Chapter 3
The Body
"Don't touch the rug," said Hollis Brandt. "I don't care how much you want to."
"I wasn't going to touch the rug."
"You were thinking about it. You've got the look." He lowered himself, with a small grunt, onto one knee at the edge of the dark red wool, and tilted his flashlight until the beam skimmed the nap. "Thirty years I've watched lawyers walk into a crime scene. Every one of them wants to feel it. Like if they put their hand on the thing, they'll know."
"And do they?"
"They know they've got blood on their cuffs." He grunted again. "Look here."
It was the nineteenth of October, a Sunday, and the study in the Hale house had been returned to the family six days earlier, which is to say it had been returned to no one, since the family was a widower in a holding cell and a housekeeper who had been given two weeks' paid leave and told to stay away. The court had granted us access under the usual conditions: forty-eight hours' notice, one investigator, one attorney, no removal of items. The tape was gone. In its place the police had left a gray film of fingerprint powder over everything, and a smell, faint and horrible, that I had expected and had not known how to prepare for. Not blood, exactly. The ghost of it. Something sweetish and metallic, working its way up through the carpet and the old books and the leather.
The room was thirty feet long, maybe twenty wide, with a high ceiling and tall windows that gave on to the back lawn. It was an expensive room that had been made to look as if no one had spent anything on it. Walnut shelves ran floor to ceiling on the long wall, crowded with books and the sort of objects that people collect without ever having decided to: a brass ship's compass, a chipped blue vase, a small stone head with its nose missing. A leather sofa. Two armchairs. And at the far end, below the windows, a long walnut desk with a green-shaded lamp, a blotter, and a laptop that the police had taken and returned an empty circle in the dust to prove it.
There was nothing to show where she had died except a stain.
I had seen the photographs. They were in a gray binder in my briefcase and I had gone through them four times the night before, at the kitchen table, with a glass of water I did not drink. The stain was larger than I had expected. It lay on the carpet between the desk and the center of the room, an irregular dark map the color of dried wine, and there was a smaller outline beside it, chalked and then erased, then chalked again by someone more careful. The Persian rug had been pulled back at the corner. The wood beneath was bare.
I will say what was in the photographs, because I looked at them for a long time, and because someone ought to. She lay on her left side with her knees drawn up, as a child lies who has been told to be quiet. One arm was flung out beneath her. Her hair, which was dark and long and had been loose, had dried into thick black ropes against the carpet. The left side of her head was no longer the shape of a head. There was a depression above the ear, wide as a saucer, and in the middle of it the bone had given way in pale jagged plates, like the crust of a pie, and what lay under them was the color of raw liver. Blood had run from her ear and her nose and the corner of her mouth and pooled in the fold of her neck. It had soaked her cream silk blouse to the waist. One shoe had come off. The foot in its sheer stocking was turned inward, the toes curled, the way a foot curls on a cold floor.
Her eyes were open. The photographer had not closed them. They looked at the camera, at the underside of the desk, at nothing, with a bright, glazed, mildly surprised expression, as though she had been interrupted in the middle of a sentence.
I had turned that photograph face down on the kitchen table four times. Each time I had turned it up again.
"Here," Hollis said. He had the beam on the baseboard. "See the spatter?"
I crouched beside him. A fine spray of dark dots ran up the white-painted wood in an arc, six inches off the floor, then eleven, then nineteen, like the track of a bird in snow.
"Cast-off," I said.
"The blood travels on the backswing. Whatever was swung." He drew a short curve in the air. "That's three blows. I'd say three. You could count the arcs. Left to right. Low, then higher, then, see, there. Almost to the shelves." He rose, slowly, one hand on his knee. "Whoever did it was standing about here." He walked to a spot a little in front of the desk, and stood. "Facing her. She's on her side. She's trying to turn away. He, or she, hits her anyway."
"The ME says the first blow would have been enough."
"The ME wasn't in the room." He said it without heat. Hollis was fifty-eight, thin and stooped, with a long gray face and a drooping mustache and a way of standing with his hands in the pockets of his raincoat as though to keep them out of the evidence. He had been a detective in the Port Meridian police for twenty-six years, and an investigator for me for six, and I trusted him more than any person I employed. "I'm only saying. People don't stop at one. Not when it's personal."
"You think it was personal."
"I think a man doesn't put three blows into a woman's head in her own study at nine at night unless he's got a reason to be furious." He looked at me sidelong. "Or a reason to be thorough."
"That's not what we're here to decide."
"No," Hollis agreed. "That's what we're here to avoid." His mouth twitched under the mustache. "Go on. Say your piece, counselor. I know you've got a theory."
I did not have a theory. I had an instinct, which is a poorer thing, and I had learned long ago not to say it out loud before I had a way to test it. I took out my notebook and began to walk the room.
The first thing I wrote down was the shelf.
It was the third from the top on the long wall, directly above the desk, at about the height of my eyes. A row of books ran along it, leaning against each other. In the middle of the row there was a gap, a space of perhaps ten inches where something had stood. The wood there was lighter than the rest, free of dust, and the paperbacks on either side had slumped inward to fill part of the hole. A little brass plate was screwed to the edge of the shelf. It read: Heron, c. 1923, bronze, M. Aubert.
"That's the weapon," said Hollis.
"The bird."
"Fourteen inches tall. Six and a quarter pounds. Found on the floor, nine feet from the body, with her blood and hair on the base, and her husband's partial prints on the neck." He ticked them off. "The prosecution's going to love it. They'll pass it round the jury box like a communion plate."
"It lives in his study."
"I know it does. That's your defense." He shrugged. "It's a pretty one. I'm just saying, a jury doesn't think in prints. A jury thinks in pictures. And the picture is a man's own bird, in a man's own room, on a dead woman's skull."
I wrote: Heron. Who knew it was there? Who could reach? Prints: on the neck. Why the neck? I looked at the words for a moment. Then I looked up at the shelf again, at the empty place where the bronze had sat, and something nagged at me, a small mismatch, like a picture hung very slightly crooked.
I put a finger under my chin. The gap in the books was about ten inches wide. The heron's base, I remembered from the photograph, was perhaps six. There had been four inches of slack. And the books on either side were not leaning toward the hole. They were leaning away from it.
"Hollis. Come here."
He came and stood beside me. I pointed.
"Someone's put those books back since the bird came off. Look at the angle. The left side's been pushed up straight. The right's been left to flop." I stepped back. "If the heron had just been lifted off, they'd be tilted in. Something else has been standing here. Something that propped them open."
"Or somebody dusted," said Hollis, "and put them back wrong."
"No one's dusted in this room for a week."
"Police might have."
"The police would have photographed it first."
He looked at me, then at the shelf. He took out his flashlight, switched it back on, and held it flat against the wood a few inches from the shelf, so the beam slid sideways across the surface. In that raking light something showed that had been invisible a second before: two small, shallow, parallel scuffs in the wood, an inch and a half apart, running a short way along the front edge of the shelf.
"Feet," Hollis said slowly. "Little ones. Rubber. Like what's on the bottom of a stand."
"A phone stand."
"Or a camera."
"There's a lot of things with feet." I felt my pulse in my throat. I was not sure why. A scuff on a shelf was a scuff on a shelf. In thirty days it would mean nothing. But I wrote it down, with a little arrow and a question mark, and underlined the question mark twice. "Was Eleanor's phone recovered?"
"I'll have to check the inventory."
"Check it."
He took out his own notebook and flipped it open and read for a while with his lips moving. The rain was falling steadily on the windows behind us, an even, tapping, interminable sound, and the light in the room had gone the color of dishwater. I could hear the old house settling around us, the faint tick of pipes, the groan of a beam, somewhere far off a door that someone had not closed.
"No," said Hollis. "Not recovered. The ME's report lists her wristwatch and a ring. Her handbag was in the kitchen, with her wallet and her keys. There's no phone. The police ran a tower dump. Her last ping is at 9:43 p.m., connecting to a mast at Kestrel Road, which is about a half mile from here. After that, nothing. It's off, or dead, or smashed."
"They think he took it."
"They think he got rid of it. It's in their theory, Dunleavy said it to a reporter. A killer with sense takes the phone."
"A killer with sense," I said, "leaves it where he found it and goes home." I looked at the scuffs again. "Unless there was something on it."
Hollis said nothing. A muscle moved in his cheek.
"It's thin," I said.
"It's a scratch on a shelf."
"Yes." I closed the notebook. "I'd like a photograph of it before anyone sneezes."
He photographed it. He did it carefully, with a scale and a flash, four angles, three exposures, and I stood in the middle of the dead woman's study and felt, for the first time since I had met Victor Hale, a small bright fragile sensation that I recognized, with some shame, as hope.
We went through the rest of the house in the afternoon.
It was a handsome one, a long, low, gray-stone building in Calder Heights, built in the 1930s by a shipping family that had gone bankrupt, and bought by the Hales fourteen years earlier for a figure the Ledger had described as eight digits. It sat at the end of a curving drive behind a tall hedge, and neither the road nor the neighbors could see more of it than a corner of roof. Inside it was all warm wood and soft carpet and framed paintings, the kind of house that is designed to make people feel important and then ashamed of the feeling. Every room was immaculate. I had a sudden unreasonable sense that somebody had been through them with a cloth, in the last six days, and put everything back.
"The housekeeper," I said.
"Maribel Santos. She was off Tuesday at four. Came back Wednesday at seven in the morning and found the street full of cars." Hollis opened a kitchen cabinet and looked into it and closed it. "Seventeen years with the family. She's what they call discreet."
"And frightened."
"Everyone I've called has been frightened. It's a shipping family." He tipped his head toward the back of the house. "Want to see the studio?"
It was in the old carriage house, thirty yards across the lawn, a low outbuilding with a slate roof and tall north-facing windows. The door was unlocked. Inside it was cool and smelled of turpentine and linseed oil and something sharp and sweet that I could not place, and the light was the only thing in the building that was not neat.
It came from above, silver and even, through a long skylight. It fell on a big wooden easel in the center of the room, and on the painting that stood on it, a portrait of a young woman in a green dress, eighteenth-century, faintly cracked. Half of her face was brown with old varnish. The other half had been cleaned, and the contrast was startling: one eye dull as pond-water, the other bright, direct, alive, looking out of three centuries at the person standing in the doorway.
I stopped. I did not intend to. I stood there with my hands in my pockets and my briefcase against my leg and looked at it for longer than I should have.
Along the wall were shelves of jars and brushes, rolls of cotton, small steel instruments laid out in rows on a white cloth. A stool. A lamp on a bent arm. A corkboard covered with sketches and swatches and index cards, each in the same fine upright hand: check pigment, lead white? Wed. — ask L about the frame. Call R. — Mon. 10:30. A calendar from a conservation supply company hung beside it, with Tuesday's square empty and Wednesday's covered in a tight pencil scrawl.
I leaned in to read it. Wed. 10:30, R.K. 4th fl. And below it, in a different pen, as though added later in a hurry, a single word that had been written and underlined twice. Tell.
"Tell what?" said Hollis, behind me.
I did not answer.
"Could be nothing."
"It could."
"People write all kinds of things."
"They do." I straightened. I looked once more at the portrait, at the bright eye and the dull one, at the line down the middle of her face where one century had been taken away and another had not yet been. I tried to imagine the hand that had been doing it, the slow patient mind behind it, a woman who spent her working days removing the damage that other people had done to something beautiful, so gently and for so long that the original came back.
Then I tried to imagine that same woman on a cold floor, nine feet from a bronze bird.
It would not come. I could not do it. I could picture the wounds, the chalk, the spatter on the baseboard, the long line of the investigation. I could not picture her. She was a name on a brass plate, a handwriting on a card, a thing the State kept calling the victim.
I realized it was the first time in twelve years that I had wanted to.
"Let's go," I said.
I left Hollis to lock up. I walked back across the wet lawn toward the house with the rain on my face, and at the top of the terrace I turned, as one does, and looked back at the carriage house. A single light was burning in its window. It was the lamp on the bent arm. It must have been on all along, burning in the daytime, in an empty room, for six days.
Nobody had thought to turn it off.