Garcia and Luke disappeared into the back of the house. Being separated from her boss gave Bernadette a twinge of discomfort. The doctor was taller than both his drunken sibling and Garcia, and he was stone sober. She reassured herself that Garcia was more muscular than either man and carried a big gun.
Matthew headed for the stairs. “This way, Agent Scully.”
She gave one last glance to the lighted room in back of the house and followed the tipsy smartass up the steps. “If you point me in the right direction, I’m sure I can find it all by my lonesome,” she said to his back.
Without turning around, he responded, “That would leave you free to snoop around, wouldn’t it?”
“Exactly,” she said as she scouted the steps for blood.
He hiccupped a laugh. “At least you’re being honest this time.”
She took notice of the artwork lining the staircase wall. The signature on the rendition of a dusty cowboy ranch looked familiar. “Is that an authentic Remington?”
“Frederic Remington, James Edward Buttersworth, George Henry Durrie,” he said, waving his arm. He could have been ticking off the cereal selection in his kitchen cupboard.
Though Bernadette had snoozed through most of college art history, she recognized those names as important American painters. “Your brother is quite a collector.”
“My parents were the collectors,” he said as they reached the second-floor hallway. “My brother and I are stuck being the curators.”
She remembered that Luke had had a similar complaint. “Most people would kill to inherit such treasures,” she said.
“In a sense, we did,” he said ominously.
Her eyes widened. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
More art hung from the hallway walls, and he ignored her question to point out the pieces. “Here we have a hand-signed print by Marc Chagall. That’s hand-colored lithography by Currier and Ives. Those are all numbered and signed artist proofs by Norman Rockwell. A little too Main Street for my palate, but Mother and Father liked that sort of thing. They were all about the wholesome American family.”
His voice carried a bitterness that alarmed her. “Matt, maybe we could talk. Just the two of us.”
He stopped in front of a door in the middle of the hall and pushed it open. “I’ll leave you to whatever it is you want to do up here. Wash your hands. Powder your nose. Dust for prints. I’ll be downstairs with the menfolk.”
She watched him head down the hall, his shoulders sagging, his gait unsteady. She found him more pathetic than menacing.
Scanning the second floor, she saw it wasn’t anything like what she’d observed through her sight. The entire upstairs was ringed by railing, allowing all the rooms to look down onto the first floor. The corridor traveled by the killer had solid walls on both sides.
She walked into the hallway bathroom. She knew it wouldn’t be the one she’d observed. For starters, the bathroom from which the young woman had fled had emptied into a bedroom, not a hall. Instead of a claw-foot tub, the doctor had a modern Jacuzzi. Instead of white walls, Luke VonHader had ornate wallpaper hung with framed art. She scanned the bottom of the tub, but found nothing more suspicious than a collection of children’s toys: headless Barbie dolls, beach buckets, sand shovels, rubber ducks. The surface of the tub looked bone dry. She went over to a stall with a glass door—the only feature even remotely similar to what she’d conjured through her sight—and popped it open. The floor was wet. Not a surprise. The robed Matthew had probably just used the shower. Was there a chance he’d been washing off blood? She studied the tiles on the floor and the grout between them and found no stains.
Bernadette opened the medicine cabinet and surveyed the contents. Tylenol and sinus tablets and bars of soap and shaving cream and a disposable razor. A few of the wife’s cosmetics and perfumes. She took down the sole prescription bottle: amoxicillin, for the girls’ ear infections. She put the bottle back and closed the cabinet, another fixture that wasn’t in the killer’s bathroom. He’d had only an oval mirror over the sink. Encased in dry cleaner’s plastic, a set of the doctor’s shirts hung from the back of the bathroom door. This was a messy family bathroom, not a murder site.
She quickly made the circuit around the second floor, poking her head inside one bedroom after another. None of them matched the sparsely furnished one Bernadette had seen during her first round with the scarf. The sleeping quarters were filled with dressers and nightstands and blanket chests. Armoires and tallboys and lowboys and vanities. Perched atop the tables and chests and dressers were vases and statues and linens and quilts.
The only things distinguishing the little girls’ room from the other antique parlors were the mermaid spreads on the matching twin beds. Shuddering, she tried to imagine a childhood spent suffocating in this sea of old stuff. It all felt like a heavy weight pressing down on her, and she was only a visitor. She was starting to understand the brothers’ resentment toward their parents.
The largest bedroom—it had to be the master—was the most jammed of all. Two veneered chests stood next to each other. A dark old armchair was parked in front of a cherrywood dressing table. On each side of the bed was a marble-topped nightstand. Nearly every inch of wall space was plastered with framed art. Taking up the center of one wall was a massive fireplace, its mantel crowded with old oil lanterns like the fireplace mantel downstairs.
Poking her head inside the master bathroom, she spotted another Jacuzzi tub, plus a marble-topped vanity with two modern sinks. Satisfied that the doctor’s home wasn’t the killing ground, Bernadette started for the stairs, wondering how much she’d gotten wrong over the past week. But a woman had been kidnapped, and they had to find her.
When she walked into the kitchen, she saw Luke and Matthew VonHader seated on the same side of the table. The brothers were in handcuffs. Her boss stood across from them, holding his gun on the pair.
“Call the police, Agent Saint Clare,” said Garcia.
“Yes, sir.” Bernadette retrieved her cell with one hand and took her gun out of her pocket with the other.
While she punched the numbers on her phone, Bernadette’s eyes went from one brother to the other. The expressions on their faces were calm, almost relieved. While she spoke into the cell, the room was silent. She noticed it was a small but bright kitchen, so unlike the rest of the house.
When she was finished with the dispatcher, she closed the phone and asked the question she’d been asking herself from the minute she stepped inside. “Where’s the body?”
“In the ground,” Garcia said grimly.
“So they killed—”
“Their father,” said Garcia.
Chapter 38
THE BROTHERS TOOK turns recounting the story. It was a smooth retelling, almost practiced. Bernadette wondered how many times one had talked the other out of going to the authorities with it.
“Our parents were good people,” said Luke VonHader, his voice a monotone and his eyes fixed at some invisible target beyond the agents. “They went to church. Made sure we went.”
“Ten o’clock mass every Sunday,” said Matthew, his lids lowered as if he were nodding off.
“They put us in Catholic school,” Luke continued. “We had golf lessons. Tennis lessons. Piano. Growing up, we had everything.”
“All three of us, nothing but the best,” said Matthew.
“Someplace warm during Christmas break,” said the doctor. “Come the summer, a big family vacation. France. Scotland. Denmark. We went to Ireland three times.”
“Four times,” his younger brother corrected him. He looked from one agent to the other. “Can I have a drink? I could really use a drink.”
Garcia shook his head and addressed the doctor. “What went wrong?”
“Time. There was just no time,” said Luke, dragging his hand across his face. “My parents were busy. Father worked sixty hours a week. Mother had her volunteer work. Her charities and antiquing. They didn’t have time for traditional discipline. They were older and less patient, I suppose. They’d waited to have a family. With three high-spirited children, they took the quickest, most effective route to taming them. It was humane, in a sense. It left no marks. The worst you could accuse them of is—I don’t know—lazy parenting.”