The others were gathered outside the open door in the hallway in horrified silence. They were all out there. Hannah, whose screams had brought them running. Aaron and Carly, Les, Teddy, Spence, Jory and Jase. The scene was almost an exact replay of earlier that morning, when they’d been gathered outside of the room right next door. No one was saying a word. Partly out of shock. Partly because Des had asked them not to until she’d taken their individual statements-each was a potential witness to Ada’s killing and she did not want them coloring each other’s recollections. But mostly, they were hushed by the reality of what they all knew:
One of them had murdered Ada Geiger in cold blood within the past five minutes.
It had to be one of them. No one else was around, not unless somebody was hiding there in the castle’s deepest recesses, unbeknownst to all of them. Actually, this nutty notion did trigger a fleeting recollection of something that had happened to Mitch in the night. But the memory vanished before he could fully summon it, shoved aside by the overwhelming revulsion and sorrow he felt as he gazed down upon this gifted, indomitable woman lying there dead on the carpet.
Des crouched over Ada, studying the phone cord around her throat, the bloody wound to her head. She opened an eyelid and examined the pupil. “We have hemorrhaging in the eyes,” she told Mitch, keeping her voice very low.
“What does that tell you?” he croaked. He had a hot, bilious taste in the back of his throat.
“It points to strangulation, not the head wound, as cause of death. The small blood vessels in the eyes tend to burst under extreme pressure. Plus her head’s still bleeding. She was struck with that receiver before she died.”
“How do you know that?”
“The heart’s no longer pumping blood after someone’s gone. So there’s little or no blood. If it bleeds it leads-that’s our old crime scene saying.”
“I thought journalists owned that expression, vis-a-vis our news priorities, or total lack thereof. We tend to be drawn to the gory, as you may have noticed if you’ve ever picked up a newspaper, turned on a television or…” He was starting to blather. He knew this. He was shaken.
Not Des. She seemed cool, alert and focused. She had, after all, spent years working violent deaths for a living. But on the inside she wasn’t calm at all, and Mitch knew that. Because it was precisely this kind of hideous, gut-wrenching violence that had driven her to the drawing pad.
“Most likely,” she concluded, “the killer dazed her with the phone receiver, then used the cord to finish the job. Quick and quiet. See those scratches there under the cord?”
Mitch forced himself to look. There were bloody scratch marks on Ada’s neck. Many bloody scratch marks. “What do those tell you?”
“That she was still conscious.” Des studied Ada’s hands. “See this blood and tissue under her nails? I’m guessing it’s her own. She made those scratches herself, Mitch. The old girl put up a fight.” Now Des stood back up and moved away from Ada over to the window. Outside, the snow was falling heavier, the wind gusting hard enough to rattle the glass.
Mitch joined her there, keeping his voice low. “Let’s say she did struggle-could a woman have done this to her? Or are we strictly looking at a man?”
“I don’t see why it couldn’t have been a woman, provided she’s reasonably strong. Ada may have been full of piss and vinegar, but she was still ninety-four years old. Straight up, I don’t believe we can rule out anyone yet,” she said, letting out a sigh.
Mitch looked at her. “Are you okay, Des?”
“Good. I’m good. But I can’t say a whole lot for our situation. We’ve got us two murders, and until this damned weather eases off I can’t dial up any backup. We’re strictly on our own here.”
“Okay, I have to ask you to hit your rewind button.”
“Why?”
“You just said we have two murders.”
“Well, yeah. A mother and daughter dying within hours of each other this way-you don’t think it’s a coincidence, do you? The very first thing I learned on the job, boyfriend, is that there’s no such as thing as coincidences. Someone wanted both Ada and Norma dead.”
“But I thought Norma died of a heart attack.”
“An apparent heart attack. That’s what it was meant to look like. But I guarantee you she was murdered.”
“How?”
“Can’t answer that yet. We may not know until we get the results of her autopsy. We know very little right now, I’m sorry to say. Except we do know this: We know that no one can get in or out of this place. And we know that one of the people who we’re trapped with up here is a murderer.”
Mitch puffed out his cheeks, exhaling slowly. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I’ve seen this movie before,” he said grimly. “Except it took place on a remote island instead of a mountaintop. And everyone, not just Norma, had a British accent.”
“Mitch…?”
“And there was no such thing as cell phones back then, which changes the dynamics rather dramatically, don’t you think? Because they couldn’t call out and you can. You can call out, can’t you?”
“For as long as my charge lasts. So far, so good.”
“Plus you have the two-way radio in your cruiser.”
“True again,” she acknowledged patiently. “Only, Mitch…?”
“Yes, Des?”
“This is not a freakin’ movie!”
“Hey, I’m totally aware of that.”
“Good, because there’s no one else I can count on. There’s you and, well, there’s you.”
“I’m all yours, Des. But you do realize that this sort of thing never happened to me before you came into my life, don’t you?”
Right away Des Mitry stiffened and made with her Wary, Scary Look, those pale green almond-shaped eyes of hers searching his face, studying, probing. “Mitch, are you trying to tell me something?” she demanded.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re sorry that you met me.”
“Not in a million years, slimbo. Where would you get a crazy idea like that?”
“I just can’t imagine.”
“So where do we start?”
By Des grabbing Ada’s room key from the nightstand and heading briskly for the door. “I need to get witness statements from those people, one by one. You need to keep an eye on everyone else while I’m doing it, okay?”
“Let’s do it.”
They joined the others out in the corridor, Des locking Ada’s door behind her and pocketing the key. She glanced from one stricken face to the next, taking the measure of each of them. Mostly, there was a lot of fear. Aaron and Carly were holding hands so tightly that their knuckles were white. Jory and Jase were huddled together like a pair of wide-eyed schoolchildren. Spence and Hannah stood together, too, tight-lipped and tense. Teddy leaned against the wall next to them, looking overwhelmed. Les stood a bit apart from the rest of them with his hands in his pockets, watching Des expectantly. No one spoke. All eyes were fixed on Dorset’s resident trooper.
It was Aaron who finally broke the silence. “I demand to know what you are intending to do about this.”
“Everything I can. My very best.” Des turned to Hannah and said, “You’re the one who found her?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Hannah gulped, shuddering. “I… I was just in my room for a minute, putting on my face.”
Which she indeed had, Mitch observed. Eye makeup, lipstick, rouge, even those retro round glasses of hers. Mitch had actually preferred how Hannah had looked without all of that on-more serious, less like somebody in costume. But he’d never cared much for makeup on women. Des rarely wore any. Maisie never had.
“You were alone in your room?” Des asked her.
“Well, yeah. Why would anyone be with me?”
“Which one are you in?”
“I’m right here in four,” Hannah said, gesturing to the door across the hall from Ada’s. Teddy was next door to Hannah in two, directly across from Les and Norma. “I was starting my way back downstairs and I noticed that her door was part open, so I stopped to ask if she was ready to head back down.”