was eaten away, tissue underneath red and goopy. Lye had come foaming up through his nasal passages, too.
Des stood over the body with Soave and Yolie, their breath steaming in the chill, dry air. It had taken them nearly an hour to get down to Four Chimneys from their nice warm beds in their nice warm Hartford suburbs. The forensic nurse had beaten them, as had the crime scene techies. Everyone was hushed. It was barely seven in the morning, and this was an exceptionally not cheery way to start the day.
“What are you thinking, Des?” Soave asked, breaking the silence.
At first glance, Tolly’s death cried out suicide. It appeared he’d come down to these woods from the rose garden, chugalugged the lye and keeled over, hitting the back of his head against that granite. A scalp wound had bled down the back of his neck.
“Des?…” Soave tugged at his goatee as the techies hovered around them, snapping pictures. “What are you thinking?”
“It’s your case, Rico,” Des responded, thinking that she could have, should have prevented this. But she hadn’t. They hadn’t.
And now Guy Tolliver lay dead on the cold, muddy ground. The forensic nurse believed that he’d been there for about twelve hours, placing his time of death at around dusk-the same ap-proximate time when they’d been interviewing Poochie and Gly-nis in the parlor.
Soave began humming tunelessly under his breath, which was a thing that he did whenever he was shook. He had reason to be. Rico Tedone would have a lot of explaining to do in Meriden. “How about you, Yolie? Run with it.”
“No way in hell this is a suicide,” she declared, shivering in her belted leather jacket. Yolie was strictly a warm weather girl. “Someone whacked this man on the back of his head, okay? And while he was semiconscious forced him to drink down that lye.” Yolie crouched next to Tolly, studying him closely. “We have finger marks on his neck and jaw here and here,” she added, using her Bic pen as a pointer. “Somebody pried his mouth open. And there was a struggle. His scarf thing… girl, what do you call these again?”
“It’s an ascot,” Des said softly.
“Yeah, the knot’s yanked halfway around his neck, see? And check out these bloodstain patterns on his neck. They’re all wrong.”
“He bled down his neck,” Des agreed. “Which means he was either standing or sitting when he incurred the head wound. He was positioned here after the fact. There’s a bit of blood under his head, but no soak pattern, no drainage. The scalp injury didn’t happen here.” Des knelt next to Tolly’s grotesque body for a closer look at his left hand. “I see no lye on his wrist or sleeve. If he’d been holding that bottle himself when he drank the lye it would have streamed down his hand like a melted ice cream cone. Somebody positioned it in his hand after they killed him.” She stood back up, swiping at her muddy knees. “One more thing, and I can’t emphasize this enough-Tolly lived for style. Absolutely no way does he leave such a vile-looking corpse behind. Not even within the realm of possiblity.”
“So we’re all in agreement,” Soave concluded. “What we’re looking at here is a staged crime scene.”
“I’m betting he got it in the rose garden,” Yolie said. “The man’s bent over, working away at his pruning. Somebody bops him from behind, then carries him down here-out of sight, out of earshot-and forces him to drink that lye.”
“We’ll search the ground up there,” Soave said. “If that’s how it happened, we’ll find the blood.”
“This man was plenty good-sized,” Yolie went on. “One person couldn’t have horsed him all of the way across that field. And I’m seeing no wheelbarrow treads or whatever in the mud. That makes this another two-man job. We’re looking for the same pair who took out Pete Mosher, am I right?”
“That’s a slam dunk.”
Des said nothing. She was too busy playing it out.
“What’s wrong with it, Des?” Soave asked, studying her warily.
“It’s tight, Rico. I’ve got nothing.”
“Yeah, you do. Something’s still bugging you.”
“Nothing I can put my finger on. But this all just feels clanky to me. Too obvious. Too clumsy. Too… I don’t know, as if someone smart wants us to think they’re really stupid. Does that make any sense?”
“Not so much.”
“It appears to be a clumsy attempt to mask a murder as a suicide-the kind of thing somebody small time might try to pull off. Somebody like the Kershaw brothers. Except that whoever pulled this had to be calculating and cool. Check it out: If they’d waited until pitch dark they would have needed flashlights or lanterns. Way too risky. So that means they killed Tolly no later than six, six-thirty. For all we know, we three may still have been on the premises at the time. Plus we’ve got a cruiser stationed at the foot of the drive. And yet, somehow, they murdered this man right under our noses.”
“I’m with my girl,” Yolie said. “We are not talking lame-assed raggies.”
“What we are talking is desperate,” Des said. “They took an enormous chance. Tolly must have known something.”
“This one’s on us, isn’t it?” Soave’s shoulders slumped defeat-edly. “We let it happen.”
This was not something that a younger Soave would have admitted out loud, Des reflected. “We’re dealing with some serious customers here, Rico. And they’re totally messing with our heads again. But we’ll nail them.”
“Who had access to this site? Run it for us, will you, Des?” “Claudia was around, as were Eric and Danielle. Bement got home by six, so he’s in play. And he made a point of telling me the Kershaw brothers were leaving for the day when he got here. So they’re in play, too.”
“Don’t forget Glynis,” Yolie said. “And the old lady.” “So we know where to focus our attention.” Soave rubbed his hands together briskly. “We’ll go at them, one by one.”
“Pull over to the curb, wow man,” Des cautioned him. “I didn’t know this until a half-hour ago, but there’s more.”
She continued down the footpath through the trees, Soave and Yolie trailing along behind her, until she emerged at the hard, frozen shallows where the Connecticut River met its eastern bank. Here, all was icy winter calm. And here, things got considerably more complicated. Because the footpath didn’t end at the water. It hugged the bank for as far down river as the eye could see.
“I discovered this while I was waiting for you to get here,” Des explained to them. She’d also phoned Mitch on her cell to tell him about Tolly. Things weren’t real until she’d shared them with him. He’d sounded upset by the news. Also strangely preoccupied. “After a half-mile or so it comes out at a state-run boat launch at the foot of Kinney Road. During the summer, people put in their kayaks there. This time of year, it’s pretty much deserted. Someone could have parked there yesterday afternoon and hiked in and out, totally unseen.”
“There’s no fence to keep people out?” Yolie asked, stamping her feet against the cold.
“It’s posted to keep the hunters out, but no fence.”
Soave shook his head disgustedly. “Who’d know about this?”
“Anybody who’s ever spent time here. Claudia’s husband, Mark, for one. And Milo Kershaw used to be caretaker here. They’re in the mix, Rico.”
Soave tugged at his goatee. “What’s the link, Des? Why have Pete Mosher and Guy Tolliver both turned up dead in the last twenty-four hours? Why did they have to die? What did they have in common?”
“Rico, I honestly…” She broke off, her memory suddenly tweaked by something that had bothered her earlier. “I have no idea. But I think I know who will.”
Poochie’s KitchenAid power mixer was in high gear, roaring away on the counter like a jumbo jet as it creamed together butter and brown sugar.
Dorset’s first lady was in high gear herself. “I crave gingerbread this morning,” she exulted as she raced around the kitchen, flinging flour and baking soda into a bowl, followed by ground ginger, powdered mustard, coarse ground pepper, cinnamon, cloves. “Tolly loved my gingerbread. The secret is adding one cup of hot, strong coffee for moisture. And good molasses, of course. God, how I love the smell of molasses!”
Glynis Fairchild-Forniaux sat at the table with her briefcase before her, looking very somber. Claudia sat there with her, as did Bement and Danielle.
“Mummy, please sit down, won’t you?” Claudia said anxiously.
Poochie pulled a pair of loaf pans out of a cupboard. “I can’t sit.”
