by Jane Haddam
And then, in spite of all those precautions, he still often found himself in the position of being resented and obstructed at every turn.
This afternoon, Gregor was more than aware that he had no official standing, at least not publicly. And he didn’t kid himself about what his unofficial standing would bring in its wake. He was, in this case, everything he shouldn’t be: He was a close friend of the prime suspect. He was a close friend of the mayor, which made him a representative of an interfering outside political force. He had a big public reputation, which made him a glory hound. He was the last person Homicide would want to see.
Gregor said none of this to George Edelson as they crossed to the building where they were to have their appointment with the two detectives who had been handed the case, but he would have been very surprised if it hadn’t occurred to Edelson himself.
“They’re good men,” Edelson kept assuring him. “First-rate professionals. Lots of experience.”
Gregor made a noncommittal noise. He’d have preferred two men with less experience and no bullheadedness, but the chances that he would ever have gotten something like that were nearly nil. You didn’t put two new men on a case that was going to suck up national attention.
“I know you probably feel that they’re jumping to conclusions,” George said, “but I can assure you, they are not—and they never have done any such thing. It’s just that this case, well. This case does look—”
“Open and shut,” Gregor said. “I know.”
Gregor thought he was ready for what he could expect, but he let Edelson lead him through the long corridors of the Homicide Division without protesting. When had every police department and Social Services office and Department of Motor Vehicles building become a warren of corridors made out of pasteboard and put up on rollers? Had something happened to architecture and aesthetics when he wasn’t looking?
Gregor followed Edelson into an actual corridor, with real walls, and then down a single flight of heavily fire-protected steps to an open area full of round tables with laminated tops that were peeling in every direction.
“It’s what passes around here for a lunchroom,” Edelson explained. “You’ve got to bring your own.”
The room was empty except for two young men sitting at the back. Both of them were thin, short, and dark. Both of them were very upset.
“There they are,” Edelson said.
Then he walked himself and Gregor up to the table where the two young men were sitting and said, “Tony, Ray, this is Gregor Demarkian.”
Tony and Ray looked up from where they were sitting and made noncommittal grunting sounds. Gregor had no idea which one was which.
“So,” George Edelson said. “We should get started. You two are busy. I’m busy. Mr. Demarkian is busy.”
This time, there wasn’t even a noncommittal grunt. This was much worse than Gregor had been expecting.
George Edelson pulled out a chair. Gregor stopped him before he could sit down.
“Do us both a favor,” Gregor said. “Go wander around someplace for half an hour.”
George Edelson looked startled. “I don’t think that would be a good idea, do you? John said—”
“I can guess what John said,” Gregor said, “and he means well, but the best thing you can do right now is to get lost for half an hour. Or forty-five minutes. Go wait for me somewhere. Play something on your cell phone.”
Tony and Ray were watching all this very carefully, but they were not moving. They weren’t even blinking.
George Edelson looked from one to the other and then at Gregor. He looked resigned. “All right,” he said. “If that’s the way you want to play it. I think you’re wrong.”
“If I’m wrong, I can always come and get you and we can start all over again.”
“Right,” George Edelson said. “But I know these two, and you don’t.” Then he took himself off, moving very slowly, as if he expected to be called back any minute.
Gregor waited until George Edelson was all the way out the door, and then turned to Tony and Ray. “Which of you is which?” he asked them. “Tony who, and Ray who.”
The slightly shorter one stirred. “Tony Monteverdi,” he said. “That’s Ray Berle.”
“Fine,” Gregor said. He pulled out one of the molded plastic chairs and sat down. “Do you think we can cut through the horse manure right away and then get down to business? You two don’t want me here, you don’t think I should be here, and you resent like hell the implication that the mayor doesn’t think you can do your jobs.”
Ray looked more surprised than George Edelson had when Gregor told him to get lost.
Tony looked skeptical. “If you think you can pull bull like that and smooth this over, you’re wrong,” he said. “We know who you are. We know what your reputation is. At least you’re not some kind of frigging amateur. But you don’t belong here. It’s just wrong.”
“I agree,” Gregor said.
“Then you’re going to go?” Tony said.
“No,” Gregor said. “The man who is probably my closest friend on earth has been arrested for murder. He’s behaving like—”
“A world-class asshole?” Ray suggested.
“A something,” Gregor admitted. “A lunatic, maybe. And not like himself. He’s been accused and he’s behaving erratically, and I don’t know why. You think he’s guilty. I don’t. But it doesn’t matter which of us is right. In either case, I’d still want to know what was going on.”
“What bugs me,” Tony said, “is the only reason you think he isn’t guilty is you’ve known him forever and you think he couldn’t do something like this. But you’re wrong. We see it every day. Almost everybody who murders anybody has a pack of relatives and friends who say he couldn’t have done it, no way. People do things nobody would expect them to do. They do them all the time.”
“And if he did this,” Gregor said, “I’ll find out about it. And then I’ll know. But I can’t know if I don’t have the facts.”
“Honest to God,” Ray said. “I’d have thought that video would be enough for anybody.”
“Do me a favor,” Gregor said. “Skip the video for a moment. Explain the times.”
Tony shifted in his seat. He looked a little less rigid. Gregor mentally crossed his fingers.
“All right,” Tony said. “What about the times?”
“Start with the basics,” Gregor said. “The judge was in the courtroom originally? She was in the courtroom when Tibor Kasparian got there?”
“No,” Ray said. “She had an earlier case. She heard that case and she finished early, but they hadn’t brought the Maldovanian kid over yet. They usually bring them all over together, it’s more efficient, but that day there was some holdup. I think it had something to do with the Maldovanian kid and Immigration. Handling finished her first case and couldn’t call the second one, because the kid wasn’t there, so she went to her chambers.”
“Her chambers is the room she was killed in?” Gregor said.
“Yeah,” Tony said.
“And that was when, exactly?” Gregor asked.
“About ten thirty,” Ray said.
“About ten thirty,” Gregor repeated. “And her body was found when?”
“Eleven forty,” Ray said.
“So, we’ve got about an hour and ten minutes where we don’t know what was happening to her.”
“We know she was being murdered, Mr. Demarkian,” Tony said. “I get the reasonable doubt thing, but we definitely know she was being murdered.”
“We know she was being murdered,” Gregor said, “but you know as well as I do that we can’t pinpoint time of death even as close to an hour and ten minutes. The best we can do here is say she was killed between ten thirty and eleven forty, because at one end of that time she was seen alive, and at the other end of that time she was found dead. Do you know who was in the building at ten thirty?”
Tony looked indignant. “Dozens of people were in the building at ten th
irty. It’s a courthouse. And it’s a courthouse for juveniles, so there are social workers and child psychologists and I don’t know who else all over the place.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Let me put it another way. There were security cameras?”
“Some,” Ray said. “Not as many as you’d think. There are a lot of privacy issues with juveniles. So there’s a security camera right at the door, that tells you who goes in and out. And there’s one in the foyer right at the start of everything. And then there’s one in each of the corridors to the right and the left. There’s also one at the end of the corridor to the right, because that’s where the restrooms are.”
“People think they can do all kinds of fancy stuff in the restrooms,” Tony said.
“And?”
“We have pictures of about forty people who came in through the front door that morning and who then went down the corridor to the bathrooms,” Ray said. “The way the cameras are positioned, you can’t actually tell who goes into one of the bathrooms and who just keeps going into the next corridor, and unfortunately—”
“The camera in the next corridor had been tampered with,” Tony said.
“We do have some blurry stuff from that camera,” Ray said. “We think a total of seven people went down that corridor. Not including Judge Handling. She didn’t use that corridor, as far as we can tell. There’s a door behind the judge’s bench in every courtroom and it leads directly into the corridor where the chambers are.”
“And you could see, clearly, that Father Tibor Kasparian used that corridor?” Gregor asked.
“Hell, Mr. Demarkian. Everybody used that corridor,” Ray said. “Father Kasparian. The Maldovanian kid’s brother. That woman who started screaming and brought the police down on the scene.”
“Janice Loftus,” Tony said.
“Yeah, Dr. Janice Loftus,” Ray said. “There’s a good two dozen people we don’t know who they are yet. There are other people we know who they are but we don’t think they matter. Attorneys. Law enforcement and court staff.”
“But you are sure that Father Tibor Kasparian was one of these people,” Gregor said.
“Sure,” Ray said. “He’s one of the ones we’ve got twice. The first time was at ten forty-two. The second time was at eleven fifteen.”
“What about coming back?” Gregor asked. “If the camera caught people going to the bathroom, wouldn’t it catch them leaving?”
“Leaving can be harder to figure out,” Ray said. “The camera’s pointing the wrong way. You get people’s backs. Sometimes you can recognize them, but sometimes you can’t. If they’re dressed in a sort of nondescript way, and there are a lot of people milling around, it can be hard to pick out particular people and be sure of it.”
“We’ve got Father Kasparian pegged going down the corridor the first time,” Tony said. “Then we’ve got him going down it again the second time. But we can’t find him coming back up after the first time. That’s going to be a windfall to discovery, if Kasparian ever gets his act together.”
“Unless he pleads out,” Ray said.
“He’s not going to plead out,” Tony said. “He’s already said he isn’t going to plead out. He doesn’t want to plead at all.”
“Still,” Ray said. “I bet it’s coming.”
“This is what I want you to do for me,” Gregor said. “I want you to list everybody who appears on that camera starting at ten thirty and going all the way to eleven forty. Every single person. Even if you can’t identify them. Then I want you to get me—can you send me the video from the camera? That’s possible, isn’t it?”
Tony and Ray gave Gregor a look that said, plain as day, it was possible, but neither of them had the least idea of how to do it.
2
They went back upstairs to the Homicide Division proper, and found George Edelson waiting patiently on a chair in the corner. On second thought, Gregor decided that Edelson was not being so patient as he seemed. His fingers were drumming against his knees. His feet were pumping up and down on the balls, making his knees look like pistons.
“Well?” he said when Gregor came in behind Tony and Ray.
Tony explained in just enough words to convey the nature of the operation, but not quite enough to make it clear. Then he went over to a cubicle and sat down. “This is mine,” he said. Then he logged in to his computer.
The cubicle was stacked with files, on the sides of the desk and on the floor. There was a small old-fashioned filing cabinet in one corner. The top of the CPU was also covered with files. The monitor, being a flat screen, couldn’t hold them.
“The best way I can figure how to do this,” Tony said, “is to forward the video to your phone. I can do that with videos on my phone. I don’t see why I couldn’t do that from this computer. It occurs to me, though, that there’s something else you might want to see.”
“What’s that?” Gregor asked.
“We’ve been putting together a minute-by-minute schedule of everybody who came in and out of that corridor, to the extent that we know who they are,” Tony said. “We haven’t gotten very far yet, and it’s taking frigging forever—”
“We were talking about it right before you two showed up,” Ray said. “We thought we’d get some people to help us with it.”
“Over here,” Ray said, pointing to the next cubicle.
There was a picture next to the computer monitor of Ray with a young woman and two young boys. Gregor presumed they were his family.
Ray logged on to his computer and then brought up a file.
Even with a truly spectacular level of computer illiteracy, Gregor could tell when something was taking forever to load, and the document Ray was trying to bring up was taking forever. Ray seemed to be no more patient about it than anybody else.
“We turned it into a PDF file,” he said. “I hate PDF files.”
“You didn’t put it up as a PDF file,” Tony said. “You put it up as a docx file. Got it. Now I just need to send it.”
Gregor went back to Tony’s booth. What showed on the screen was a single still picture, blurry and indistinct, of a lot of people in a corridor.
“Anybody we know?” Gregor asked. There wasn’t anyone on the screen he could recognize.
“There isn’t anybody on this frame,” Tony said. “But if you look through the entire tape, you’ll find a few. You’ll find Father Kasparian, twice. There’s the brother of the kid that was on trial. And there’s the lawyers, the prosecutors, and what’s his name, the one who wanted to be the lawyer for Father Kasparian—”
“Russ Donahue,” Gregor said.
“Right,” Tony said. “We’re going to have to go and try to identify everybody we can, but just looked at the frame. There are dozens of them. And they’re moving every minute. We did get a couple of interesting outliers, though.”
“Got it,” Ray said.
Gregor went back to Ray’s cubicle. On the screen was an enormous list of numbers printed in a column, and next to them, every once in a while, were names.
10:30
Russell Donahue
Catherine Arnold
John Richard Magnini
10:31
Janice Loftus
Martin Seligman
Marlynne Cole
Co’Dann Jackson
10:32
Stuart Creel
Lorraine Czelowski
Mark Granby
Susan Chen
Sharon Chen
Gregor sat back. “What is this thing?” he asked. “You’re looking at the tapes and listing everybody you see minute by minute?”
“That’s the idea,” Ray said.
“You’re right, it is going to take forever,” Gregor said. “And does it make any sense? Granted it’s thorough, but it hardly seems worth the effort. Tibor’s already been arraigned. You’re in the business of supplying evidence to the prosecutor’s office. Why would you—?”
“Got it,” Tony said. “The video should be on yo
ur phone.” He slid backwards in his chair until he got to Ray’s cubicle. “We started off fooling around with it,” he said, “and if we’d come up completely blank, we’d have quit. But it’s like I said. We found some interesting outliers.”
“Right off the bat,” Ray said. “In the first couple of minutes.”
“So what are you trying to tell me?” Gregor asked. “You’ve changed your minds? You’re not sure Tibor murdered Martha Handling?”
“Whoo boy,” George Edelson said.
“We’re as sure as we can be that Tibor Kasparian murdered Martha Handling,” Tony said, “but we aren’t the kinds of sons of bitches people make us out to be. We want to be thorough. We want to be right. And, like I said, we did come up with a couple of outliers.”
“And we aren’t close to having everybody identified yet,” Ray said. “There are an awful lot of people going down that hallway and disappearing for minutes at a time, longer than that, even disappearing forever. Without the backup from the other cameras, we just can’t be sure. So here we are.”
“And where are we?” Gregor asked.
Ray tapped the screen. “There’s Janice Loftus, for one thing,” he said.
“And who’s Janice Loftus?” Gregor asked.
“She’s a professor at Philadelphia Community College,” Tony said. “She’s also the person who started screaming bloody murder that brought everybody in to find the body.”
“Okay,” Gregor said. “Why is she an outlier? Wouldn’t you expect to see her picture on the security tape? She had to get to Martha Handling’s office to find Tibor and the body.”
“Yes, she did,” Tony said. “But look at the time. Ten thirty-one. She didn’t find the body and start screaming until eleven twenty-two. That’s nearly an hour. What was she doing for an hour?”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Interesting.”
“More interesting than you know yet,” Ray said. “There’s a connection. There are a couple of connections. Loftus is a member of this group called Philadelphia Justice that tries to get cases reconsidered they think were wrongly decided. Sort of a local version of the Innocence Project.”
