Hannibal reached forward to touch a bookmark sticking out just a bit at the top of the book. Ruth moved her hand and he opened the yearbook to the designated page. The room was dominated by the sounds of people rushing more than they needed to on their way to their next destination. Over that noise he heard Ruth’s small gasp.
“Yes, this is the woman upstairs,” Hannibal whispered. “Joan Kitteridge. She went to school with Oscar. More recently, she was his boss, at her own software company.”
“His boss. Her company.” Ruth spat out the words. “I knew that little tramp when she was young and dirt poor. Oscar even brought her home once or twice for a meal.”
“But then she married young, didn’t she?” Hannibal asked.
Ruth’s face reddened, making a sharp contrast to her blue tinted hair. “In Germany,” she said. “She was with him before she was even out of high school. But I understand he died in a training accident.”
Hannibal reached out to take the old woman’s right hand in both of his own. The hand was cold, but the veins on its back were a road map of the long and twisted trail she had taken through life. There were secrets buried so deep she could barely see them. He thought now was the time to dig them out.
“Mrs. Peters, I need for you to tell me what it is that ties Joan and her ex-husband to your husband and to Gil Donner. What connects them?”
Ruth released one loud sob and a tidal wave of tears spilled out of her eyes. She faced downward, her sorrow splashing onto Joan Kitteridge’s teenage face. “The murder,” she said.
Hannibal looked around but none of the travelers stopped to ask about, or even seemed to notice the old woman sobbing in the lobby. Still, he leaned closer to make it clear he was comforting her, and offered her his handkerchief. He couldn’t see how Gil Donner or Foster Peters figured in the death of Grant Edwards or Oscar’s more recent murder. One possibility remained. “Do you mean Carla Donner?”
Ruth nodded, holding the handkerchief to her nose. “Foster covered it all up to protect them. Oh, God, he covered up the murder and somehow, Oscar always suspected. He knew his father had done something wrong. That suspicion drove them apart.”
“You said protect them? The murderer and…”
“Gil,” she said, forcing words through her crying. “He was afraid if there was a real investigation everyone would know…” Hannibal waited for her to regain her breath. “They’d know she was with another man.”
Hannibal was rubbing her hand now, feeling her shake. “And somehow Joan knew about all this?”
This time when Ruth’s head started nodding it didn’t stop. “She must have known. Her husband was having an affair with Carla.”
31
Hannibal stopped at the hotel room door to add to his tally of victims. While Foster Peters lived with his own actions, his wife Ruth felt such guilt about his actions that it had eaten her alive from the inside out for perhaps twelve years. Hannibal had called Ray inside to keep an eye on Ruth while he went upstairs to face the conspirators who, he was certain, were working at getting their stories straight in case of trouble. He had just raised his hand to knock when the door opened inward and Joan almost walked into him.
“Where you headed, girl?” Hannibal asked, planting a gloved palm in the center of her chest and shoving her back inside. “This is where it gets interesting.”
As Joan fell against the bed Hannibal took the room in at a glance. Donner had decorated his space to look like home. A five or six inch statuette of an infantryman stood guard on the low chest of drawers. What looked like a class photo of men in uniform stood in the center of the round table by the window. Between that table and Hannibal, Gil Donner stood at the writing desk holding the telephone to his ear. As Hannibal stepped past the bathroom door on his left Donner slowly lowered the phone back into its cradle.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Donner asked.
“Giving you a chance to confess and maybe lighten your sentence.”
“I have done nothing,” Donner said, taking one step forward.
Hannibal pulled his automatic from under his right arm and pointed it at Donner’s right knee. “Nothing except perhaps destroying evidence and certainly falsifying reports. Maybe you’re just guilty of being a bad cop. Or isn’t a provost marshal considered a cop?”
Donner and Joan exchanged a look that seemed more desperate than Hannibal would have expected. Joan sat up on the bed, looking more like a woman than an executive for the first time in Hannibal’s experience.
“You don’t understand,” she said in an unexpected, plaintive tone. “You can’t keep me here.”
“Then why don’t you make me understand,” Hannibal said. “While we’re waiting here for the police to show up, make me understand why you covered for your ex-husband when he killed Grant Edwards.”
Frozen in place, Donner stammered one word. “How?”
“And I’d really like to know why you covered for him when he murdered your wife.” Hannibal said, leaning against the wall. He was enjoying the stunned reactions of his two-person audience. “I do think I get why Oscar had to die, but it all goes back to your wife, doesn’t it Gil?”
“You can’t think Al Brooks killed Oscar Peters,” Donner said. “He died in a training accident years ago.”
“Please,” Hannibal said, waving Donner into a chair. “If the man was dead, Joanie here wouldn’t have had to sneak off to Las Vegas to get a divorce before she could marry Mark Norton.”
“Even if you were right,” Joan said, “why would a man I was married to kill Oscar?”
Hannibal pointed Joan to the other side of the bed where she sat very close to Donner. “I figure it this way. Stop me if I go wrong, now. You, Joan, were a witness to Carla Donner’s murder. Either that or your hubby came home and told you he did her in. He was sleeping with her in that little second flat the Donners kept for entertaining their extra curricular friends. In any case, you told your good friend Oscar, didn’t you?”
“She caught us up there,” Joan blurted out.
“Quiet,” Donner said. “Don’t tell this jerk anything.”
Hannibal sat on the low chest of drawers shaking his head. “You and him. Only you weren’t married yet. In fact, you were probably underage. Okay, Carla goes to her little hideaway and finds her boyfriend going at it with a high school kid. She flips out. Attacks him. He defends himself a little too robustly and kills her. How am I doing so far?”
“This is silly,” Donner said, hands held wide. “Remember this is my wife we’re talking about.”
“Yes, and I can’t figure yet why you would help cover up her murder,” Hannibal said. “Joan I understand. He married her, so her testimony would be inadmissible. But that didn’t last too long. They moved to the States, she dropped her married name and went back to living with her uncle. You have been a handful for him, haven’t you?”
Again Joan and Donner exchanged significant looks. Joan opened her mouth to speak, but Donner cut her off. “His theories only work if all the killings were done by one man, and your husband, Al Brooks, died in a training accident in Germany.”
“It just doesn’t wash, Donner,” Hannibal said. “If her ex really had nothing to do with Grant Edwards’ death, why were you asking Walt Young about it?” Donner was still cool, but Hannibal could smell Joan’s fear. He kept talking, hoping she would fill in whatever pieces were missing. “I figure Grant was murder number two. Brooks slipped into the house just before Francis got there and stabbed him with a bayonet, then slipped out to let Francis take the rap. You see, Joan had moved on to Grant, and our ghost was jealous.”
“But jealousy can’t be a motive for the final murder,” Joan protested. “I was never intimate with Oscar Peters.”
“Oh, no, but he had to die, didn’t he?” Hannibal asked. “After all, he was blackmailing you wasn’t he? I’m thinking when he and Dean put their heads together, he found out about your connection to Grant Edwards’ murder. That led him to suspect that your ex-husband was still alive. And that made you a blackmail target. And that made him a target for your murderous ex.”