by Jane Haddam
Clara Walsh was up at the makeshift podium, introducing him. Gregor only half listened. Everybody said the same things about him when they were presenting him to an audience. They covered his career in the FBI and his time with the Behavioral Sciences Unit. They mentioned the latest case or two that had received some serious publicity. They stressed the fact that he was a consultant and not a private eye. Gregor was still fixated by the audience. The seats were in a block, without a row up the middle, even though the room had been set up horizontally, along the length instead of the width. It felt odd. He wondered why it was so.
Clara had turned to look at him, which probably meant he ought to get up. He did get up. He thanked her, although he didn’t know for what, and stood at the podium, looking out. In spite of all the deference paid to the broadcast and cable media, the woman from The New York Times was front and center. From what he remembered, the reporter from The New York Times was always front and center, no matter what the story was, or where. Maybe there was some kind of protocol here, where everybody was required to acknowledge the importance of The Times above all other newspapers.
I’m up here blithering inside my head, Gregor thought, and then called on the woman from The Times because she was right there in front of him.
“Mr. Demarkian,” she said, “there have been rumors for the last few days that you have been asked here by members of Arrow Normand’s family because they are unsatisfied with the level of professionalism exhibited by the local police. Is there any truth to those rumors?”
“No,” Gregor said, relieved beyond measure to be able to give a straight answer to the first question out of the box. “I’m sure Miss Normand has a wonderful and loving family who care deeply about her interests, but I’ve never met or heard from any of them as far as I know. I was asked to come here by Clara Walsh, in consultation with the Oscar-town Police Department.”
The woman from The Times sat down. There were a hundred hands in the air. Gregor knew he wasn’t going to be able to get away with calling on only people in the front row. If he tried, it would be all over the Internet in seconds. He squinted into the distance and picked a young man midway into the block of seats. The young man was clean-cut and reassuringly ordinary looking. He didn’t even go in for flam-boyance in ties.
Gregor pointed to him. The young man stood up and said, “Tom Carlyle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Could you tell us what you’re charging the Oscartown Police Department for your services? Do you think the Oscartown Police Department would be willing to pay your fee if this case had not involved celebrities?”
Gregor sighed. You couldn’t trust anything these days. Back when he’d been with the FBI, “clean-cut” had almost always meant “respectful.” There was a pitcher of water and an empty glass on the podium. Gregor poured himself some water and drank it. “In the first place,” he said, “I’m not sure it’s the Oscartown Police Department that’s paying my fee. It may be Clara Walsh’s office. In the second place, most of the cases I’m called in to consult on do not include celebrities. I have no particular expertise at working with celebrities, but I do have some expertise at working with the analysis and classification of evidence, which is what I’m doing here.”
“Are you trying to say that the fact that the accused in this case is Arrow Normand makes no difference at all?” The question came from a very young man all the way in the back of the room, and he was nothing like clean-cut. In fact, Gregor wondered what he’d done to get that hair. It looked as if he’d been electrocuted.
Gregor cleared his throat. “You are…?” he said.
The young man with the electric hair said, “I’m Bobby Gedowski, from Caught in the Crosshairs dot com. And I’ll repeat. Can you really say that the fact that this case is about Arrow Normand makes no difference at all? That you and the police are handling this the same way you’d handle a domestic disturbance in a trailer park?”
“No,” Gregor said, “but not necessarily for the kind of reasons you’re implying. A domestic disturbance, in a trailer park or elsewhere, isn’t usually a matter where it is difficult to unravel the facts of the case. The facts are presented to the officers who respond to the call. The officers may have to deal with differing claims of culpability, and who hit whom first, but almost always the universe of their investigation is right there in front of them, and there’s no need to go further afield. This case, like most of the ones I’m called in to consult on, contains a high level of ambiguity. Evidence is there, but its import isn’t clear. Some of the evidence is missing. What is and is not a fact is not clear. And in cases like that, whether they involve celebrities or not, it is in the interests of justice for everybody to be very careful. The system should be as good a system as we can make it. The fact that it can never be perfect, that it will convict the wrong person on occasion and release the wrong person on occasion, is no reason to stop trying to eliminate error in all its forms wherever we find it.”
The man who jumped up next was pudgy, middle-aged, and smug. “Lou Bandovan, Christian Reporter,” he said, without waiting for Gregor to call on him. “Wouldn’t you say that the disgraceful acts committed in this place are the result of a popular culture steeped in obscenity and lawlessness meeting up with an elite liberal culture committed to moral relativism?”
There were groans, and not just from the front of the room. Gregor didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t even sure that there was anything to say.
“Well,” he started, because he was sure he had to say something, “I don’t know about obscenity or relativism, but I do know that crime is a constant in all human societies, and murder especially is a constant. Some of the oldest anthropological artifacts are the bodies of men and women murdered millennia ago. In fact—”
Gregor didn’t have much to follow that “in fact.” He was spinning words in hopes that one of the reporters he thought he could trust would raise her hand. He was almost ready to get down on his knees and plead with the gentleman from MSNBC.
Then, at the very back of the room, an odd thing happened. There were a pair of double doors there, where the reporters had been let in before the start of the conference, and for a split second they pulled back and revealed the hall outside, along with two or three men in green blazers. Then the doors closed again. There were sounds from the hall. Somebody seemed to be shouting. Then the doors opened again, and Gregor saw, framed by the light coming in behind her, a very young woman with very red hair and the oddest assortment of clothes. She was poised and still for only a moment. Then she lurched forward, almost running, and fell into the last row of chairs.
“Shit,” she said, out loud, very much out loud. “Shit, shit, shit.”
The reporters were no longer the least bit interested in Gregor Demarkian. They were interested only in this young woman with her red hair and her odd clothes and this flailing performance she was putting on, falling into the lap of one person and then the other, pushing her way against the chairs instead of going around the block. She seemed to be trying to get to the front of the room, but that wasn’t entirely clear, because she was laughing and crying at the same time and cursing in the middle of all of it.
Finally, she got to a place in the middle of the sea of reporters, with all the cameras and their lights aimed at her face, and let out a long, piercing, wailing scream that could have broken ear drums. Gregor was sure that she’d managed to break his.
“Goddamn it!” the young woman screamed. “Will somebody around here fucking listen to me? Kendra Rhode is dead.”
Part III
Chapter One
1
Later, Gregor Demarkian would tell Bennis Hannaford that the scene around Kendra Rhode’s body had been “ crazy,” but that was almost as if he’d called the Mona Lisa “ cute.” Gregor had been at crazy crime scenes before. He’d been there in the dark when the Philadelphia Police Department had pulled an endless stream of bones out of a cellar, all thought to be the work of the Plate Glass Killer. He’d been in the
middle of a hurricane in North Carolina when a young woman brought her smashed and bleeding baby out of the rain and blamed the death of it on witches. He’d even been on the scene at an attempted assassination of a president of the United States. He’d never seen a crime scene completely wrecked before. It was so completely wrecked that nothing and nobody could put it straight, and nothing the police managed to find would ever be credible evidence in a court of law. These were not crime reporters they were dealing with. The words “reasonable doubt” meant nothing to them, except as the hinge of suspense in a courtroom drama, which, like all dramas, they found inherently unreal. They were, however, much better at knowing where the news was than any other reporters Gregor had ever met, and they were fast.
The woman who had come careening into the Versailles Room in the middle of the press conference was Marcey Mandret, and in the beginning the photographers were concentrated on her. They should have been. She had been one of their main targets for weeks, and there she was, not exactly sober, unsteady on her feet, half undressed, hair a fright,screaming at them. It didn’t take them long, however, to realize that Marcey Mandret was talking about Kendra Rhode, and Kendra Rhode was a much bigger and better target than this everyday pop tart who had been in the tabloids far too often for far too little reason. They were out the door in a shot, and Gregor found himself staring across a vast expanse of empty space with only the old-line print reporters in it, and not many of those.
It was Gregor who got to Marcey Mandret first, soon followed by one of the older women reporters.
“She’s in shock,” the woman said. “Did she say that Kendra Rhode was dead? How can Kendra Rhode be dead?”
Gregor could think of dozens of ways, and reasons, why Kendra Rhode could be dead, but he let it pass and tried to concentrate on this young woman. It was hard to identify what she was wearing. None of it seemed to go together, and none of it seemed to be useful to any present purpose. She was also crying, her head buried in her arms, her arms propped up against one of the folding seats.
The doors at the back opened up, and Stewart Gordon came in, striding, the way everybody remembered him striding across his spaceship on that tele vision series that assumed that manned space flight to other galaxies would take place in vehicles large enough to stage a political convention in. Stewart saw Marcey Mandret and walked right up to her, leaned over, and sighed. Then he straightened up.
“She’s supposed to be in the hospital,” he said. “We left her in the hospital. I talked to the doctor. She’s supposed to be there for two to three days.”
Marcey jerked her head up. “Kendra’s in the hospital. That’s where she is. Right at the bottom of the steps. And her head is on backward.”
“What?” Clara Walsh said.
Marcey had gone back to burying her head in her arms and sobbing, except that every once in a while she seemed to be giggling. It was hard to tell. All the sound coming out of her was muffled.
Stewart Gordon tapped the reporter on the shoulder to get her to move back, then gestured to Gregor, who moved back too. Clara Walsh and Bram Winder just stood there, which was all right, since there didn’t seem to be anything for them to do. Stewart knelt down on the floor and pulled Marcey up just a little.
“Calm down,” he said. “Take a deep breath.”
Marcey looked up at him. “Kendra’s dead. And if Kend-ra’s dead, that’s going to mean that Arrow’s dead, because there’s going to be nobody to say that Arrow couldn’t have been there when Mark was killed. I can’t say it, because I wasn’t there.”
“Wait,” Clara Walsh said. “Kendra Rhode could give Arrow Normand an alibi? And she didn’t? Why not?”
Stewart gestured frantically at Clara to be quiet, but Marcey was talking now, and it was obvious she had no intention of stopping. “She didn’t because she wanted to see if they’d give her the death penalty. Arrow. If they’d give Arrow the death penalty. She likes to get people in trouble and watch them squirm. She does. And now she’s dead, right there, I saw her. She’s lying there with her head on backward and she’s never going to be able to say and Arrow is going to go to the gas chamber and—”
“Lethal injection,” Clara Walsh said. “And I don’t think—”
“She’s just lying there,” Marcey said.
Stewart was more practical than any of the people who were supposed to be practical. Gregor was gratified to see it.
“Listen to me,” he told Marcey again. “You saw Kendra Rhode with her head on backward, which doesn’t surprise me a bit. It’s like The Exorcist. Possessed by demons seems to me to be just about right. But where did you see her? When did you see her?”
Marcey looked confused. “It was just now. I told you. I was trying to get out of the hospital without everybody seeing me, and there’s a way, going down these back halls and places, locker rooms, like that, and I was going around and around and I was at the back, which was good, because there were no paparazzi around the back. I just wanted to. I want to.” She looked confused.
“We’d better get over to the hospital,” Clara said. “Or, better yet, we’d better get Jerry Young and go. If there’s a body, or even if there isn’t—”
“And I went through these doors,” Marcey Mandret said, “and they were the kind they have in schools, you know, with the little window with the wire in it up near the top, and there she was, there she was, at the bottom of the stairs and she had her head on backward and she wasn’t breathing. I put my ear up to her chest and she wasn’t breathing.”
“Call Jerry Young, but call the hospital first,” Gregor said. “It sounds like Kendra Rhode fell down a flight of stairs. I don’t think we can count on Miss Mandret here to be accurate about the breathing—”
“I’m going,” Bram Winder said, and went.
“She’s not a liar,” Stewart Gordon said, more than a little indignant. “She’s a twit, and she’s a fool, and there are squirrels with better educations, but she’s not a liar. If she says she saw Kendra Rhode at the bottom of a staircase, she saw Kendra Rhode at the bottom of a staircase.”
“I’m sure she did,” Gregor said. “I’m just not sure she knows how to check for breathing, especially if the breathing is faint, which it can be after a bad fall.”
“Oh,” Stewart said.
“There was somebody at the top of the stairs,” Marcey said. “Way at the top, not just up at the next landing. And he was breathing very hard.”
“Did you see who it was?” Stewart asked.
Marcey shook her head. “I didn’t really look. I threw up. And then all I could think of was to find somebody, and the best place to find anybody in Oscartown is the inn, so I came here. I didn’t want to go to the front of the hospital and see the photographers again. I didn’t want. I didn’t know what. I’m sorry. I’m so cold. I want to go home. I want to go all the way home, but I can’t go there, because my father.
My father doesn’t talk to me. He says it’s all my fault. And it is. That’s the worst of it. It is.”
“What’s she talking about?” Clara Walsh demanded.
“We’d better get over to the hospital,” Gregor said. “We’d better find Kendra Rhode before the reporters do.”
2
Gregor liked to think that if he had really understood what was going on on Margaret’s Harbor, he would have behaved differently, that they all would have behaved differently, in the face of what really was a stampede. As it was, only Stewart knew what was going on, and he was frantic. He was so frantic, Gregor and Clara Walsh both moved instinctively to calm him down, as if what was needed in this circumstance was patience and deliberation.
“You don’t understand,” Stewart kept saying. “They do know where she is. They do and we don’t because it’s what they are. If we don’t get there immediately there’s not going to be a crime scene. There’s not even going to be a body.”
It seemed self-evidently true that the paparazzi couldn’t “know” where Kendra Rhode, or Kendra Rhode’s
body, was. They hadn’t even stayed long enough for Marcey Mandret to give away any of the details. Bram Winder was calling for backup just in case, but Gregor thought they needed only to follow Marcey’s lead to get in before most of the photographers did, if not all of them, and he said as much.
Stewart Gordon threw up his hands and threw back his head—a classic Commander Reesgesture, if there ever was one—and took off on his own.
Clara Walsh, Bram Winder, and Gregor started in the direction of the hospital, which was less than a city block and a half away, with Marcey as their guide. They got to the intersection of Main and Bell and turned right. They got to the intersection of Bell and Chabron and—
The hospital was on Chabron, set back from the road. The front door and its curving entryway were deserted, but the sliding glass doors at the emergency room entrance to the side had been broken. Little pellets of safety glass lay all over the sidewalk and the asphalt drive. Marcey Mandret blanched.
“Oh, God,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have come to the press conference, it was just that I couldn’t find anybody anywhere, everybody was gone, even Stewart was gone and—”
“What in the name of God is that sound?” Clara Walsh said.
Gregor couldn’t place the sound either, but it was more feral than otherwise and it seemed to be coming from the back. He stepped through the broken glass to find the emergency room’s waiting area completely deserted. He followed the sound and came upon Mike Ingleford looking crazed.
“I called the state police,” he said. “I told them we had a riot. It’s worse than a riot. There’s a woman in there. I think they killed her.”
