Skeleton Key (24 page)

“We're okay to go inside,” Mark Cashman said. “I'd like to do that if you don't mind.”

Gregor didn't mind. Stacey Spratz seemed to be in a hurry to see Margaret Anson, too. Gregor was interested in seeing her himself—if only to find out if he agreed with Bennis about her awfulness.

The inside of Margaret Anson's house was a model of fidelity to historical period. All the furniture in the back hall through which Gregor, Mark, and Stacey passed on their way to the living room was antique, and good antique at that Unfortunately, the house itself was antique. If it had been a couple of years older, the ceilings would have been higher and the dimensions of the rooms more forgiving. Instead, in spite of its enormous size, the house felt cramped. Gregor felt downright claustrophobic. He was six feet, three inches tall. These rooms had not been made for him.

They passed into the front hall, and that was a little better. The stairwell gave the illusion of expansive height, at least for a few moments. There were glass doors that
opened onto the living room. Gregor knew enough about architecture to know that they must have been added some time in the twentieth century. Women in Revolutionary War America did not want doors of any kind to their main reception rooms. He stopped to look at a pen-and-ink drawing in a small frame on the wall next to the front door. It was yellow with age under its glass, and it showed the devil prodding sinners into the flames of hell.

“Charming,” Gregor said.

Mark and Stacey ignored him. They were already through the glass doors into the living room. Margaret Anson was sitting on a long low couch upholstered in something murkily floral. Everything about this house was murky. It was as if Margaret Anson worshiped the darkness.

Margaret Anson herself was unexceptional—a woman in late middle age, with all the usual lines on her face and a body that was thin and wiry in the way bodies get after a lifetime of riding horses. There were probably two dozen women in Litchfield County who looked exactly like her.

Stacey and Mark were standing in the middle of the room, not quite sure what to do next. Margaret Anson wasn't helping them. Gregor stepped to the front of the group.

“Mrs. Anson?” he said. “My name is Gregor Demarkian. I believe we have a mutual acquaintance.”

“I have been informed by my attorney,” Margaret Anson said, “that I do not have to answer any questions I do not want to answer, and I do not have to talk to any person not directly associated with the police department investigating this case. I do think that means I don't have to talk to you, Mr. Demarkian.”

“The police department investigating this case is the Connecticut State Police,” Stacey Spratz said. “Mr. Demarkian is our consultant. He
is.
directly associated with us.”

“You mean you've hired Mr. Demarkian as a consultant in your investigation of this young woman in my garage?”

“We've hired Mr. Demarkian as a consultant in the investigation of the murder of your daughter, Mrs. Anson,” Stacey said.

Margaret Anson smiled thinly. “You are not here, at the moment, on the matter of the murder of my daughter. You are here on the unrelated matter of the murder of this young woman. Whoever she was.”

“Her name was Zara Anne Moss,” Mark Cashman said.

“Was it? Well, it has nothing to do with me. And as far as you know, it has nothing to do with Kayla. Once you've taken Mr. Demarkian on in the matter of the death of this young woman, I would of course be more than happy to talk to him.”

Stacey and Mark looked at each other, momentarily brought up short.

Gregor cleared his throat. “I can't really believe,” he said, “that you think the two things are unconnected. Do you often find the dead bodies of young women in your garage?”

“I don't often find much of anything in my garage, Mr. Demarkian. But it is a detached garage, well to the back of this house, and this house is very large. Anything at all could be going on out there without my knowing a thing about it.”

“I'm sure it could,” Gregor said. “But doesn't the timing seem strange to you?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“Well, the reporters have been out here, in front of the house, most of the day, haven't they? I saw a picture of this house on the news last night, and there were vans and reporters parked all over the road, making it nearly impassable.”

“So?”

“So,” Gregor said, “you can see the garage bays from the road. I don't think anyone could have brought that young woman's body in here—or that young woman herself in here, alive and well—without the reporters on the
road noticing. Unless there's a way into the garage to the back?”

“There's a door in the back, yes.” Margaret Anson said. “I still don't see what you're getting at.”

“Could you tell me if the garage bays were open earlier today, Mrs. Anson?”

“I have no idea. I haven't been out. I haven't even been interested in going out. I had to see Kayla's lawyers, but they came here.”

“In full view of the television cameras parked outside.”

“Of course.”

“But then for a while the television cameras left the scene,” Gregor said. “They took off for the Washington Police Department, to cover the press conference. I saw many of the same people there that I'm now seeing here.”

“We did have a few moments of calm, yes,” Margaret said. “I don't know if they all went, though. I didn't check.”

“But you went outside.”

“Did I?”

“You must have,” Gregor said. “You found the body in the garage. To find the body in the garage, you had to have gone to the garage. Unless you're claiming clairvoyance. It doesn't seem your style.”

Margaret Anson looked down at her hands, folded calmly in her lap. If she was going to notice the fact that she was talking to him even though she had declared that she wouldn't, she would notice it now. She didn't. Instead she seemed to be studying the pattern of her good wool dress. Gregor realized that Margaret Anson looked dressed for church, at least, if not for a full day of professional obligations in the city. Either she had changed into formal clothes in anticipation of the arrival of the police, or she lived an unbelievably formal life.

“I grow herbs,” she said now. “On a window shelf—a whole series of window shelves—in the kitchen. I like to put up vegetables in the fall.”

Gregor waited. The nails on Margaret Anson's hands were short and blunt but very well cared for, professionally
manicured hands. She did not put those hands in dirt.

“I went out to the garage,” she said, “to get a couple of small clay pots. It's what I grow the herbs in. And I walked through the bay and there she was.”

“The bay was open?”

“One of them was.”

“Was it the one where she was lying?”

“What? Oh, no. It was the one in front of Robert's car. The Jaguar. Robert always had very flashy taste in cars. I once threatened to divorce him if he insisted on buying a Rolls-Royce.”

“And this young woman was lying there, in one of the empty bays, on the ground?”

“Yes, she was. Except that I didn't know it was a person at first. It was dark in the garage. It looked like a pile of garbage. So I went over to check it out. And there she was.”

“Dead.”

“I assumed she was dead.”

“You didn't get down on the floor to check?”

“I could see her eyes. They were—coming out of her head. Is that the way to put it? I knew she was dead.”

“What did you do then?”

“I came back to the house and called the police department.”

“You didn't touch the body in any way?”

“No,” Margaret Anson said. “Not at all. Not even with a single finger. I didn't even want to look at it.”

“What about the reporters? Were there any in the road?”

“I didn't notice.”

“What did you do after you called the police?”

“I came in here and made myself a cup of tea,” Margaret Anson said. “And then I drank it. And then I waited. And the next thing I knew, everything turned into a circus again. And here you are.”

“Do you really think that this murder and the murder of your daughter are unconnected?”

Margaret Anson stood up. “I think you've had enough questions,” she said. “I think I've talked entirely too much.
I think it's about time you left this house. You can come back when I have my attorney present.”

“We'll need you to come down and make a formal statement,” Stacey Spratz said quickly.

Margaret Anson waved him off. “I'll come down and make a formal statement when I have my attorney present. That should be tomorrow. I don't have to make one today in any case, and I don't have to come with you anywhere unless you're arresting me on some charge. Are you arresting me on some charge?”

“No,” Mark Cashman said.

“Good.” Margaret Anson nodded to each of them in turn. “Then I think, gentlemen, that it's about time that the three of you left my house.”

Back out in the driveway, Gregor could see that the road was once again so clogged with reporters that it was unpassable. While they had been talking to Margaret Anson, the work in the garage had been proceeding quickly, but the body was still lying on the concrete floor. Gregor went inside and stood over it, trying not to get in the way of Tom Royce and the uniformed officers doing routine evidence gathering. Margaret Anson had been telling the truth about at least one thing. Zara Anne Moss's eyes were indeed protruding from her head, one of the common symptoms of death by strangulation. Gregor could see others. There was a deep welt in the part of her throat that Gregor could see. On cursory examination, there didn't seem to be anything about this welt that was inconsistent with the idea that it had been made by a nylon athletic shoelace. The mouth was hanging open.

Gregor backed away from the body and looked around. There was no sign of clay pottery in the garage, but he hadn't expected there to be. There was a shed-roofed box built into the side of the house near the back door. Gardening
things would be kept in there. He went to the back of the garage and looked at the rear door. It was an undistinguished wooden door, and it was unlocked. He opened it and looked outside. There was more lawn and a few trees, nothing special. There was no sign of anyone having gone back and forth through it anytime recently. He shut it again and went back across the garage and through the bays to the drive.

“So?” Stacey Spratz said, when he walked up.

“So,” Gregor said, “she's lying about why she went out to the garage. She's never grown herbs in her life, she doesn't even garden, and the pots for that kind of thing aren't kept in the garage in the first place. The interesting question is why she bothered to tell that particular lie.”

“But if she's lying, can't we do something about it?” Stacey asked.

“What?” Gregor asked him. “She wasn't under oath. She wasn't even making an official statement. By the time she gets down to making that statement, she'll probably have figured out what was wrong with what she said and changed it. And you're not dealing with some street kid here. You're dealing with a very rich woman who has lots of legal help. If there are discrepancies between the story she just gave and her eventual statement, she'll just say—perfectly plausibly—that she was too upset to know what she was talking about when she first talked to us.”

“I don't believe that woman is ever too upset to know what she's talking about,” Mark Cashman said.

“I agree,” Gregor said. “But the problem remains, at the moment, why she told this particular lie. There's always the possibility that she killed Zara Anne Moss herself.”

“But you don't think so,” Stacey said.

“No, I don't. Take a look at those hands, the next time you see her. How do you strangle somebody—how do you strangle a vigorous young woman—and have hands that look like that when you're done?”

“If she didn't kill her, why is she lying?” Mark Cashman asked.

“Oh,” Gregor said, “people lie all the time. They lie to hide what they think is discreditable in themselves, so that you won't know that they knock wood or cross their fingers or refuse to walk under ladders. Or because they've maxed out their credit cards and are ashamed of it. Or because they spend their spare time imagining themselves being interviewed by Ed Bradley on
60 Minutes
and they're just too embarrassed to tell you about it. No, what I want to know is, why this particular lie? Why pots and herb gardens?”

“I'd say she was lying to protect somebody,” Mark Cashman said, “but I can't see that woman protecting anybody but herself. You should have seen her Friday night, when we found the body of Kayla Anson. I mean, it was her daughter, for God's sake.”

“She's a cold woman,” Stacey agreed.

“Cold doesn't mean murderous,” Gregor said. “Do they have anything in the way of preliminary findings around here? Did they find one of those shoelaces, like the one they found on Kayla Anson?”

“Just a minute,” Mark Cashman said.

He disappeared momentarily, and came back with Tom Royce. Tom looked dispirited and cold. He also looked angry.

“It had to be set up,” he said. “Don't you agree? It had to be set up for the time of the press conference. It was done on purpose.”

“Murder is usually done on purpose,” Stacey Spratz said. “That's what makes it murder.”

“A white shoelace,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Tom Royce sighed. “It was lying half under the body. We found it when we turned her over. I don't know how it got there. It had to have been taken off. It wouldn't have just fallen off. If it was the murder weapon.”

“Why not?” Stacey Spratz asked.