Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  “I’m surprised nobody’s ever broken this,” he said. “I’d think it would be the perfect target for a certain sort of person in a certain kind of mood.”

  “What sort of person in what sort of mood?” Lucinda Watkins said. “There isn’t much of anybody on this street anymore. What little population there is is junkies, bad junkies, the nearly dead ones. They can’t work up the energy to throw rocks, not even when they’re out of dope. They just collapse.”

  “Somebody broke the other windows,” Gregor pointed out.

  “Years ago,” Lucinda said. “When this neighborhood was disintegrating, but before it actually died. When you had buildings full of angry young men with nowhere to go. You’ve got to wonder why they threw rocks at the houses in their own neighborhoods. If I was in their position, I’d go out to Society Hill or Chestnut Hill or the Main Line—”

  “It’s not so easy to get out to those houses on the Main Line,” John Jack-man pointed out.

  “There are trains,” Lucinda said. “There are cars to steal. It wouldn’t take so much. I’ve driven out there myself a few times. It’s not that complicated. You have to wonder—”

  “What?” Gregor said.

  Lucinda shrugged. “Oh, don’t mind me. I’m always on a tear. Just ask Mr. Jackman. There’s just a part of me that doesn’t understand why all this stays up. All those people out there, like Annie’s brother, living in thirty-thousand square feet when the girls we serve don’t have a room to themselves and the space they do have has cockroaches crawling all over it. Thomas Jefferson thought that the country should be made up of farmers and artisans, small businessmen, small craftsmen. He thought that the country would be ruined if there were any men richer or more powerful than that. Maybe he had a point.”

  “Thomas Jefferson was a rich man who owned a plantation and slaves,” John Jackman said drily. “What’s this all about, Lucy? I didn’t realize you’d gone Communist on me while I was busy elsewhere.”

  “Oh, Lucinda would never go Communist,” Anne Ross Wyler said, coming into the room with her hair so completely a mess that it looked like she’d put a wig on backwards. “She thinks the Communists are as bad as the capitalists, they just put a different name on doing the same old stuff. Hello again, Mr. Demarkian. Hello, John. Is there a reason for this visit in the middle of the day?”

  “Ask him,” John Jackman said.

  “I wanted to get a look at the place,” Gregor said. “And I wanted you to show me the cars. Where they’re kept. How they get in and out of the property. It hadn’t occurred to me before I saw this place up close, but you must have a certain amount of worry with the cars. You have two, don’t you?”

  “Two, yes,” Annie said. “A station wagon and a two-door. Why?”

  “Which one did you have on the night your brother died?” Gregor asked.

  “The two-door,” Annie said. “The deal is to park inconspicuously, although I’m not very inconspicuous anymore. Still, a small dark car isn’t very intrusive.”

  “They painted her trunk orange once while she was in some convenience store,” Lucinda said. “Annie likes to pretend it was just kids, but I know better. They were trying to mark her. They managed it for about a day.”

  “Less than that,” Annie said. “Why do you think we’d have trouble with the cars?”

  “With people stealing them,” Gregor said. “It’s one thing to break windows or not to break them, but a car is a valuable piece of property. And there are car thieves all over this city who wouldn’t think twice about coming into this neighborhood if they thought they could get a decent vehicle without much trouble.”

  “Maybe,” Annie said, “but they haven’t yet.”

  “We keep the cars in a little garage around the back,” Lucinda said. “We’ve even got a driveway. She bought a house just around the corner and had it demolished. She cut the driveway through and had the garage built. You wouldn’t believe what trouble we had getting all the permits.”

  “It wasn’t as if anybody was ever going to live in that house again,” Annie said. “There wasn’t much more left of it than stray bricks and loose asbestos. This whole neighborhood is full of asbestos. And no, we don’t lock the garage, Mr. Demarkian. There isn’t any point. In the middle of the night, when we sometimes have to go out, we tend to be in a hurry.”

  “They pick up the girls if they call,” John Jackman explained. “The ones who get scared by a john or who’ve just gotten beaten up by a pimp.”

  “They go back, though,” Lucinda said. “You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like they’ve been brainwashed.”

  “What kind of car is the station wagon? What kind of car is the two-door?”

  “The two-door is a Honda,” Annie said. “I don’t know what kind of Honda. I don’t pay attention to that sort of thing. The station wagon is a black Volvo Cross Country. I know because we just bought it maybe six months ago, and the guy who sold it to us insisted on giving us the brochure.”

  “He was just doing his job,” Lucinda said.

  “I don’t know why everybody on earth seems to think his job is to sell me something,” Annie said.

  There was a faint buzzing. John Jackman stuck his hand inside his jacket and came out with his cell phone. “Excuse me,” he said, retreating back into the hallway.

  Gregor looked around the living room. It was a pleasant space, not too large, not too small, newly painted, newly carpeted, dusted to within an inch of its life. On one wall, there were bookshelves. On another, a plain brick fireplace. The furniture was serviceable and comfortable, but not extravagant.

  “How big is this place?” Gregor asked. “How many bedrooms? How many square feet? And how many people stay here full-time?”

  “Only Annie and I stay here full-time,” Lucinda said, “although there’s usually somebody or the other spending the night. And we’ve got, what, six bedrooms?”

  “Seven, if you count what’s in the attic,” Annie said.

  “Well, yes, but we never use the attic,” Lucinda said. “And that’s jury-rigged anyway, except for the bathroom, which is nicer than any of the other ones in the house.”

  “What about the night Tony Ross died?” Gregor asked. “Was anybody staying in the house then?”

  “I don’t remember,” Lucinda said. “There was somebody or the other doing something—a group, or something like that. There was a meeting. I remember that, because Annie here went out to take photographs while it was going on and we had Father Kasparian coming, and I was worried there wouldn’t be anybody to talk to Father Kasparian while he was here.”

  “You could talk to Father Kasparian while he was here,” Annie said.

  John Jackman came back into the room. “Gregor?” he said. “That was my office. We’ve got to go.”

  “All right,” Gregor said.

  Lucinda and Annie were both staring at Jackman, curious. “That doesn’t sound right,” Annie said. “What’s the matter, John? Has somebody shot the mayor?”

  “No,” John said. “They’ve found somebody Mr. Demarkian has been looking for. Unfortunately, they’ve found him dead.”

  PART THREE

  In Germany, as in the United States, a virtual government was conceived with the trappings of democratic rule by the engineers of the Holocaust.

  —FROM “PREAMBLE: ON THE ROAD TO A FOURTH REICH” FROM VIRTUAL GOVERNMENT: CIA MIND CONTROL OPERATIONS IN AMERICA BY ALEX CONSTANTINE

  ONE

  1

  It was not the middle of the night, but the police cars and the evidence vans and the ambulances were lit up as if it must have been. In the end, it didn’t matter who among the civilians may have died. The town drunk and the president of the United States got differing levels of response, but neither got the response accorded to the lowest level of police officer. Even the death of police officers that other officers didn’t like rated a full-court press investigation. Even the deaths of police officers from other jurisdictions, or on vacation, or undercover,
or in disguise—Gregor couldn’t remember when he’d known the death of a police officer not to bring out the visceral animal in the department who got the call. That was part reaction and part insurance. The safest course for any police department was to let it be known on the street that hurting one of their own would bring down the wrath of God and worse. The reaction was, Gregor supposed, inevitable. When you train men and women for months at a time and then make them work together for years under pressure, they begin to feel like part of a single organism. Crap, Gregor thought. Maybe it was none of these things. Maybe it was just the obvious, which is that people don’t like to feel personally attacked, and police officers always took the murders of police officers personally.

  The odd thing, Gregor admitted to himself, was that the city police had been so quick to assume that Steve Bridge was one of their own. Not only did most local cops have very little use for the FBI—and often for good reason, Gregor had to admit—but Bridge had had the kind of job that local cops had the least use for. He was going undercover, but only to spy on a group whose ideas he and his bosses didn’t like. Gregor knew there had been a time when local cops had been just as zealous in the hunting down of Communists as they were at the hunting down of sneak thieves. In the red scares of the twenties and the McCarthy-inspired witch-hunts of the fifties, local police had gone out of their way to aid and abet first the paranoia of the United States Congress and then the Bureau at its worst; breaking up “radical” meetings, locking people in holding cells for attending union organizing drives, shutting down printing presses to make sure no “subversive” pamphlets got out onto the street where somebody interested might read them. That was a long time ago. Somewhere in the sixties, a sea change had come. The Bureau was still too often preoccupied with “subversives,” and Gregor was sure there were sheriffs out in Omaha and Kansas City who were preoccupied with them too, but the local cops had come to their senses and decided to leave well enough alone. If it was armed, you had to worry about it. If it wasn’t armed, it didn’t matter if it was preaching the eventual second coming of the Great Banana, it made no sense to do anything except leave it alone.

  Unless you were the police department of Penryn, Pennsylvania, Gregor thought, who had refused to direct traffic at the annual YMCA triathlon because, it said, the YMCA was encouraging witchcraft by reading Harry Potter books aloud to children in its after-school program. Maybe Tibor was right. Maybe the world really was going crazy. Maybe he himself was going crazy, standing next to John Jackman’s big black limousine and looking out across this rundown backstreet neighborhood as if this was all supposed to be making some kind of sense.

  “What’s wrong?” John asked, coming back from a low conference with two of the uniformed cops now watching the scene. He looked around at the sky and the neighborhood and shook his head. “God, this is awful. Have you seen him yet?”

  “Briefly.”

  “There are maggots in his eyes,” John said. “I’ve seen a lot in my time, but that was unbelievable. Christ, you’d think whoever it was could have buried him.”

  “Here?” Gregor asked.

  They both looked around again. John shrugged. “Okay, maybe not here. But wouldn’t it have made sense to move him?”

  “I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “Assuming we’re dealing with the same person as the person who murdered Tony and Charlotte Ross, and assuming one person murdered both of them—”

  “I think we can assume,” John said drily. “At least about Tony and Charlotte Ross. I admit this makes something of a mess of things. At least it’s within the city limits.”

  “Why at least?”

  “Because now I have control of it,” John said. “I don’t want to say anything against the Lower Merion police, because they do a good job and they mean well, but they don’t deal with the real trouble out there and you know it. They don’t have the experience. And we do.”

  “You ever heard of Penryn, Pennsylvania?”

  “No.”

  “Last fall sometime, a year ago, the police department there refused to do its usual duty at an annual YMCA event because it said the YMCA was encouraging children to engage in witchcraft because it was reading them the Harry Potter books.”

  “And?” John Jackman said.

  “Well, John, what the hell? Is that usual? Does that sort of thing happen so often that it doesn’t surprise you? Let me ask you a question Tibor asked me. When did we get to the point that we forgot that witches are pretend?”

  “Does this have something to do with the case? With any part of the case? With the bombing of Holy Trinity Church? With the death of Steve Bridge? With anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Except that I want to answer yes, because it does, just not in the way you think you mean it. I get embarrassed for what’s happening to this country, I really do. It’s like we all took acid at a showing of Alice in Wonderland and now we think we’re really all the way down the rabbit hole.”

  “Maybe you ought to go home to bed,” John said. “Maybe you’re coming down with something. Because you sure as hell aren’t making a lot of sense.”

  “I want to go over there and take a better look,” Gregor said. “Can I do that without screwing up everything from fingerprints to footprints to DNA samples?”

  “Sure. Tell the boys I sent you. Wear gloves.”

  John Jackman meant latex gloves, which Gregor didn’t have, although he was sure one of the officers over at the scene would. He walked over and nodded to the uniformed man on duty. His progress was not challenged. By now, everybody at the scene probably knew he’d arrived in the company of the commissioner of police. The scene was a vacant lot between two small frame houses, overgrown with the kinds of vegetation that grow on vacant lots: a lot of grass, brown and dead in the cold; some small shrubs; too many boxes and crates and piles of debris. The police had put a wooden plank down leading from the sidewalk to the body itself, so that officers needing to come and go wouldn’t muck up the scene any more than they already had, but Gregor didn’t think that it had really been needed. The closer he got, the stronger the smell got. It was a wonder someone hadn’t noticed it long before now—or maybe they had, and maybe they had complained, but the city had dismissed it as just another mess from a pile of garbage left on a postcard-stamp bit of land nobody wanted or wanted to claim.

  Gregor came to a stop about a foot behind the two plainclothes detectives who were standing directly over the body. Right here, the stench was overwhelming, and the body itself was still visible and uncovered on the ground. Gregor didn’t know if it had maggots coming out of its eyes, but it was badly decomposed, and at that stage of decomposition that made the most impact. The skin was black and had rotted away from the muscle and bone in several places along the jaw and the top of the hands. The skin along the nose was wet and oozing. Gregor shook his head. The plainclothesman closest to him turned around and nodded.

  “It’s Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “The commissioner’s friend.”

  Gregor had no way of knowing if that was being said sarcastically or not. He decided not to worry about it. “How do you do?” he said, nodding as well to the other plainclothesman, who had turned around when he heard Gregor and his partner talking. “I don’t mean to get in your way. I was just wondering how you knew this was Steve Bridge.”

  The first plainclothesman shrugged. “I don’t guess we do, absolutely, just yet. We’ll have to take the body in for identification and DNA samples and all the rest of it. But we’ve had a heads-up on him for days—”

  “This complete asshole of an FBI guy lost contact with his own partner and didn’t call the disappearance in for days,” the other plainclothesman said. “Can you believe it? I mean, who in Christ’s name—”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” the first plainclothesman said. “You know how I feel about taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “Christ,” the second plainclothesman said. “You’ve got no idea what a pain in th
e ass you’ve gotten to be since you got born-again.”

  Gregor cleared his throat. “Steve Bridge,” he said, directing their attention back to the problem at hand. “How did you find him? Who found him?”

  “We don’t know,” the first plainclothesman said. “The precinct got an anonymous call about, maybe, two hours ago. Body in the vacant lot. You could smell the stench for blocks. That kind of thing. They didn’t think anything of it, because you couldn’t smell the stench for blocks—”

  “That’s because of the cold,” the second plainclothesman said. “The damned thing has been out here refrigerated for however long it’s been. A couple of weeks. But you know what it’s been like. There hasn’t been a day with temps over thirty-five since October.”

  “Yeah, well,” the first plainclothesman said, “that only does so much. It’s not like he was frozen. That would have been different. But the local precinct sent somebody out, just in case. And he walks in here and finds this.”

  Gregor nodded. “I’m surprised he wasn’t visible from the sidewalk.”

  “Too much in the way of shrubbery,” the first plainclothesman said, “and then there’s all the garbage around here. If people saw anything, they probably thought some old bum had come and ditched his clothes.”

  “Then I’m surprised some kid hasn’t run in here and discovered this before now,” Gregor said. “Kids play in vacant lots, don’t they? They did when I was growing up.”

  The first plainclothesman shrugged. “Maybe that was the cold too. Maybe it’s been too cold to play outside. I don’t know. Maybe there aren’t that many kids on this block.”

  Gregor looked around. A small crowd had gathered, inevitably, on the road and on the far sidewalk from the place where all the vehicles were parked. It seemed to consist almost entirely of women, old ones, young ones, middle-aged ones, all wrapped up in heavy woolen coats and scarves and gloves. There were no children that he could see. He turned back to the body.