“Apart from the broken casket and open window, has anything else been disturbed?
“Obviously that,” Peale said, pointing to the smashed glass door of the case on the wall.
“Was something taken?”
For the first time, the haughtiness in Peale’s voice was diluted with something that sounded like fear. “Five surgical scalpels and one bone mallet.”
Barstow spoke up. “Could you describe the mallet?”
“My largest. Ten-inch handle. Lead-weighted head. Narrow-diameter striking surface. Why do you ask?”
“Long story.”
Morgan returned to his own line of questions. “Are you aware of anything else that’s been taken or disturbed?”
Peale pointed to an area on the bare wall between two cabinets. “There are some peculiar scratches over there.”
Morgan and Barstow stepped closer, peering at a horizontal number eight with a vertical line through the middle of it. It appeared to have been scraped into the paint with a sharp-pointed instrument. Barstow pulled out her phone and took a photo.
“Anything else?” asked Morgan.
“No, apart from that, everything is wonderful!”
Morgan’s mouth tightened. He spoke with the forced evenness of a man defusing a bomb. “This would be a good time to turn the room over to Kyra. Her crime-scene team will go over it with a fine-tooth comb. If the intruders left any evidence behind, they’ll find it. In the meantime, I’d like to get a broader picture of the situation—especially the time period between the arrival of Tate’s body and its removal. You mentioned having an office upstairs. That might be a good place to talk, unless you’d rather come next door to headquarters.”
Peale stared at him for a long moment before answering, as if anger at the desecration of his workplace was getting in the way of his ability to think. “My office . . . is fine.”
Gurney, meanwhile, had noted what he suspected was the lens of a discreet security camera mounted atop the hinge bracket of one of the wall cabinets.
He pointed to it. “Is that what I think it is?”
Peale looked up, reluctantly, it seemed. “I’m afraid so.”
11
Danforth Peale’s “office” had little in common with the image the term brought to mind. With the exception of a handsome walnut file cabinet and a laptop computer on a small Hepplewhite table, there was no hint of it being a place where business was conducted, even the genteel business of burying the wealthy dead.
The old-money look of the furnishings evoked the cozy den of an Ivy League dean. One wall was covered with sepia prints of what Gurney guessed were the winning boats in various yacht races, another with old botanical prints. Four damask-covered Queen Anne chairs were grouped around an oval coffee table. In the center of the table stood a Chinese vase.
Peale gestured to the chairs as he chose one for himself. Once they were all seated, he spent a few seconds flicking invisible specks off his sweater before looking up with a strained smile.
Morgan cleared his throat. “I’d like to hear more about that security camera in the embalming room—and your whole security setup.”
Peale sat back and crossed his legs. The preppy loafers visible below the cuffs of his green pants looked expensive. He steepled his fingers thoughtfully in front of his chin. “Three or four years ago, some vandals from Bastenburg broke into the embalming room. They were observed by a neighbor and apprehended almost immediately. No damage was incurred beyond a forced lock on the back door. But it did raise a concern, and I brought in a security expert who installed a state-of-the-art system. Supersensitive to sound and motion, audio-tropic, video-tropic, hi-def, full color.”
Slovak interrupted. “Sorry, sir? Audio-tropic? Video-tropic? Could you—?”
Peale cut him off. “The camera lens pivots automatically in the direction of any detected sound or motion, follows it, and transmits it—to be recorded on that computer.” Peale pointed to the laptop on the Hepplewhite table. “Wonderful theory. Horrible reality.”
“Sir?”
Peale addressed his answer to Morgan and Gurney. “The damn system’s strength is its weakness. Its level of sensitivity makes it a waste of my time. There’s a street that runs in back of my parking area. Every damn vehicle that passed set off the system’s functions. Every single morning, on that computer, I would have a series of videos of the rear wall of the embalming room—which, as far as the camera was concerned, was the source of the sound of the passing cars. All those hi-def files ate up the computer memory.”
“So you turned it off?” asked Morgan.
“Not entirely.” Peale flicked another invisible speck off his sweater and re-steepled his fingers. “I left the search and transmit functions on, since I’m often here in the evening and I can glance at that computer screen to see if anything problematical is occurring. In fact, nothing ever is. But I did turn off the record function.”
“So, the basic monitoring function is on all the time?”
“Just from nine in the evening till six in the morning. To my knowledge, Larchfield’s never had any daytime crime at all.”
“So,” said Morgan with a summarizing frown, “if you were in this office the night of the body’s removal, you would have witnessed it happening on that computer?”
“Correct.”
“But no recording was made.”
Peale’s voice hardened. “Also correct. Infuriatingly so.”
“It would be helpful if you could take us through everything that happened between the time you took possession of the body and the last moment you saw it.”
Peale raised his hands in objection. “Let’s be clear about that ‘possession’ term. I was told that the deceased’s next of kin, Darlene Tate, had requested that the body be brought here, pending a decision regarding its final disposition. I complied with that request as a courtesy, not as a legal transfer of possession. I agreed purely as a temporary matter of accommodation to the bereaved.”
Morgan looked at Slovak, as if for confirmation.
Slovak nodded his assent to Peale’s account and added some details, seemingly for Gurney’s benefit. “During my call to Billy’s stepmother, she asked that the body be taken here. She said she’d come as soon as she could to discuss arrangements. Since the fatal accident had been witnessed by Chief Morgan, myself, and the couple who photographed it happening, Dr. Fallow waived the need for an autopsy.”
Perhaps in response to a look of surprise on Gurney’s face, Slovak added, “In addition to being a local physician, Dr. Fallow is the county’s part-time medical examiner—so he gets to make the autopsy decisions.”
“He signed a preliminary death certificate?”
“Yes, sir, he did,” said Slovak. “Right after we brought the body in on the trolley.”
“He arrived that quickly?”
“Yes, sir. He lives right here in the village. As soon as we saw Tate fall, we called him—in his capacity as a regular medical doctor. When he examined Tate on the ground, he pronounced him dead, then signed the certificate in the embalming room.”
Peale resumed his narrative, again addressing himself to Morgan. “As I was saying, I was informed that Darlene Tate would be arriving with further instructions.”
“Did she show up as promised?”
“Sooner than I’d expected. Around four thirty that morning. I was still here in the office.”
Morgan asked, “Did she give you specific instructions at that time?”
“Indeed she did. Specific and unnatural.”
“Unnatural in what way?”
“First of all, she insisted on conducting our meeting down in the embalming room rather than my office. She asked to see the body. I cautioned her concerning the brutal effect of the lightning strike on the side of his face. It was a burnt vertical gouge, with some of the bone over the eye and cheekbone exposed. But she insisted that I wheel the body out of the storage unit so she could see it. Reluctantly, I complied—fully prepared for a shocked reaction. The shock was my own, when I saw the look on her face.”