“And do you think that Claire is the second Ghost?”
“ ‘Think’ isn’t the right word. My gut says she is, my mind says she can’t be.” He sighed. “If she is the second Ghost, she has managed to get away clean.”
“Never mind,” she soothed, stroking his hair. “At least the murders are at an end. No more abducted girls. Claire couldn’t do it on her own, she’s female and grossly handicapped. So count your blessings, Carmine.”
“Count my stupidity, you mean. I’ve bungled this case from start to finish.”
“Only because it’s a new sort of crime committed by a new sort of criminal, my love. You’re an extremely competent, highly intelligent policeman. Regard the Ponsonby case as a new learning experience. The next time things will go better for you.”
He shuddered. “If I have my druthers, Desdemona, there will be no next time. The Ghosts are a one-off.”
She said no more, just wondered.
Chapter 29
It took just over a week for Patrick, Paul and Luke to go through everything that the Ponsonby killing premises had to offer, from operating table to bathroom. The final report from Patrick and his forensics team pointed out very clearly that it was just as well they had caught a naked Charles Ponsonby bending over a naked abducted girl tied to a bed rigged for torture.
“The place was cleaner than Lady Macbeth. His fingerprints everywhere, yes, but it’s his place underneath his house, so why not? But of blood, body fluids, shreds of flesh or human hairs – no scintilla, iota or anything else microscopically small. As for Claire, no fingerprints, even on the lever behind the stove.”
They had pieced Ponsonby’s cleaning techniques together, staggered at the amount of work involved, the obsessiveness. A medical man, he knew that heat fixed blood and tissue, so the hose he used first and the water blaster he followed that with were fed by cold water; the talisman alcove was sealed off by a steel slider. When every surface was dry again, he steam blasted it. Finally he wiped everything down with ether. His surgical instruments, the meat hook and its hoist, and the penis sheaths were soaked in a blood-dissolving solution before being subjected to the rest of the treatments. They were also autoclaved.
When the room yielded nothing, they started on the drains with a compressor-driven vacuum, which sucked water containing no organic matter. Backwashing didn’t work, leading the county engineers to think that the effluent was not deposited in a septic tank. Ponsonby had his outlet in an underground stream, of which there were many in the neighborhood. Their sole remaining hope was to dig down to his pipes and follow them.
The moment the county engineers began to excavate her garden for no better reason than flogging an already dead horse, Claire Ponsonby took out a lien against willful destruction of her property, and respectfully petitioned the court to grant a blind woman permission to live in said property without perpetual and extremely distressing harassment by the Holloman police and their allies. Given that Charles Ponsonby had been positively identified as the Connecticut Monster and that nothing going on at 6 Ponsonby Lane was necessary to produce further evidence of this, Miss Ponsonby had had enough.
“The well is bottomless and the pump chugs out three horses,” said the chief county engineer, thwarted and angry. “Since there’s a twenty-acre deer park as well as five-acre house lots, the water table is high and local consumption low. You haven’t gotten any organic matter because the bastard must have put thousands and thousands of gallons down after every killing. The residue is on the bottom of Long Island Sound. And shit, what does it matter? He’s dead. Close the case, Lieutenant, before that nasty bitch starts suing you personally.”
“It’s a total mystery, Patsy,” Carmine said to his cousin.
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“Obviously Chuck was wiry and strong, but he never struck me as an athlete, and his Hug colleagues were convinced he couldn’t change the washer on a tap. Yet what we found is marvelously constructed out of expensive materials. Who the hell put in a terrazzo floor and isn’t owning up to it now that the secret’s out? Ditto the plumbing? No one’s reported a missing plumber or terrazzo worker since the war!” Carmine ground his teeth. “The family has no money, we know that. Claire and Chuck lived so well that they must have spent every cent he earned. And yet there’s two hundred grand’s worth of labor and material down in the ground. Damnit, no one admits to having sold them the linen or the plastic liquid for the heads!”
“To quote the county engineer, what does it matter, Carmine? Ponsonby is dead and it’s time to close the case,” Patrick said, patting Carmine’s shoulder. “Why give yourself a coronary over a dead man? Think of Desdemona instead. When’s the wedding?”
“You don’t like her, Patsy, do you?”
The blue eyes dimmed but refused to look away. “Past tense might be more accurate. I didn’t like her in the beginning – too strange, too foreign, too aloof. But she’s different these days. I hope to come to love her as well as like her.”
“You’re not alone. Your mom
“Made worse because she’s noticeably taller than you are,” said Patrick, laughing. “Moms and aunts and sisters
“They last longer than faces or figures.”
The case was officially closed that afternoon. Once the Medical Examiner’s report was filed the Holloman Police Department was obliged to admit that it could find no evidence to implicate Claire Ponsonby in the murders. If Carmine had had the time he might have gone to Silvestri and asked to reopen the murder of Leonard Ponsonby and the woman and child in 1930, but crime waits for no man, especially a detective. Two weeks after Charles Ponsonby was shot dead, a drug case was occupying all of Carmine’s attention. Back on familiar ground! Criminals he knew were guilty, his wits engaged in gathering the evidence to bring them to justice.
Chapter 30
The axe fell on the Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research at the end of March.
When the Board of Governors convened in the Hug boardroom at 10 A.M., all the Governors were present except Professor Robert Mordent Smith, who had been discharged from Marsh Manor two weeks before, but wouldn’t emerge from his basement and its trains. An embarrassment for Roger Parson Junior, who hated to think that his judgement of Bob Smith had been so erroneous.
“As the business director, Miss Dupre, please take a seat,” Parson said briskly, then looked at Tamara quizzically. “Miss Vilich, are you up to taking minutes?”
A legitimate question, as this Miss Vilich didn’t resemble the woman whom the Parson Governors had known before today. Her light had gone out, so Richard Spaight fancied.
“Yes, Mr. Parson,” Tamara said tonelessly.
President Mawson MacIntosh already knew what Dean Wilbur Dowling only suspected; however, the one’s certain knowledge and the other’s strong suspicion produced contented faces and relaxed bodies. Chubb University was going to inherit the Hug, so much was certain, together with a huge amount of money that wouldn’t be devoted to neurological research.
Half glasses perched on his thin blade of a nose, Roger Parson Junior proceeded to read out the legal opinion that had rendered his late lamented uncle’s last will and testament null and void in respect of the trust fund that
