“How do you know this? Did you follow her?”
“I never left my bed. But I could hear her. That old staircase creaks like crazy.”
“I see,” Des said thoughtfully. “Why didn’t you mention this to me earlier?”
“The specifics didn’t seem worth mentioning. But things are different now, aren’t they?”
“They are.”
“Teddy, how can you be sure it was Norma who you heard?” Mitch asked. “How do you know it wasn’t Les?”
“You’re absolutely right,” Teddy admitted. “I don’t know that. I’m simply assuming it, since Norma often went downstairs in the night. Les seldom does. But wait, there’s more-I also heard another door open and close a few minutes later, followed by more footsteps heading downstairs.”
“Whose?” Des asked.
“Ada’s.”
Des studied him intently. “You’re sure about this?”
“Positive.” Teddy looked across at room three. “It was her door and her footsteps. The old girl had an unusually light tread. You may have noticed.”
“Oh, I noticed,” Des said. “You believe Ada followed Norma downstairs, is that it?”
“Yes, I do,” Teddy said.
“Did you hear them come back up?”
“After maybe a half hour,” he replied, nodding. “Ada came back up first. I could hear her door open and close. I figured Norma would wait awhile downstairs for her to go back to sleep. Then she would, you know, come to me. But that didn’t happen. She returned to her own room a moment or two after Ada did and never came back out again. I fell asleep shortly thereafter,” Teddy said dejectedly. “May I go down and play now?”
Des frowned at him. “Play?”
“The piano. I get terribly uneasy if I’m away from the keys for long.”
“I’m afraid not, Teddy. I need you in your room. But I would like to borrow your desk chair, if you don’t mind.”
Teddy didn’t mind. She took the wooden chair and carried it out into the hall, then closed Teddy in his room. She and Mitch were all alone in the hall now.
“This is for you.” She positioned the chair at the top of the stairs, facing the corridor. “I have to go downstairs real quick and radio this in. Can you make sure no one leaves their rooms while I’m gone?”
“Not a problem. If you need it, there’s an ice pick under the tarp in the back of my truck. Also a scraper. And, hey, you’d better take this,” he offered, fishing his battery-powered lock de-icer from his pocket.
“I’m all set,” she said, patting her coat pocket. “What I wish you had on you was a weapon.”
“Des, that’s just not me.”
“There’s a couple of hunting rifles in the kitchen.”
“No way. I don’t believe in guns.”
“Mitch, this isn’t about guns. It’s about protection.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, suit yourself.” She lingered there at the top of the stairs for a moment, furrowing her brow. Mitch knew why. She needed to spitball. When she’d worked Major Crimes she’d had her partner, Soave, to bounce her ideas off. Right now, she had only the lead film critic for the most prestigious of New York City’s three daily newspapers. “I’m thinking that more than one person may be behind this,” she said to him slowly.
“Why would you think that?”
“Because Ada said they to me,” she replied. “Last night in the ladies’ lounge. We were talking about my work, or so I thought, when out of nowhere she said, ‘They will never, ever get it.’ Meaning this castle, I think. She was so cryptic about it, I wasn’t positive. I even wondered if maybe she wasn’t completely together in the head. But now I’m thinking that she knew something. Maybe something Norma told her. Something that got both of them killed. Ada wanted to have more words with me this morning. She was quite insistent about it. And whatever those words were, she didn’t want to say them in front of Les.”
“I wonder how come.”
“I wish I knew. I wish I’d managed to get her alone for a few minutes. But I didn’t. And that one’s on me.”
“Don’t go blaming yourself for this, girlfriend.”
“Mitch, I can’t help how I feel.”
“If Ada didn’t want to speak to you in front of Les, then we have to take a good hard look at him, don’t we?”
“For sure. Only, what’s his motive?”
“You said it yourself. This place-it’s worth millions.”
“Not to Les it’s not. Aaron gets it all. Les knew that. He’s the executor of Norma ’s estate.”
“Then that makes Aaron the prime candidate, no?”
“Aaron has the most to gain from Norma ’s death,” Des acknowledged. “Plus he has a girlfriend and a way pissed-off wife. Hell yeah, he’s our early front-runner.”
“Do we know exactly where he was when Ada got strangled?”
“He went upstairs looking for Carly is all we know right now.” Des started for the stairs, then stopped. “We do know something else-we know that the first murder was planned and the second one wasn’t.”
“And how do we know that?”
“Because whoever killed Norma would have gotten away with it if they hadn’t gone and killed Ada, too. Most likely, there’d have been no autopsy of Norma. Now there will definitely be one. And it will definitely turn something up. Count on it. The only way something this stupid goes down is if the play is blown. I’m talking total desperation, as in Ada accidentally seeing something, maybe. Something so heavy that the risk of her spilling it outweighed the risk of exposing Norma’s death to scrutiny. Real world, that is my idea of beyond desperation. That is plain, pure loco. Because, damn, we are snowed the hell in up here. No way Ada’s murder doesn’t fall on somebody.” Des shook her head disgustedly. “All right, enough of this. I’d better go do what I’ve got to do. Watch my back, okay?”
“Absolutely. There’s nothing in the whole world I enjoy more than watching your back-with the possible exception of watching your front.”
She stood there looking at him as if he were the loco one.
“Sorry, I blather when I’m knocked out of my comfort zone. I know this about myself.” He parked his generous bottom in the chair, facing the hallway.
“You’re doing good, baby,” she assured him. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Sure it will.”
Des was halfway down the stairs before she abruptly stopped and returned and said, “Okay, I have to know how it turns out.”
“How what turns out, Des?”
“This old movie of yours.”
“Trust me, you really don’t want to know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, okay, you asked for it,” Mitch said, clearing his throat. “No one gets out alive.”
“Oh, that’s just great.”
CHAPTER 10
“We are all victims in the end.”
Des photographed Ada Geiger’s body from a dozen different angles with the digital camera that she kept in the trunk of her cruiser. She moved nothing as she snapped her pictures, and she touched nothing. That would be a job for the crime scene technicians when they got there-if they got there. For now, her job was to produce photos and protect the scene, even though what she really wanted to do was sit down with her 18-by-24-inch Strathmore 400 drawing pad and a piece of graphite stick. She yearned to capture the spirit of fight that remained in Ada’s ancient, intricately lined face. The absence of fear in that face despite the certainty of what was coming.
Acceptance without surrender.
This was the essence of Ada Geiger in death. Yes, there was the unfathomable stillness. But there were also courage, defiance. Even in death, Ada Geiger spolie. And Des felt a desperate need to listen with her graphite stick. But there was no time for that now. It would have to wait for later, when she could take heed in her studio with these photos pinned to her easel.
Right now, she had a killer to catch.
Des took a quick look around for the gloves that Ada’s killer must have worn, taking care not to disturb anything. She found none. She did take the time to glance under the bed for them-a ritual of hers that dated back to one of the first cases she’d caught as a rookie in uniform. She’d found an East Granby woman lying dead on the bedroom floor of her home, stabbed sixteen times in the chest and neck. Des did not see the murder weapon anywhere. She was just about to call it in when, strictly as an afterthought, she’d thought to glance under the bed. That was where she found the bloody knife. If she hadn’t done that, she would have looked like a consummate bimbo when the Major Crime Squad people got there and found it. She’d never have lived that down. So she always looked under the bed when she caught a murder. Call it a superstition.