided to catch up on some paperwork. For the most part, her colleagues were too sleep deprived themselves to badger her with follow-up questions.
She waited until they were over the novelty of her early arrival and back to whatever they’d been doing, before taking out the sketches she’d drawn based on Zeke’s description of the intruders. She scanned them into her computer and ran the program that searched the database for matches. None were found for the taller of the two men. Either the sketch wasn’t accurate enough, or he’d been lucky enough to escape the system so far. The shorter man was not as lucky. Stuart Sanford, aka William Weber, aka Michael Manning, had not only an apparent fondness for alliteration, but also a record that went back eighteen years. He’d done time for breaking and entering, assault and battery, and grand theft auto, the experience from the latter no doubt coming in handy if he was the one who stole the silver Ford and the black Jeep. Rory wondered if he’d gotten away with murder in the past, or if Mac was his first victim of that crime. She jotted down Sanford’s last known address on Downing Street in Patchogue, already anticipating Zeke’s admonition to stay away from him.
She was just shutting the program down when Leah walked in. Since Leah had a houseful of children, husband, dog and cat to oversee before coming to work, Rory was generally in before she was anyway, so no excuses were necessary on her part. Instead, she gave her friend a warm and hopefully innocent “hi there, nothing’s up with me” kind of smile and found some paperwork that actually did require her attention.
For Rory the day dragged on interminably, both because she’d come in early and because she was eager to get to the appointment she’d made with Gordon Weatherbee after work. At a minute past four, she was up from her desk and on her way out.
“Hey, wait a sec,” Leah called, running to catch up with her. “What’s going on today? Whenever I glanced over at you, you were looking at the clock. And now you’re sprinting out of the building. Hot date tonight?”
“I wish,” Rory said, forced to slow her pace as they walked out to the parking lot together. “More like an old-fashioned case of boredom.”
Leah shook her head. “You’ll get no sympathy from me. Have yourself a couple of kids and you’ll be too damned busy to be bored. Or to get into trouble, for that matter,” she added pointedly.
Rory laughed as if getting into trouble was the furthest thing from her mind, and quickly spun the conversation in another direction by asking Leah about her youngest boy’s T-ball league. When they reached her car a few moments later, she opened the door and slid inside with a lighthearted “see ya” before Leah had a chance to reprise her own line of questions.
R
ory had arranged to meet Gordon Weatherbee at Anderson and Shor. It was convenient for both of them, since the store was in Huntington and he had to be there to pick up the rolls of wallpaper he would be be there to pick up the rolls of wallpaper he would be hanging the next day.
Rory found him inside chatting with Bonnie Anderson. Once the appropriate greetings had been attended to all around, Bonnie went into the back room to find the order Gordon needed.
“I appreciate your agreeing to see me,” Rory said.
“Not at all.” He brushed a few wispy brown hairs back from his forehead. “But I have to say, I don’t quite get why you’re so interested in this little missing wallpaper issue.”
Rory shrugged. “It’s really just a matter of curiosity, since I’m thinking of making an offer on the house.” She wondered how many white lies it took to lose one’s reservation inside the Pearly Gates.
“Good enough then,” Gordon said. “I had two of my best men working that job while I finished up another one. When they told me the order was short, I didn’t think too much about it, don’t you know. I went by to see just how much more we needed. In fact, that was the day I met you.”
“Then you’re
certain
the shipment was missing a roll?”
“Well, that’s where it all starts to get a little hazy.” Gordon sighed. “My guys claim they never actually counted the rolls when they started on the room; they just pulled them out of the package as they needed them and in the end they were short one.”
Rory nodded.
“Of course, once I went in and saw the bathroom, it was pretty obvious to me what had happened there. The guys had gone and made a mess of hanging it, mismatched edges and the like. Who knows how many panels they had to redo. It’s no wonder they ran out of the paper. The worst part was that neither of them would own up to the shoddy workmanship. Each man swore up and down that he wasn’t the one who screwed up. Well, someone sure as hell did and it wasn’t me or the Easter Bunny. I wound up firing the two of them. I’m a pretty easygoing guy, don’t you know, but one thing I won’t abide is lying.”
“Well, of course not,” Rory said, thinking that if she were struck dead right then and there, she’d have no one to blame but herself.
Bonnie returned from the store room at that moment, carrying two packages, one considerably smaller than the other.
“That extra roll you ordered came in too,” she said, setting the packages on her desk. “I’d like you to open both of them before you leave, so there won’t be any discrepancies to deal with later. That’s my new policy across the board.”
Gordon opened the packages with Rory and Bonnie looking on and proclaimed them to be complete. Rory and he said their good-byes and walked out together. As they were crossing the parking lot to their cars, one of the rolls of wallpaper dropped out of the package. Rory bent to retrieve it and as she handed it back to him, she had a sudden epiphany. The plastic wrap covering the wallpaper felt exactly like the piece of plastic wrap that had been tangled in Gail’s hair when she was found dead at the base of the stairs.
“Thanks.” Gordon smiled, taking it from her. “I sure don’t want to play ‘where’s the missing roll?’ again anytime soon.”
Rory smiled back and murmured another “thanks for your time” as she turned down the aisle where she was parked. She drove out of the lot and headed home, mulling over everything Gordon had told her. On one hand, the missing roll of wallpaper and the mismatched panels seemed to have reasonable explanations that had nothing to do with Gail’s death. But on the other hand, it was very possible that it was wallpaper wrapping that had been found in her hair. Gordon Weatherbee might be satisfied with his theory of what happened, but then he only knew part of the story. Rory had the unshakable feeling that she shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss that single piece of evidence, that single, tangible clue.
Between that and the results of her computer search earlier in the day, she had a lot of new information to impart to Zeke when she got home. She wondered what he would make of it all. A dizzying thought struck her and she started to laugh. When on earth had it happened? At what point had a ghost become a normal and acceptable part of her life?
Chapter 23
“K
inda makes you wonder how that scrap of plastic wrappin’ came to be in Gail’s hair,” Zeke said once Rory finished telling him about the day’s events. They were sitting at the kitchen table. Although it was not yet dark outside, the room was shrouded in a sickly gray-green light, courtesy of a passing thunderstorm that was also spitting rain at the house like a mad carpenter wielding a nail gun.
Zeke rubbed his hand along his jaw, where a week’s worth of stubble had sprouted overnight. Rory was pretty sure he was trying to call her attention to his new look. She’d noticed his five o’clock shadow immediately, but had chosen not to comment on it, since she’d never cared for the style and wanted to avoid a possible argument over it. For now their time would be better spent brainstorming the latest developments in the case.
She stood up and went to the refrigerator to pour herself a glass of iced tea. The house was still warm from the heat of the day, but she preferred open windows and cold drinks to the artificial cold pumped out by the central air. Zeke never seemed to be affected by the heat, and Rory was pretty sure he wouldn’t suffer in silence. “If Weatherbee is right about his workmen screwing up and using the last roll to try to fix things, then there may not be anything insidious about the plastic wrap in her hair,” she said after downing half the tea.
“That little scrap’s the only clue we have,” Zeke said, “so I don’t think we can afford to give up on it just yet. But that don’t mean we can’t go at this case from another angle too.”
Rory brought her glass back to the table and took her seat. “That’s what I’ve been thinking. I mean, what if the workmen weren’t lying? What if
they
didn’t do a lousy job of papering? What if eight rolls were ordered and eight rolls were delivered and
someone else
stole that missing roll to try to cover up evidence of the murder?”
“Whoa there,” Zeke said, “that’s one heck of a lot of ‘what ifs.’ ”
Rory drank the last of her tea. “Look,” she said, “what I’m getting at is that just because Gail’s body was found at the bottom of the staircase, it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s where the initial struggle took place.”
“Assumin’ she was killed.”
“
You’re
the one who’s been trying all along to convince me that she was,” Rory protested. She’d never met anyone who could make her angry with so little effort.
“I just wanna make sure we don’t overlook anythin’.”
“Fine. But . . .” She caught herself before she said “what if” again and rephrased her thought. “There might have been blood spatter or some other evidence on that wall in the bathroom and the murderer tried to sanitize the scene by repapering it. But then he ran out of paper.” Even as Rory spoke, she recognized how unlikely it was that the CSI team had missed anything of such consequence. They were trained to go into an investigation without any preconceived notions of how or where a crime was committed. They’d no doubt scrutinized every inch of the house, inside and out.