Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29)

by Jane Haddam

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  October 30

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Epilogue

  Also by Jane Haddam

  About the Author

  Copyright

  October 30

  It was almost Halloween, and out there in the world of normal, people were putting jack-o’-lanterns on their front steps and stuffed suits of clothes on their mailboxes. Bennis Hannaford Demarkian found herself wondering if what she was seeing was even allowed. She’d grown up in Bryn Mawr. They got fussy in Bryn Mawr about lawn signs and unraked leaves and whatever you wanted to call “blight.”

  It was early in the day, and bright. The houses sat back behind broad lawns. The light was the kind that made everything seem to have hard edges, including the leaves. Bennis couldn’t stop herself from wondering how she must look. She was driving a tangerine orange car that was not only highly visible, but also the wrong kind of car. A lot of trouble had been taken to make this part of town look rural, but it wasn’t really. There were no sidewalks, but there were people.

  Her mother used to warn her that it was a bad idea to run away from your background. No matter how hard you tried, you always made a mess of it. That was a long time ago, and Bennis hadn’t listened. She’d been too busy running away from her background.

  The GPS was winking at her, but she didn’t need to consult it. She’d been out this way twenty times in the last four days. She slowed down as she saw the very low, very small, very discreet sign that told her the driveway to the Glenwydd House was right up ahead. She wondered who’d decided that it was the ultimate in Upper Classness to pretend to be Welsh.

  The driveway was there, and the gate. Bennis pulled up next to it and rolled down her window. “Bennis Hannaford Demarkian,” she said to the guard.

  The guard consulted first a computer screen and then a written list. Then the gate went up. Glenwydd House was very, very discreet. It never asked you the name of the patient you’d come to see. It only checked to make sure you were one of the people Allowed to Come In.

  She was thinking in capitals today.

  The drive curved around and then around again. It was a silly drive, bad for ambulances, and they got a lot of ambulances at Glenwydd House. Bennis remembered the place from ages ago. It belonged first to a Cadwallader, and then, when something had happened that nobody spoke about, to a family named Finchley. God only knew what had happened to the Finchleys. They weren’t “real Main Line,” as people said in the old days. Nobody Bennis might know would have any news of them.

  She was also thinking in anachronisms. If she kept this up, she would start in complaining about the way nothing was the same and nothing ever would be. She would sound like she was eighty years old.

  She was, in fact, forty-six. The house came up out of the trees in front of her. It had been a castle once, in England. One of the Cadwalladers had it taken apart stone by stone and reassembled here. People complained that the rich of today were ostentatious and vulgar. The rich of today had nothing on the rich of the era of the robber barons.

  A wide parking lot with abnormally broad spaces had been carved out of what used to be a topiary front lawn. There wasn’t a single car in the spaces. There was a staff parking lot somewhere in the back. The kind of people who put their loved ones in Glenwydd House didn’t want to visit them.

  Loved ones. Bennis made a face.

  She pulled into the space closest to the narrow stone walk that led to the front door. She cut the engine and stared straight ahead, not ready to go on yet. If it was hard to understand how they got an ambulance up the drive, it was impossible to understand how they got a stretcher up that walk.

  Maybe they didn’t get stretchers up that walk. Maybe, when somebody died, they took him out the back, out the servants’ entrance, like—

  There was no “like.” Died kept reverberating in her head.

  She took off her seat belt and grabbed the tote bag in the seat next to her.

  Then she got out of the car and headed up the walk.

  Halfway to where she was going, she stopped. She put the tote bag on the ground. She bent over and pulled out the only thing in it: a big package of books and audiotapes, fastened together with thick rubber bands and carefully labeled in thick black marker ink: TIBOR KASPARIAN.

  It was cold. October was always cold in Pennsylvania. Wind went through her wild black hair. Cold made her neck muscles clench. She stood looking at the parcel for a long time. Agatha Christie. Boris Pasternak. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Dead.

  Dead.

  You didn’t take audiobooks to someone who was dead.

  Bennis dropped the parcel back into the tote bag and hefted the whole damned thing up again.

  PROLOGUE

  1

  Once, long ago, Father Tibor Kasparian had come to Cavanaugh Street on a temporary assignment, a sacrificial lamb meant to placate all sides in an impossible situation. Father Tibor himself was one side of that situation. He had appeared suddenly and out of nowhere from the never-never land of religious persecution, eyes sunk into the back of his head, weight barely enough to keep him standing upright. Priests used to come out of the old Soviet Union like that, and then the Church had done what it could for them. It had no other choice.

  By the time Tibor arrived, the situation was different. Persecution was still going on, but there were rules to the game. There were procedures. The Church was not expecting a ghost on its doorstep, one who needed not only help but affirmation.

  The other side of the situation was Cavanaugh Street itself, one of the oldest Armenian churches in America and, by then, one nobody wanted. In those days, all Armenian priests were trained in Armenia, and all of them had grown to adulthood in Armenia. They had expectations about the relationship between a priest and his parishioners. The priest should be the most educated person in the parish. He should be the intermediary between his parishioners and the outside world. His parishioners should defer to him on all things, even the naming of their children.

  When the bishops and the patriarchs asked their priests why they wouldn’t go to Cavanaugh Street, the priests had very good answers. The parish was “too worldly,” most of them said, or “the people are falling away from God.” One inventive priest claimed that he had visited there and found the place impossible. It was full of people with “Roman tendencies.” If there was one thing no Armenian priest was going to put up with, it was a parish full of people with “Roman tendencies,” the kind of people who would be Catholic if they could, but didn’t know how.

  The bishops listened to all this talk and said nothing to contradict it, even though they knew it wasn’t exactly true. The real problem with Cavanaugh Street
was both simple and unfixable. The people of Cavanaugh Street were, indeed, “worldly,” in the sense that they had a lot of money. What had once been a small immigrant Armenian enclave of tenement houses had changed over the years into a street of elegant town houses and co-ops as expensive to buy as a Harvard education and almost as expensive to rent.

  And it wasn’t the money alone. The first generation of immigrants had given way to a generation of American-born overachievers. That generation had given way to one where every last child was pushed at colleges and universities with famous names and serious social pretensions. By the time Father Tibor arrived, the street was full of people who not only thought they knew better than any immigrant priest from Armenia, but probably did.

  Tibor Kasparian took up residence in the cramped little apartment next to the old church, and a very odd thing happened. The people of Cavanaugh Street, who had driven away six priests in less than seventeen months, decided that they liked this one. The bishops waited patiently for the complaints to start rolling in, but it never happened. They sent observers, just in case Father Tibor was preaching the prosperity gospel or maybe Marxism instead of good solid orthodoxy. They could find nothing objectionable in his celebrations of the liturgy.

  Eventually, the hierarchy had decided it was best to leave well enough alone. The impossible parish had a priest it could live with. The office of the Eastern Diocese was not being flooded with reports about how the man had to be shipped back to Yerevan or angry Monday-morning phone calls about how the man was impossible. The Armenian Church in America was growing. There was a lot to do. The Church even had Web sites, and Armenian American experts to run them.

  Tibor Kasparian never asked why things worked out so well. He’d heard all about Cavanaugh Street before he got there. He’d heard how terribly they treated priests, and how little they had of piety and charity, and how they had become “Americanized” in the worst possible way. Then he showed up at the church door, and a small woman in an enormous chinchilla coat had taken his books out of his right hand, shaken the hand vigorously, and said, “Valley of the Dolls? I love Valley of the Dolls. Wherever did you find a copy at this late date?”

  Tibor would have told her where he’d found the copy if she’d stopped talking long enough to listen. She hadn’t, and she’d made no comment on the rest of the books, which included both Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics in Greek and Saint Thomas’s Summa in Latin.

  On the morning of September 9, Tibor got dressed in the oversized bedroom of the new rectory apartment that the parish had built him when they rebuilt the old church. There were too many mirrors in the room, which he did not like to look into. He hadn’t been all that attractive when he was a young and healthy man. These days, he was neither young nor particularly healthy, and he thought he looked like the less colorful kind of garden gnome. Still, the mirrors were a fact of life, along with the Jacuzzi built for eight and the refrigerator the size of a railway transport vehicle. He wasn’t going to complain about them.

  Somewhere out in the foyer, his bells were chiming. He asked himself if he looked “professional” this morning. He decided that he did not look like a homeless person, which was better than he did three out of seven days a week. Then he made his way out through the stacks of books and into the hall.

  The hall was also full of stacks of books. So was the living room and the dining room, and the kitchen beyond that. So was the foyer. The books were of every possible kind and in almost every possible language. There were the works of the Church fathers in Greek. There was that old copy of the Summa in Latin that he’d brought with him. There were books on history in English, German, and French. There was Dostoyevsky in Russian and a complete set of the Harry Potter novels in the original English. There were books on art and books on music and books of literary criticism. There were even cookbooks, although Lida Arkmanian—she of the chinchilla coat—always said that giving Father Tibor a cookbook was like giving a mad bomber a guide to explosives.

  In the foyer were the books he hadn’t read yet, and a small stack of books he’d tried to read but couldn’t make himself finish. On the top of that pile was something called Fifty Shades of Grey. It embarrassed him just to look at it.

  The bells chimed again, and as they did, Tibor could hear giggling just beyond the door. He opened up to let in Donna Moradanyan Donahue and her small son. Her older one, Tommy, must already be out at the Ararat. If Donna didn’t hurry, one of the Melajian girls would stuff Tommy full of pastry and he’d be wired all day at school.

  Donna wasn’t hurrying. She was decidedly young and decidedly healthy, and the small boy she had with her was positively ecstatic. Tibor tried to pick him up, but he raced away into the living room and could be heard squealing from there.

  “He’s happy this morning,” Tibor said.

  “He’s always happy,” Donna said.

  She went into the living room and corralled the child, who let loose with another stream of giggles. Then she came back into the foyer and looked Tibor over from head to foot.

  “There’s something wrong,” she said.

  Tibor took his sweater off the brass coatrack that had been a gift from Bennis Hannaford Demarkian four Christmases ago. It was still warm this early in September, but he got cold easily. He got cold for the same reason he looked like a garden gnome.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Donna asked him. “You’re not getting sick or something?”

  “I’m not getting sick or something,” Tibor said. “If we don’t hurry up, Tommy will be full of sugar.”

  “Tommy’s with Russ,” she said absently, meaning her husband, but not Tommy’s father. She was still staring him up and down.

  Then she opened the door to the hall and ushered the small boy out.

  “I still say there’s something wrong,” she said.

  Tibor didn’t waste his time arguing the point.

  2

  Judge Martha Handling didn’t like going into court early, and she didn’t like staying late. In fact, for the last five years, she hadn’t liked going into court at all. Actually, it was much worse than that. For the last five years, Martha hadn’t liked going much of anywhere.

  This morning, she pulled her little Ford Focus into the parking space with her name on it behind the court building, cut the engine, and made herself take a deep breath. She knew it was ridiculous to get this upset about what everybody else took for granted, but she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t even believe that everybody else took it for granted, no matter how often they said so. Back when she was in college—Bryn Mawr, class of 1976—she’d taken a sociology course on the history of law enforcement, and in that course she was introduced to a thing called the Panopticon.

  The Panopticon was either a prison or a plan for a prison where the guards could keep constant and uninterrupted surveillance of everything the prisoners did. Martha couldn’t remember whether the prison had ever actually been built, but she did know that its principle had surely come to pass, and not just in prisons.

  These days, the cameras were everywhere. They were in restaurants. They were in grocery stores. They were even pointed at the street here and there. Most of all, they were in the courthouse. They would have been in the dressing room she used to enrobe if she hadn’t had a complete nutcase fit and put a stop to it.

  The problem, of course, was that she wasn’t sure she had put a stop to it. She didn’t like the people who worked for the City of Philadelphia these days. She didn’t like the people who worked for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, either. She wouldn’t put it past any of them to lie straight to her face and go on filming anyway.

  She had her cell phone out on the front passenger seat, where she could grab it in an emergency, and she had the other cell phone out, too—the one she bought at the kiosk in the King of Prussia Mall. That was not entirely satisfactory. Martha was sure there were security cameras all over the mall, including some trained on that kiosk. There could be a tape somewhere
with a picture of her on it, buying that very cell phone.

  Then there was the whole GPS tracking thing, or whatever it was. They could tell where a call had been made and where the person who received it had been. It didn’t matter how “untraceable” the phone was if it could in fact be traced to someplace you were known to be. That meant she couldn’t use it to call someone from home, and she could use it in the car only if she was moving. She could not use it while she was parked right here behind the courthouse, no matter how much she wanted to.

  She stared at the prepaid phone for a bit and then reached over to put it into her bag. She would have used nothing but prepaid phones if she thought she could get away with it, but in the end, she’d decided that wouldn’t be a good idea. A woman in her position was expected to have a cell phone. She was expected to have an expensive one. That was how Martha had ended up with the iPhone 5, which she honestly felt was more annoying than functional.

  Martha stuffed that phone into her bag, too, then picked up the bag and grabbed her briefcase. There were five security cameras in this lot. One was trained on the front gate. The rest were installed to make sure all parts of the lot could be seen at all times. She’d heard once that there was no such thing as a perfect surveillance system. Every system of security cameras had a blind spot.

  If that was true, Martha had never been able to find one.

  She got out of the car and locked it up behind her. She sent up a little fume of annoyance on the subject of John Henry Newman Jackman, the city’s mayor. In New York, Bloomberg and Giuliani had made the city nearly as safe as an upscale suburb, but Jackman was a first-class ass. He didn’t care if the city burned to the ground, so long as his base was happy.

  And Martha knew exactly whom his base consisted of.

  She went up the small flight of concrete steps to the courthouse’s back door. There was a security camera there, and she got out her little can of black spray paint. She aimed it at the camera lens far over her head. Then she double-checked it to make sure she’d gotten it all.