Chapter 34

“Is it possible that you succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss?”

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Empty House

We left the mansion without meeting Ivy Douglas again, for which I was thankful. We had more suspicions but no more facts, except that no one knew what became of Nurse Mary Holder.

“I’m beginning to think she’s dead,” I said on the way to our cars.

“Me too,” Morgan confided.

“Do you think we’ve got enough to reopen an investigation into the Dowager’s death.”

“Yes, I do, DD. If you take what the Tollers had to say along with the murder and two - quote accidents unquote - in the house, and then you add the fact that Nurse Holder’s missing, I think we’ve got something going. I’m going to try to get the case reclassified as a suspicious death and have it sent to Cold Case. Then I’ll have control of it.”

“Good luck. I hope you don’t get into too much trouble.”

“If I manage to get it reclassified, it will be interesting to see who objects and why. That in itself will be revealing. Let’s stop for coffee. Follow me. I know a joint.”

We parked at the same grill I’d stopped at the other day. We both ordered coffee and reviewed impressions of our visit to the mansion.

“What’s the next step?” I asked.

“In a cold case, DD, I like to focus on the victim.”

“But Morgan, there are three victims in this case. First the Dowager, secondly Tom, and third Jean Toller.”

Morgan raised four fingers. “You’re forgetting victim number four - Nurse Mary Holder.”

“Are you going to start with her?”

“No. I’m going to start with the Dowager. We need to discover where she was most vulnerable. Who had access to her? Who had motive? Was more than one person involved?”

“Didn’t you look at those questions when you did the initial investigation?”

“I started to, but then got yanked off the investigation as you know. Thankfully we were at the mansion in the evening and there’s no one around downtown for Ivy Douglas to bitch to. Now I’ll do some real digging. I’ll go back over the photos and notes of the scene, time of day, what else was happening in the house, all the other little details. It’s important to realize that if it was murder - which I think it was - it was deliberately made to look like an accident. That one aspect will help build a profile of the killer.”

“What about Jean Toller’s murder? Will you be involved in that investigation?”

“I’ll talk to the team assigned to that. I already e-mailed them asking for all the paperwork. I’ll review everything they send as soon as I get back. And I’ve been filling them in on everything I know. That’s another reason I think I’ll be able to get the Dowager’s death reclassified.”

“One thing, Morgan. If Nurse Holder was involved in the Dowager’s death, how can we connect her to Tom’s fall or to Jean’s death? She’s either missing or she’s dead. Either way, she wasn’t there at the mansion when Tom took the fall.”

“I’m looking for a starting point. Maybe she knew something about the Dowager’s murder so she was murdered too. If we find out what happened to the Dowager, we’ll begin to understand what’s going on at that house. Then we’ll connect up the dots to what happened to Nurse Holder, Jean Toller and to Tom. I’m sure someone tried to kill him, too. He’s lucky to be alive.”

“I think that staircase in the servant’s wing should be branded a health hazard. Things were sure different in the old days.”

“I remember that servant’s staircase. And everything - every little detail - means something DD. There’s a former FBI profiler, John Douglas, who I learned a lot from. He uses a formula, and I always base my investigations on it. How plus why equals who. And if the hows and the whys of a crime get answered, generally you come up with a solution.”

“Morgan, you sound like Sherlock Holmes.”

“I sometimes am Sherlock Holmes, or at least Colombo.”

“Do you do profiles, like they do in the FBI and on TV?”

“I’m not a profiler, but I did take a course in Face Reading. I’ll tell you all about it sometime. But I do believe in those profiles. They can tell you a lot about a killer. Here, several crimes have happened in one location, the mansion. This tells us something right away about the killer. He or she is arrogant and thinks they’re smarter than anyone else.”

“And they think they’ll get away with it,” I added.

Morgan nodded. “Right. Whoever it is, he or she feels totally in control.”