Mae lifted the faded doll and fluffed its dry, yellow hair.“Yes, this is the doll I gave Jane. The doll that was Jane’s cry for help.” She gave Harper a long look. “A cry that didn’t arrive until after she was dead.” She stroked the doll sadly, and laid it in her lap beside the brindle cat curled asleep on the pink afghan. “Was there evidenceof who-which one of those three-actually killed Jane? And of who buried her?”
“None,” Harper said. “We know only that she was given a lethal dose of Valium mixed with other drugs. Drug traces in the body are a cause of death which is still detectable long after bruises and flesh wounds can no longer be found. We’re assuming that either Adelina or Teddy buried her; forensics found hairs from both suspects around the grave. The lab had to separate them out from some animal hairs that forensics collected at the site, all of it was mixed together in with leaves and dirt and grass.”
“What kind of animal hairs?” Dillon said.
“Cat hair,” Harper said. “Some stray cat.”
He did not look at Clyde, though Clyde was watching him. He was still ridiculously edgy about Damen’s gray tomcat. The cat was, at the moment, perched above them in the orange tree, presumably asleep, though twice he had caught a thin gleam of yellow through its narrowly slitted eyes. Aware of the cat, he felt as he did too often lately, edgy, nervous, wondering if he was losing his grip.
The cat had got mixed into the case in a way that left him uncertain and short-tempered, left him so edgy he wouldn’t care if he never saw another cat. Cats in the cemetery, some cat racing through the house with Renet in hot pursuit, cat hairs around the doll which had been set up for him to find. And the tiny indentations in the doll’s arm, those marks, the lab swore, were the marks of a cat’s teeth.
None of this helped his digestion. None of it was comfortable to think about.
If this had been the first time these two cats had got mixed up in a case, he’d shrug and chalk it up to coincidence, forget about it.
But it was not the first time. This was the third murder case within a year that, one way or another, these two cats had seemed to blunder into, leaving their marks, leaving their own perplexing trail.
And the worst part was, he had an uncomfortable feeling this would not be the last time.
Dulcie, lying on Mae Rose’s lap, yawned and curled deeper into the pink afghan, pushing aside the doll. She had not looked up when Harper mentioned cat hairs on the grave, nor had she glanced up into the tree. Joe, crouched up there among the leaves, would be highly amused that Harper had sent cat hairs to the lab. If she dared look up at him, she’d see that stupid grin on his face. Grinning out through the leaves as smug as Alice’s Cheshire cat.
Harper hadn’t looked up at Joe, either. She hoped he wasn’t putting some things together that were best left apart.
Still, if he was, she couldn’t help it. He couldn’t prove anything. She and Joe had, she considered, done an admirable job to assist Harper. But he’d never know for sure. If he insisted on feeling nervous, that was his problem.
“It’s so strange,” Susan said, “how the stolen doll got into the graveyard-and why Adelina’s black book was hidden under her desk. Surely she’d have some better place to hide it.” She glanced at Dillon. “It’s almost like a child’s prank, moving evidence around.”
Dillon looked blank Harper helped himself to another slice of lemon cake from the plate in the center of the table. Some details of the case did not bear close scrutiny.
They had a solid case, but there were unanswered questions that could prejudice the prosecution. He just hoped defense didn’t claim the notebook was tainted evidence. They’d have to wait and see. Certainly the department had done a fine job sorting out the information in Adelina’s black book, checking its entries against the backgrounds of her nurses.
The black book had contained, as well as the dossiers of two dozen employees, a separate sheet of paper with a code list of the dead patients. No name, just a number, with a birth date, and apparently the date he or she was secretly buried. Some had a second date when that person was given a public funeral and some other body buried. He had, when he removed the coded paper, found caught in the spine of the book one short dark hair, a hair varied in color like the hair of a dark tabby cat.
He had not sent this to the lab.
In the old cemetery, his men had found fifteen unmarked graves. They had found, as well, double burials in four of the Spanish graves where more-recent bodies had been tucked in to sleep, perhaps restlessly, beside ancient Spanish bones.
When he did the numbers on that, it looked like Adelina was raking in well over half a million a year on dead patients.
“It was with the fourth death,” he said, “whatever the cause, that Adelina decided to have a funeral. By this time, the long-deceased Dorothy Martin would have been ninety-nine years old. Adelina probably decided that she’d better fake a death before Dorothy started receiving unwanted publicity for her longevity. She gave Dorothy a nice, though modest, send-off, using the body of a newly deceased Mary Dunwood. With Renet’s background in the makeup department, it was no trick for her to make up the dead Mary Dunwood to look like an aged Dorothy Martin.
“Over the years,” he said, “no one seemed to notice that Casa Capri always used the same funeral parlor, nor to think it unusual that the funeral director drives top-of-the-line Cadillacs which he trades in every year. Not likely anyone would have commented. No one takes a friendly view of funeral directors-people like to think of them as rip-off artists.
“For each prospect who fit Adelina’s requirements-no close attachments, no close family-she kept a detailed record of any distant relative or friend, and she made copies of all their correspondence. It wasn’t hard to learn to fake different people’s handwriting. And she got personal information, as well, from what Teddy learned during his friendly little chats with the patients. Adelina knew more about those people than they ever imagined.
“And it wasn’t hard for Renet, using her makeup and acting skills, to impersonate the dead patients. People change sufficiently as they age; five or six years can make a significant difference.
“Renet took photographs of the victims often, before they died. And she photographed herself made up like them, to compare. She made quite a study of how the patients would look as they aged; we found books outlining the changes that can occur. I’m guessing Adelina demanded that amount of commitment from Renet. Adelina is a perfectionist. She made sure, as well, that wherever Renet was living, up and down the coast, they were in touch. All Renet had to do, if she was needed, was hop on a plane. The nursing home made it known-an inviolate rule-that visitors must give twenty-four-hour notice. That patients did not like surprises, and did not liked to be disturbed during any small illness, such as a cold or an attack of asthma.”
Susan and Wilma exchanged a look; Susan’s dislike for the Priors was very clear. She had told Harper her suspicions about Teddy and how, the afternoon Adelina and Renet were arrested, there had been a major panic at the home. Susan said Teddy had spent maybe fifteen minutes in Adelina’s office, then Adelina had left in a hurry; Teddy had wheeled to the front door, watching her drive away, then whirled his chair around, racing into the social room.
There he had confronted Susan, had wanted to know what she’d told the police, what she’d seen out in the grove, what she’d said about him.
Susan had played dumb, said she didn’t know what he was talking about. She’d been terrified of him, said his eyes looked almost glazed, said she expected him to leap out of his chair and start hitting her.
Now, Harper watched Susan speculatively. He had been really distressed about Teddy’s threat, thinking of Susan so vulnerable in the wheelchair. Strange, Susan was the only woman, since Millie died, who gave him that warm, totally honest, comfortable feeling, as if with Susan you could be totally yourself.