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

by Jane Haddam

  “And he left word that he wouldn’t talk to me? And all he’ll say is—?”

  “Is that he has the right to remain silent,” Bennis said. “Yes. According to what the people in John Jackman’s office have been able to find out, anytime anybody tries to talk to him, all he’ll do is take the Fifth. But Gregor, it’s not just that he won’t talk to any of us—he won’t talk to anybody. They had a guy come down from the Public Defender’s Office, and Tibor wouldn’t talk to him either. He just keeps saying he has the right to remain silent.”

  “You’re right,” Gregor said. “Whatever’s going on here, it’s not that Tibor murdered somebody.”

  Bennis brightened. “Do you mean that? Are you sure?”

  “I’m absolutely sure,” Gregor said. “Unfortunately, I don’t know why I’m sure.”

  Bennis’s face fell again. She got up from her chair to tend to the coffee. Gregor could see that she had also started crying again.

  THREE

  1

  By the time Janice Loftus was released from the courthouse, she had been hanging around for four hours, and she was fighting mad. Even the more than slightly relieving fact that she had not been required to go down to a police station somewhere didn’t help. Rights were much more than being left alone, no matter what those idiots in the Teabaggers Party said, but being left alone was certainly a right. Janice had not been left alone. She had been harrassed and intimidated. She had been accused of a dozen things she couldn’t possibly have done. She had been asked questions nobody had a right to ask and been told—all right, not outright—that if she didn’t give the answers, it would be very suspicious.

  Very suspicious.

  They really thought she was going to fall for that kind of thing. No wonder so many people of color were in jail. It would be hard to stay out of jail if your schools absolutely sucked and you barely had a fourth-grade education and you were subjected to tactics like that.

  In a free society, your thoughts were you own. It didn’t matter what you thought. It only mattered what you did. Or sometimes it did matter what you thought, and America wasn’t a free society, and—

  Janice couldn’t think straight. Every muscle in her body was twitching, going off like a string of firecrackers. It took everything she had not to run down the street. It took more than everything she had not to say something nasty to the reporters who ringed the building and crowded the halls. There was something that would be all over the place in a minute. The police had had no business accusing her of taking that video, and no business confiscating her cell phone as evidence.

  She was around the corner and down the street and—well, she didn’t know where she was, exactly. She’d been walking without looking where she was going. Now that she looked around, she thought she might have landed in a very bad neighborhood. It was wrong to categorize people by what they looked like but even so, the people around her right now made her very nervous. She was the only white person she could see.

  The important thing was not to be afraid. Predators against women were always male, and they were always on the lookout for fear. You couldn’t look intimidated. You couldn’t give out vibes that said you were intimidated.

  The taxi emerged out of nowhere. It could have been sent by God in a poof of smoke but Janice didn’t believe in God. God was not just the opium of the people. God was the Big Lie that kept everybody else in line.

  Janice ran out into the street and raised her hand. The cab pulled over immediately.

  Janice grabbed the door and hopped in. She shut the door behind her with a slam. She gave the address of the offices of Pennsylvania Justice. Then she buried her head in her bag so that she couldn’t see what was going on outside.

  As an example of white skin privilege, getting that cab had been pretty spectacular. Janice was willing to bet the cab wouldn’t have stopped for anybody else on the street.

  The offices of Pennsylvania Justice were apparently not very far away. At least, the cab didn’t take a long time, and the meter didn’t go up much. Janice tried to think, but she really couldn’t remember where anything was in relation to anything else.

  She carefully counted out too much money and put it into the cabdriver’s hand. She got out of the cab and shut the door carefully and slowly behind her. The worst of the evidence of shock and angry was draining away. She was able to walk slowly toward the door in front of her without giving the impression that she was afraid of the cabdriver and wanted to get away from him quickly.

  Pennsylvania Justice had a storefront office with a plate glass window, with private cubicles in the back for anything that shouldn’t be seen by the general public. They wanted to encourage walk-ins, people with problems who might be intimidated by the stiff formality of an ordinary office.

  Janice went through the plate glass door and looked around. There was a waiting area with cheap plastic chairs and no one in them. There were three even cheaper desks where one man and two women were working away at computers. The computers were anchored to the desks with thick chains.

  One of the women looked up from whatever she was working on and said, “Oh! Janice. Are you all right? We’ve all been so worried about you. And Kasey wants to talk to you. We’ve been calling you and calling you, and you never answered your phone.”

  “I don’t have my phone,” Janice said, the indignation rising up in her throat like bad shellfish. “I had to leave it at the door. And then I ran out of there and I forgot it. And now I don’t know if I’m ever going to get it back.”

  “Oh, my God,” the other woman said. “Are you all right? Did they get rough with you?”

  There was a rumble and a bump and another woman came out from the back, where the private cubicles were. She was extremely tall, and extremely slender, extremely electric. Her hair was a cascade of red that ended at her waist.

  “Oh, Kasey,” Janice said. “Oh, thank God.”

  “They took Janice’s cell phone,” one of the women said. “Just look at her. She’s shaking.”

  Kasey looked her up and down, and Janice felt immediately better. There were people who said it was a bad idea to have Kasey as head of Pennsylvania Justice, because she fed into all the stereotypes that said no organization could succeed without playing into the sexual demands of men, but Janice wasn’t having it.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Kasey said. Her voice had an odd flat tone Janice was never able to define. “We’ve been watching the news back here all afternoon. Did they rough you up? Physically?”

  “Oh, no,” Janice said. “There wasn’t anything physical. But there wouldn’t have been, would there? There were security cameras everywhere.”

  “Probably,” Kasey agreed. “Come on back here and talk. We’ll get you a cup of coffee or chamomile tea or whatever it is you’re drinking these days.”

  “Chamomile tea,” Janice said. She was very grateful that Kasey had remembered. Most people in her position wouldn’t have. “Except maybe there weren’t security cameras everywhere, because some of them looked like they had paint on the lenses. Does that sound crazy?”

  Kasey turned back toward the cubicles, and Janice followed her.

  “It really was incredible,” Janice said as they wound their way to the very back. Kasey’s cubicle was no bigger than any of the others. That was the kind of person she was.

  “They kept us all round forever, and they questioned us over and over and over again, and that man, the one in the video, the one who did it, all he’d do was take the Fifth. And then there was my student—”

  “Your student?”

  “Oh, yes,” Janice said. “That was why I was there. I drove my student. Petrak. Petrak Maldo—Maldonian? I’m sorry. It’s one of those incredibly long East European names and I can never get it right. His brother was having a hearing about something, I don’t know what. Stefan. That’s the brother. He was undocumented and it was Martha Handling he was appearing before. Petrak doesn’t have a car so I offered to drive him. And, all right,
I’ll admit it. I wanted to get a look at how she operated.”

  “Did you?” Kasey asked.

  Janice shook her head. “It turns out that juvenile hearings are closed. Or this one was. They wouldn’t let me in.”

  “So you went down to see Martha in her chambers?”

  “Oh, no,” Janice said.

  The cubicle was invaded by another woman, this one very small and intense. She had cup of tea. “That’ll make you feel better!” she said chirpily.

  Then she went out. Janice wondered if she was an intern. Interns were often chirpy.

  “Janice?” Kasey said. “How did you end up in Martha Handling’s chambers?”

  “It was just an accident, really. There’s this guard at a table near the door, and he told me I couldn’t go in, and there were a lot of other people trying to get in, so he went and talked to them. And there were two halls on either side of the front door without any guards on them, so I just started wandering.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Yes, of course, just like that. They’ve got to know that themselves, don’t you see, because there really were security cameras everywhere. I could see them the whole time. Except there was something strange some of them. They had paint over the lenses. Little blobs of paint. Can you understand that?”

  “It would explain why they don’t have enough security tape footage to know what actually happened,” Kasey said.

  “Honestly, it was just so odd. I mean, all the cameras, and the paint, and then I got to the door and her name was on it and I thought I’d just go in and see. And there he was, sitting in all that blood and with that gavel in his hand.”

  “And you screamed your head off,” Kasey said.

  “Not at the beginning,” Janice said. “At the beginning I just stared at it. I was trying to remember it. It’s like you always told us. Keep as much of the evidence as you can secure. So I did. Except there really wasn’t much evidence that I could get my hands on, but I took some notes. And it was a good thing I did, too, because, well, look at this.”

  Janice hiked up her poncho just a little and flipped at the base of her skirt. It was encrusted with something dark and hard, and the dark and hard stuff went up the skirt proper almost to her waist.

  “Blood,” Kasey said.

  “Her blood,” Janice said. “I have no idea how it happened. It got very crazy and there were tons of people wandering around even before the police got there and there was blood everywhere and the next thing I knew, there was blood on my skirt. And then, well, you know how things get. They just got worse.”

  “Did you also post a video to YouTube?”

  “Oh! The video! I heard about that, but I didn’t get a chance to see it. A video of that man murdering Martha Handling. They were all talking about it after a while. It’s supposed to be absolutely gruesome. But I thought that was a security tape.”

  “No,” Kasey said. “I’ve seen it. The one thing it is almost certainly not is a security tape.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you,” Janice said. “I’ve got no idea. But there’s something else. And I can’t help feeling a little guilty. Except not guilty, if you know what I mean.”

  Kasey looked unmistakably puzzled.

  Janice plowed on: “It’s better this way, don’t you see? Murder is a terrible thing, and that man is a priest on top of everything, but Martha Handling is dead and that means that almost every juvenile defendant in the system is going to be better off. There isn’t another judge in the system that’s as harsh as Martha Handling was, at least not in Philadelphia. So maybe it was a pretty fair trade.”

  “A pretty fair trade,” Kasey said.

  Janice tossed her head. It didn’t work so well as when she was younger. It had no effect on Kasey Holbrook at all.

  “Sometimes,” Janice said, “I think we’re just too polite. We want to act like ladies. Sometimes I think that ending injustice directly is the only thing that will ever work.”

  2

  When Mark Granby left the courthouse, he started walking in a straight line. He was lucky. He was out and on the street when the first cop cars pulled up, their sirens screaming and their tires squealing and the whole world stopping to watch what they did next. It was one of those moments that no one in their lives is supposed to have. He felt like he was in an action movie. There he was, the villain, right there, standing on the edge of the crowd and watching the chaos unfold.

  Mark liked action movies, as far as that went, but he’d never thought they bore much resemblance to reality. Real villains wouldn’t stand around and watch. He was sure of it. Real villains would get their business done and get the hell out of Dodge as soon as possible.

  Mark had been standing on the curb when the police cars pulled up because he hadn’t been able to figure out what he was supposed to do next. He did not consider himself a victim. He had done absolutely nothing but find the body and not report it to anybody. That might be against the law, but it wasn’t some kind of big moral deal.

  If he ever got stuck having to answer questions about it, that was what he would tell them—that and nothing else. They would never be able to prove anything else, no matter how hard they tried. He was pretty sure they would never be able to prove he was in the room in the first place, unless they were already looking for him. He had left fingerprints. He had left fingerprints everywhere. He hadn’t been able to help himself.

  He walked and walked, always going in a straight line, never paying attention to anything he didn’t have to. He had no idea how long he had been walking. He had no idea where he was. The only thing he was sure of was that he hadn’t found it, and if he hadn’t found it, somebody else would.

  He had reached the point where he wasn’t really breathing anymore. His chest hurt. He felt as if it were about to crack open. He had never been in really good shape. These days he was in really bad shape, except that he wasn’t all that overweight, at least as overweight as people he worked with.

  He came to an abrupt stop near a mailbox and looked around. Given how long he’d been walking, he was sure he was far enough away that nothing about his being here could be taken as indication that he had ever been there.

  “Here” was one of those “mixed” neighborhoods the magazines always talked about when they talked about Philadelphia. There was a McDonald’s on one side of the street and a Starbucks on the other. There was a Panera. There were small shops selling art supplies and other small shops selling drug accessories. In the window of the store with the drug accessories was a big pile of books with the title Best Bongs. The bong on the cover had been made out of an eggplant.

  Mark had lived in Philadelphia long enough to know that the neighborhoods were only superficially mixed. The great Philadelphia racial divide didn’t ease up for anybody. Standing where he was, Mark could see the patrons going in and out of McDonald’s and the patrons going in and out of Starbucks. All the people going into McDonald’s or coming out of it were black. All the patrons going in and out of Starbucks were white. It was like the entire city of Philadelphia had signed up to be in some kind of racial stereotype enforcement project.

  Mark didn’t actually like Starbucks. On the other hand, he was trying very hard not to call attention to himself. He headed into the Starbucks.

  All Starbucks looked alike, just as all McDonald’s looked alike. That was the first rule of chain store restaurants. Mark bought some kind of coffee he didn’t understand and headed for a little round table at the back. He took a swig of it right before he sat down. It tasted, as the man said, like goblin piss.

  The store was mostly empty except for a few people who had converged at the counter. That was exactly what he needed. He got out his cell phone and called Beth. Beth picked up immediately, she must have seen the caller ID before she’d heard the ring.

  “Where are you?” Mark asked her.

  “I’m at work,” Beth said. “But it’s all right, really, there’s nobody much here at the moment. Where are you? I’
ve been looking at the news, I’ve been looking—they say—”

  “Shut up,” Mark said. “I know you say there isn’t anybody around, but there may be somebody you can’t see. Just listen to me.”

  “I am listening,” Beth said. “I’m just scared to death. Wasn’t that the woman—?”

  “Shut up,” Mark said again.

  Beth made a strangled little noise, but after that, there was nothing.

  “Listen,” Mark said again. “I’m not exactly in a position to talk, either. I’m in a Starbucks. I don’t know where exactly, but nowhere near the courthouse. The bad news was that I was near the courthouse. In fact, I was in it—”

  “Oh, my God,” Beth said. “Oh, my God. I knew it. I just knew it. I kept looking at the Web sites and there she was and there was that talk we had this morning and I just knew—”

  “Shut up. The bad news is there are security cameras all over that damned place and they have to have some pictures of me somewhere. The good news is that there’s no reason at all for these people to know who I am or to think I’m anything but a regular person in the courthouse to do some business. Got it?”

  “Yes, Mark, I know, but—”

  “Forget the buts. There’s no reason for anybody to know. Even if everything else we were worried about were true, even if she talked to somebody already, even if there’s some kind of federal investigation going on—any of that—it doesn’t matter. I’m not a high-profile figure. I’m not recognizable on sight. If we just shut up and stay shut up, they should never figure out I was ever there.”

  “The news sites say they have a suspect in custody,” Beth said. “They say it’s that man, the one who you said was messing with everything. The priest person. He’s going to know who you are, isn’t he? He’s going to be able to tell them about you.”