At the head of the table, standing, there was one more figure. A man dressed in a dusty black suit, the lines of it streaked with gray. No: when Laura looked closer, she realized that the lines on his suit were marks made with tailor’s chalk, as if to mark out all of the places where the garment was to be adjusted.
He turned towards her, lured by the sound of her footsteps down the stairs, and she found her gun swinging up towards him. At the same time, she had heightened awareness of everything else: Nate and Thorson tumbling down the stairs behind her, no doubt with their own weapons ready to fire. All of the people around the table, any of whom could have been a potential threat.
But none of them moved. Not a single one of them reacted to her presence at all.
And when Laura spared one more glance away from the man dressed in the tailor-ready jacket, Laura understood why.
They were all mannequins.
Each of them was dressed in a different jaunty outfit – some in suits, others in shorts and t-shirts, female mannequins in dresses and skirts. Their faces were marked with paint in the approximation of faces, some of it faded or chipped, clearly from old-fashioned mannequins that were meant to resemble real people. They wore wigs and hats to cover their plastic hair, and for a moment with a brief glance, the effect was actually convincing enough to fool the eye – but not now that she’d had the time to look again.
The tailor was holding some kind of dinner party down here, as though each of the mannequins was a guest in his home.
“Who were you talking to?” Laura demanded quickly. If there was someone else down here –
Nate moved behind her, and she sensed him passing by as he began to scan the rest of the room, gun out and ready.
The tailor said nothing, but his eyes drifted down to one of the mannequins. It was dressed as female, with vivid red lipstick smeared on top of the original paint job, a blonde wig covering the eyes partially.
It clicked: the tailor had been talking to himself. Providing the voices for his guests. Acting out the scene, not just positioning it for visual effect.
There was no victim. He was alone down here.
Still, it was the closest display Laura could think of to what she had seen the killer perform. The idea of all of these guests set up and ready for a full scene, an eerie tableau waiting for him every time he came back to the house. A fake life, so removed from reality that he no longer spent any time upstairs in the main house.
“Frank Geharty?” Laura asked, to which the tailor nodded silently. He was still frozen in place, looking right at her, one of his arms still outstretched in a gesture towards the woman he had been ‘talking’ to. The single movement somehow made his pose even more unnerving: the knowledge that he could move if he wished, and yet was choosing to act like the mannequins around him.
“Clear,” Nate said quietly behind her.
“We’re arresting you on suspicion of murder,” Laura said, putting her gun into her belt with the knowledge that Nate had her covered and bringing out a pair of handcuffs. She opened her mouth to give Geharty his rights, but she found herself stopping in surprise as the tailor turned slowly and placed his hands behind his back, clearly offering no argument against his arrest.
All of which left her feeling more unsure and unnerved than if he had put up a fight or tried to run – and gave her another feeling, too. The feeling that this case, resolved as it seemed to be on the surface, was still far from over.