Conundrum (22 page)

Her own parents had been cremated, according to their wishes. She and her brother had scattered their ashes from the top of a mountain near their childhood home in Norwich, Vermont. Would it have been more comforting for her to have had a grave site to visit?
Probably not.
She still felt her mother’s
presense
. Sometimes she would carry on whole conversations with her mother, taking both sides, as Sheba watched her warily.

Iris wandered on, stopping to read handy tree identification tags. Her horticultural knowledge, outside of flowers, was thin. She was passing a particularly ugly modern mausoleum when she heard a sound, footsteps crunching quietly on the stone path behind her. Was someone following her? She ducked quickly behind the tiny building and ran around to peek from the other side in time to see a man’s leg disappear.

Where was everyone? The public all seemed to be occupied elsewhere on this warm June Saturday. Even the teams of green-uniformed gardeners, walkie-talkies clipped to their belts,
must have been tending the grounds in other sections of the vast cemetery. Her cell phone was back in the Jeep. She needed to make her way back to a more populated area.

She was overreacting. It was probably an innocent mourner laying flowers at a loved one’s grave. She rounded the next corner and saw his back. With icy calm, her brain registered: Adam.

He must have hidden during the funeral. She tried to silently back away but a twig snapped underfoot. He rounded on her and she rocketed up a hill, dodging headstones. Please, God, don’t let me twist an ankle. Her eyes raked the landscape for a hiding place. Maybe I can make it to that clump of trees. Can he see me? She zigzagged behind mausoleums and bushes but then tripped on a sprinkler head sticking up in the grass and sprawled forward, skinning her palms as she went down. She could hear him wheezing in the distance behind her and scrambled back to her feet. She didn’t stop to look. Her sides burned and she gasped for breath. A huge Weeping Willow appeared on the hilltop and she willed herself towards it. She could try to hide inside its trailing boughs, inside its cave of space, but knew it wouldn’t take long for Adam to guess where she was.

She pushed through the silvery branches and bent down from the waist to breathe deeply. Focus, Iris! You have to defend yourself. What good was her brown belt if she was out of practice? At least her school of karate,
Uechiryu
, emphasized close-in fighting. That was all she’d have room for.
Time to test her skills.

She slumped into
Sanchin
defensive position, elbows protecting ribs, palms
up,
thumbs tucked in, and waited, practicing long, deep breathing. In less than a minute Adam breached the boughs, charging toward her like a spooked horse, shuddering with rage. He lunged out at her, grabbing for her wrists.

“Where did you find that tape? You gave it to the cops, you bitch! Why didn’t you stay out of this?” he howled.

She slashed down on his forearms, knocking his hands apart and attempted to side-kick him in the knee. “Are you going to kill me too, like you killed Will and Norman?”

Damn—
too slow. He grabbed her foot, pulling her down onto her back.

“Norman killed Will. He was
gonna
kill me too,” he growled, his shoulders heaving. He lifted his foot to stomp on her face. She rolled aside and sprang back up. She faked a left-foot kick, followed by an actual right-foot snap kick to the groin. Then spinning around, gathering momentum, she rammed her braced left elbow into his ribs, and drove her right palm upwards into his chin.
A sharp crunch come
from his jaw. He doubled over and crumpled to the ground.

“It’s over, Adam. Malone knows you killed Carey,” she spat out, trying to shake away the explosion of pain in her skinned palm.

He clamped a hand onto her leg and said through gritted teeth, “Then it won’t matter if I kill
you
.”

She tried to sweep her leg free but his arms were like tentacles. He managed to pull himself up to a standing position,
then
clamp his hands around her throat. She couldn’t break his grip. He started squeezing. Purple streaks appeared across her blurred vision and she felt herself start to sway. With the energy she had left, she latched onto his right wrist with both hands and, using gravity and her own body weight, she dropped down, taking his right arm with her.
Then gulping in air, she shot up from a crouch, shoving his arm up his back as hard as she could.
She kept pushing until she heard a satisfying pop, followed by his collapse on the ground.

She leaned over, hands on knees, trying to see straight. She tasted blood, her throat and hand throbbed, but she needed to escape while she could. Pushing through the branches, she ran out into an open field, searching for help. She made a quick decision to follow the winding road back towards the front gate. Painfully, she began to trot, her lungs burning. Cresting a hill, she thought she saw a car heading her way. She raised her arms and tried to shout to get the driver’s attention but her voice came out strangled. Like a mirage, a police cruiser floated towards her, picking up speed as it got closer. She sobbed with relief. Sergeant
DiAngelo
spoke into his radio, “I’ve found the Reid woman. Send a bus.”

Chapter 44

T
wo days later, on a sultry Monday afternoon, Iris adjusted the telephoto lens as she peered through the viewfinder at Norman’s house. It sat nestled in the hill, its windows looking blank and undisturbed. Shafts of sunlight broke through the trees. Sheba lay dozing on the grass nearby, snoring softly.

Luc, from behind her, lifted her hair and gently kissed the bruises on her neck. “I could kill that asshole.”

“It’s not easy. I tried… Hey, you’re distracting the photographer.”

“How
does
the rest of you feel?” He kept kissing.

“Bruised, pummeled, and scraped. The hospital docs say no internal injuries. When they sprung me this morning, they said I just needed time to mend. Adam didn’t make out so well. I managed to dislocate his shoulder and crack his jaw.”

“Ouch, I hope he’s in agony.” Luc eased down onto the grass, propping himself on his elbows. “But remind me to watch my step around you. How did you learn how to fight like that?”

“I’ve taken some karate. He’s strong though. I almost blacked out when he was trying to choke me.”

“I’m not sure I can listen to that part without becoming murderous myself.” He yanked up some grass. “Okay, you’ve promised to fill me in on all the details. You have my total attention.”

“I like having your total attention,” she smirked down at him,
then
squeezed the shutter.

“You have it a lot, you know.” He regarded her through half-closed eyes. “So, it’s all over? Adam was behind everything? What happened to his unshakable alibi for Friday
afternoon.
”

“That’s just it,” she said. “
Norman
killed Will. Detective Malone was explaining things to me while I waited in the hospital for all those damned tests. He was able to get quite a bit out of Adam before Alyssa charged in with her lawyer.”

“Wait a minute. Maybe you should start at the beginning with Carey.”

“Okay. Adam
did
kill Carey twenty years ago. Adam had been apoplectic about the drubbing he’d gotten at his final review from the same critics who’d idolized Carey, so Adam set out to humiliate him at the party. But after he’d gotten Carey stoned and out on the balcony, Adam couldn’t resist giving him a push. Norman had followed them as far as the bedroom and witnessed the whole thing, so Adam swore he’d get him Carey’s notebook of inventions in return for his silence.” Iris unscrewed the long lens from the camera, then the camera from the tripod, and headed to a new vantage point ten feet away.

Luc hopped up and followed, then flopped back down onto the grass.
“An ethical guy, our Norman.”

“No dummy either,” she said, affixing a wide-angle lens. “He later recorded Adam discussing this arrangement with him, and said the tape would be sent to the authorities if he, Norman, ever met with an untimely death.”

“This was on that cassette you found in his papers about the house project?”

“Right.
He’d probably been listening to it in his office before his Sunday meeting with Adam and had forgotten to put it back in the safe.” Iris tipped her head as she studied the shot. “Norman kept it in an envelope with ‘
Linc
’ written on the outside, so Claire assumed it was Lincoln renovation paperwork. ‘
Linc
’ really meant Adam’s nickname.”

“Telling what he’d seen to the police back when it happened would have been a lot safer than making this recording. He was the only witness to a murder.”

“True, but then Norman wouldn’t have gotten the notebook. He’d already tried to hire Carey. He knew how valuable those ideas were.”

“This is like a chess game. They were holding each other in check but neither of them could checkmate the other.”

“That’s exactly right, and the stalemate held for all those years after Carey’s death. Then Norman upset the balance by holding the reunion party at his fancy new house. He was trying to get C.C. to publish it in her magazine so he could pimp his profile on the social scene, but he ended up rubbing Adam’s nose in how well he had done on the strength of Carey’s notebook.” She bracketed the shot with three quick exposures.

“How did Will fit into the picture?”

“After C.C. finally revealed that Will was planning to hit up Norman for money, using his knowledge of how Norman had built his company as leverage, the police think Norman responded by suggesting a meeting on Friday to go over the business proposition. Instead, he
tasered
Will in the car, drove over to Fresh Pond, injected him with that syringe of poison,
then
rolled his body down from the parking lot into the woods. He must have figured he’d frame me for Will’s murder by dumping the body where he knew I walked my dog every afternoon.” Her teeth locked over her lower lip.

“Why? What did he have against you?”

“I don’t think I was supposed to take it personally. He just needed a fall guy and I was convenient. He knew my habits. I guess th
at’s why he left me his Porsche—
as a sort of ‘no hard feelings’ gift, a reward to enjoy if I was clever enough to wriggle out of the frame he was creating.”

“Wow—
a shrink would have a field day with this guy. So that explains Carey and Will, but what about Norman’s death? I assume that Adam did that.
But why?”

“That’s actually the most logical of the three murders. Adam admitted that he set up a meeting with Norman for Sunday afternoon. Norman must have figured that Adam wanted to shake him down for more money. He might have even killed Will partially to warn Adam off. But basically, Norman was in clean-up mode to get rid of anyone who knew about the source of his wealth. He was in his kitchen ready for Adam, with his stun gun and another loaded syringe. I’ll bet he arranged to have me there at the house so I could be framed for Adam’s murder as well as Will’s.”

She removed the wide-angle lens and went on, “I guess he hoped to surprise Adam, like he had with Will, but Adam overpowered him, grabbed the
needle, and shot him up with it—
he was
hoisted with his own petard. Then Adam heard me drive up, so he dragged Norman’s body downstairs, stashed it in the wine refrigerator to confuse the time of death, then drove off from the garage, figuring that no one would find Norman for another day. It makes my flesh crawl to think that I might have run into Adam if I had arrived earlier.”

He threw her a worried look and she reminded herself to soft-pedal the truly scary parts of her story.

“Where did Norman get this drug that he put in the syringes?”

“The police think he was able to synthesize it himself in his lab. They found one of the components of this drug in a refrigerator there. It would have been almost impossible to detect if the police hadn’t found that first syringe with some traces of the drug still in it.”

“What I don’t get is why Adam, as Norman’s murderer, would come back for the guy’s funeral?” Luc asked.

“There you have me. The police are guessing that he might have been planning to search for the cassette tape. Or maybe he wanted to find out if the police suspected him. Alyssa, of course, is claiming that she had no idea about anything that Adam had been up to.”

“Do you buy that?”

“From Lady Macbeth?
Doubtful.
But unless he turns on her, it’ll be impossible to prove. I still can’t get my head around the fact that Norman killed Will and tried to kill Adam. He seemed to be such a wimp. I guess, with his inflated opinion of himself, he considered these killings to be justified. I worked for the guy for a year. I’m glad I didn’t do anything to piss him off.” She clicked on a short telephoto lens, set the tripod lower, and tilted the camera up at the house.

“I’d never thought of architecture as such a dangerous profession.”