In a routine police investigation—the kind that involves poor people who live in ghettos, and drug deals, and domestic violence—crime scene investigation takes a few hours at best and half a day at worst. The lab people come in and do their dirty work as quickly and efficiently as possible. The police come in and talk to half a dozen people with conflicting stories and another half dozen who want to turn state’s evidence. But this was not an ordinary crime scene. In the first place, there were elements here that were honestly mysterious, even though they would probably turn out to be not so mysterious in the end. In the second place—well, Gregor knew the drill. You had to be careful when you were dealing with rich people, even quasi-rich people, like the ones who lived at Fox Run Hill. Rich people had lawyers and—more important—knew when to use them. Rich people knew their rights. They thought they ought to have more rights than the Constitution already allowed.
Gregor walked through the cavernous garage and into the mudroom. He checked out the wooden pegs artfully hammered into one wall and the bench that had been machine-cut to look rough-hewn. There would probably be a lot of that sort of thing in a place like this. He looked under the bench and found three pairs of shoes: Topsiders; Gucci loafers with pennies in them; Nike running shoes. All three pairs were the same size and made for a man. There were no clothes of any kind on the pegs. There were two baseball-style caps on a shelf over the bench. One of the caps had the words CAPITALIST TOOL printed on the crown. The other had the symbol for the New York Mets.
“Fieldstone,” Gregor said, kicking at the floor.
“This house is big on fieldstone,” Dan Exter told him, “also on beams and dark wood. It’s like a signature.”
“You ought to check out the shoes,” Gregor said. “Just because they’re all the same size doesn’t necessarily mean they all belong to—what was his name again?”
“Stephen Willis,” John Jackman said.
“Mr. Willis.”
Gregor walked up the four steps from the mudroom and opened the screen door there.
“That’s the kitchen,” Dan Exter told him. “Wait’ll you see what it’s like in there.”
Gregor went through the doorway and looked around. What it was like in there was large—too large, like some of the statuary of ancient Egypt, as if sheer size had been the point. There seemed to be two of everything: two sinks, two ovens, two refrigerators, two side-by-side Jenn-Air ranges built into a rounded-corner island. Beyond the island was what looked like an ancient keeping room, complete with an oversized stone fireplace big enough to roast a pig in. Gregor went over there and looked around.
“Can’t you just imagine watching the Eagles on the tube in this place?” Dan Exter asked him, pointing to the enormous television set placed discreetly in a dark wood cabinet, set up in front of a group of black leather chairs. “I’d be worried about making an echo every time I coughed.”
“It’s not exactly homey,” Gregor agreed. “Are those trophies over there on that wall?”
Dan Exter shook his head. “Some of them are, but most of them are decorations. They’re just supposed to look like trophies.”
“What are the real trophies for?”
“Golf,” Dan Exter said.
Gregor walked over to the trophies. Then he walked past them and looked at the bookcase built into the paneling. There were half a dozen books on securities law, one or two on the history of the Civil War, and a collection of the complete works of Tom Clancy in hardcover.
“Was Mrs. Willis a Civil War buff?” Gregor asked.
“Mr. Willis was,” Dan Exter said. “He’s got one of those Civil War chess sets upstairs, you know, where the pieces are soldiers in blue and gray. A really expensive set too.”
“How do you know it belonged to Stephen Willis and not his wife?”
“It was in Stephen Willis’s private closet.”
Gregor looked up at the ceiling. What was above his head right then were dark wooden beams, machine-cut to look hand-hewn. “Is upstairs this way?” he asked, pointing to an archway on his right.
“That’s it exactly,” John Jackman said.
Gregor went through the archway and looked around. There was a broad front foyer out there, and a staircase that curved in an angular sort of way. There was also a closet. He opened the closet and looked inside. There were six men’s coats, including a heavy camel hair and a black cashmere and a leather biking jacket that was much too expensive to have ever belonged to a biker. On the floor were four pairs of rain boots, Wellingtons and fancy galoshes, all men’s too.
“The bedroom’s up here,” John Jackman said, shooing Gregor in the direction of the staircase. “Every house in Fox Run Hill has a formal entry foyer and a grand front staircase.”
“That’s a direct quote,” Dan Exter said, “from the developer who built this place. We talked to him last night.”
Gregor stopped on the landing and looked out the window there, at the road and the houses.
“All the houses in Fox Run Hill have one of these landing things too,” Dan Exter said, “at least as far as I can figure. Or the ones right around here do. You can see it when you’re outside. The window halfway between the other windows.”
Gregor looked out at the big brick house. It had a window just above the entryway, halfway between the windows on the regular floors. “You can hardly tell the police have been here,” he said. “The place is so clean.”
“The place is antiseptic,” John Jackman said. “But you can tell the police have been here when you get upstairs. Just you wait.”
Gregor didn’t have to wait long. He got to the upstairs hall and looked right and left. To one side, the hall seemed as empty and clean as the rest of the house. The wall-to-wall carpeting looked as if it had been fluffed. The walls looked as if they had been polished. To the other side, however, there was chaos. A set of double doors was propped open by what looked like a pair of cardboard boxes. A large young man in a blue police uniform was standing watch between them. Beyond him, Gregor saw mess and insanity. He walked up to the large young man, nodded a greeting, and walked past him into the bedroom. Since John Jackman and Dan Exter were coming up behind him, the large young man did not protest. Gregor walked through to where the bed was and stood at the end of it. The sheets had been stripped from it, showing the bare mattress, still stained with blood. The bloodstains still looked wet.
“I take it he was sleeping when she shot him,” Gregor said to John Jackman and Dan Exter, who had come up behind him.
“Let’s just say the body was in bed when we found it,” Dan Exter said.
“Shot how many times?”
“Three.”
“Any stray bullets?”
“Not that we could find, no,” Dan Exter said. “She fired three shots, she hit him three times.”
“Good hits?”
“One of them was,” Dan Exter said blandly.
“What’s a good hit except that it kills the target?” John Jackman asked. “Jesus Christ, Gregor.”
Gregor walked around the bed to the night table on the right side. This was obviously Stephen Willis’s night table. It had a little brass golf statue next to the lamp. Gregor opened the night-table drawer and found a pack of cards that looked well used and a brown wood pipe with a pouch of cherry tobacco beside it. The pipe was not well used. Stephen Willis, Gregor thought, had been one of those men who wanted to smoke a pipe for the prestige, but who could never get the hang of it.
Gregor walked around the bed to the night table on the other side. There was nothing on this one except the lamp, and nothing in the drawer either, except that sawdusty debris that collects inside wooden drawers after a while. Gregor slid the drawer shut and turned to the line of closets that made up the facing wall.
“Are these all the closets in this suite?” he asked.
“No such luck,” Dan Exter said. “These are his closets, from what I’ve been able to figure out. There are other closets in the dressing room, which is back through there.”
Gregor went “back through there.” The dressing room was large, but mostly with a lot of wasted space. It held a wall of closets and a stationary bicycle that looked even less used than the pipe.
Gregor opened one of the closets. It was the size of a moderately spacious bathroom, and it was absolutely empty.
“Well,” he said.
“You can look at the rest of them if you want,” John Jackman said, “but I already have. They’re all like that.”
“Empty,” Gregor said.
“That’s right,” Dan Exter said.
“She took all her clothes,” Gregor said.
John Jackman walked to the other end of the room and looked out the large plate-glass window there. “There were clothes in the parking garage,” he said, “lots of them, thrown out by the blast. And a lot of stuff burned, of course. We couldn’t prevent that.”
“What kind of a car was it?” Gregor wanted to know.
“Volvo station wagon,” Jackman said. “There’s a lot of room in those station wagons.”
“There isn’t infinite room in those station wagons,” Gregor said. “What did she do? Kill him and then pack?”
“Maybe she packed before she killed him,” Dan Exter said. “We’re running all kinds of tests. We’re trying to find out if he was drugged. We’re trying to find out if he was poisoned. God only knows what.”
“The thing is that it all had to be deliberate,” John Jackman said. “Gregor, no matter how you look at it, it had to be deliberate. It had to be planned. She must have worked it all out beforehand—”
“Assuming she’s the one who planted the pipe bombs,” Dan Exter said. “Don’t let’s jump to conclusions.”
“Who else would have planted the pipe bombs? Who would want to?” Jackman had started to pace. “There’s a record of everybody who comes into this place and out of it. Into Fox Run Hill, I mean. It’s not like dropping a little something off in the ash can outside a brownstone in the middle of the city.”
“The pipe bombs might not have been planted here,” Dan Exter argued. “They might have been planted in the garage. You can’t tell me you trust that idiot from the garage to remember who went in and out all afternoon.”
“Of course I don’t,” John Jackman said, “but I don’t believe the bombs were planted in the garage either. Somebody would have noticed something. Maybe not the garage attendant, but somebody.”
“Maybe somebody did,” Dan Exter said. “We haven’t even started talking to people yet. Someone could come forward at any moment.”
Gregor Demarkian cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. “I wonder if you’ve noticed something.”
“Noticed what?” Dan Exter sounded exasperated.
“That it wasn’t just her clothes,” Gregor said. “It isn’t just that clothes are missing from this house. It’s that everything connected to a woman is missing from this house. At least, it has been so far. No women’s shoes in the mudroom downstairs. No women’s coats in the closet in the foyer. Nothing at all in the night table next to Mrs. Willis’s side of the bed—”
“But not everybody keeps things in their night-table drawers,” Dan Exter pointed out. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“By itself, of course it doesn’t mean anything,” Gregor agreed, “but I think you’d better have this house searched from top to bottom, and see if you can find anything at all that would indicate that Patricia MacLaren Willis ever lived here, because so far I can’t. And since the impression I got was that she was supposed to have lived here for some time—”
“Round about twenty years,” Dan Exter said.
“Well,” Gregor said, “you see what I mean. If Patricia MacLaren Willis obliterated all trace of twenty years of her life from a house this size, she must have been at it for weeks.”