Cruel and Unusual

4

Where are you?” I demanded, my eyes riveted to the number on the screen.

“East End, and it's coming down like a bitch,” Marino said. “We got a DOA. White female. At a glance appears to be your typical CO suicide, car inside the garage, hose hooked up to the exhaust pipe. But the circumstances are a little weird. I think you better come.”

“Where are you placing this call from?” I asked so adamantly that he hesitated. I could feel his surprise.

“The decedent's house. Just got here. That's the other thing. It wasn't secured. The back was unlocked.”

I heard the garage door. “Oh, thank God. Marino, hold on,” I said, flooded with relief.

Paper bags crackled as the kitchen door shut.

Placing my hand over the receiver, I called out, “Lucy, is that you?”

“No, Frosty the Snowman. You ought to see it coming down out there! It's awesome!”

Reaching for pen and paper, I said to Marino, “The decedent's name and address?”

“Jennifer Deighton. Two-one-seven Ewing.” I did not recognize the name. Ewing was off Williamsburg Road, not too far from the airport in a neighborhood unfamiliar to me.

Lucy walked into my study as I was hanging up the phone. Her face was rosy from the cold, eyes spark ling.

“Where in God's name have you been?” I snapped.

Her smile faded. “Errands.”

“Well, we'll discuss this later. I've got to go to a scene.”

She shrugged and returned my irritation. “So what else is new?”

“I'm sorry. It's not as if I have control over people dying.” Grabbing coat and gloves, I hurried out to the garage. I started the engine, buckled up, adjusted the heat, and studied my directions before remembering the automatic door opener attached to the visor. It's amazing how quickly an enclosed space will fill with fumes.

“Good God,” I said severely to no one but my own distracted self as I quickly opened the garage door.

Poisoning by motor vehicle exhaust is an easy way to die. Young couples necking in the backseat, engine running and heater on, drift off in each other's arms and never wake up. Suicidal individuals turn cars into small gas chambers and leave their problems for others to solve. I had neglected to ask Marino if Jennifer Deighton lived alone.

The snow was already several inches deep, the night lit up by it. There was no traffic in my neighborhood and very little when I got on the downtown expressway. Christmas music played nonstop on the radio as my thoughts flew in a riot of bewilderment and alighted, one by one, on fear. Jennifer Deighton had been calling my number and hanging up, or someone using her telephone had. Now she was dead. The overpass curved above the east end of downtown, where railroad tracks crisscrossed the earth like sutured wounds, and concrete parking decks were higher than many of the buildings. Main Street station hulked out of the milky sky, tile roof frosted white, the clock in its tower a bleary Cyclops eye.

On Williamsburg Road I drove very slowly past a deserted shopping center, and just before the city turned into Henrico County, I found Ewing Avenue. Houses were small, with pickup trucks and old model American cars parked out front. At the 217 address, police cars were in the drive and on both sides of the street. Pulling in behind Marino's Ford, I got out with my medical bag and walked to the end of the unpaved driveway where the single-car garage was lit up like a Christmas creche. The door was rolled up, police officers gathered inside around a beat-up beige Chevrolet. I found Marino squatting by the back door on the driver's side, studying a section of green garden hose leading from the exhaust pipe through a partially opened window. The interior of the car was filthy with soot, the smell of fumes lingering on the cold, damp air.

“The ignition's still switched on,” Marino said to me. “The car ran out of gas.”

The dead woman appeared to be in her fifties or early sixties. She was slumped over on her right side behind the steering wheel, the exposed flesh of her neck and hands bright pink. Dried bloody fluid stained the tan upholstery beneath her head. From where I stood, I could not see her face. Opening my medical bag, I got out a chemical thermometer to take the temperature inside the garage, and put on a pair of surgical gloves. I asked a young officer if he could open the car's front doors.

“We were just about to dust,” he said.

“I'll wait.”

“Johnson, how 'bout dusting the door handles so the doc here can get in the car.”

He fixed dark Latin eyes on me. “By the way, I'm Tom Lucero. What we got here is a situation that doesn't completely add up. To begin with, it bothers me there's blood on the front seat.”

“There are several possible explanations for that,” I said. “One is postmortem purging.”

He narrowed his eyes a little.

“When pressure in the lungs forces bloody fluid from the nose and mouth,” I explained.

“Oh. Generally, that doesn't happen until the person's started to decompose, right?”

“Generally.”

“Based on what we know, this lady's been dead maybe twenty-four hours and it's cold as a morgue fridge in here.”

“True,” I said. “But if she had her heater running, that in addition to the hot exhaust pouring in would have heated up the inside of the car, and it would have stayed quite warm until the car ran out of gas.”

Marino peered through a window opaque with soot and said, “Looks like the heater's pushed all the way to hot.”

“Another possibility,” I continued, “is that when she became unconscious, she slumped over, striking her face on the steering wheel, the dash, the seat. Her nose could have bled. She could have bitten her tongue or split her lip. I won't know until I examine her.”

“Okay, but how about the way she's dressed?”

Lucero said. “Strike you as unusual that she'd walk out in the cold, come inside a cold garage, hook up the hose, and get into a cold car with nothing but a gown on?”

The pale blue gown was ankle-length, with long sleeves, and made of what looked like a flimsy synthetic material. There is no dress code for people who commit suicide. It would have been logical for Jennifer Deighton to put on coat and shoes before venturing outside on a frigid winter night. But if she had planned to take her life, she would have known she would not feel the cold long.

The ID officer had finished dusting the car doors. I retrieved the chemical thermometer. It was twenty-nine degrees inside the garage.

“When did you get here?” I asked Lucero.

“Maybe an hour and a half ago. Obviously, it was warmer in here before we opened the door, but not much. The garage isn't heated. Plus, the car hood was cold. I'm guessing the car ran out of gas and the battery went dead a number of hours before we were called.”

Car doors opened and I took a series of photographs before going around to the passenger's side to look at her head. I braced myself for a spark of awareness, a detail that might ignite some long-buried memory. But there was not the faintest glimmer. I did not know Jennifer Deighton. I had never seen her before in my life.

Her bleached hair was dark at the roots and tightly wound in small pink curlers, several of which had been displaced. She was grossly overweight; though I could tell from her refined features that she may have been quite pretty in a younger, leaner life. I palpated her head and neck and felt no fractures. I placed the back of my hand against her cheek, then struggled to turn her. She was cold and stiff, the side of her face that had been resting against the seat, pale and blistered from the heat. It did not appear that her body had been moved after death, and the skin did not blanch when pressed. She had been dead at least twelve hours.

It wasn't until I was ready to bag her hands that I noticed something under her right index fingernail. I got out a flashlight for a better look, then retrieved a plastic. evidence envelope and a pair of forceps. The tiny fleck of metallic green was embedded in the skin beneath the nail. Christmas glitter, I thought. l -also found fibers of a gold tint, and as I studied each of her fingers I found more. Slipping the brown paper bags over her hands and securing them at the wrists with rubber bands, I went around to the other side of the car. I wanted to look at her feet. Her legs were fully rigorous and uncooperative as I pulled them free of the steering wheel and positioned them on the seat. Examining the bottoms of her thick dark socks, I found fibers clinging to the wool that looked similar to the ones I had noticed under her fingernails. Absent was dirt, mud, or grass. An alarm was sounding in the back of my mind.

“Find anything interesting?” Marino asked.

“You found no bedroom slippers or shoes nearby?” I said.

“Nope,” Lucero answered. “Like I told you, I thought it unusual she walked out of the house on a cold night with nothing but-”

I interrupted. “We've got a problem. Her socks are too clean.”

“Shit,” Marino said.

“We need to get her downtown.”

I backed away from the car.

“I'll tell the squad,” Lucero volunteered.

“I want to see the inside of her house,” I said to Marino.

“Yeah.”

He had taken his gloves off and was blowing on his hands. “I want you to see it, too.”

While I waited for the squad, I moved about the garage, careful where I stepped and keeping out of the way. There wasn't much to see, just the usual clutter of items needed for the yard and odds and ends that had no other proper storage place. I scanned stacks of old newspapers, wicker baskets, dust'. cans of paint, and a rusty charcoal grill that I doubted had been used in years. Sloppily coiled in a corner like a headless green garter snake was the hose from which the segment attached to the exhaust pipe appeared to have been cut. I knelt near the severed end without, touching it. The plastic rim did not look sawn but severed at an angle by one hard blow. I spotted a linear cut in the cement floor nearby. Getting to my feet, I surveyed the tools hanging from a pegboard. There was an ax and a maul, both of them rusty and festooned with cobwebs.

The rescue squad was coming in with its stretcher and body pouch.

“Did you find anything inside her house that she might have used to cut the hose?” I asked Lucero.

“No.”

Jennifer Deighton did not want to come out of the car, death resisting the hands of life. I moved to the passenger's side to help. Three of us secured her under the arms and waist while an attendant pushed her legs. When she was zipped up and buckled in, they carried her out into the snowy night and I trudged with Lucero along the driveway, sorry that I'd not taken the time to put on boots. We entered the ranch-style brick house through a back door that led into the kitchen.

It looked recently renovated, appliances black, counters and cabinets white, the wallpaper an Oriental pattern of pastel flowers against delicate blue. Heading toward the sound of voices, Lucero and I crossed a narrow hallway with a hardwood floor and stopped at the entrance of a bedroom where Marino and an 1D officer were going through dresser drawers. For a long moment, I looked around at the peculiar manifestations of Jennifer Deighton's personality. It was as if her bedroom were a solar cell in which she captured radiant energy and converted it into magic. I thought again of the hang ups I had been sitting, my paranoia growing by leaps and bounds.

Walls, curtains, carpet, linens, and wicker furniture were white. Oddly, on the rumpled bed not far from where both pillows were propped against the headboard a crystal pyramid anchored a single blank sheet of white typing paper. On the dresser and beside tabletops were more crystals, with smaller ones suspended from window frames. I could imagine rainbows dancing in the room and light glancing off prismatic glass when the sun poured in.

“Weird, huh?” Lucero asked.

“Was she a psychic of some sort?” I asked.

“Let's put it this way, she had her own business, most of it carried out right there.”

Lucero moved loser to an answering machine on a table by the bed. The message light was flashing, the number thirty-eight glowing red.

“Thirty-eight messages since eight o'clock last night,” Lucero added. “I've skipped through a few of 'em. The lady was into horoscopes. Looks like people would call to find out if they were going to have a good day, win the lottery, or be able to pay off their charge cards after Christmas.”

Opening the cover of the answering machine, Marino used his pocket knife to flip out the tape, which he sealed inside a plastic evidence envelope. I was interested in several other items on the small bedsides table and moved closer to take a look. Next to a notepad and pen was a glass with an inch of clear liquid inside it. I bent close, smelling nothing. Water, I thought. Nearby were two paperback books, Pete Dexter's Paris Trout and Jane Roberts's Seth Speaks. I saw no other books in the bedroom.

“I'd like to take a look at these,” I said to Marino.

“Paris Trout, “ he mused. “What's it about, fishing in Prance?”

Unfortunately, he was serious.

“They might tell me something about her state of mind before she died,” I added.

“No problem. I'll have Documents check them for prints, then hand them over to you. And I think we'd better have Documents take a look at the paper, too,” he added, referring to the sheet of blank paper on the bed.

“Right,” Lucero said drolly. “Maybe she wrote a suicide note in disappearing ink.

“Come “Come on,” Marino said to me. “I want to show you a couple things.”

He took me into the living room, where an artificial Christmas free cowered in a corner, bent from copious gaudy ornaments and strangled by tinsel, lights, and angel hair. Gathered near its base were boxes of candy and cheeses, bubble bath, a glass jar of what looked like spiced tea, and a ceramic unicorn with blazing blue eyes and gilded horn. The gold shag carpet, I suspected, was the origin of the fibers I had noticed on the bottom of Jennifer Deighton's socks and under her fingernails.

Marino slipped a small flashlight from a pocket and squatted.

“Take a look,” he said.

I got down beside him as the beam of light illuminated metallic glitter and a bit of slender gold cord in the deep pile of the carpet around the base of the tree.

“When I got here, the first thing I checked was to see if she had any presents under the tree,” Marino said, switching the flashlight off. “Obviously, she opened them early. And the wrapping paper and cards got disposed of right over there in the fireplace - it's full of paper ash, some pieces of foil-type paper still unburned. The lady across the street says she noticed smoke coming out of the chimney right before it got dark last night.”

“Is this neighbor the one who called the police?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“That I'm not clear on. I got to talk to her.”

“When you do, see if you can find. out anything about this woman's medical history, if she had psychiatric problems, et cetera. I'd like to know who her physician is.

“I'm going over there in a few minutes. You can came with me and ask her yourself.”

I thought of Lucy waiting for me at home as I continued taking in details. In the center of the room, my eyes stopped at four small square indentations in the carpet.

“I noticed that, too,” Marino said. “Looks like someone brought a chair in here, probably from the dining room. There's four chairs around the dining room table. All of 'em have square legs.”

“Another thing you might consider doing,” I thought out loud, “is checking her VCR. See if she had programmed it to record anything. That might tell us something more about her, too.”

“Good idea.” We left the living room, passing through the small dining room with an oak table and four straight-backed chairs. The braided rug on the hardwood floor looked either new or rarely walked on.

“Looks like the room she pretty much lived in was this one,” Marino said as we crossed a hallway and entered what clearly was her office.

The room was crammed with the paraphernalia needed to run a small business, including a fax machine, which I investigated immediately. It was turned off, the line connected to it plugged into a single jack in the wall. I looked around some more as my mystification grew. A personal computer, postage machine, various forms, and envelopes crowded a table and the desk Encyclopedias and books on parapsychology, astrology, zodiac signs, and Eastern and Western religions lined bookcases. I noted several different translations of the Bible and dozens of ledgers with dates written on the spines.

Near the postage machine was a stack of what appeared to be subscription forms, and I picked up one. For three hundred dollars a year, you could call as often as once a day and Jennifer Deighton would spend up to three minutes telling you your horoscope “based on personal details, including the Alignment of the planets at the moment of your birth.”

For an additional two hundred dollars a year, she would throw in “a weekly reading.”

Upon payment of the fee, the subscriber would receive a card with an identification code that was valid only as long as the annual fee continued to be paid.

“What a lot of horseshit,” Marino said to me.

“I'm assuming she lived alone.”

“That's the way it's looking so far. A woman alone running a business like this - a damn good way to attract the wrong person.”

“Marino, do you know how many telephone lines she has?”

“No. Why?”

I told him about the hang ups I had been getting while he stared hard at me. His jaw muscles began to flex. “I need to know if her fax machine and phone are on the same line,” I concluded.

“Jesus Christ.”

“If they are and she happened to have her fax machine turned on the night I dialed back the number that appeared on my Caller ID screen,” I went on, “that would explain the tone I heard.”

'Jesus friggin' Christ,” he said, snatching the portable radio out of his coat pocket. “Why the hell didn't you cell me this before?”

“I didn't want to mention it when others were around.”

He moved the radio close to his lips. “Seven-ten.”

Then he said to me, “If you were worried about hang ups, why didn't you say something weeks ago?”

“I wasn't that worried about them.”

“Seven-ten,” the dispatcher's voice crackled back.

“Ten-five eight-twenty-one.”

The dispatcher sent out a broadcast for 821, the code for the inspector.

“Got a number I need you to dial,” Marino said why he and the inspector connected on the air. “You got your cellular phone handy?”

“Ten-fo'.”

Marino gave him Jennifer Deighton's number and then turned on the fax machine. Momentarily, it began a series of rings, beeps, and other complaints.

“That answer your question?”

Marino asked me.

“It answers one question, but not the most important question,” I said.

The name of the neighbor across the street who had notified the police was Myra Clary. I accompanied Marino to her small aluminum sided house with its plastic Santa lit up on the front lawn and lights strung in the boxwoods. Marino barely had rung the bell when the front door opened and Mrs. Clary invited us in without asking who we were. It occurred to me that she probably had watched our approach from a window.

She showed us into a dismal living room where we found her husband huddled by the electric fire, lap robe over his spindly legs, his vacuous stare fixed on a man lathering up with deodorant soap on television. The pitiful custodial care of the years manifested itself everywhere. Upholstery was threadbare and soiled where human flesh had made repeated contact with it. Wood was cloudy from layers of wax, prints on walls yellowed behind dusty glass. The oily smell of a million meals cooked in the kitchen and eaten on TV trays permeated the air.

Marino explained why we were here as Mrs. Clary moved about nervously, plucking newspapers off the couch, turning down the television, and carrying dirty dinner plates into the kitchen. Her husband did not venture forth from his interior world, his head trembling on its stalklike neck. Parkinson's disease is when the machine shakes violently just before it conks out, as if it knows what is ahead and protests the only way it can.

“Nope, we don't need a thing,” Marino said when Mrs. Clary offered us food and drink. “Sit down and try to relax. I know this has been a tough day for you.”

“They said she was in her car breathing in those fumes. Oh, my,” she said. “I saw how smoky the window was, looked like the garage had been on fire. I knew the worst right then.”

“Who's they?” Marino asked.

“The police. After I called, I was watching for them. When they pulled up, I went straight over to see if Jenny was all right.”

Mrs. Clary could not sit still in the wing chair across from the couch where Marino and I had settled. Her gray hair had strayed out of the bun on top of her head, face as wrinkled as a dried apple, eyes hungry for information and bright with fear.

“I know you already talked to the police earlier,” Marino said, moving the ashtray loser. “But I want you to go through it chapter and verse for us, beginning with when you saw Jennifer Deighton last.”

“I saw her the other day -”

Marino interrupted. “Which day?”

“Friday. I remember the phone rang and I went to the kitchen to answer it and saw her through the window. She was pulling into her driveway.”

“Did she always park her car in the garage?” I asked.

“She always did.”

“What about yesterday?” Marino inquired. “You see her or her car yesterday?”

“No, I didn't. But I went out to get the mail. It was late, tends to be that way this time of year. Three, four o'clock and still no mail. I guess it was dose to five-thirty, maybe a little later, when I remembered to check the mailbox again. It was getting dark and I noticed smoke coming out of Jenny's chimney.”

“You sure about that?” Marino asked.

She nodded. “Oh, yes. I remembered went through my mind it was a good night for a fire. But fires were always Jimmy's job. He never showed me how, you see. When he was good at something, that was his. So I quit on the fires and had the electric log put in.”

Jimmy Clary was looking at her. I wondered if he knew what she was saying.

“I like to cook,” she went on. “This time of year I do a lot of baking. I make sugar cakes and give them to the neighbors. Yesterday I wanted to drop one by for Jenny, but I like to call first. It's hard to tell when someone's in, especially when they keep their car in a garage. And you leave a cake on the doormat and one of the dogs around here gets it. So I tried her and got that machine. All day I tried and she didn't answer, and to tell you the truth, I was a little worried.”

“Why?” I asked. “Did she have health problems, any sort of problems you were aware of?”

“Bad cholesterol. Way over two hundred's what's she told me once. Plus high blood pressure, which she said ran in the family.”

I had not seen any prescription drugs in Jennifer Deighton's house.

“Do you know who her doctor was?” I asked.

“I can't recall. But Jenny believed in natural cures. She told me when she felt poorly she'd meditate.”

“Sounds like the two of you were pretty close,” Marino said.

Mrs. Clary was plucking at her skirt, hands like hyperactive children. “I'm here all day except when I go to the store.”

She glanced at her husband, who was staring at the TV again. “Now and then I'd go see her, you know, just being neighborly, maybe to drop by something I'd been cooking.”

“Was she a friendly sort?” Marino asked. “She have a lot of visitors?”

“Well, you know she worked out of the house. I think she handled most of her business over the phone. But occasionally I'd see people going in.”

“Anybody you knew?”

“Not that I recall.”

“You notice anybody coming by to see her last night?” Marino asked.

“I didn't notice.”

“What about when you went out to get your mail and saw the smoke coming out of her chimney? You get any sense she might have had company?”

“I didn't see a car. Nothing to make me think she had company.”

Jimmy Clary had drifted off to sleep. He was drooling.

“You said she worked at home,” I said. “Do you have any idea what she did?”

Mrs. Clary fixed wide eyes on me. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I know what folks said.”

“And what was that?” I asked.

She pressed her lips together and shook her head.

“Mrs. Clary,” Marino said. “Anything you could tell us might help. I know you want to help.”

“There's a Methodist church two blocks away. You can see it. The steeple's lit up at night, has been ever since they built the church three or four years ago.”

“I saw the church when I was driving in,” Marino replied. “What's that got to do -”

“Well,” she cut in, “Jenny moved here, I guess it was early September. And I've never been able to figure it out The steeple light. You watch when you're driving home. Of course…” She paused, her face disappointed. “Maybe it won't do it anymore.”

“Do what?” Marino asked.

“Go out and then come back on. The strangest thing I've ever seen. It's lit up one minute, and then you look out your window again and it's dark like the church isn't there. Then next thing you know, you look out again and the steeple's lit up just like it's always been. I've timed it. On for a minute, then off for two, on again for three. Sometimes it will burn for an hour. No pattern to it at all.”

“What does this have to do with Jennifer Deighton?” I asked.

“I remember it was not long after she moved in, just weeks before Jimmy had hi stroke. It was a cool night so he was building a fire. I was in the kitchen doing dishes and could see the steeple out the window lit up like it always was. And he came in to get himself a drink, and I said, 'You know what the Bible says about being drunk with the Spirit and not with wine. 'And he said, 'I'm not drinking wine. I'm drinking bourbon. The Bible's never said a word about bourbon.' Then, right while he was standing there the steeple went dark. It was like the church vanished into thin air. I said, 'There you have it. The Word of the Lord. That's his opinion about you and your bourbon.' “He laughed like I was the craziest thing, but he never touched another drop. Every night he'd stand in front of the window over the kitchen sink watching. One minute the steeple would be lit up, then it would be dark. I let Jimmy think it was God's doing - anything to keep him off the bottle. The church never behaved like that before Miss Deighton moved across the street.”

“Has the light been going on and off lately?” I asked.

“Was still doing it last night. I don't know about now. To tell you the truth, I haven't looked.”

“So you're saying that she somehow had an effect on the lights in the church steeple,” Marino said mildly.

“I'm saying that more than one person on this street decided about her some time ago.”

“Decided what?”

“About her being a witch,” Mrs. Clary said.

Her husband had started snoring, making hideous strangling noises that his wee did not seem to notice.

“Sounds to me like your husband there started doing poorly about the time Miss Deighton moved here and the lights staffed acting funny,” Marino said She looked startled: “Well, that's so. He had his stroke the end of September.”

“You ever think there might be a connection? That maybe Jennifer Deighton had something to do with it, just like you're thinking she had something to do with the church lights?”

“Jimmy didn't take to her.” Mrs. Clary was talking faster by the minute.

“You're saying the two of them didn't get along,” Marino said.

“Right after she moved in, she came over a couple of times to ask him to help out with a few things around the house, man's work. I remember one time her doorbell was making a terrible buzzing sound inside the house and she appeared on the doorstep, scared she was about to have an electrical fire. So Jimmy went over there. I think her dishwasher flooded once, too, back then. Jimmy's always been real handy.”

She glanced furtively at her snoring husband.

“You still haven't made it clear why he didn't get along with her,” Marino reminded her.

“He said he didn't like going over there,” she said. “Didn't like the inside of her house, with all these crystals everywhere. And the phone would ring all the time. But what really gave him the willies was when she told him she read people's fortunes and would do it for him for nothing if he'd keep fixing things around her house. He said, and I remember this like it was yesterday, 'No, thank you, Miss Deighton. Myra's in charge of my future, plans every minute of it.'“

“I wonder if you might know of anybody who had a big enough problem with Jennifer Deighton to wish something bad on her, hurt her in some way,” Marino said.

“You think somebody killed her?”

“There's a lot we don't know at this point. We have to check out every possibility.”

She crossed her arms under her sagging bosom, hugging herself.

“What about her emotional state?” I inquired. “Did she ever seem depressed to you? Do you know if she had any problems she couldn't seem to cope with, especially of late?”

“I didn't know her that well.” She avoided my eyes.

“Did she go to any doctors that you're aware of?”

“I don't know.”

“What about next of kin? Did she have family?”

“I have no idea.”

“What about her phone?” I then said. “Did she answer it when she was home or did she always let the machine do it?”

“It's been my experience that when she was home, she answered it.”

“Which is why you got worried about her earlier today when she wasn't answering the phone when you called,” Marino said.

“That's exactly why.” Myra Clary realized too late what she had said.

“That's interesting,” Marino commented.

A Bush crept up her neck and her hands went still.

Marino asked, “How did you know she was home today?”

She did not answer. Her husband's breath rattled in his chest and he coughed, eyes blinking open.

“I guess I assumed. Because I didn't see her pull out. In her car…” Mrs. Clary's voice trailed off.

“Maybe you went over there earlier in the day?”

Marino offered, as if trying to be helpful. “To deliver your cake or say hello and thought her car was in the garage?”

She dabbed tears from her eyes. “I was in the kitchen baking all morning and never saw her go out to get the paper or leave in her car. So mid-morning, when I went out, I went over there and rang the bell. She didn't answer. I peeked inside the garage.”

“You telling me you saw the windows all smoked up and didn't think something was wrong?” Marino asked.

“I didn't know what it meant, what to do.”

Her voice went up several octaves. “Lord, Lord. I wish I'd called somebody then. Maybe she was -” Marino cut in. “I don't know that she was still alive then, that she would have been” He looked pointedly at me.

“When you looked inside the garage, did you hear the car engine running?” I asked Mrs. Clary.

She shook her head and blew her nose.

Marino got up and tucked his notepad back in his coat pocket. He looked dejected, as if Mrs. Clary's spinelessness and lack of veracity deeply disappointed him. By now, there wasn't a role he played that I did not know well.

“I should have called earlier.” Myra Clary directed this at me, her voice quavering.

I did not reply. Marino stared at the carpet.

“I don't feel good. I need to go lie down.”

Marino slipped a business card out of his wallet and handed it to her. “Anything else comes to mind that you think I ought to know about, you give me a call.”

“Yes, sir,” she said weakly. “I promise I will.”

“You doing the post tonight?” Marino asked me after the front door shut.

Snow was ankle-deep and still coming down.

“In the morning,” I said, fishing keys out of my coat pocket.

“What do you think?”

“I think her unusual occupation put her at great risk for the wrong sort of person to come along. I also think her apparent isolated existence, as Mrs. Clary described it, and the fact that it appears she opened her Christmas presents early makes suicide an easy assumption. But her clean socks are a major problem.”

“You got that right,” he said.

Jennifer Deighton's house was lit up, and a flatbed truck with chains on its tires had backed into the drive way. Voices of men working were muted by the snow, and every car on the street was solid white and soft around the edges.

I followed Marino's gaze above the roof of Miss Deighton's house. Several blocks away, the church was etched against the pearl gray sky, me steeple shaped weirdly like a witch's hat. Arches in the arcade stared back at us with mournful, empty eyes when suddenly the light blinked on. It filled spaces and painted surfaces a luminescent ocher, the arcade an unsmiling but gentle face floating in the night.

I glanced over at the Clary house as curtains moved in the kitchen window.

“Jesus, I'm out of here.” Marino headed across the street.

“You want me to alert Neils about her car?” I called after him.

“Yeah,” he yelled back. “That'd be good.”

My house was lit up when I got home and good smells came from the kitchen. A fire blazed and two places had been set on the butler's table in front of it. Dropping my medical bag on the couch, I looked around and listened. From my study across the hall came the faint, rapid clicking of keys.

“Lucy?” I called out, slipping off my gloves and unbuttoning my coat.

“I'm in here.”

Keys continued to click.

“What have you been cooking?”

“Dinner.”

I headed for my study, where I found my niece sitting at my desk staring intensely at the computer monitor. I was stunned when I noticed the pound sign prompt. She was in UNIX. Somehow she had dialed into the computer downtown.

“How did you do that?” I asked. “I didn't tell you the dial-in command, user name, password, or anything.”

'You didn't have to tell me. I found the file that told me what the bat command is. Plus, you've got some programs in here with your user name and password coded in so you don't get prompted for them. A good shortcut but risky. Your user name is Marley and password is brain.”

“You're dangerous.” I pulled up a chair.

“Who's Marley?”

She continued to type.

“We had assigned seating in medical school. Marley Scates sat next to me in labs for two years. He's a neurosurgeon somewhere.”

“Were you in love with him?”

“We never dated.”

“Was he in love with you?”

“You ask too many questions, Lucy. You can't just ask people anything you want.”

“Yes I can. They don't have to answer.”

“It's offensive.”

“I think I've figured out how someone got into your directory, Aunt Kay. Remember I told you about users that came with the software?”

“Yes.”

“There's one called demo that has root privileges but no password assigned to it. My guess is that this is what somebody used and I'll show you what probably happened.”

Her fingers flew over the keyboard without pause as she talked. “What I'm doing now is going into the system administrator's menu to check out the log-in accounting. We're going to search for a specific user. In the case, root. Now we'll hit g to go and boom. There it M She ran her finger across a line on the screen..

“On December sixteenth at five-oh-six in the afternoon, someone logged in from a device called t-t-y-fourteen. This person had root privileges and we'll assume is the person who went into your directory. I don't know what he looked at. But twenty minutes later, at five twenty-six, he tried to send the note 'I can't find it' to t-t-y-oh-seven and inadvertently created a file. He logged out at five-thirty-two, making the total time of the session twenty-six minutes. And it doesn't appear anything was printed, by the way. I took a look at the printer spooler log, which shows files printed. I didn't see anything that caught my attention.”

“Let me make sure I've got this straight. Someone tried to send a note from t-t-y-fourteen to t-t-y-oh seven, “ I said.

“Yes. And I checked. Both of those devices are terminals.”

“How can we determine whose office those terminals are in?” I asked.

“I'm surprised there's not a list somewhere in here. But I haven't found it yet. If all else fails, you can check the cables leading to the terminals. Usually, they're tagged. And if you're interested in my personal opinion, I don't think your computer analyst is the spy. In the first place, she knows your user name and password and would have no need to log in with demo. Also, since I assume the mini is in her office, then I also assume she uses the system terminal.”

“She does.”

“The device name for your system terminal is t-t-y-b.”

“Good.”

“Another way to figure out who did this would be to sneak into someone's office when they aren't there but are logged in. All you've got to do is go into UNIX and type 'who am I' and the system will tell you.”

She pushed back her chair and got up. “I hope you're hungry. We've got chicken breasts and a chilled wild rice salad made with cashews, peppers, sesame oil. And there's bread. Is your grill in working order?”

“It's after eleven and snowing outside.”

“I didn't suggest that we eat outside. I simply would like to cook the chicken on the grill.”

“Where did you learn to cook?”

We were walking to the kitchen.

“Not from Mother. Why do you think I was such a little fatso? From eating the junk she bought. Snacks, sodas, and pizza that tastes like cardboard. I have fat cells that will scream for the rest of my life because of Mother. I'll never forgive her.”

“We need to talk about this afternoon, Lucy. If you hadn't come home when you did, the police would have been looking for you.”

“I worked out for an hour and a half, then took a shower.”

“You were gone four and a haft hours.”

“I had groceries to buy and a few other errands.”

“Why didn't you answer the car phone?”

“I assumed it was someone trying to reach you. Plus, I've never used a car phone. I'm not twelve years old, Aunt Kay.”

“I know you're not. But you don't live here and have never driven here before: was worried.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

We ate by firelight, both of us sitting on the floor around the butler's table. I had turned off lamps. Flames jumped and shadows danced as ft celebrating a magic moment in the lives of my niece and me.

“What do you want for Christmas?” I asked, reaching for my wine.

“Shooting lessons,” she said.