Cruel and Unusual - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 18

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• 18/73
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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?”

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