Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) (9 page)

“Look at the note.” I pointed to the Au and the Ag.

Patrick squinted at the page and muttered, “Ag, agriculture, agnostic, agent . . . Au, auto, Auburn University, awesome . . . no, that’s Aw.”

“How about chemical symbols? Stephanie studied chemistry in college, didn’t she? And all the A’s are capitalized, the way chemical symbols are supposed to be written.”

“Brilliant. Sure. Au is gold, isn’t it? What’s Ag?”

“Silver. I looked it up.”

“Silver and gold.” Patrick resumed his seat in the straight-back chair, crossed his skinny legs, and bent over the note in a Sherlockian manner. “You may be right, Mom, but that doesn’t tell us
why.
Or who she was talking to at the time, or what they were talking about. I assume she was on the phone when she wrote this.”

“I thought maybe jewelry?”

“Possible. I suggest we ask Dad and Juergen.” With his little finger, he pointed to some numbers Stephanie had written off to one side of the sheet. “Looks like a phone number.”

“Too many numbers.”

“Not if it includes a country code. It starts with 001. That’s the U.S.”

“I think we should call it.”

“Okay, but let’s talk to Dad and Juergen first. No hurry.” He turned the paper sideways. “What’s this? It looks like Jo bury or Jo berg.”

“Looks like her pen was skipping. I’d say Jo bury.”

* * * * *

I found Juergen in a small office-like room tucked between the living room and the stairwell. A couple of filing cabinets, a desk strewn with papers, a laptop computer, a swivel chair on a clear vinyl mat. Juergen sat with his back to the open door.

“Knock, knock,” I said.

He was on the phone.

“Excuse me.” I whispered. “I’ll talk to you later.”

* * *
* *

Brian and Chet had retreated, inexplicably, to the kitchen with a bottle of Macallan’s Scotch. Brian sat on the counter, his feet crossed at the ankles. Chet sat on a stool at the butcher-block table, hunched over his glass of single malt, neat. It shocked me to see how much larger than Chet Brian was now. Brian was talking about money. Chet may
or may not have been listening. I didn’t interrupt them.

* * *
* *

Lettie emerged from the bathroom adjacent to our room, dressed for bed, her face smeared with the green wrinkle-reducing goo she’d been using for years. She carried a bottle of lotion to her bed and began slathering her legs.

I was making a copy of Stephanie’s note because I had decided to give the original to Detective Kronenberg. I assumed they’d be back soon because they’d left crime scene tape up.

“Will the police come back in the morning, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. What do you think now, Dotsy? I’ve been mulling it over in my head all evening. I haven’t heard a word anyone else has said to me.”

“Me, too,” I said, placing Stephanie’s note on top of the dresser and slipping my own copy into a drawer. “I don’t believe Stephanie committed suicide. It makes no sense. She wasn’t depressed. She was picking out wine a few minutes before . . . well, actually I don’t know that. I don’t know how long it was after t
hat phone call to Juergen. It couldn’t have been long though, could it? Unless she came back from the bunker and then went back again later.”

“Were there any footprints in the snow leading to the bunker?” Lettie cocked her head and looked up from her slathering.

I thought carefully. “No. Erin and I were the first to walk over that direction and there were no footprints. Ours were the first. The snow was pristine, I’m sure.”

“So no one entered or left the bunker after it snowed. Wonder what time that was?”

“You know what, Lettie? I think it was someone from outside. Someone from the town, maybe. At first I thought the only way to get here was the long route by the road, but then Juergen showed me the elevator. We talked about the elevator at dinner, remember? How easy would it be for someone to have come up in the elevator, and slipped back down into town without anyone here seeing them?”

“What about Gisele?”

“What about her?”

“Did she have a key to the tunnel? Did she use the elevator?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll bet she did. Her parents live in LaMotte.”

“Who else? Don’t they have a handyman or something?”

“Don’t know.” I kicked off my shoes and flopped down on my bed. “This is rather useless speculation, isn’t it? We haven’t the vaguest idea of a motive—motives. Whoever killed Gisele probably had a different motive for killing Stephanie, assuming the same person did both.”

“One was killed for some unknown reason
. The other one saw the murder and had to be killed as well.”

“Either Gisele or Stephanie
might have been either one.” I stopped and, reluctantly, brought the grisly bunker scene to the front of my mind. “Why was the gun lying there, beside Stephanie? Why did the killer leave it?”

“So it would look like murder/suicide, which it does.”

I got up again and knelt beside my suitcase, scrambled through it for my moisturizer. “Basically, it could have been anyone in the whole world. And until one of us comes up with a convincing reason someone would have to kill either Stephanie or Gisele, we have nothing to go on.”

Eight

Lights burned later than usual in the forensic lab and in Kurt Kronenberg’s office. The Cantonal Police, like the LaMotte city cops, were unaccustomed to murder, and murder of a domestic nature was even more rare. Most of their work involved traffic. Most premature deaths involved snow—skiing or avalanches. The few murders they did have usually involved illegal immigrants and smuggling. Their last domestic killing had been five years ago when a man shot his wife and didn’t even bother to cover his tracks. Police arrested the husband within hours and had nothing to investigate because he promptly confessed.

The technician in the lab didn’t understand the significance of what she saw. Bullet A, removed in the autopsy from Victim A, was a Winchester 9 mm Luger jacketed hollow point. Bullet B, extracted from the chest of Victim B, was a Remington 9 mm Luger metal case. Kronenberg had brought her only one shell casing, a Remington 9 mm.

She dropped by Kronenberg’s office expecting to find it closed and dark, but he was still there, squinting at his computer screen as if his eyes hurt. “Here’s what I’ve found on the bullets.”

Kronenberg studied the form she handed him, blinked and rubbed his eyes, studied it some more. She turned to leave. “Wait a minute!” He threw up one hand and waved her back. “This can’t be right!”

“I assure you it is,” she shot back. “This wasn’t rocket science.”

“The shell casing I gave you came from inside the bunker. Near the body of Victim A.”

“Okay,” she said, not seeing the problem.

“It matches up with the bullet we took from Victim B.”

“Right.”

Kronenberg placed the ballistics report on his desk and covered his face with both hands. “There was no other shell casing in the bunker. I’m certain. We searched that concrete floor on our hands and knees.”

“So Victim A shot Victim B.”

“We already assumed that. But what happened to the shell casing from Bullet A?”

“Pardon?”

“If Victim A shot herself, what happened to
that
shell casing? Did she pick it up and throw it out the door? The blast blew most of her head off!” Kronenberg folded his arms on his desk and laid his forehead on them. A second later his head shot back up. “And if Victim A was standing inside the bunker when she shot Victim B, who was standing outside a full twenty meters away, and then shot herself,
who closed the door!”

Nine

I heard the helicopter as I stood at the big windows in the living room, cradling my morning coffee in my hands. The unmistakable
whump-whump
of the rotors, a dragonfly-shaped shadow swept across the meadow outside. I looked at my watch. Eight-fifteen. Why so early? I expected the police to return, but at eight-fifteen in the morning? What time did these guys go to work?

I heard their knock at a door somewhere above and behind me. I still didn’t get the overall plan of this house, and noises were always coming at me from unexpected directions. Wooden stairs creaked and popped beneath a multitude of feet in the stairwell. Juergen entered first, followed by Erin, Babs, Detective Kronenberg, and his sidekick.

“We have to get everyone together,” Juergen announced in his high-pitched voice. It sounded as if he was carefully controlling his tone. “Where are the others?”

I ran upstairs for Lettie while Juergen went to look for Chet. Erin was sent to fetch Patrick and Brian, who were supposedly in their room and probably still asleep. Eventually we all settled in the living room. Kurt Kronenberg spoke to us from a standing position, his back to the windows. I had trouble seeing him clearly, with the glare of the morning sun behind him. He looked like one of those light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-after-death movie scenes. When I thought back on this later, I decided Kronenberg had seized the spot deliberately so he could see our expressions clearly when he broke the shocking news. We couldn’t see his face that well, but he might catch a look of guilt or panic as it flitted across one of ours.

“Yesterday we were called to a scene that looked like a murder and a suicide.” He paused, dramatically. “Today, we have a double murder on our hands.” He paused again.

I felt the color rise in my face. A little squeak from Erin, several gasps around the room, and Lettie, sitting beside me on the sofa, grabbed my elbow and squeezed it. Without being too obvious, I tried to see the faces of the others. Chet and Juergen were standing behind the sofa, so I couldn’t see them at all, but Brian’s head swiveled toward his father, his eyes so wide they showed white all around the irises. Patrick and Erin exchanged looks of shock. Babs looked frozen, as usual.

Kronenberg explained what he’d discovered about the bullets and the shell casing and why it meant, unequivocally, that Stephanie couldn’t possibly have died by her own hand or by that of Gisele Schlump. He had to explain it three times before Lettie, still frowning, nodded.

“We’ll be working here for several days
, and I have to set up an incident room. We can move our small van in, but it would be difficult to drive it over the ridge. If you have a room here that we could use, it would make things simpler.”

Juergen’s words passed over my head. “Bring in your van. I’m sure you can understand the stress all of us are under. We need to talk to each other privately, to comfort one another! I’ve lost my sister and my good friend
.” His voice rose an extra octave, trembling. “Chet has lost his wife! These boys have lost their stepmother! We’re all at the breaking point!”

Kronenberg waited several beats before he answered.
“Ja.”

Brian spoke up. “In the meantime, what do we do? Can we leave? Go into town? Go to Geneva?”

“Ach, nein!”
Kronenberg’s face darkened. “You cannot leave. I will need to talk to you all again. I will . . .” He turned his back to us and jammed his fists into his pockets. When he turned around again he spoke slowly, as if consciously choosing each word. “I do not know how long this will take. Of course, I cannot hold all of you hostage. You will need to buy food, you will need to walk, to exercise. I must ask you to give me your passports. You cannot leave the country and if you are leaving the house, you must tell me where you are going.”

“But this could take weeks! I have to be back at work next week!” Babs cried.

“I’m sorry about that, but finding out who murdered these two women is more important.”

“Sounds like you think one of us did it,” Chet said.

“Given the isolation of this chateau and the time frame, Mr. Lamb, I’m afraid that’s the most likely answer.”

The room went silent while we took in Kronenberg’s statement. I glanced around again and caught Babs looking at me. Was she thinking,
Dotsy, the woman spurned? The one most likely to have wished Stephanie dead?

“I assume you have tested both victims
’ hands for gunshot residue,” Juergen said. Good old Swiss practicality.

“We found gunshot residue on Stephanie Lamb’s right hand. None on Gisele Schlump. The absence of residue on Miss Schlump’s hands and clothing tells us she was shot from a distance of more than five feet and did not fire a gun herself.”

“Have you narrowed down the time any better since yesterday?” Chet asked.

“I won’t to go into the issue of time right now. I’ll be talking to each of you individually.”

It seemed significant to me that Kronenberg easily answered the gunshot residue question but balked at the one about time. Why? I said, “We know it happened before it snowed. It must have, because there were no footprints there until”—I nodded toward Erin, sitting meekly beside her mother—“until Erin and I went in the next morning.”

“I would like to start with Mrs. Lamb
.” Kronenberg scowled at me. “Let’s talk upstairs in the dining room. The rest of you can go about your business, but when I call you in, please bring your passport with you.”