Skeleton Key by Jane Haddam

house, I don’t. God, that woman is unbelievable. And I’m not going to be able to get rid of her for weeks now. Not until this is over. If this is ever over. I keep reminding myself that the police fail to solve crimes all the time. Are you going to come out here and help?”
    â€œI’ll come out and help you.” Gregor stood up and pushed himself away from the computer table. He couldn’t concentrate on the cards anymore, and he’d been losing so badly it was embarrassing anyway. Bennis sometimes said he had a learning disability that applied only to games of solitaire. He didn’t tell her how miserably he lost at poker. Now he sat down on the bed and switched the phone from one ear to the other.
    â€œI can’t just go rushing in and disrupting a police investigation,” he said. “It’s not my investigation.”
    â€œWell, it can be if you want. The thing is, they’ve got this police department, it’s maybe got two people in it. And then they’ve got the state police.”
    â€œI think it’s the local police departments that investigate murders, Bennis. Not the state police.”
    â€œWell, actually, that’s not exactly clear. You see, the thing is, there’s more than one town involved. There’s Washington Depot, but then there’s also Watertown, and maybe Morris.”
    â€œAre these towns all close together?”
    â€œYes. Exactly. They all bump into each other. And about the first thing that happened, after we called the police, is that the call was picked up by the state police, because one of the towns has something called a resident trooper—”
    â€œResident trooper?”
    â€œRight. That’s where, if a town is too small to be able to afford its own police force, the state pays to have a state trooper live in town and do the police stuff. And there isn’t usually a lot of it, because these are really small places and nothing much happens in them.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œAnyway, one of these towns has a resident trooper, and he picked up the police call and checked on it, because it turned out that he’d seen the car.”
    â€œThe car?” Gregor was beginning to feel a little dizzy.
    â€œKayla Anson’s car,” Bennis told him. “It’s this little BMW. And according to this guy—the resident trooper—it went through the center of Morris about ten minutes after eight this evening, doing maybe ninety, ninety-five miles an hour on this road that’s narrow and all hills and twists and turns and—”
    â€œAre you sure this woman didn’t die in an automobile accident?”
    â€œYes, Gregor, of course I’m sure. The point is, the resident trooper isn’t a resident trooper for the town of Morris, because Morris has its own police department. He works in—Cornwall Bridge, I think. I’m not sure. He just happened to be in Morris at the time. And he saw the car. And he was in his cruiser, but he couldn’t really chase it because he didn’t have jurisdiction, and also I don’t think he wanted to. I mean, that kind of behavior on the roads out here is suicidal.”
    â€œThis is the car she died in,” Gregor said.
    â€œWell, it’s the car I found her dead in, Gregor. I don’t think there’s any way we can know right now if she actually—”
    â€œOkay. Yes. Now—”
    â€œOh, well. So what the resident trooper did was call ahead to Washington Depot and warn them about what she was doing. Anyway, when the police call came about her being dead there was one of those technical descriptions of the car going back and forth, you know, and so the resident trooper picked up the message and got in contact, and then some guy on the Watertown police department—no, wait, that’s not right, some woman—”
    â€œI don’t think it matters.”
    â€œWhatever. Anyway, the thing