“Did you know the friend?” inquired Carroll.
“No, and I didn’t ask. Why should I?” demanded Mrs. Patterson, tweaking a fawn-gold curl into place and looking flinty at the same time. “It’s my property, it’s to my interest to protect it. Furthermore, if you’d ever met Cl— Mr. Eggen, you’d know how absurd this all is. He’s a very quiet young man, and very polite.”
Unlike present company. Something going on there, wondered Carroll? It seemed unlikely, in view of their ages and the police artist’s sketch, but it needed only a quick dip into famous-crime annals to document how many women, often pretty ones, attached themselves as cheerfully as lemmings to men of dubious if not downright sinister appearance.
This woman had undoubtedly read the newspapers and looked at television—barring infants and the blind, no one in the city could have been entirely immune— and had any faint wonder or uneasiness wiped out by the ailing sister in Denver. People tended largely to believe what they wanted to, particularly if there was a personal relationship involved.
“Let’s have a look at his place,” said Carroll.
“Of course, I don’t really know him all that well,” said Mrs. Patterson, walking down the driveway with the three men. She had fallen into step with the state policeman, and her quilted robe under a coat swished around the high-heeled boots for which she had exchanged her slippers. “I’m away all day, I’m a realtor, and weekends are especially busy.”
Her defensiveness was now cautiously for herself, Carroll noted, and she began to slip into the past tense. “He was quiet, as I said, and paid his rent on time, and I mean what more can you ask? He wasn’t one of those men with a steady procession of lady friends coming and going—”
That and its implication lay eloquently on the night air as they reached the house and Carroll used the key she had given him and opened Claude Eggen’s front door. In spite of five years on the Chicago police force before coming to New Mexico, he had never lost his nape-prickling curiosity upon entering the private domain of a suspected killer. The beam of Carcia’s flashlight centered on a light switch, and he snapped it on.
Some places gave themselves away by their very contradiction: Carroll remembered the appalling state of the apartment belonging to an antiseptic woman school principal, and the tenderly cared-for collection of tiny glass and china animals owned by art unemployed cab driver who had wrecked his ex-wife’s house with an axe. At first glance, and in contrast, Eggen’s dwelling said nothing at all.
The ten-by-twelve living room (Mrs. Patterson informed them with unjustified pride that she rented the place furnished) contained a blue couch and two small armchairs, one blue, one brown; a television set on a stand; and a magazine rack holding several copies of an automotive publication. A single small table was bare of anything except a lamp, its shade retaining dusty cellophane pleats.
The kitchen opening off to the left was tidy except for a frying pan with congealed grease on the stove and, in the sink, a dried and crusted dinner plate, knife, and fork. On the counter beside it, obvious breakfast utensils reposed in a rubber drainer. In this sector of his life, Eggen was nothing if not neat.
Garcia, the state policeman, and Mrs. Patterson had proceeded into the bedroom and Carroll joined them there, bothered by this strange featurelessness. They had been assuming all along that the abduction of Ellie Peale was the result of a growing obsession which had finally slipped its leash, a spur-of-the-moment action without heed to consequences—but, consciously or otherwise, the man who lived here appeared to have erased his personality.
The bedroom was papered in a close pattern of gray and white diamonds. The brown-blanketed bed against one wall was made, the table beside it held a cheap clock-radio. (Eggen was clearly not a smoker, there wasn’t an ashtray in sight.) The rest of the space was largely taken up by a bureau and a chest of drawers. Astonishingly, there was a framed photograph on the bureau.
It was in color. An attractive, blue-eyed woman whose hair and makeup and dress were an echo of twenty years ago smiled proudly into the camera, her arm through that of a handsome clear-featured boy in graduation cap and gown. Unless the girl witness, Beryl Green, suffered from myopia, the boy could not possibly be Eggen. But the small overalled child in the foreground, gazing up with a blunted profile?
Garcia had opened the closet door with a practiced thumb and forefinger on the shank of the knob, although it seemed certain that Ellie Peale had never been here. Eggen did not possess an extensive wardrobe: One hanger was occupied by a gray sports coat and slacks, a second by a heavy plaid wool shirt, a third by a raincoat in need of cleaning.
Behind Carroll, standing in the middle of the room with a landlady’s all-seeing eye, Eggen’s erstwhile champion said crossly, “I had this room papered just before he came in, and he’s gone and smeared it.”
But the very small cloud on the gray-and-white wallpaper over the bed, at the height and arm-reach of a supine man, wasn’t a smudge. Up close, it was penciling, and it sent a chill through the seasoned Carroll. The state police car carried a camera and it would have to be used, the print time-dated and witnessed, to record this embryo horror until the wallpaper itself could be lifted off.
The tiny writing was arranged like a problem in addition, and Eggen had commenced with the simple, besotted equation of third-graders and then gone on to anagrams of two names:
EP-CE
Pal
Gal
Plague (This when his date invitation had been turned down?)
Leap
Chapter 17
“Hello, Rosie,” said Justin to the tear-tracked little face with terror dying out of it. “Remember me? Amanda’s friend.”
Rosie bobbed her head fractionally. Her eyelids looked alarmingly swollen.
Justin crouched down beside her,
