by Jane Haddam
“Those aren’t bad ideas,” Gregor said. “People do get wrongly convicted.”
“To hear them tell it,” Ray said, “people get wrongly convicted because people like me are racist crapholes who do it on purpose.”
“And you think she may have murdered Martha Handling for handing out long sentences to juveniles because—” Gregor stopped. “I don’t think that makes any sense when you’re trying to use it for a motive for Tibor.”
“There’s something else,” Ray said. “We didn’t know it until this morning, or we’d have held her longer yesterday. It turns out there’s another connection, and this one is a lot more interesting.”
“And what’s that?” Gregor asked.
“Janice Loftus and Martha Handling were roommates back in 1979, when they were freshmen at Bryn Mawr College,” Ray said. “So we Googled it just to see what we could get. And we didn’t get much, but we did get the information that the two of them were fighting all the time and then ended up being split up for the second semester.”
“It still sounds very thin,” Gregor said.
“Right, it is,” Tony said, “but it’s a connection. But the other one’s better. Look at ten thirty-two. Mark Granby.”
“Oh, God help us,” George Edelson said. “Here we go.”
“Who’s Mark Granby?” Gregor asked.
“Mark Granby is the local representative of a company called Administration Solutions of America,” Ray said. “It’s the company that now runs most of the prisons in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, including the juvenile prisons.”
“Remember how we were talking about the rumors about Martha Handling taking bribes?” George Edelson said. “These are the people she was rumored to be taking bribes from. The general idea was that she took money and gave longer sentences so that the cells would be full and Admin Solutions would get more money. The Commonwealth pays them per prisoner per day served. More prisoners with more days served, more money.”
“I did understand that,” Gregor said. “And I can tell you what I thought of that from the beginning.”
“The thing about Mark Granby is that there’s no reason for him to be there. Absolutely none.”
“And there was reason for Janice Loftus to be there?” Gregor asked.
“Yes,” Ray said. “Janice Loftus drove Petrak Maldovanian to his brother’s hearing. Janice Loftus is Petrak Maldovanian’s professor of something or other—”
“American Government,” Tony said.
“American Government,” Ray repeated. “Petrak Maldovanian was just getting out of that class and he was worried about making the hearing on time, so Loftus gave him a lift over to the courthouse. Maybe that was some kind of a setup and she was just looking for an excuse to get to Martha Handling, but at least it’s a reason. As far as we know, there’s no reason for Granby to be there at all.”
“Have you talked to him yet?”
“We were trying to work up an excuse,” Tony said, “but we think it would be better if you talked to him. Assuming you can get him to talk to you. But technically, we’re done with this.”
“There’s a suspect in custody,” Ray said. “And the prosecutor is concentrating on the suspect.”
“So is CNN,” Tony said.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” George Edelson said.
Tony Monteverdi looked like he had something to say to that, but he didn’t, and the two detectives began to print out material they knew Gregor had to have.
There was a lot of it.
3
Twenty minutes later, Gregor was back out on the street, carrying what felt like a twenty-pound weight.
George Edelson was carrying nothing, but he was visibly stunned. “I don’t believe it,” he kept saying. “I really don’t. There really is material in this case for you to work with.”
“I don’t find that all that remarkable,” Gregor said. “From the little I’ve been able to find out about this woman, she was in a position of power, she was generally disliked, and she didn’t mind throwing her weight around. We were almost certainly going to find something somewhere if we looked long enough.”
“We barely had to look at all,” George said. “They picked that up just poking around. And if it does turn out that Martha Handling was taking bribes—”
“I think we have to assume she was taking bribes,” Gregor said. “There’s too much smoke in too many places for that one to be without fire. I think the real question is whom she was taking bribes from.”
“But that’s obvious,” George said. “From Admin Solutions.”
“I agree,” Gregor said. “That’s almost certainly going to turn out to be true. But just because she was taking bribes from one source doesn’t mean she wasn’t also taking them from another. We need to look into—I need to look into—what else she might have been up to. Because the more I hear about Martha Handling, the more she seems to have been up to.”
“I was a prosecutor once,” George Edelson said. “You don’t want to get me started. It’s why I quit, to tell you the truth. I hated being that way to everybody—”
The man who plowed into George Edelson seemed to come out of nowhere, as if he were running. The two men collided and they both went down. Gregor’s first thought was that the man was running from the police, but no police were following, and in the tangle of the two bodies on the ground, the running man had come to a full stop.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” George Edelson demanded. “I could have you arrested for this—”
The running man was on top, so Gregor held a hand out to him first. The running man stood up, and Gregor was shocked.
“Mikel?” he said. “Mikel, what are you doing here? And why were you running? You could have hurt somebody.”
“He hurt me,” George Edelson said as he got to his feet. “And he ruined this suit. It’s got a tear in the jacket sleeve, would you look at that.”
“Please,” Mikel said, “I am very late. I have an appointment and I will not be on time and if I’m late, I may lose the house. I have to go.”
“Tell me you don’t have a meeting with somebody Russ knows nothing about,” Gregor said. “You do understand that you don’t understand the law—”
“Please,” Mikel said. “Excuse me very much,” he said to George Edelson.
And then he took off.
Gregor and George Edelson watched him go.
“I could have him arrested,” Edelson said.
“Don’t do that,” Gregor said. “He’s in the middle of some kind of unholy mess with his mortgage and he spends all his time worried he’s about to be thrown out of his house.”
FOUR
1
Father Tibor Kasparian trusted himself in almost everything, but he was beginning to find that he was not able to tolerate boredom. It was also true that he had not expected to be bored. He blamed himself for that. He usually had more foresight. Still, the way things had been, with the woman lying dead there on the floor, and everything he knew, and everything that had to be done—well, it hadn’t occurred to him that he would have time to be bored, or mental space that wouldn’t be occupied by the whole teeming mess of it.
This was the kind of thing that happened to you when you didn’t think ahead. And nobody ever thought ahead in an emergency.
One of the things he had thought ahead about was what he would have to do while he was in custody, and that was not to talk to anybody he knew, ever. In a case like this, your best friends became your worst enemies, because you couldn’t lie to them, and you didn’t even want to. It had been almost more than Tibor was capable of to keep his head turned away from the crowd in the courtroom.
There they were, sitting in a little row: Bennis and Donna and Lida Arkmanian. There was Gregor, in a seat just behind them. If it had been anything else that happened, other than this, he would have discussed all his options with Gregor before he’d done anything at all. Then he would at least have known whether what he wa
s going to do had a chance in hell at working.
The way things were, he had to keep his fingers crossed and hope. He was not an idealist, and he was not an innocent. He did not expect people to be naturally good at heart. He did not believe that there was no evil in the world. He most certainly did not believe that justice would always be done.
What he couldn’t get past was that he was not only bored, but lonely, too. He was so lonely, his head felt empty of everything, and he didn’t think he could fill it with books, even if he had any. The essential knot was untie-able. His only hope was not to say anything to anybody. His only chance of a way out of this mess was to let nobody know anything. And all the people he wanted to talk to would want answers to exactly those questions he did not want anybody to ask.
Even so, the cell was small, and it was very empty. He didn’t understand why jailers everywhere always did this. Cells could be small. That didn’t matter. But cells should not be empty. Even very stupid people could get bored with nothing to occupy them. And boredom always caused trouble.
He had gotten to the point where he was repeating nursery rhymes in his head when the guard came to tell him he had a visitor, and the visitor was not somebody he had expected. He had started by repeating Armenian nursery rhymes to himself. Then he had gone on to English. Then he had gone on to French. French was not a language he had ever been completely easy with, at least in its spoken form.
When the guard asked him if he wanted to go downstairs and talk to his visitor, Tibor had a moment of complete frozenness. Hannah Krekorian was down there. She had come to him all on her own, as if she had a plan. Hannah Krekorian never had plans, not real ones. She had vague intentions, and a lot of emotions, and a world’s supply of intellectual confusion. She was a nice woman. She was not a threat.
The nursery rhymes were driving him crazy. He made up his mind before he’d had a chance to think it through.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I will come.”
Coming was a mass of complications: handcuffs, leg irons, orders. Tibor let it happen. If you got upset about these things, they wore you out. He also didn’t entirely blame them. They would have seen that video just like everybody else. He hadn’t seen it, but he could imagine. He probably looked like a crazed animal with no restraint.
They brought him to a room with a line of booths against one wall. The booths had seats and little shelf desks and phones, and one of the sides was faced with thick glass. Tibor had seen this on TV. He didn’t know if the glass was so thick, it was impossible to hear through it, or if it required so much in the way of shouting that nobody wanted to do that. They wanted their privacy. They used the phones instead.
Hannah had been crying, and that was not a good thing. She had never been an attractive woman, even when she was younger. Crying made her face go red and her eyes puff up and her nose run. Tibor wanted to put a hand through the glass and pat her head to make her feel better.
Tibor was more relieved than he wanted to admit that he had no sudden urge to start talking. Instead, he sat down and picked up the phone on his side of the glass and waited for Hannah to pick up hers.
She did pick up her phone, but instead of holding it to her ear, she put her face into an already sodden handkerchief and started to cry.
Tibor made motions telling her to put her phone to her ear, because they really weren’t going to get anywhere if she didn’t do that.
Hannah did it, and the first thing she said was, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there this morning. I meant to be. Lida came to pick me up. But at the last minute, I couldn’t handle it.”
“There was nothing special about this morning,” Tibor said. “You were better to stay at home.”
“That’s not what I hear,” Hannah said. She’d gone from crying to indignant. “Lida has been talking about it ever since they came back. You did something stupid. Or you did something worse. You did something dangerous. Bennis called a Supreme Court justice to ask about it.”
This was probably garbled. Tibor wondered whom Bennis had actually called, to make Hannah think it was somebody on the Supreme Court.
“I was sorry I hadn’t been there,” Hannah said. “If I’d been there, I would have known. So I thought I would come down here. They were saying you wouldn’t talk to anybody, you wouldn’t even talk to Gregor, but I thought I’d come.”
“Well,” Tibor said. “I am talking to you. You can see there is nothing wrong with me.”
“There’s everything wrong with you,” Hannah said in a wail. “Just look at you. And look at this place. What are you doing in this place? And that video. Have you seen yourself in that video? It’s impossible.”
“No, no,” Tibor said. “I have heard about the video, yes, but I have not seen it. I do not have a cell phone here.”
“I’m not completely stupid,” Hannah said. “I know there must be something going on you’re not telling anybody. I know there must be some reason you’re not talking to Gregor, and it’s not because you killed some silly woman you didn’t even know. And I know that what you’re doing is wrong, Tibor, I know it. I was suspected of committing murder once. This is not what you are supposed to do.”
“No, no,” Tibor said. “I am not doing anything. I am only telling the truth.”
“Telling the truth to say you killed that woman?” Hannah said. “Telling it to a judge in court? I don’t believe it.”
“No, no,” Tibor said again. “I did not tell anyone that I killed someone. You must understand—”
“Bennis said that after what you said in court today, they could send you away to jail forever. I understand that.”
“No, no,” Tibor said again.
But it felt hopeless. Hannah was sitting over there on her side of the glass, glaring triumphantly, and he couldn’t think of another word to say.
And this had not relieved his loneliness.
It had made him feel as if he were the only person left on the planet.
2
Mark Granby had never liked his office in Philadelphia. There was something raw about it, as if it had never really been finished, or as if it was a sham, meant to fool people into thinking he was “an integral part of the Administrative Solutions family.”
That last bit came from the little brochure they gave everybody who showed up for orientation. They gave it to the incoming receptionists and the incoming secretaries and the incoming middle management. They even gave it to the hires they were serious about. Mark had thought, from the beginning, that it was as if the company wanted to pretend to be making a sitcom about an office, as if they wanted to pretend they weren’t doing the work they were doing.
The raw unfinishedness of the office always made Mark pause when he walked in. It practically screamed that he was expendable. If he had really been an important part of the Administrative Solutions family, his office would have been in Harrisburg, and it would look solid as a rock.
Mark had never liked being expendable, but he hadn’t really minded. You took what you could get these days, and if you worked hard enough, you could find yourself moved into the category of essential personnel. Then you could sit back and let other people take responsibility for your mistakes.
The present situation, however, was not his mistake. It was company policy, even though it was written down nowhere. Carter Bandwood had been completely clear about that. What Mark hadn’t quite figured out at the time was that the way this thing worked, the only paper trail anybody would ever find would lead directly to Mark Granby, and nobody else.
That was why, when the call came, Mark had almost lost his lunch. For a couple of minutes after he was sure he knew what it was, he’d had the impression that the caller was speaking a foreign language. It was only a foreign accent. It was thick, and the man’s syntax was too formal. It was not Spanish.
“There is your name here,” the man said. “In the contacts list. There are voice mails with your name on them.”
Why was it that the people who did these thi
ngs were always so stupid? Not the man. Mark didn’t know if the man was stupid or not. It was Martha Handling he couldn’t believe. There she was, taking his advice, buying a prepaid cell phone that nobody could trace, buying half a dozen of them and throwing them out after a day or two. There she was, going to all that trouble, and then what did she do? She put his name in the contacts list for anybody at all to find.
At first, Mark thought that he ought to meet the man somewhere out of the office. They could run into each other at Starbucks. They could meet in a park with a bench. His mind kept racing through the possibilities as the man went on talking.
Then he realized that the one thing he could not do was to meet the man someplace else. If he was being watched, the implication would be that this was a clandestine meeting. He could almost hear some idiot in a courtroom somewhere, describing how he’d been skulking around, making it seem as if he were doing something wrong.
And he was doing something wrong. That would make it even worse.
He assumed that the man on the phone wanted money. People like that always wanted money.
At the moment, Mark didn’t have any money. And he had the distinct feeling that if he called Carter Bandwood, he wouldn’t get any.
He told the man to come by the office. He sat down behind his desk and looked at papers. There really wasn’t much in the way of work that needed to be done. When things were going the way they were supposed to be going, Mark only had to keep track of the upcoming cases throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and make sure the management at the prisons knew what to expect.
And, of course, he had to talk to the judges, and to make sure they were happy.
Waiting for the man to show up, he imagined all kinds of things. He imagined himself right into an episode of The Sopranos. He thought about all the stories he had heard about the Russian mob, and Bruce Willis movies, and Arnold Schwartzenegger—but no, the accent had not been German. He couldn’t really peg just what it was, but it definitely had not been German.
