Читать книгу Death Night - Todd Ritter - Страница 10

“I don’t know why anyone would want to hurt Connie. It’s devastating. Absolutely devastating.”

Emma Pulsifer used the sleeve of her nightgown to dab at her eyes. They were red and raw, the result of a crying jag that had lasted for the better part of an hour. Kat spent that time making calls to the appropriate authorities—county sheriff, prosecutor’s office, state police—and then greeting the endless stream of cops and crime scene techs who arrived at the museum. Now she was back with Emma, who had calmed down enough to talk.

The two of them sat in a dim conference room next to the museum’s back door. It was dry there and mostly free of the smoky residue left by the fire. Just down the hall, the small army of investigators got to work in the main gallery. Kat heard cautious footsteps on the charred floor and the low murmur of voices trying to piece everything together. Occasionally, the incandescent flash of a camera bounced down the hallway, causing Emma to flinch.

“Constance was a widow, right?” Kat asked.

“Just like me,” Emma said. “There weren’t any children.”

“Did she have any other family that you know of? Any immediate next of kin you think we should contact?”

“Not that I know of. The historical society was her family. She devoted her life to it.”

“Is there anyone in the historical society that didn’t get along with Constance?” Kat asked. “Anyone who might want to do her harm?”

The suggestion seemed to horrify Emma, who dropped her jaw before answering, “Of course not. Everyone loved her. There were disagreements, naturally. But nothing that would result in murder.”

She was mistaken there. Kat knew anything could result in murder. A grudge. An affair. A lie that spiraled out of control. Sometimes nothing prompted the killing. Sometimes people just snapped. The ominous warning scrawled on Constance’s hand—THIS IS JUST THE FIRST—pointed in that direction. Kat didn’t want to consider that possibility at the moment, so she asked, “What kind of disagreements are we talking about?”

“Well, this museum, for one,” Emma said. “It’s free to the public, and some members disagreed with that. They thought we should charge admission. We’re always short on funds, and the extra money would help. Connie disagreed. She said the town’s history belonged to everyone. We were just the people who took care of it.”

“And what did you think?”

“It didn’t matter what I thought. Connie was the president. She had the final say.”

Kat leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms. “How many members does the historical society have? I know there were you and Constance. Who else?”

“It was just the five of us. Father Ron is the secretary. Claude Dobson is the treasurer. And Mayor Hammond is the honorary member, as were all the mayors before him.”

Kat had seen Father Ron and the mayor outside while the fire was still raging. As far as she knew, Claude Dobson, a retired high school history teacher, wasn’t with them. She wasn’t sure if that worked in his favor or not.

“When was the last time you saw Constance?”

“Tonight.” Emma checked her watch, seeing they had entered a new day. “I mean, last night.”

“What time was that?”

“A little before eight. I drove past the museum and saw the lights were still on. I popped in and found Connie still here, just like I thought.”

“In the gallery?”

“In her office. It’s across the hall.”

Kat looked past Emma to the doorway behind her. An office sat on the other side of the hallway, its door closed. Someone had been smart enough to criss-cross it with police tape.

“I’m assuming she was alone,” she said.

“It was just Connie at her desk, as usual.”

“What did you two talk about?”

“Chitchat, mostly,” Emma said. “I asked if she planned on going to the Chamber of Commerce fund-raiser later.”

The fund-raiser was the premier social event of the year in Perry Hollow, which wasn’t saying much. It probably looked like a rinky-dink affair to people from more metropolitan areas, but in a town where most wedding receptions were held in the Elks Lodge, the fund-raiser was a very big deal. Those who could afford it put on their best clothes, sipped cocktails, and gossiped the night away. Kat had been invited but politely declined the offer. She wasn’t good at schmoozing, nor did she enjoy it. Besides, it had been movie night with James—part of her renewed push to spend more time with him. That night’s selection was Toy Story, one of his favorites.

“Is the fund-raiser where you were headed when you passed the museum?”

Emma’s nod turned into a flinch as another burst of flashbulbs shot down the hall. “It was. Connie told me she’d be there in a little while. But she never showed.”

“Were any other members of the historical society there?”

“Yes,” Emma said. “All of us.”

“What time did it end?”

“I’m not sure. I left close to midnight. The others were still there.”

The fire, Kat had learned, was first reported by Dave and Betty Freeman, who saw it from their bedroom window. The 911 call was made at 12:52. Whoever was still at the fund-raiser at that time was in the clear. Emma Pulsifer, however, wasn’t one of them.

“Where was the fund-raiser held this year?”

“Maison D’Avignon,” Emma said, referring to the French restaurant that had helped turn Perry Hollow from a crumbling mill town into something slightly more upscale. It was located on Main Street, five blocks up and four blocks over from the museum.

“And did you pass the museum on your way home?”

“I took a different route.”

“Did you stop anywhere along the way? A place where someone else could verify your presence. A gas station, perhaps? Or maybe at the ATM outside Commonwealth Bank.”

“No. I went straight home.” Suspicion crept into Emma’s voice. “And I don’t see why any of this matters.”

“I’m just trying to place your whereabouts when the fire started.”

“I was in bed,” Emma said, tugging absently on her pink nightgown. “I heard the sirens, looked out the window, and saw the flames. I didn’t even know it was the museum that was on fire until I got closer.”

Since Emma was also a widow, there was no one at home to back up her alibi. Kat had to take what she was saying at face value. She didn’t want to, but for the time being, she had no choice.

“One last question before you can go,” Kat said. “Why was Constance here so late on a Friday night?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Emma said.

“Was she normally here at night?”

“In the past, no. But in the last few weeks or so, yes.”

“Was she working on something?”

“Maybe.”

Emma made no effort to elaborate, prompting Kat to say, “Either she was or she wasn’t.”

“She was. Possibly. On Thursday, she sent an e?mail to the rest of us in the historical society calling an emergency meeting.”

“About what?”

“No one knows. But I have a feeling it had something to do with all the time she was spending here lately.”

“And when did she want to have this meeting?”

“Tonight,” Emma said. “She wanted to have it tonight.”

Kat felt the yawn coming on as she guided Emma Pulsifer out of the museum via the back door. She managed to stifle it as she told Emma to expect more questions in the morning, both about Constance and about the museum itself. But once she was back inside the building, heading down the hall to the main gallery, the yawn erupted—jaw-stretching proof of just how tired she really was.

A sallow-faced man with gray hair standing in the middle of the gallery noticed—it was hard not to—and gave her a knowing smile. The man was Wallace Noble, the medical examiner, and Kat had known him since the days when her father was Perry Hollow’s police chief.

“Long night, eh?” he said in a voice made raspy by forty years of smoking.

Kat replied with another, more modest yawn. “Yep. And I’m afraid this is just the beginning of a very long morning. This case looks like it’ll keep me up for days.”

“I thought you’d be used to it by now,” Wallace said. “First the Grim Reaper killings. Then the Olmstead thing. You seem to get all the good crimes.”

“I guess I’m just lucky,” Kat said, although she knew the opposite was true. A lucky cop would be one who spent an entire career avoiding such cases. The only reason Kat felt fortunate was because she had somehow managed to survive them.

“This is far cleaner than those Reaper killings,” Wallace said. “No amateur embalming here, thank God. Remember how he attacked his victims?”

Kat gave him a slight nod. As if she could ever forget. The Grim Reaper, one of the two most evil people she had ever encountered, liked to play games. He’d place a dead animal at the scene, distracting his victims long enough for him to sneak up on them. Then he’d render them unconscious with a handkerchief doused with chloroform. Then he’d kill them.

Slowly.

Painfully.

Henry Goll had been the only one to survive.

“Well, now there’s this,” Kat said.

Her gaze drifted around the gallery, which looked far different than when she first arrived with Dutch Jansen and Emma Pulsifer in tow. The darkness that had previously enveloped them was now banished by a few well-placed klieg lights powered by a generator outside. The blinding glare highlighted the destruction, from the fire-scarred walls to the floors already warping from water damage. Shards of glass were everywhere, glinting in the light.

Above Kat, a portion of the ceiling had been eaten away, revealing both the second and third floors. She remembered from her grade-school visits that on the second floor were rooms decorated just as they would have been during the town’s founding. Above that, she assumed, was the attic, where Emma said the rest of the museum’s collection was stored.

The devastation from the fire and the water damage that followed meant there was likely very little trace evidence to be found. Still, a few crime scene techs huddled around the crawl space where Constance had been discovered. Although her body was now lying beneath a white sheet on a wheeled gurney next to Wallace, Kat still pictured her slumped over that trunk, her wool skirt wet and clinging to the back of her legs. The techs, who were probably used to seeing far worse, worked in silence. One of them, wearing a baseball cap with a penlight duct-taped to the bill, dropped into the crawl space like a seasoned spelunker.

“I’m assuming the cause of death is blunt force trauma,” Kat said.

“Probably,” Wallace replied with a nod. “She was certainly hit hard with something heavy. A single blow to the back of the head. Cracked her skull right open.”

“Any guess as to the time of death?”

“Fairly recent. The body was still warm, so I’m guessing no more than three hours ago.”

Immediately, Kat started forming a timeline of events. If Wallace was correct, Constance had died between twelve-thirty and one A.M., around the same time the fire started. Kat assumed that whoever killed her dragged the body into the crawl space before starting the fire.

“What do you think the murder weapon was?” she asked.

Wallace gave a palms-up gesture of ignorance before opening his arms wide. “Take your pick. There were probably a hundred objects in here heavy enough to do that kind of damage. Bronze statues. Household items, which were heavier back in the day than they are now. Housewives back then must have had biceps the size of bowling balls.”

“All the better to keep men like you in check,” Kat said.

Wallace let out a low chuckle that quickly morphed into a smoker’s cough and seemed to last a full minute. When he recovered, he said, “I’m off to do the autopsy now. I’ll call you as soon as I find anything.”

He started to wheel out Constance’s body, pausing long enough to pull a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and pop it between his lips.

“Don’t worry,” he said, the cigarette bobbing up and down. “I won’t light it until I get outside. Not that it’ll make much of a difference to this place.”

Once Wallace was gone, Kat crossed to the other side of the gallery. She trod lightly, careful not to step on any of the debris that littered the charred floor. What she didn’t see, oddly enough, were many evidence markers. The gallery contained exactly one, placed a few paces to the left of the museum’s front door.

Two men knelt next to the yellow fold of plastic. One of them was a stranger. The other Kat knew very well.

“Lieutenant Vasquez,” she said. “No offense, but I wish you weren’t here.”

Tony Vasquez was a detective with the Pennsylvania State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Neither the town nor the county had the manpower or expertise to handle crimes as big as homicide and arson, so the BCI was usually called to step in. As a result, Tony had worked on the Grim Reaper murders and the Charlie Olmstead disappearance. Now he was here once again.

“Frankly, I do, too.”

“I’m assuming you’re in charge.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Seeing how I know my way around the town by now, they figured I’d be a good point person.”

“Well, you know the score,” Kat told him. “You’re in charge. I don’t mind that you’re in charge. And I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

Lieutenant Vasquez got to his feet. In addition to being a professional cop, Tony was also an amateur bodybuilder. Those biceps the size of bowling balls that Wallace mentioned? Tony had them. His sheer size never ceased to amaze Kat. He was so big that he looked out of scale with the rest of the gallery—like Alice after nibbling on the cake that made her grow.

“It’s looking very likely that the fire hoses washed away all the evidence,” he said. “No trace. No blood spatter. If there is any evidence, it’s mixed in with this rubble. What did you find?”

Kat caught Tony up to speed on the events before and after she discovered Constance Bishop’s body. She also detailed her interview with Emma Pulsifer and the whereabouts of the other members of the historical society when the fire broke out. Then it was time to talk about the thing she least wanted to talk about. The thing that indicated this was no ordinary murder.

“There was something written on Constance’s hand.”

“I know,” Tony said. “I saw it.”

“What do you make of it?”

“I’m not sure. It might be nothing.”

“Or it could mean we have another Grim Reaper on our hands.”

Kat couldn’t get those five words out of her head. When she closed her eyes, she still saw them, smudged and startling. THIS IS JUST THE FIRST.

Tony inhaled, his massive chest expanding and deflating. “Yes. That’s a distinct possibility.”

It wasn’t what Kat wanted to hear. The answer silenced her for a moment as she pondered what it could mean for her and the town.

The man standing at Tony’s side cleared his throat, forcing an introduction.

“Kat,” the lieutenant said, “this is Larry Sheldon. He’s an arson investigator with the state police.”

Kat quickly sized up the newcomer while shaking his hand. He was younger than her, thirty if a day, and boyishly handsome. Wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, and a tie, he looked more like a math teacher than someone who’d be studying a crime scene at three-thirty in the morning. His wire-frame glasses, slipping off his nose, didn’t help.

“You find anything interesting?” Kat asked.

“A lot that’s interesting, actually,” Larry said. “And before you ask, I’m ninety-nine percent sure that this fire was arson.”

“How can you tell?”

“This is the point of origin.” He turned to the patch of floor he and Tony had been examining. “Although a trail of accelerant at the wall caused the most damage.”

Kat tapped him on the shoulder. “This is my first arson. You’ll have to dumb it down for me.”

“Oh, right. Sure.” Larry paused to push his glasses higher on his nose. “The mark on the floor right here indicates that this is where the fire burned the hottest and brightest. That’s the point of origin. The marking is typical of a fire in which an accelerant was used.”

“Gasoline?” Kat said.

“Possibly. But my gut tells me it was kerosene.”

Kat stared at the charred floor. “You can tell all that from a burn pattern?”

“No. I can tell from this.”

Larry pointed to a twisted jumble of wood and metal lying nearby. The shards of glass surrounding it were different from the ones from the shattered display cases. These pieces were opaque, almost milky. It took a minute for Kat to realize it had all once been a kerosene lamp.

“Judging from the burn pattern, the accelerant wasn’t poured onto the floor,” Larry said. “It was thrown, if that makes any sense.”

“Our guess is that someone smashed the lit lantern onto the floor,” Tony added. “This building is old. The floor is untreated wood. The fire spread very fast to the walls, which are also wood. No drywall or Sheetrock here.”

“Do you think whoever started the fire knew this?”

“Not necessarily,” Larry said. “Truth be told, most arsonists don’t even think about such things. They just want to watch something burn.”

“Which brings me to my next question,” Kat said. “What type of person would want to start the fire in the first place?”

“That depends on the arsonist’s goal. More often than not, the fire is set for a specific reason. Sure, there are guys—and it’s almost always a guy—who do it because they’re messed up in the head.”

“Pyromaniacs,” Kat said.

Larry pointed at her like a game show host commending a contestant for guessing the correct answer. “Setting fires gives them a sense of power, of having control over a situation. But these cases are extremely rare. Whenever I investigate a fire, I assume there was something else at play. Collecting insurance money, for example. Or revenge.”

“Or,” Tony chimed in, “someone trying to destroy evidence after they just murdered someone.”

“Maybe,” Larry said. “But there’s also the possibility that the fire, and not murder, was the ultimate goal here.”

It was entirely possible that whoever set the fire had been caught in the act by Constance, who paid for the discovery with her life. But Kat didn’t think so. All one needed to do was look at Constance’s hand to debunk that theory. Still, she played along with Larry Sheldon.

“Say someone torched the museum just for the sake of torching it,” she said. “How would we narrow down the suspects?”

“Have you interviewed the firefighters yet?” Larry asked.

“Not yet. Why?”

“Because those are your suspects. It’s no big secret that pyromaniacs tend to gravitate toward careers that have to do with fire. So the first people you have to suspect are the ones who put out the fire in the first place.”

If Dutch Jansen had been here, Kat had a feeling Larry wouldn’t still be standing. He’d be sprawled on the floor, knocked out cold. Dutch was an old-school chief. He protected his own. And he wouldn’t take well to someone like Larry Sheldon casting doubt on his squad, especially when the speculation was so far off base. Maybe what he was saying was true of fire departments in other towns, but not in Perry Hollow. Still, it didn’t stop Kat from deciding to have Carl look into the records of all the town’s volunteer firefighters. Just in case.

“Other than firefighters, what else should we be looking for?”

“People who were watching the blaze.”

“Which was approximately half the town,” Kat said.

“Did you notice anyone who seemed particularly fascinated by it?”

“Yes. Half the town.”

“Was anyone taking pictures?” Larry was getting exasperated. “And if you say half the town was, then I’m just going to give up and go home.”

Although it had only been a couple of hours earlier, it felt like a day had passed since the museum was engulfed. Kat remembered the atmosphere being quietly excited—like a crowd at a bonfire. But no one she saw had been taking photos of the blaze. She hadn’t even seen a camera. “Not that I noticed.”

“Was there anyone acting suspicious?” Larry said. “Anyone who looked even remotely out of place?”

One person immediately popped into Kat’s head—the stranger with the blond ponytail and outdated clothes she had bumped into during the fire.

“Yes. A man,” she said. “A stranger. He was the only person at the scene that I didn’t recognize.”

“Do you remember what he looked like?”

Kat certainly did. Tall. Vaguely foreign. Weird. “Think a sketch artist is in order?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Tony said. “It might come in handy later if this guy really did have something to do with the fire.”

Kat added talking to a sketch artist to her ever-growing schedule. It wasn’t even four in the morning, and already her to-do list for the day was a mile long.

“Once the sketch is done, I’ll compare it with photos of convicted arsonists recently released from jail,” Larry added. “Maybe this guy was one of them.”

Across the gallery, a small commotion rose from the crawl space. Kat heard excited chatter among the crime scene techs. One of them shouted for Tony.

“Lieutenant! You’ll want to take a look at this.”

Tony and Kat crossed the room as fast as they could. Not an easy task when the floor was unstable and covered with shattered glass. The investigator who had been in the crawl space was now sitting on the edge of it, his dangling legs disappearing into the darkness below.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said.

He pointed a flashlight into the hole, brightening the space enough for them to see the trunk Constance had been slumped over. It was now open, revealing a burlap sack that filled most of its interior space. The mouth of the sack had been pulled wide open and lowered slightly to reveal its contents. At first, Kat thought the objects inside were pieces of old ivory. They had the same jaundiced coloring, the same dull sheen.

Then she saw the teeth.

And the eye sockets.

And finally, the smooth curve of what could only be a human skull.