The final shot was the stunner. It was a Polaroid taken from the hallway into the bedroom through a partly opened door. The image showed a naked man with wet and carefully combed silver hair standing in front of a full-length mirror, obviously admiring his body, which was nothing to write home about. Well, he was naked but for the black socks held up by elastic bands. “Jesus,” Alexa murmured. Dr. William LePointe’s appearance, aside from being naked in Dorothy Fugate’s bedroom, might be the key to some answers. Unless he had been showering at Fugate’s house for some innocent reason, Fugate and LePointe appeared to be more than coworkers.
Alexa put the cigar box on the dresser and replaced the board in the closet floor. She noticed that there was a smudge on the outside of the box, and it appeared to have been made by a bloody finger.
She sat in the living room to wait for Manseur. She had no physical description of Sibby nor any idea how she was dressed. Let Manseur’s locals handle this. She pictured LePointe’s smug face and felt a flush of anger. Controlled through modern medicine, she thought to herself. You really flubbed this one, Doctor. Now Dorothy Fugate is dead and Sibby killed her for some reason we’ll probably never know. I guess they’ll round her up and send her back to River Run.
When Manseur came in, Alexa led him back to the kitchen, letting him stamp alone down the stairs. She’d already seen more than enough of the basement.
Manseur spent five minutes downstairs, and when he re-emerged he was holding a handkerchief to his nose.
“I’ll never get used to that smell,” he declared. “You okay?”
“Sibby shoved me down those stairs,” Alexa snapped. “Can we go outside before I faint?”
“Tell me everything,” he said as they walked.
“I knocked and got no answer. I tried the door and it opened. I smelled decomposition and entered to investigate. While searching for the source of the odor, I heard a door closing. I came into the kitchen, and the basement door was the only one that was closed. While I was shining my light down there, somebody-whom I assume was Sibby-knocked me down the steps.”
“Solid statement. Did you get a good look at her?”
“No. The basement door was between us.”
“How do you know it was her?”
“I’m just assuming it, based on the fact that she’s been staying in Nurse Fugate’s guest cell,” Alexa said.
“Christ,” Manseur said. “This is a grand mess.”
“There’s a cigar box with a bloody fingerprint on it that was under the closet floor in Fugate’s room. Sibby might have taken something of hers out of it at some point. There’s a metal lockbox on Fugate’s bed that was full of tranquilizers and anti-psychotic drugs prescribed to Fugate by Dr. LePointe. Sibby took them when she split.”
“Alexa. Only you saw them, but she took them. Maybe she’ll have them with her when we find her and we can use them somehow to question LePointe. We have to be damn sure of something before we accuse him of anything. Very, very damn sure.”
Alexa nodded.
“You’re lucky she just pushed you down the stairs,” he said. “That sure isn’t the worst she’s capable of.”
“Obviously not.”
Manseur said, “Here’s the deal. I’ll handle this as an anonymous-reported death and keep you out of it. So, how do you think it went down?”
“I think Fugate was attacked in the kitchen probably with that meat hammer and dragged down to the basement, because the kitchen and the stairs were cleaned up. You know, something about Sibby doing this doesn’t quite make sense,” Alexa said.
“Since when do crazy people make sense?” he asked.
“Okay, she loses it, beats Fugate to death, then drags the body down there to keep it from being found, which means she knew killing her was wrong. I wouldn’t imagine an inner-voice-minding psychopath would bother to mop up. And there’s no blood spatter on the walls and ceiling. That would seem to indicate Fugate was first assaulted upstairs, maybe was struck just hard enough to knock her out. Sibby calmly drags her down the stairs, props her against the wall, and then does the real damage with the mallet and puts it in her hand for some reason.”
“Maybe her rage grew as it went on,” Manseur conjectured. “Or she was staging it as a suicide.”
“Funny. To be released by the committee, Sibby had to be cured. Twenty-six years rocking away and suddenly she does this. It doesn’t feel right. And why would she mop up?” Alexa asked.
“Maybe she was crazy enough to kill her, but cured enough to realize she screwed up and, filled with remorse, cleaned up as best she could. Or maybe she just straightened up because she planned to stay here and didn’t want to stumble over the corpse every day when she was cooking her breakfast.”
Alexa was silent.
“So, where’s Danielson now? I have to get an updated description of her.” Manseur nodded solemnly. “I’ll see if that young woman at the hospital can give me one. You suppose Fugate’s tied into the West thing?” he asked. “I didn’t see a car in the driveway. Maybe Sibby took her car and went after Gary West?”
Alexa shrugged, which made her shoulder ache. “I only know that the only common thread in both is Dr. LePointe,” she said.
“I’ll assign two of my detectives to this scene. Find anything on Fugate’s next of kin?”
“I found papers and pictures. If she has kin, I don’t know who they are or where. Somebody took the answering machine’s outgoing and incoming voice tapes out. The machine showed there were eighteen new messages, though. We need her phone records.”
“I spoke to Jackson Evans about the letter from Gary West. I asked to see it and Evans thanked us for trying to help. I’m not sure how to handle it to get a look at the letter. He’s made it clear the case is closed.”
“You could push it,” Alexa said.
“How?”
“You’d have to bring in this murder.”
“Not unless I have cause,” Manseur said. “I don’t think this is enough as it stands.”
“Maybe when you process this place, you’ll get something. Check the toilet for prints. I think a man was here recently. He might have left something of himself. Fingerprint, DNA in the bowl.”
“I’ll tell Cooley to check.”
“Come take a look at something I found,” she said, leading Manseur to the cigar box. Carefully she sifted through the pictures until she got to the money shot of LePointe.
He whistled softly. “I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing that. I think I should take that one out.”
“Send it to Playgirl magazine,” Alexa said. “It’s evidence.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure of anything other than the doctor’s obvious suntan deficiency,” Manseur said.
“I’ll figure it out.” Alexa picked up her purse, wincing. “First thing I’m going to do is run by the hotel and take a hot shower and change clothes. Then I’m going to have a talk with Casey West.”
“Remember that the letter means it’s not a kidnapping,” Manseur reminded her, shrugging.
“Even if Gary West did send LePointe a letter, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t abducted after that. Gary West was the victim of foul play. Only question is who’s behind it and what the reason was. Maybe West will show up, but he’ll have a bad knot on his head and hopefully he’ll tell us what happened and who abducted him.”
“This is your field, but if he knows who abducted him, will they let him live?”
“That’s not how it normally goes, unless the abductor used a third party, or Gary has a reason not to tell anybody. I’m going.”