door open.”
“You mean unlocked.”
“Yes, it was.”
“The door next to the window where you said a pane of glass was missing and another pane was broken,” Investigator Turkington says, writing it down.
“And I went in, knowing I probably shouldn’t. But I thought in my head,
“That’s the thing — where you make hard choices in life,” Ashley says, his eyes jumping back and forth from the investigator to the camcorder. “Don’t go in? Or never forgive yourself later when you read in the paper that someone could have used your help.”
“Did you film the house, sir?”
“Filmed some porpoises while I was waiting for Madelisa to come back out.”
“I asked if you filmed the house.”
“Let me think. I guess a little bit. Earlier, with Madelisa in front of it. But I wasn’t going to show it to anybody if she couldn’t get permission.”
“I see. You wanted permission to film the house but filmed it anyway without permission.”
“And when we didn’t get permission, I erased it,” Ashley says.
“Really?” Turkington says, looking at him for a long moment. “Your wife runs out of the house afraid somebody’s been murdered in there and it occurs to you to erase part of what you filmed because you failed to get permission from whoever might have been murdered?”
“I know it sounds strange,” Madelisa says. “But what matters is I didn’t mean any harm.”
Ashley says, “When Madelisa ran out and was all upset about what she saw in there, I was desperate to call nine-one-one but didn’t have my phone. She didn’t have hers, either.”
“And you didn’t think to use the one in the house?”
“Not after what I saw in there!” Madelisa says. “I felt like he was still in there!”
“‘He’?”
“It was just this awful feeling. I’ve never been so scared. You don’t really think after what I saw I’d stop to use the phone when I could feel something watching me.” She rummages through her purse for a tissue.
“So we hurried back to our condo, and she got so hysterical, I had to calm her down,” Ashley says. “She just cried like a baby and we missed our tennis clinic. She cried and cried, well into the night. Finally, I said, ‘Honey, why don’t you sleep on it and let’s talk about it again in the morning.’ Truth is, I wasn’t sure I believed her. My wife here has quite the imagination. Reads all these mystery books, watches all these crime shows, you know. But when she kept on crying, I started to get worried maybe there was something to it. So I called you.”
“Not until after another tennis clinic,” Turkington points out. “She’s still so upset, yet you went to tennis this morning, then back to your condo, showered, changed, and packed the car to head back to Charleston. Then finally got around to calling the police? I’m sorry. I’m supposed to believe this?”
“If it wasn’t true, why’d we cut our vacation two days short? We planned it for a whole year,” Ashley says. “You’d think you’d get a refund when there’s an emergency. Maybe you could put in a word for us with the rental agent.”
“If that’s why you called the police,” Turkington says, “you just wasted your time.”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep my camcorder. I erased what little bit I filmed in front of the house. There’s nothing to see. Just Madelisa in front of it, talking to her sister for maybe ten seconds.”
“Now her sister was with you?”
“Talking to her on the camcorder. I don’t know what you’d see that’s helpful, because I erased it.”
Madelisa made him erase it because of the dog. He had filmed her petting the dog.
“Maybe if I saw what you recorded,” Turkington says to Ashley, “I would see the smoke rising up from the barbecue. You said that’s what you saw from the beach, didn’t you? So if you filmed the house, wouldn’t the smoke be in it?”
This takes Ashley by surprise. “Well, I don’t think I got that part, wasn’t aiming my camcorder in that direction. Can’t you just watch what’s on it and give it back? I mean, most of what’s on there is Madelisa and a few porpoises and other stuff I’ve filmed at home. I don’t see why you’ve got to keep my camcorder.”
“We have to be sure there’s nothing you recorded that might give us information about what happened, details you might not be aware of.”
“Like what?” Ashley says, alarmed.
“Like, for instance, are you telling the truth about your not going inside the house after your wife told you what she did.” Investigator Turkington is getting very unfriendly now. “I find it unusual you didn’t go in and check out your wife’s story for yourself.”
“If what she said was true, there’s no way I was walking in there,” Ashley says. “What if some killer was hiding in there?”
Madelisa remembers the sound of running water, the blood, the clothes, the photograph of the dead tennis player. She envisions the mess in the huge living room, all those prescription bottles and vodka. And the projector turned on with nothing playing on the movie screen. The detective doesn’t believe her. She’s in for a world of trouble. Breaking and entering. Stealing a dog. Lying. He can’t find out about the dog. They’ll take him and put him to sleep. She loves that dog. The hell with lies. She’ll tell lies all the way to hell for that dog.
“I know this isn’t my business,” Madelisa says, and it takes all her nerve to ask, “but do you know who lives in that house and if anything bad’s happened?”
“We know who lives there, a woman whose name I don’t care to divulge. It just so happens she’s not home, and her dog and car are gone.”
“Her car’s gone?” Madelisa’s lower lip starts to tremble.
“Sounds like she went somewhere and took her dog, don’t you think? And you know what else I think? You wanted a free tour of her mansion and then worried someone might have seen you trespassing. So you made up this wild tale to cover your butts. That was almost clever.”
“If you bother to look inside her house, you’ll know the truth.” Madelisa’s voice shakes.
“We did bother, ma’am. I sent a few officers over there to check, and they didn’t find anything you supposedly saw. No pane of glass missing from a window by the laundry-room door. No broken glass. No blood. No knives. The gas grill was turned off, clean as a whistle. No sign something had recently been cooked on it. And the projector wasn’t on,” he says.
In the arrangement office where Hollings and his staff meet with families, Scarpetta sits on a pale gold-and- cream-striped sofa and goes through a second guest book.
Based on everything she’s seen so far, Hollings is a tasteful, thoughtful man. The large, thick guest books are bound in fine black leather with lined creamy pages, and because of the magnitude of his business, three to four books a year are required. A tedious search through the first four months of last year’s hasn’t produced evidence that Gianni Lupano attended a funeral here.
She picks up another guest book and begins to work her way through it, running her finger down each page, recognizing well-known Charleston family names. No Gianni Lupano for January through March. No sign of him for April, and Scarpetta’s disappointment grows. Nothing for May or June. Her finger stops at a generous, looping signature easy to decipher. On July 12 of last year, it seems he attended the funeral service of someone named Holly Webster. It appears the attendance was small — only eleven people signed the guest book. Scarpetta writes down each name and gets up from the sofa. She walks past the chapel, where two ladies inside are arranging flowers around a polished bronze casket. Up a flight of mahogany stairs, she returns to Henry Hollings’s office. Once again, his back is to the door and he’s on the phone.
“Some people prefer to fold the flag in tri-corners and place it behind the person’s head,” he is saying in his soothing, lilting voice. “Well, certainly. We can drape it over the casket. What do I recommend?” He holds up a sheet of paper. “You seem to be leaning toward the walnut with champagne satin. But also the twenty-gauge steel…I sure do know. Everybody says the same thing…. It’s hard. Just as hard as it can be to make decisions like this. You want me to be honest, I’d go for the steel.”
He talks a few minutes longer, turns around, and sees Scarpetta in his doorway again. “Some of these are so hard,” he says to her. “Seventy-two-year-old veteran, recently lost his wife, very depressed. Puts a shotgun in his
