"I believe we'll find it was Raoul de Vries, rather than Lund, who killed Fondulac. He'd already attacked Phyllis Talmadge, though not very efficiently. He knew that his wife had a safe filled with blackmailing material, but he couldn't get at it because of the continuous presence of the police. When he heard Ms. Talmadge's declaration that the room contained secrets, he thought her statement was based on clear knowledge rather than some vague psychic intuition, and he panicked. Howard Fondulac's death was similarly opportunistic, making use of the exercise machine, but you can be sure that this time his killer was watching, waiting for just such a chance.
"Christopher Lund's problem was that he'd started using more cocaine than he was selling. His death, although the timing is suspicious, may finally prove to be the accident it appears. The crime scene technicians haven't finished in there, so it's far too soon to say anything about it.
"But now we come to Ondine's death, which is the real reason we've brought you here. The precise details of her death are proving hard to pin down." (An unfortunate turn of phrase, Caroline thought, considering the way the poor girl had died. The inappropriateness seemed to occur to Emilio/Jonathan at the same moment. He went on hastily.) "From the position of the body, it is just possible that she came back in the salon, looked into the next room and saw Karen McElroy lying dead in the pedi-bath, and fainted. She was, after all, so severely malnourished that it wouldn't have taken much of a shock." Caroline thought he seemed determined not to look over at the rock star and the actress when he said this, and she wondered why.
"So Ondine could, possibly, have fallen against the shelf unit and had it come down on top of her. It was massive, but most of the weight was in the top, and as a result the piece as a whole was far from stable. The only problem with that theory is that we found two very clear sets of prints on the side of that freshly polished wood. One set up along the back." Here he gripped his right hand over an invisible object at shoulder height. "And another lower down." In illustration, he pulled with his right arm against the imaginary weight, pushing out with his left. The room winced at the silent crash of a shelving unit, laden with nail polish, onto the fragile bones of a prostrate but still breathing model-waif.
"Now, before I tell you about those prints, we need to look at the other skein in this tangle. For that we need to go back even farther than twelve years.
"I believe most of you were aware some time ago that Claudia de Vries was a blackmailer. It should be obvious by now that she was a lot of things; anything that brought in money, she was willing to try. Some criminals stick to a specific area; others are generalists. Claudia was one of the latter.
"The first criminal act we know of was when she was in college and agreed to help a friend arrange an illegal adoption. For payment, naturally, to ensure that the friend's illegitimate baby went to a good, caring, if none too wealthy family. In fact, she dumped the child with a relative and kept the money."
Caroline realized that she was squeezing Douglas's hand until all their fingers were turning white. She eased off, made herself take a deep breath, and then jumped when another voice spoke up.
"That was me." The speaker, Caroline saw with incredulity, was Lauren Sullivan, beautiful and bruised. "My adult looks have taken me a long way, I know, but as a child I was difficult and funny-looking and incredibly shy. My acting career began young, when I constructed a storybook family, loving and stable and infinitely detailed, and imagined myself into their midst." She wasn't about to go into detail here, serving up her life history for these eager strangers to drink in every nuance. It was none of their business that a year ago, when her therapy reached the point that the imaginary parents really had to be dealt with, she simply killed them off in an equally imaginary car wreck, fiery and tragic. Adoring but dead parents were infinitely more comforting than the parents she'd had, and any crutch, even a twisted one, was better than no support at all. She continued with the abbreviated version. "It is a role I play still-to the extent that when he asked me, I gave Detective Toscana that fantasy version of my history automatically, without thinking about it. In actual fact, although I was taken in as an infant by Claudia's older sister, it didn't last long. I was passed from one family member to the next, then into a series of foster homes. Not until I was thirteen did I arrive in a family that actually wanted to adopt me. The week before the papers were finalized, the father came to my room. I had a baby at fifteen."
The library was so still the air reverberated, even the whispers of the fireplace seemed to pause. Into this hush dropped a name.
"Ondine."
Caroline must have made some sound, some protest, because Lauren looked up and smiled, tears quivering unshed. King David was holding her hand.
"It's a cycle, isn't it? My baby, too, was put up for adoption. Claudia's sister agreed to take me back, more or less permanently, but she couldn't handle a baby as well. Ondine was removed from me when she was two days old, and I never knew what happened to her. All I knew was that my baby was a girl and that she had a birthmark on her face, although the doctor said it would fade when she grew. On her eighteenth birthday we both registered to have our records released, but even then it took us years to find each other, the records were so confused. She was so beautiful." And then she wept.
The DEA agent cleared his throat, to take the room's attention off the weeping woman. Caroline's eyes, however, remained on the actress. Her sister.
"About three years ago, we became aware of another figure on the scene, directing Claudia and Raoul. A silent partner, with authority but working through a lawyer in Atlanta. Christopher Lund came into it around then, too, a clever young man with a growing appetite for money. There were several questionable deaths connected with the spa: two accidental deaths of the possessors of large estates; one due to a heart condition exacerbated by the extreme diet and exercise program assigned here; and the hit-and-run killing of a wealthy man about to divorce his wife (nothing was proved against her because she had an alibi). There were even a couple of late-term miscarriages that might or might not have been induced. Nothing we could pin down, except that the deaths all involved hefty inheritances or life insurance policies for their grateful families." (Such as Leticia Finnerman, Vince thought, of Newton, Massachusetts, killed by a brake failure on her way home. The macabre humor of that collection of falsified records in the conference room closet under the label "Dead Files." Typical of the criminal mind, so sure that no one would catch on.)
"So you get the idea. A lot of greedy and hard-to-prove illegalities, most of which were arranged by a known blackmailer. We're talking major income and influence. So when Ondine threatened to interfere with Chris Lund, that threatened the business's smooth running. The cold, mathematical logic of the psychopath: Lund was necessary, Ondine was a danger to Lund, therefore Ondine had to be removed.
"In truth, the deaths connected to the spa all seem to have been directed by a party other than Claudia and Raoul de Vries, a party concealed behind an Atlanta law firm, whose financial records are being subpoenaed and will, I have no doubt, reveal payments from a number of names close to the dead. And I'm very sorry to have to say this publicly, Mrs. Blessing, but we believe that person to be Hilda Finch. She was the one out to take over the operation as a whole. She was the one on hand to wrest power from the other surviving member of the triumvirate, Raoul de Vries. She seems to have had contact with family members of several of the spa clients who died under dubious circumstances. And certainly the only prints on the shelf unit that killed Ondine were hers, along with those of Karen McElroy, which belonged there."