“And did she take her gun with her? Or say anything about it being missing in the past few weeks?”
“Until five seconds ago, I didn’t even know my wife had a gun. I’m still trying to process that information. It’s an interesting footnote to everything that’s been going on around here.” He laughed in a self-deprecating way, as if Lenhardt should be intimate with his troubles. Yet Lenhardt still didn’t have a clue who the guy was, had yet to learn his first name, in fact. “Why do you care?”
“A.22 registered to Michael Delacorte was recovered Friday from Glendale High School.”
“From Glendale -oh, my fucking God, that’s all I need.”
Could this guy be more self-involved? But then it hit Lenhardt-Delacorte. Stewart Delacorte. Another business guy under indictment, or about to be, something to do with stock manipulation in a furniture company that had been in his family for generations, gone public, then gone pretty much to hell.
“We’re trying to figure out how the gun came to be in the girl’s possession.”
Delacorte was in responsible-citizen mode now, keen to help. “We had a baby-sitter, a regular, came every Thursday. I think she was a Glendale girl.”
“You know her name?”
“I might, if I heard it.”
Lenhardt carefully read off three names, although he didn’t need to refer to his notes to do that. He just wanted to make sure that he didn’t lead this guy in any way, that each name was repeated in the same careful, uninflected tone.
“Katarina Hartigan. Josie Patel. Perri Kahn.”
“Dale’s daughter? But she was the one who was killed, right? Poor guy. When I read that in the paper, it reminded me there’s always someone whose troubles are worse than your own.”
“So Kat was your baby-sitter?”
“Oh, no. I just know Dale from, you know, around. He’s a good guy. So I recognize Kat, but those other names-it could be either one. I’m sure it was one of those y names. Josie. Perri. Terry.”
“But you saw the baby-sitter, would know her if you saw her again, right?” Perri’s parents had already confirmed that their daughter baby-sat for this family, but Lenhardt was keen to determine that the other girls couldn’t have procured the gun. The Kahns’ lawyer would sure as hell find out if they had access, if Kat or Josie had so much as rung the doorbell in the past three years.
Delacorte looked a little sheepish. “I suppose so. I-I worked a lot. That’s the reason Michael left. Part of the reason. The baby-sitter was…thin. Kind of bony.”
That description could apply to Perri Kahn or Josie Patel.
“Tall? Short?”
Delacorte shrugged.
“Um, ethnic?”
“Ethnic?”
“Like, Asian or Indian. Not American Indian but the other kind.”
“Oh, no. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone like that in the house.”
“And there was only the one baby-sitter?”
“On Thursdays. She came in on the nanny’s day off, because, you know, God forbid Michael would have to spend an entire day alone with Malcolm.”
“Why did your wife have a gun?”
Delacorte gave Lenhardt what he obviously thought of as a man-to-man smile. “I don’t know, but believe me, I’m thinking about it.”
“How do I get in touch with her?”
“Beats me. She won’t tell me where she’s living and hasn’t let me see my son since she moved out. Is that even legal?”
“Not exactly. But you need a family lawyer-”
He held up a hand. “I know. The question was largely rhetorical.”
“You got a number for your wife?”
“A cell. She won’t answer when I call, though. She always makes me talk to voice mail.”
“I thought I could call it.”
“Oh. Oh, of course.” Delacorte began to wander the room, pulling open drawers in various end tables and chests, looking for paper and pencil. Lenhardt felt a stab of pity, watching a man roam his own home, incapable of finding so much as scrap of paper.
He handed him his own pad and pen, asking, “Who’s Maurice?”
“My driver. It’s about an hour to Harrisburg. I can’t afford that much downtime, so he drives, I work. I moved here because I thought I could commute by helicopter, but the neighbors went berserk on my ass. That’s how I got to know Dale. He tried to broker a compromise, but there was no dealing with these nuts. I could have fought them in court, but it wasn’t worth it, not with everything else going on.”
“Why are you going in on a Sunday, though?”
“The usual things,” he said. “Papers to go through. Some things to box up and put into storage.”
His tone had the vague, innocent air of a lying kid, and he was no longer making eye contact.
“It’s illegal, you know. Getting rid of stuff once an investigation is under way.”
“Thanks for the free legal advice, Sergeant. Helps defray the cost of the official advice that costs me six hundred dollars an hour. Got any other pearls of wisdom for me?”
Lenhardt knew he was being put down, but he pretended to take the guy’s words at face value. “Okay, one more tip: Everything you steal, your wife is entitled to half of, under Maryland law. So if she knows where you hid all your assets before you gutted your company, you’ll have to cut her in.”
He left in a good mood, even though he hadn’t established anything other than the probability that Perri Kahn was the only girl who could have taken the gun from this house. It would be interesting to pin down the when, which would suggest just how long she had been planning her morning of havoc. And Delacorte hadn’t been able to place Josie in his home, a complication that Lenhardt had been happy to sidestep, even if he did think the girl was lying her head off.
What if she stalled on purpose? The thought hit him with a happy shock as soon as he was back on the highway, another possible resolution to the inconsistencies that were nagging at him. What if she hoped that refusing to open the door, pretending to be incapacitated, would be more likely to lead to the other girl’s death?
He filed it away and continued to the office, where he and Infante were going to write up the paperwork necessary to get permission for a medical examiner to eyeball the girl’s wound. According to the X-rays, the trajectory had been remarkably straight, as if someone had held the gun directly over the girl’s foot and fired. As if she had stood still, polite and proper, the best-behaved kid lining up for a flu shot.
15
Alexa had her Sunday routine down pat-the gym, then the farmers’ market under the expressway, shopping for whatever new recipe she had picked out for that night’s supper, usually something from Gourmet, or Food & Wine, or Nigella’s column in the New York Times, but not Martha, never Martha, even before her legal problems. Martha Stewart was cold, while Nigella Lawson had an earthy sensuality that Alexa believed was not unlike her own nature. Warm, giving. And although Alexa sometimes invited Washington friends to her Sunday-night suppers, entertaining was not the point of her ritual. In fact, she prepared meals just as elaborate when alone-single portions of pot-au-feu, soufflés, paella. She refused to be one of those women who were stingy with themselves, postponing pleasure until the proper husband or boyfriend showed up.