House on Fire

55

Leaving Port Chester, I stopped for a late lunch at a burger place. While I ate, I searched on my phone for “Markus Kask” or “Marcus Cask.” I found plenty, in Sweden and Estonia, mostly. So that was a lost cause. I called Dorothy and asked her to search for a medical doctor and researcher in Estonia named Marcus Kask. Spelled however.

I’d paid and was on my way back to the Toyota when Dorothy called back. “I’m not sure I have the right one,” she said. “This Professor Marcus Kask, spelled with a k, was a doctor at West Tallinn Central Hospital.”

Tallinn. That had to be him. “Was?”

“Killed in a car accident on the Ring Road in Tallinn, seven years ago. Young guy too. Forty-three.”

“Shit.”

A man is killed in a car accident in a busy European city: there was nothing necessarily odd about that. But that left just the chief medical officer, Dr. Zubiri. And getting to him, a man who had worked for Kimball Pharma for years and was surely loyal, would not be easy.

Port Chester was only half an hour from Katonah and Kimball Hall, so I decided to take a drive to the Kimball house. I was thinking about Maggie. I took 684 into the Town of Bedford, and after a couple of turns found myself on the tree-lined Cantitoe Street, where Conrad Kimball lived. I slowed down when I recognized the stone gate booth and saw the street number. In the distance I could see the handsome brick gate house, which I had earlier mistaken for the main mansion. I didn’t know what I was doing there, but I knew I shouldn’t drive up to the house and call attention to myself. So I kept driving, along his property line, passing a clay tennis court near the road, and then taking a right onto Girdle Ridge Drive, which slashed through forest.

And I noticed something.

This was the end of Conrad’s Katonah property, this road here. This was the property line. And it wasn’t demarcated with a wooden fence or a chain-link one. The property was really too big to enclose with a running fence.

I pulled over when I saw an unmarked dirt road cutting through the trees on Conrad’s side of Girdle Ridge Drive. I saw tire tracks from trucks.

This was a service entrance to Kimball’s house.

I slowed and then turned onto the dirt road. It was narrow — the trees encroached close in — and the Toyota was scratched by branches.

The killer could have entered the property along this road. He, or she, wouldn’t have been spotted on video.

Or would he?

I braked, reversed, and saw a discreet CCTV camera on a telephone pole at the entrance to the dirt road from Girdle Ridge. It wasn’t exactly concealed, but it wasn’t obvious at all.

There was video back here. I wondered if Detective Goldman had seen it.

The Town of Bedford Police Department was on Bedford Road, in a redbrick building with white dormers that looked like a suburban bank office. Inside I could see it had been recently renovated.

Goldman was at his desk. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. But he didn’t want to talk in the building. He drove us to a Dunkin’ Donuts a mile or so down Bedford Road. As he drove I asked him about the dirt service entrance road and whether he’d seen the video from that camera from the night Maggie was killed.

He hadn’t, and he seemed angry at himself about it.

“I asked my partner to inventory all video cameras,” he said. “He must have missed it. Tunnel vision.”

I didn’t expect him to thank me, and he didn’t. It went unspoken. We parked, and entered the Dunkin’ Donuts. We both got coffee and sat at a table.

A guy in a black leather jacket entered, glanced over at us, and ordered something.

I went on. “Conrad must have an apartment in New York, right? A pied-à-terre?”

“Ten sixty Fifth Avenue,” Goldman said. “Eighty-eighth Street. View of the park.”

“Sounds about right. Are you any closer to finding out who killed Maggie?”

“The ME says the cause of death was blunt force trauma. She landed on her head and snapped her neck. And all the usual broken bones and contusions and lacerations.”

“What about the manner of death?”

“ME won’t conclude anything. She was probably shoved off the cliff. The ME is holding off pending further investigation.”

“Do you have footprints from the ground?” I remembered standing on the pre-impregnated pad to create elimination prints, when Goldman questioned me back in Kimball Hall.

“We took several plaster casts of impressions in the soil. Someone appears to have scuffled with her on the ledge above the ravine.”

“Male or female?”

“We can’t ascertain that.”

“You have casts of whatever shoes or boots Cameron had on.”

“All the kids. But we’re unable to establish a match.”

“Because of the rain?”

“No, we’ve got some decent shoeprints despite the rain. Just not a match.”

“Shit. If it was Fritz Heston, we know he’s going to be careful with the forensic traces anyway,” I said. “This is his business.”

“He’d also know how to turn off any video cameras he wanted off.”

“What about Maggie’s iCloud account? She’s got photos—”

“Way ahead of you there, chief. We got access to her iCloud account, but apparently she didn’t back up her photos to the cloud. So we got no pics, and her phone was stolen.”

“Have you been able to locate it?”

“Someone must have removed the battery or smashed it or something. So no, we haven’t found it.”

The guy in the black leather jacket was waiting for his order. He stood at the delivery counter and looked around but not at us this time. He had a medium-dark complexion, looked Middle Eastern. He had black hair shaved close to the scalp, a prominent jaw, and a thin scar cutting through his right eyebrow. He took his coffee and left the shop. So: nobody of concern. But I mentally clocked the face.

I turned back to Goldman.

“Right. So listen, uh, Bill, I need to ask you a favor. I want to take a look at Maggie’s office.”

“It’s a home office, and it’s sealed.”

“Right, but could you get me in? With an escort, if you want, someone from the Manhattan PD?”

“What are you looking for?”

“To be honest, I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said. “I know — knew her well, and I just might see something your people missed.”

Goldman scratched his goatee. “I think that can be arranged.”