“I better drive our car, then.”
Paz got into their white Taurus and dropped off immediately, and awoke when he felt the car slow, then stop. He shook himself awake, straightened his tie, tasted the inside of his mouth, wished for a cigar, settled for a stick of spearmint gum, and looked out the window. They were in a parking lot in front of a low gray modern building with a neat circle of lawn in front of it and a flagpole in the middle of that. It could have been a minor electronics firm, but it was the Hicksville barracks of the New York State Police.
Detective Captain Jerry Heinrich, the man who had led the investigation into the killing of Mary Elizabeth Doe, had a large, modern office, with the usual featureless furnishings and a wall full of award plaques and photographs. There was a big stuffed bluefish on the wall, too. He was a comfortable slow-speaking sort, with curly brown hair graying at the sides, and the perfectly ordinary look of a high-school teacher or an appliance salesman. He seemed reasonably open and glad to help.
After the usual preliminaries, Heinrich said, “If you got the FBI file, you’ve got all we set down on paper. Obviously, we put out the max on this one. We had gubernatorial interest and a totally clear field. The county boys and the locals let us handle it completely. You know about this family?”
“We heard they were local big shots,” said Paz.
“You could say that. More like an institution in this part of the world. Money? It doesn’t mean anything to them anymore. Churches, charities, hospitals. Hell, they sent half the bright kids on the north shore through college, and they’ve been doing it since forever. And they’re related to everybody who’s been here longer than the Nixon administration. So it wasn’t like they had to make any angry phone calls. People just pitched in to do anything they could, which was why the press was kind of frozen out of it, and believe you me, they were swarming for a while, the victim being such a big model and all. But no one would talk. And the isolation helped. You been there yet? Sionnet?”
Barlow said, “Is that how you say it? No, we haven’t. We’re going out after we finish here. We thought we’d talk to Mr. Doe and any of his people who were around then.”
“Yeah, well good luck. Boy, I’ll tell you, we had every detective on the Island talking to people, and some from upstate, too, and we got zip. Four people in the house when the thing went down, the butler, guy named Rudolf, been with the family since Pluto was a pup. Well, in this case we’re pretty damn sure the butler didn’t do it. Then a girl who worked for the family, cooking, slept in, was in the kitchen all the time, working on dinner. Then the mother, in her bedroom, sleeping, she said, and I tend to believe it.”
“Why?” asked Paz.
Heinrich lifted his hand to his mouth, cupped. “All the time. And pills, too. A damned shame. Besides, hell, a thing like that, you don’t usually figure Mom for involvement. And there was Jane, the other daughter. She was out on the north terrace facing the water, for most of the afternoon. She said. But it turned out no one recalled seeing her there at the time of. Near as we can figure it, it was done between three and four in the afternoon. And I was saying about Sionnet, it’s isolated, out on a neck, maybe a hundred fifty acres, but to get to it you have to go through Sionnet village, and there’s nothing at all past the village but the estate. There’s a big sign saying private road and a little turnaround for tourists who get lost. On a busy day in the summer you might get six cars going that way through the village, people working at the estate and so on. This particular day was September sixteenth, a Saturday. People recalled Mr. Doe driving out with his two sons-in-law to see that car show in Huntington, about one, and then driving back around four-thirty. Hell of a thing to come home to, huh? Anyway, no strange cars at all during the critical times. And you’re going to ask about boats. They would’ve heard a boat for sure. There were people working on the place, down by the dock, and the daughter said she was down there, too. Yeah, sure, some commando could’ve landed a dinghy and snuck in there, but …” He gestured to show how unlikely he thought that was.
Barlow asked, “You were in charge from the get-go?”
“Yep. Lucky me.” He described his involvement in the case, and what they had found, which was pretty much what Barlow and Paz had found, and Heinrich expressed the same anger, sadness, bitterness, and frustration that they both felt.
“They buried the mother and baby in the same casket,” he told them. “They got their own cemetery, right there on the property. There was just the extended family and a few close friends at the ceremony, a couple of dozen folks. Mr. Doe was like a rock. Mary’s husband was leaning on him, crying, that German photographer. The mother?hell, she didn’t know where she was. And the sister, Jane. I never saw anyone so scared in my life.”
“You attended?” asked Barlow.
“Oh, yeah. We’re always ready for a remorseful graveside confession. Anyway, Jane was white as paper, and shaky. She dropped the trowel, you know, for picking up a clump of earth and tossing it in there? Shaking like a damn paint mixer, holding on to her dad and her brother. Her husband was standing off by himself. An African- American fella, by the way.”
“What was he like?” asked Paz, a little too avidly. Heinrich gave him a look.
“Oh, a nice fella. Well spoken. A pretty famous writer, plays and stuff, poetry. Of course, he was off with the other two men the whole time, so there was no question. The sister, on the other hand, his wife …” Heinrich paused, swiveled in his chair, and checked out his bluefish.
“You think she done it?” asked Barlow.
Heinrich lowered his head, like a bull deciding whether to charge the cape.
“Well, you know, we never actually concluded that. But the woman had a history. When she came back from Africa?Josiah Mount, the brother, actually he’s a stepbrother, brought her back?she was apparently pretty loose in the screws, raving about black magic?crazy stuff. She thought her husband had turned into a witch. It’d happened before, too, Mount said. He pulled her out of Russia, a couple years before this, also off her head. He thought she was on some kind of native drugs, messed up her brain. And, well, the way she was acting at the funeral?like I said, I thought she was about to jump in the grave. Then, also, she had a thing with her sister. Jealousy. Well, let me say, she had something to be jealous about.”
“How’s that?” asked Barlow.
“Hell, Mary Elizabeth Doe was the most beautiful woman I ever saw close-up. I mean she was what they call a supermodel, like you see in magazines. Jane, well, she wasn’t exactly a dog, kind of big and craggy like her old man, but when they were in the room together she might have been a damn houseplant for all anybody looked at her. And she was jealous Mary Elizabeth was having a baby too. Jane couldn’t have kids, according to her husband, and Mr. Doe?well, carrying on the family line and all, it was important to him, he was paying a lot more attention to Mary than he had before. Jane had always been his pet, sort of, and she resented it. It’s all in the files you got.”
Barlow said, “So you thought this murder, the way it got done, was like jealous rage. Jane just snapped and carved her sister up?”
“That, and the, well, excisions, we thought that part could’ve been the witchcraft stuff. Which also fit with the drugs we found in the body. But then when she killed herself, that kind of put the stopper on that theory, although, you know, in deference to the family, we never made it official. Officially, the case is still open.”
“Was there a note?” asked Barlow.
“Not that we found,” said Heinrich carefully. “I was in Jane’s room right after she did it. Neat as a pin and her desk with a box of stationery out and a pen. But no note. Mr. D. wouldn’t look me in the eye when I asked him. So …”
“How did she kill herself?” asked Paz. “Something about a boat …?”
“Oh, that was another pain in the neck. The murder was Saturday, the funeral was Tuesday. On Tuesday night, it was starting to blow pretty good from the west, and she took their yacht out, just motored out into the Sound, hoisted sail, and headed northeast, up the Sound. A little past midnight, she was about five miles south of New Haven when the boat blew up.”
“They find her body?” Paz asked.
“No, I mean the boat really blew up. They had a propane tank aboard, a full load of diesel fuel, and a gas tank for the auxiliary outboard. They saw the fireball in New London. If she was on it when it went up, she was crab food, and we got a lot of crabs out in the Sound.”
“You think suicide?”
“Accident is what’s in the official report,” said Heinrich, his tone flat. “A Catholic family. And what did it matter, anyway? Off the record, and personally? I think she was running for it and got careless. It’s easy to blow up
