“You have a lovely Steinway, Dr. Holcombe. I noticed it when we were here before.”
“Yes, you saw everything, didn’t you, when you searched my house?” Gordon walked to the eleven-foot black grand piano and laid a hand lightly on the keys. “Did you know that Steinway fought at the Battle of Waterloo?”
They shook their heads, and Gordon sighed, sipped his brandy. “Who cares?”
Dix said without preamble, “I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet, Gordon, that we know who hired Dempsey and Slater. Or perhaps you already know?”
“How would I know? Tell me, Dix.”
“Helen Rafferty.”
His hand jerked, and more brandy spilled out of his snifter. “Helen hired those two thugs? Why, for heaven’s sake? To kill Agent Warnecki here? Helen didn’t even know her last Saturday. That makes no sense, Dix.”
“No, Helen didn’t hire them to kill Ruth. She hired them to kill Erin.”
“What did you say? Kill Erin? That’s crazy. Why would Helen do such an insane thing? No, I was thinking it was that boy lover of Marian’s, Sam Moraga. I heard he wanted Erin but she didn’t want him.
” He stopped dead, stared at them. “Wait a minute, here, Dix. This means you no longer think I killed Erin? You think I’m innocent?”
Dix said, “We know you didn’t hire them, Gordon. Our apologies for believing you did.”
“We also know Sam Moraga had nothing to do with Erin’s murder, either,” Ruth said.
“So you’re blaming Helen? I don’t understand any of this, Dix.” He leaned heavily against the grand piano.
Dix said, “We’re cops, Gordon. It’s our job to keep asking questions until all the pieces fit together. And for a while there, all the pieces pointed right at you. But in the end, they didn’t fit when it came to your killing Erin and Walt. Truth be told, Gordon, we think you really loved Erin.”
“Yes, yes, of course I did, Dix. She was filled with light, filled with love.” For a moment, they were afraid he would burst into tears. He got hold of himself and managed to look contemptuous. “So you’ve been going down the list. Very well. Tell me what you think Helen had to do with it.”
“Ruth and I spent the afternoon combing through Helen’s bank records. We found three large withdrawals she made in the past three weeks, in cash. We’ve been through her telephone records as well. She called Richmond twice, Tommy Dempsey’s number specifically. There was one call from Dempsey’s number to hers, last Thursday. Helen may have been a good receptionist, but she wasn’t an experienced criminal. She left a trail.”
“She hired those men to murder my Erin? But that can’t be right, Dix. She always supported me, helped me. I think she loved me. Why would she do such a thing?”
Ruth said, “It’s not so hard to figure out, is it, Gordon? Helen saw that Erin Bushnell wasn’t like the other students you took as lovers. She realized that Erin was the first woman you really loved, the one who might be with you for the long term, not just until she graduated. Helen had made herself accept that you turned her away because of your infirmity—that’s what she called it—your need for stimulation and even inspiration from those talented young women. So Helen was able to accept them, because they were temporary. Only she was a constant.
“But then you met Erin and everything changed.”
Gordon gulped down brandy, coughed, wiped his brimming eyes. “I would have given Erin anything. Anything.”
“Yes, we know, and so did Helen. And she couldn’t live with that. She snapped.”
“I still can’t believe it. How could someone like Helen find two criminals?”
Ruth said, “We called Helen’s brother, Dave Rafferty. We asked him if Helen ever mentioned either of the men. He’s a high-school teacher, and he remembered he’d had Dempsey’s younger brother in a class. He was a troubled kid whose older brother was in and out of prison. Dave thought he’d probably talked to Helen about him. So she must have tracked the older Dempsey down.”
Dix continued, “We think it was Helen who told them about Winkel’s Cave, as a good place to hide Erin
’s body. Otherwise, they would have had no way of knowing about it. Did you or Chappy ever take Helen there?”
Gordon said, “I don’t remember. Maybe Chappy took her there. I never liked that cave when we were boys, it was Chappy’s place.”
“Helen knew about that entrance, she knew about the cave chamber. We think they chose how to kill Erin all on their own, though. Did you know they used a hallucinogenic drug to disable her, and after they killed her, they embalmed her and posed her? Did you know that, Gordon?”
He looked like he was going to faint. “They embalmed her? Like morticians do?”
Ruth nodded. “Morticians and insane people. We know that Dempsey’s stepfather worked in a funeral home. He must have hung around the place, watched the process. So Dempsey did something to really confuse things. He and Slater embalmed her, and as a final touch, posed her to make it look like a ritual killing rather than a contract killing, in case she was found too soon. And that part of it worked like a charm. It was an excellent distraction. We were led to believe a ritual serial killer might have murdered Erin Bushnell. We thought there might be other victims, and spent some time and effort looking for them
—including all your former student lovers. And because they are all alive and well, it didn’t really settle comfortably that you were some maniac serial killer.”
Gordon’s face went white. “You believed I was capable of that? A killer who did that over and over?”
“They made it look possible,” Ruth said. “But we know now it isn’t.”
Dix said, “Whatever else Dempsey and Slater were, they were savvy when it came to their own survival. Until they made the mistake of coming after Ruth.”
Gordon sat down on the piano bench, then looked over at Ruth. “However did you get away from them in that cave?”
“That’s a good question. I know that if they realized I was there they would have killed me. They killed Walt, so there is no doubt they would have killed me, too. We believe that after I inhaled or touched the drug they used on Erin, I fell and struck my head. Still, I must have gotten my wits together enough to find my way out of the cave without them seeing me, maybe after they left. And I must have wandered through the woods until I collapsed near Dix’s house.”
“But that’s at least four, five miles from Winkel’s Cave.”
Ruth shrugged. “Neither Dix nor I can figure any other way I could have ended up in his woods.”
“She’s in excellent shape,” Dix said, bringing Gordon’s attention back to him. “So even while she was hallucinating and sick, she could have wandered for hours. We figure Dempsey and Slater must have told Helen about finding Ruth’s car, with her wallet locked inside. So they knew she was an FBI agent. I’ll bet that shook them, because they had to believe she knew what they’d done. I imagine they searched for her for hours.”
Dix continued, “Helen must have contacted them when she learned I found an unconscious woman in my woods who couldn’t remember what had happened to her. It didn’t seem like they had a choice, really, so they risked coming to my house Saturday night to kill her. The only thing they didn’t count on was dying.”
Gordon was shaking his head. “I still can’t believe someone as devoted and kind as my Helen would have hired men like Dempsey and Slater. No, I think this is all a ruse to try to trap me somehow. I know you believe I hired them, maybe with Chappy’s help since he knows so many people in Richmond. That’
s what you believe, isn’t it?”
Dix said, “Oh no, Gordon, you’re being the actor here. You do believe Helen did it because she called you on Wednesday night and told you what she’d done. And that’s why you strangled her.”
“That is insulting and ridiculous! You ask anyone, Helen had to come into my office to swat flies! I couldn
’t kill anyone.”
Ruth said, “We know Helen called you Wednesday night—again, Gordon, her phone records. She probably told you all about it when you went over to her house to see her. Was she remorseful, tearful, Gordon? Truly upset about the death and pain she’d caused? Did she intend to tell everyone and ruin your life? Did you kill her in a rage, for revenge, or was it more cold-blooded than that? I go for cold-blooded, myself, because you strangled her in her sleep, when she couldn’t see you, when she was at her most vulnerable. Were you trying to protect your reputation and your cushy little wood-paneled job?”
