Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “I’ll see if Mr. O’Connor is available,” the woman said. “Could I ask what you’re calling in regards to?”

  Well, there was something that hadn’t changed since Gregor’s retirement. He’d sometimes thought that the Bureau had to hire these women and then train them to be as ungrammatical as they got on the phone.

  “I was Mr. O’Connor’s field training officer back in—well, it was a long time ago.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “If you could spell your name,” the woman said.

  Gregor didn’t blame her for being wary. He spelled his name and waited. The FBI probably got more crank calls than any other agency in the United States government, or in the state governments, either. When Gregor was with the Behavioral Sciences Unit, they got four or five people a month who called in to confess to serial murders they couldn’t have been anywhere near, and they were sane next to the people who called to say they thought the Bureau had implanted microchips in their brains.

  There was a click on the other end of the line. Kevin’s voice came bouncing down the wire, sounding happy. “Gregor! What are you doing? I read about you in the papers all the time! It gives me hope, you know what I mean? It’s possible to do this job for twenty years without becoming a basket case.”

  Gregor liked Kevin O’Connor. He just wished the man wasn’t so enthusiastic about everything.

  “You got a promotion,” he said. “I thought you said you’d never take a desk job.”

  “Yeah, well. Five years sitting on my ass in freezing weather staking out kidnap suspects and I got tired of it. But what about you? Are you just in town or do you have something I need? It’s really incredible to hear from you.”

  Gregor was sure Kevin found it incredible to hear from him. Kevin found it incredible to hear from anybody.

  “At the moment,” Gregor said, “I’m sitting in the police department of a place called Snow Hill, Pennsylvania.”

  “Oh, the monkey trial place,” Kevin said. “Yeah. We’ve got a couple of people out there, just as a precaution, you know. What are you doing out there? Has somebody been killed?”

  “Not yet,” Gregor said. “Somebody’s been attacked. A woman named Ann-Victoria Hadley.”

  “Annie-Vic! Yeah, I did hear about that. Wasn’t that some kind of mugging. It’s a damned shame, really, she’s an incredible old bat. Did you know she was on Nixon’s enemies list?”

  “Was she? For what?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember. She ran some organization for a while, I think, some anti–Vietnam War organization. Like I said, she’s an incredible old bat. Isn’t it kind of overkill bringing you in on a mugging?”

  “The chief of police here seems to think it may be more than a mugging. He’s of the opinion that somebody tried to kill her because she was the only member of the school board that wouldn’t sign on to the new policy of Intelligent Design.”

  There was a long pause. “That’s not too likely, is it?” Kevin said. “I mean, there are certainly lots of nut cases out there. You can’t deny that. But I don’t remember there ever being any violence over teaching evolution. Just a lot of, you know, hot air and screaming.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Gregor said. “The chief of police seems to think otherwise, though, and he’s the friend of a friend. So here I am. I take it that you’ve got nothing on the order of militia activity or that kind of thing going on around this.”

  “The militias are pretty much over,” Kevin said. “Not that they ever amounted to much, anyway. What’s that line from the Blues Brothers movie? A bunch of sad, sorry sons of bitches who’re just jerking off, or something like that.”

  “And no chatter saying that there’s somebody out there looking to pick off the opposition, piece by piece?”

  “Gregor, please. Do you know what these things are like? They’re a bunch of middle-class, middle-aged people striking attitudes. On both sides, if you ask me. They’re not looking for bloodshed. They’re looking for time on the evening news. I think the only people who care about the science is the scientists they bring in. Everybody else is starring in their own movie.”

  “I’ve just been told that there’s been a death threat against the judge who’s supposed to sit on this case.”

  “A death threat on Hamilton Folger?” Kevin said. “No. If there had been, I’d have heard about it.”

  “Everybody here has heard about it.”

  “No, Gregor. Everybody there has heard somebody say they heard about it. If there had been a real death threat, if somebody had actually threatened Folger—I mean, for God’s sake, Gregor, you remember Hamilton Folger. He’s got a stick so far up his ass it comes up out of his head and he uses it for a flagpole. He was appointed by W. He takes himself more seriously than God.”

  Gregor thought about it. He did remember Hamilton Folger. “Prosecutor in Chicago?” he said finally. “That weird case of the woman who’d—I don’t remember—something about she got caught with cocaine—”

  “She got caught with a lot of cocaine,” Kevin said, “but she’d just lost both her daughters in some kind of freak accident. So she went down to the nearest slum neighborhood she could find and bought enough of the stuff to kill herself with and everybody knew that was what she was trying to do, but he went after her for dealing, anyway. I mean, seriously, Gregor, the man makes conservatives look like bleeding hearts. If he’d had a death threat, I’d know about it, the national office would know about it, CBS News would know about it, and so would you.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “But the rumors are here, and rumors like that are dangerous. You say you have some agents in place?”

  “Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker, yeah. They’re both about twelve years old. I’ll give them a call and ask them to accommodate you if you want. They’re competent enough.”

  “That would be excellent,” Gregor said. “I’m just trying to be cautious here. You’re sure you’ve never heard of one of these trials where there’s been any violence?”

  “Absolutely sure,” Kevin said. “The violence tends to be limited to what the school kids do to each other, and they’re nasty. Nasty, but not Columbine. They call each other names. They bully each other. Some kid goes home in tears because somebody told her on the playground that she’s going to burn in Hell. That sort of thing. I’ve got the numbers. You have a pen to write these down?”

  Gregor had a pen. He took the numbers down as Kevin reeled them off—both were cell phone numbers. He put his pen down on the desk and stretched a little.

  “I wish I understood these things,” he said. “Everybody seems to get angry for no reason. Or no reason that makes sense to me.”

  “That’s the trouble with the world, Gregor. Everybody is angry with no reason, or at least they’re not angry for the reasons they say they are. Never mind. You’re getting married in a few weeks, aren’t you? Congratulations!”

  3

  In the world Gregor came from, protocol mattered almost more than anything. Who did what when, who had jurisdiction over which or whom was the first question any sane man asked about any action he was about to take. In the universe of Snow Hill law enforcement, there seemed to be no protocol, and not many personnel, either. He left his closet office for the larger room and looked around. Only the woman named Tina was there. There was no sign of any other person. Even Gary Albright had disappeared.

  “I’m going to take a walk,” Gregor said.

  Tina looked up at him and blinked. “All right,” she said. “Diner’s down the block to your right, if you’re looking for coffee.”

  Gregor made a noncommittal noise, then went out through the front door to Main Street. There were more people there now. The mobile news vans had visible staff. People were walking along the street. Gregor stopped and listened for a while, but that odd high-pitched wail he’d heard for a few moments earlier had ceased. He wondered what it was. He’d thought a car was about to explode.

  He looked to his right
, in the direction of the diner. People were going in and out of it, quite a few of them carrying Styrofoam cups of what he presumed to be coffee. He looked to his left. There at the end of the street was that big, white modern church and the little cluster of buildings behind it. Now that he had a chance to study it, he didn’t think the building was modern by nature. It had been remodeled, somehow. The skeleton of it was venerable, but all the ornamentation was new.

  He turned in that direction and walked slowly down past the storefronts. He had no idea what he was expecting to see. The stores and other buildings were what you would expect in a small town like this. A lot of them were churches of one kind or the other, the very biggest was the Baptist one, but it seemed to Gregor to be much less impressive than Nick Frapp’s semi-modern. There was a tire store—could something be called Hale ’n’ Hardy?—and a place for greeting cards and gifts. That one had a Hallmark sign, which meant somebody must have gotten lucky. The nearest mall must not be so near after all. There was a feed store, proof that people around here raised cattle or horses. There was a “package store,” which was how liquor stores liked to disguise themselves when they had opened up in nice neighborhoods.

  He got to the big semi-modern church and stopped. There was a lot of activity here, if you looked for it, although not in the church itself. The buildings behind the church seemed to house some kind of school. There were a couple of dozen children shivering on a playground, not quite motivated by the adult who was trying to spur them into action. Gregor smiled. He remembered that. Why was it so many adults were so convinced that fresh air was good for children, no matter what the temperature of the air.

  He heard somebody cough low in the throat and looked up to see that tallest, thinnest man he had ever encountered standing just outside the church’s front doors. He was more than tall and thin, though, this man. He was straight out of central casting. He could have starred in a remake of Elmer Gantry tomorrow, and been more convincing than Burt Lancaster ever was.

  The tall, thin man had his hands in the pockets of the pants to a very good, but not spectacular, wool suit. He held out his hand.

  “It’s Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “I’ve seen you on television. I’m Nick Frapp.”

  It wasn’t just the look. It was the voice. Okies had that kind of voice. Hillbillies had that kind of voice. Gregor reached out and took the man’s hand.

  “How do you do,” he said.

  “You ought to come inside,” Nick Frapp said. “It’s freezing out here, and there’s going to be another one of those reporters any minute.”

  “Another one?”

  “They hear about us and all they want to talk about is snakes,” Nick Frapp said.

  Gregor followed him through the open door of the church. It was not particularly unusual for a church: it had a big wide open vestibule with racks for pamphlets and a big box with a sign that designated it a collection for the poor. Nick Frapp saw him look at the sign and shrugged.

  “We get maybe a couple of dollars every week in that,” he said. “It’s not a bad idea. I don’t find it as useful as organizing something concrete, though.”

  “Do you organize a lot that’s concrete?”

  “Sure,” Nick said. “In a way, this whole place is an organization of something concrete. We’ve got half a dozen outreach programs running. We go up to the prison in Allentown. We have a halfway house for those of our people who get out on parole, or anybody else who wants to use it. We’ve got a mothers and children drive, which is important, because the social workers won’t go up into the hills anymore. And of course, we’ve got the school.”

  They had been moving as they spoke, and now they were in a long hall lined with photographs of people who were posing too self-consciously to look natural. Gregor tried to catch the nature of those poses but couldn’t. Nick was up ahead, holding a door for him.

  “Susie Cleland is around here somewhere, but I don’t know where she’s got to,” he said.

  “Susie Cleland?”

  “Our volunteer secretary for today,” Nick said. “We can’t really afford to hire too much in the way of full-time staff, and I’d rather spend money hiring teachers for the school than getting myself a fancy church secretary, so some of the women volunteer. They’re very good. Can I get you a cup of coffee? We’ve got coffee all over the place. Susie really likes to make coffee.”

  “Thanks,” Gregor said. “I’d like that.”

  He was standing in Nick Frapp’s office now, and the first thing that hit him was the books. There were literally hundreds of books. Every single available space on all four walls of the room was a bookshelf. Nick Frapp didn’t restrict himself to whatever the Christian presses were publishing, either. He had Aristotle and Kant. He even had Spinoza. Gregor looked from shelf to shelf. Thomas Aquinas. Hobbes and Lock. John Stuart Mill. Saint Irenaeus.

  “I know somebody else who reads like this,” Gregor said. “I don’t suppose you sneak Judith Krantz novels on the side.”

  “True crime.” Nick was coming back with coffee. He handed Gregor a cup and gestured across the room. “Cream and sugar and that over there,” he said.

  “But you’ve obviously read these,” Gregor said. “Or somebody has. They’re not here for show. Where did you go to college?”

  “Oral Roberts University.”

  “Are they this good with the Western Canon? I didn’t think anybody was this good with the Western Canon anymore, except that place in Maryland, you know, that does the great books.”

  “They’re all right,” Nick said. “I was reading this stuff before I went there, though. And I still read it. I’m looking for something I know I’ll find, eventually, except probably not until after I’m dead.”

  “What?”

  “The face of God,” Nick said. “That’s what all these people were looking for, really, even the ones who didn’t think they believed in God. It’s what we’re all looking for. Man cannot rest until he rests in Him.”

  “If you’re quoting, it’s going to be wasted on me,” Gregor said. “Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I don’t understand it. What are you doing here? If you do this sort of thing, if this is the way you think, you could have gone off to graduate school and ended up at a university. Instead of—”

  “Instead of ending up in a backwater small town where most of my neighbors can’t pronounce Liebniz, never mind read him?”

  “Something like that.”

  Nick sat down behind his desk. It was a big desk, which was good, because he needed big furniture to accommodate him.

  “How come you came to me first?” he asked. “Did Gary Albright point me out as a prime suspect?”

  “No, not at all. He did say a few things. None of which I understood.”

  “Gary and I went to high school together,” Nick said. “Hell, we went all through school together. And I’ve got to admit it up front that Gary’s a remarkable man. He had a record of courage in the Marine Corps. And there was that thing with the leg. Not many men could do what he did, and even fewer would do it to save a dog.”

  “But,” Gregor said.

  “But,” Nick agreed. “In the end, Gary can’t help being who and what he is. He was the football hero. I was the trash. We were all trash to the people in town, all of us who came from up in the hills. We’d come down here to town for school and we might as well not have bothered, because the teachers all assumed we were mentally retarded and they treated us that way. You don’t know how many of the boys I grew up with ended up in prison before they were twenty. Real prison, not juvenile hall. And dead of drugs and alcohol. And all the rest of it. Year after year, decade after decade, going back generations. Because there’s no point in trying to educate the retards.”

  “You got educated,” Gregor said.

  “I did indeed,” Nick said. “But that was Miss Marbledale, combined with the fact that I have an unusual amount of drive. When I finished college and came back here, I looked around and I saw that it was s
till going on. They were still treating the hill kids like retards. So I went back up into the hills and I started preaching, and after a while we managed to buy this place. And after that we managed to start the school. We don’t have it all done yet. I mean to have a full high school by the time we’re finished. But we do the first eight grades now. And, lo and behold, our hill kids do better on every standardized test than anybody from town.”

  “It makes me wonder,” Gregor said. “I’d think they’d like you for that. Gary Albright seems mad at you.”

  “Yes, I suppose he is. We didn’t join the lawsuit. Although, you know, I’m not sure just what old Franklin Hale wanted us to do. Our kids don’t go to the public school. We aren’t interested parties. But he wanted us to do something. Stand up in solidarity, or something. I’d say he wanted us to file an amicus brief, but I don’t think Franklin knows what that is.”

  “Why didn’t you file an amicus brief?” Gregor asked. “Are you teaching Darwin here on top of everything else?”

  “Our eighth graders are asked to read parts of The Origin of Species in their world history class. But no, since that’s what you’re asking, our biology classes don’t teach evolution here. Or rather, they do, but they concentrate on the problems with the theory. Yes, and I do know that there aren’t any problems the scientists think they can’t answer, but then we’re not worried about the science when it comes to evolution. Nobody is. Did you know that?”

  “Gary Albright said as much,” Gregor said. “It’s a little beyond me. Evolution is a scientific theory. If you aren’t worried about the science, what are you worried about?”

  “The culture,” Nick said firmly. “There’s a lawsuit going on in this town and it has nothing to do with the science. Franklin Hale wouldn’t know science if it bit him in the ass and left a note. It’s the culture that matters, the culture that says that people who believe in God are ignorant idiots, that there is no grounded morality of any kind, that it doesn’t matter what you do with yourself or your life, it’s all just—choices, I suppose. You have no idea how I hate that entire ideology of choice.”