“It’s about time you came out of there,” she said. “For a man with a medium-rare complexion, I’d say you look overly cooked.”
“Shall we roll in the snow?” The bravado in Morgan’s proposal betrayed his relief at evading death and, equally, avoiding making an utter fool of himself.
“There isn’t any,” she said. “Let’s run naked under the stars.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“You didn’t!” Miranda exclaimed. “I thought you could take care of yourself! What if… What would have happened to my car? Mired at the bottom of a pond beside Norman Bates’s motel. With your head in the boot. My God, Morgan, how could you?”
“We say ‘trunk’ in these parts — those of us who don’t own vintage Jaguars.”
“Trunk is what would be left of your body after your paramour finished with it. The defective detective. What were you thinking? It’s obvious what you were thinking with!”
He grinned across the table at her. They were meeting for a coffee and Danish at Starbucks expressly so Morgan could fill her in on what he’d discovered during his unorthodox investigation of their principal suspect. He felt sheepish about admitting he had momentarily panicked in the sauna, yet it was a necessary prelude to confessing his ultimate innocence. First, he would allow himself to appear compromised, then admit to having further avoided her charms.
“So, you’re trying to tell me you didn’t sleep with her. What do I care, Morgan? You probably missed a golden opportunity, if you were up for it.” He exuded a boyish good cheer that irritated her immensely. “If you did sleep with her, I would imagine the conquest was hers, and if you did not, that was probably her doing as well. So tell me, were you good together? Either way, who cares?”
The odd thing to Morgan was that it had never come up as an issue, whether or not he and Shelagh Hubbard would be lovers. After running around like adolescents on the soggy lawn, leaving dreadful footprints to be rolled out later in the season, they had briefly returned to the sauna to warm up, then separately showered in the bathroom off the kitchen where they returned to dry un-self-consciously and make hot drinks of cocoa that they sipped in front of the dying fire. She rose first, leaned down, kissed him on the forehead, and retired to her ground-floor bedroom. After a few minutes, lingering to watch the embers fade and fall, glowing gold and vermillion, he had gone upstairs and crawled under the duvet where he slept soundly and wakened in the early light, feeling completely relaxed. He had not bothered to lock the bedroom door.
Miranda didn’t know whether to believe him or not. “You’re a bit of a whore, you know. Was it worth the effort?”
“Is it ever, Miranda?”
“It all sounds quite adolescent,” she said, and could not stop from reinforcing her previous disclaimer, “I don’t care what you did.”
“Good,” he said. “Then it’s settled.”
“Yes it is.”
“And what about you? Did you have a good weekend?”
“Yes.”
“At the zoo?”
“And otherwise.”
“Now, what does that mean?”
“It means I might have been whoring, myself.”
“Not likely.”
“You’re sweet, Morgan.”
“But foolish?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t think she did it — that’s my judgment after two days of foolishness.” They ordered more coffee and proceeded to sort through the facts and hypotheses. “There’s no pattern,” he said
“Not yet. The pattern will become clear when she does it again.”
“Don’t hold your breath. One funny thing she said — ”
“Only one?”
“She made a point of telling me she had never been abused as a child.”
“What an odd thing to confess.”
“Yeah, over breakfast, she asked about my growing up, but it felt like an excuse to talk about herself, then she explained she’d never been abused, assaulted, molested, or in any way damaged, that she had had a thoroughly ordinary upbringing, absolutely average, absurdly normal.”
“Now, why would she want you to know all that?”
“Establishing her credentials as a psychopath manque.”
“What the hell does that mean, Morgan?”
“A failure.”
“As a psychopath?”
“Perhaps a declaration that there is nothing in her background that would drive her to murder.” He paused for effect. “Or possibly the dead opposite — something more sinister: a declaration that she takes full responsibility for what she’s been doing.”
“You’d rather it wasn’t her.”
“I’d rather it wasn’t her.”
“She’s not a nice person, Morgan. Sometimes I worry about you. Do you really think she’s innocent?”
“ An innocent, no. Innocent? Possibly.”
“I have my doubts.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Grave doubts, Morgan.”
“You’re on shaky ground, you know. Guilt isn’t generally determined by personal animosity.”
“Nor innocence by affection. It seems to me you were the one on shaky ground.”
“You cannot convict someone for having a sauna,” he said.
“Not at all. I’ve had a few myself.”
“No, no, I mean owning a sauna. This is not about you.”
“But it is, perhaps, about you, since you managed to insinuate yourself into the middle of things, so to speak.”
“I mean, she has a sauna, so does Alexander Pope. That doesn’t make them killers.”
“Morgan, I survived my sauna at Pope’s with virtue intact. Rachel and Alexander and I did not compromise anything beyond the limits of modesty. Your friend’s sauna could easily be an oven for the mummification of human remains, even a chamber of execution. And she does own a coffin-sized freezer and she does live in an isolated farmhouse and she does have the requisite talents and arcane knowledge.”
“Circumstantial. Half her neighbours could be accused of the same. All those Torontonians with country retreats.”
“But not the professional training, nor the warped personality. There’s no such thing as a normal, average, ordinary childhood, Morgan.”
No, he agreed, there is not. He said nothing.
“Look,” she said. “We could send in forensics, but I doubt we’d find much at the abattoir. She’ll have cleaned up perfectly. It’s a matter of aesthetics.”
“Maybe she’s just a normal forensic anthropologist. You know, an intellectual more at ease with the dead than the living.”
“A vampire with very big breasts.”
“I found her charming. Gracious, intelligent, sensitive, good-humoured. Any of those sound familiar?”
“Morgan, she’s fucked with your mind.”
“What a nasty expression. She charmed my mind. I would much rather think she is innocent.”
“The last thing that woman is, is innocent.”
Miranda spent the rest of Monday and most of Tuesday going over the accumulated file, looking for missed connections and anomalies. She had been dividing her time over the past couple of weeks, working on other cases that were not in her portfolio, doing background for detectives more directly involved. She responded to inquiries from outside their jurisdiction — one from the FBI and a couple from Scotland Yard. She spent time off duty looking into private schools for girls. The housekeeper who looked after Jill was returning to be with her children in Barbados before they completely grew up. She had dinner with Rachel a couple of times and neither of them mentioned their intimate encounter, although they were comfortably affectionate in each other’s company. She called Alexander Pope from police headquarters to ask him esoteric questions about plaster and paint and the concealment of bodies, and stayed on the phone for over an hour, chatting about his latest reclamation project — the restoration of an infamous abandoned church north of Toronto as a museum of some sort, or a gallery. She dropped in on Ellen Ravenscroft at the morgue and they chatted amiably, but she found little had been revealed in the tissue tests they had run; the causes of death were still deemed extreme dehydration and asphyxia, but whether from a singular cause or a sustained condition was indeterminate.