“I know,” she said, nodding. “Lieutenant Morelli told me you would be coming when he visited me at the hospital.”
“Are you feeling any better?” Mike asked gently.
“It’s hard to say.” She looked at them as if she might find her answer in their eyes. “The doctors said I could go home, although I have to return to the hospital tomorrow for more sutures. They think my brain may be partially detached from my skull.
Having grown up with a doctor father, Ben had had an opportunity to see injuries of all sorts and degrees. Nonetheless, he could not recall ever seeing anyone so hideously damaged, so…ruined. “Forgive me for asking, but have you consulted a plastic surgeon?”
“Just long enough to find out they are very expensive. Too expensive for me. Especially now that Howard is gone.”
“Surely your husband’s medical insurance at Apollo—”
“Terminated the instant he died. I’ve already spoken to Robert Crichton about it. He said he was sorry, but there was nothing he could do.”
Mike gave Ben a pointed look. “Some boss you got there, Ben.”
Ben didn’t reply.
“Please come in,” Gloria said. “I don’t like to stand out in the open.”
They stepped into the foyer of the house. Now that he was inside, Ben realized that the house was even more palatial than it seemed from the outside. The furnishings were absolutely top-drawer—much better than he would have expected a mid-level member of the Apollo legal staff to be able to afford.
“How many rooms have you got here?” Ben asked.
“Twenty-two. Not counting the attic, garage, or basement.”
Ben whistled. “Mike, we’re going to need help.”
“Agreed. Although I doubt we’ll be able to divert many men from the serial killer investigation. Let me make a call.”
Gloria pointed to a telephone in the den. Mike dialed headquarters, leaving Ben alone, and extremely uncomfortable, with Gloria.
“Do the police have any idea who did this to you?” Ben asked.
“Not that I’ve heard.” Her diction was so slurred that Ben at first thought she had said “God how I hurt.” A shiver shot down his spine. “Not that I’ve been any help.”
“You didn’t help the police?”
“I couldn’t. I didn’t see a thing. It was about one A.M. I wasn’t sleeping well—I haven’t since Howard was killed. I heard a noise downstairs. Like a fool, I got up and looked around. I startled the intruder, who proceeded to beat me into unconsciousness—I suppose so he could get away before I called the police.”
Ben gazed sadly at the woman’s tragic face. Whoever did this was seeking more than just a hasty retreat. Whoever did this was a deeply cruel human being.
“Do you have any idea what the intruder was doing here?”
She shook her head, then winced, as if the tiny movement pained her. “He seemed to be searching for something. What, I don’t know.”
“You said he. Are you certain it was a man?”
“Well, I just assumed—but no, I suppose I really don’t know. It was too dark to see anything.”
“That must be a horribly…invasive feeling,” Ben said. “To have someone break in, to learn that you’re not safe in your own home.”
“This is just one more…incident,” she murmured.
“There have been others?”
“I don’t mean like this. I mean…everything.” She lowered herself slowly into a chair. “One more blow. One more incomprehensible slap in the face. When Howard was killed, I thought my life was over, thought I had no reason to live. And now…” Her head bowed till she was staring at her hands. “…now, I wish I could die.”
25
BY FIVE-THIRTY, BEN, MIKE, and three uniforms from the Central Division had been through each of the twenty-two rooms in Gloria Hamel’s house twice. Some more.
And come up with nothing.
“Maybe we’re wasting our time,” Ben said. He sat dejectedly beside the fireplace in the den. “Maybe Hamel’s murder had nothing to do with his home life.”
“Whether it did or didn’t, he lived here,” Mike replied. He was opening drawers, looking under rugs, and checking all the other places he had already checked twice before. “There must be something helpful here, something that would give us a hint of what happened to him.”
“Well, I don’t want to sound like a quitter, but I don’t think there’s anything here.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Think about it, Ben. Last night someone took an enormous risk by breaking in here. A very desperate person, if what he did to the lady of the house is any indication. And why? Because he was looking for something. Gloria Hamel interrupted him before he found it, and he fled immediately after the beating. I don’t know what he was searching for. But I know it’s still here.”
“Well, since you put it that way…”
Ben pushed himself away from the fireplace and resumed his search.
“I’m going to check with Sergeant Mattingly. He’s searching the garage.”
The garage? “Mike, there’s also a basement and an attic. In addition to the twenty-two rooms we’ve already searched.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. Gloria told me.”
Mike slapped him on the back. “All right, Sherlock Kincaid. I’ll take the basement, you take the attic.” He poked Ben in the ribs. “Unless that’s too high up for you. I don’t want you to get dizzy and fall out a window.”
Actually, it was too high up for Ben, not that he planned to admit it. Worse, the attic had huge windows on two sides. There was no direction he could turn to forget that he was not firmly planted on the ground. He tried to calm himself, recalling that he had once jumped out of an office window at least this high off the ground. Somehow, that only made him more nauseated.
The Hamels’ attic was a junkman’s dream. Almost every inch of floor space was piled high with mementos and castaways. The tremendous clutter guaranteed that this search would take several hours at least.
Most of the clutter derived from the man of the house. Incomplete projects filled the attic—a half-finished model train set, various model airplanes, a ship in a bottle. One corner was filled with fishing and camping gear. The only traces of Gloria he saw were a dust-covered dressmaker’s dummy, a sewing machine, and various needles and threads—remnants of an avocation long since abandoned.
Well, there was no point in procrastinating. Ben chose the closest corner and plunged in. He tried to be as thorough as possible; he opened every drawer, every trunk, every cardboard box. He overturned every piece of furniture, carefully checking for hollowed cushions and the like.
An hour and a half later, he had tunneled a path to the first wall, and come up with nothing that cast any light on Hamel’s death.
He patted down the wall, listening for a hollow sound that might suggest a secret room. All he heard was the consistent thud of plaster and wood.
You’re losing it, Kincaid, he thought to himself. This is real life, not a Gothic romance.
Above him, Ben spotted a huge blue swordfish, stuffed and mounted on the wall. A small plaque informed him that Howard Hamel caught the fish off Padre Island on August 12, 1988.
The swordfish triggered something in the back of Ben’s mind. It took him a moment to bring it back: I love deep sea fishing, Hamel had said. If I could, I’d spend my whole life doing that and nothing else.
Could it be? Ben pulled over a rickety chair and raised himself eye level with the swordfish. Maybe it was just his overactive imagination, but the fish seemed to be…smiling at him. Cautiously, Ben put his hand into the fish’s mouth, stretched, and withdrew.