Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  It hadn’t been what she’d wanted for herself, all those years ago. She hadn’t imagined that she would take a job in some godforsaken small town and then just sit there, year after year, getting older and grayer and weaker in the process. For a while she thought it would be enough as long as she and Margaret got away to Europe for the summers. They could walk through Florence and Madrid and Athens and see the art and talk about books. It was almost as if they were children again. Catherine Marbledale remembered her childhood. She remembered going to the library with Margaret and taking out all the best books, Anna Karenina and David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice and For Whom the Bell Tolls. She didn’t know how long it was before she discovered that you weren’t supposed to read like that, jumping around among the different time frames, paying no attention to literary history. She didn’t care. It was the best way to read, and she hadn’t read that way in many years.

  She had the door to her office closed. The secretaries were out there, dealing with things. She thought they could deal with them a little while longer. She thought about Florence again, and about Athens, about walking up the steep hill to the Parthenon and down again, and stopping at a little place on Nikis Street to have galatoboureko and coffee.

  She pulled her phone to her and picked up the receiver. She wondered how long phones like this would last. Everybody had cell phones now. It was close to one o’clock. Margaret would be in her office. Margaret was always in her office. Catherine punched the numbers in, and Margaret picked up on her cell phone.

  “Are you alone?” Catherine asked.

  “I am,” Margaret said. “I’ve been watching you on the news this morning.”

  “It’s over now,” Catherine said. “I have a headache, but I was wondering . . .”

  “About what?”

  “About money,” Catherine said. “Remember, a couple of years ago, we talked about it? There would come a time that we couldn’t handle it anymore. That we couldn’t go on fighting a war we knew we were never going to win?”

  “And you’ve come to that point,” Margaret said. “Because of the protestors?”

  “It’s not the protestors,” Catherine said. “It’s everything, really. It’s the lawsuit, and the school board, and the fact that nothing ever gets done unless I do it. It’s having to live day after day with people who are just so damned proud of their ignorance they glow. I don’t know. I take it you don’t feel the same way.”

  “I feel the same way,” Margaret said. “I’m just not quite as close to the end of my rope as you are.”

  “Well, I’m at the end and beyond it,” Catherine said. “And I’ve been sitting here ever since they let me back into my office, thinking that if I have to do this for one more year, I’m going to have a breakdown. I can’t fix people, Margaret. I accepted that long ago. I can’t fix people, and I don’t want to live with the people I can’t fix.”

  “So?”

  “So I was thinking it was about time for me to bail,” Catherine said, “and I was just wondering, that being the case, whether we have the money for me to do it. I know I should be better about these things, Margaret, but you were always better about these things than I was.”

  “I, at least, look at our bank statements every month. You want to know how much we have in the retirement accounts?”

  “That was the idea,” Catherine said. “Yes.”

  “At the end of last month, it amounted to five point eight million dollars.”

  “That’s more than I thought,” Catherine said.

  “It’s less than it could have been, if you hadn’t insisted on sticking to government bonds,” Margaret said.

  “I wanted to be safe,” Catherine said. “It was so complicated. Getting the money and getting it put away, I mean. And I didn’t think we’d ever have that chance again.”

  “I think we can retire, if we want to,” Margaret said. “We can’t stay in five-star hotels and eat out of the Michelin Guide, but we can definitely retire.”

  “That’s good,” Catherine said.

  And suddenly, she felt much more relaxed.

  She could take anything now, because she could see the light at the end of the tunnel. She could see the end of her misery.

  She could taste escape.

  SEVEN

  1

  Gregor Demarkian did not go to see Alice McGuffie in jail. For one thing, it was too far a drive at a time when he had a lot to do much closer to home. For another, he knew almost everything she had to tell him without asking, and he didn’t like the idea of asking her. There are some people in this world who are always in a state of crisis, no matter what is happening to them. A mildly offhand remark in the supermarket is interpreted as a gross insult, or a racial slur, or the first step in sexual harassment. A driver who won’t get out of the way so that the people behind him can pass is an example of incipient road rage, or deliberately attempting to prevent our heroine from getting to work, because he’s always been jealous, even back in the third grade. It went on and on, with no good ever coming of it, and often a lot of harm. Its practitioners were male as well as female, every possible color, every possible nationality. Gregor sometimes thought that some nationalities—the Armenian, for instance—practically turned it into an art form. It didn’t matter, because what it came down to was that it was tiring, and he avoided that kind of person, and the events they generated, when he could. Fortunately, there really was nothing Alice McGuffie could tell him that he didn’t already know. He listened to her brother when he called and agreed to take a look at the photograph Alice wanted him to see, and that was that.

  “It won’t kill her to sit in jail for a few hours,” Gregor told Gary, Eddie, and Tom, as he spread papers out across Gary’s desk. He’d given up on using his own desk. The space was too cramped, and he needed room. “My guess is that she has a picture of the building launch. Would there have been any reason for her to go to that?”

  “Sure,” Gary said. “She was president of the PTA when that happened. Say what you want about Alice, she’s very concerned about her kid’s education. Why would she think it would be important to see a picture of the launch?”

  “Because there’s somebody who’s not in it,” Gregor said.

  “Who’s not in it?” Eddie asked.

  “Catherine Marbledale,” Gregor said. “She should be in it. She’s the principal of the high school. But my guess is that she’s not in it.”

  “And that’s important?” Gary asked.

  “In a peripheral way, yes,” Gregor said, “but not in the way Alice thinks it is. You’ve got to understand that all of this, from the very beginning, was about money. And if Annie-Vic Hadley hadn’t been elected to the school board, nobody would ever have gotten hurt. Except the taxpayers of the town, of course. They’d have been out several million dollars with nothing to show for it. But there’d have been no reason to go running around town, bashing people on the head with baseball bats. Note I said bats, plural. I’m fairly sure they were each of them disposed of as soon as possible after the event. There’d be no point in keeping them around.”

  “I want a case like on CSI,” Eddie Block said. “You know, there’s a forensics lab, and they take a hair, and they get everything, name, rank, serial number, DNA, phone number, last known location—”

  “Why was it Annie-Vic who had to be elected to the school board?” Gary asked. “Wasn’t it the case that anybody new who was elected to the school board would cause the same problem? I mean, just because you have one group of people hoodwinked doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to pull the wool over the eyes of the new ones who come along.”

  “I wish they’d call in and tell me that they’ve found it,” Gregor said, looking at his cell phone as if it were personally responsible for the delay. “And I wish they’d find that woman, just in case. Never mind. No, it couldn’t have been just anybody. Look who else was elected to that school board. There was you, Gary. Was there ever any danger of you pulling out t
he files on that construction project and looking them over?”

  Gary Albright considered this. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t really have that kind of time, and I explained that to Franklin when he asked me to run. I could come to meetings. I could do a reasonable amount of homework. But I couldn’t take on a major project. I’ve got work here. I’ve got my family.”

  “Exactly,” Gregor said. “And you would have had the brains. But you know, even if you did decide to get involved, my guess would be that it would have taken a long time before you figured out anything was wrong, and even longer before you figured out what. You’re not a trained accountant, or anything close.”

  “Annie Vic isn’t a trained accountant,” Eddie Block said.

  “No, she isn’t,” Gregor said. “But she manages her own investments. I don’t know how many times people told me that. She manages her own investments, and she’s good at it. So she must have at least a rudimentary idea of how deals are done, and what disclosure forms mean.”

  “I know what a disclosure form means,” Gary said.

  “You might, but I’ll bet you don’t know how to read one,” Gregor said. “And then who do you have? Alice McGuffie and Franklin Hale. Franklin Hale runs a business, so there should be some expertise there. And there probably is. It’s just that Franklin Hale doesn’t seem much interested in looking into the practical aspects of running the schools in Snow Hill. There’s no sign in any of these papers I have that he’s ever so much as asked to see the operating budget. I called the secretaries down at the high school. Not a single one of them has ever had a request for any information from him, except for information about the biology curriculum. He wanted to see lesson plans. He wanted to see textbooks. He did not want to see budgets and disclosure forms.”

  “None of us realized he was so single-minded about the evolution thing,” Gary said. “When he ran for the board, his campaign was all about competence, not evolution. He talked a lot about the construction project then.”

  “That was because he knew he couldn’t win an election in this town saying he was going to get evolution out of the schools,” Eddie Block said. “Even most of the people who’ve lived here all their lives wouldn’t have voted for that.”

  “And why not?” Gary asked. “Does that make sense? I don’t mean getting evolution out of the schools. I mean not letting anything else in. We didn’t vote to remove evolution from the curriculum. We didn’t even vote to let Intelligent Design into the curriculum. We just wanted to put a book in the library—”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “Enough. The fact remains that Franklin posed no danger to anybody, because he wasn’t looking into any of the financials and probably wasn’t going to. Alice McGuffie posed no danger to anybody because no matter how often she might have looked at the paperwork, she’d never have the first idea of what she was seeing. Her husband might, I admit. He runs a business. But why would she show it to him? The only reason Alice McGuffie cared about the money the Snow Hill schools were spending was that she resented any money being spent on schools at all. She would have looked at a bunch of numbers and complained that they were too high, but she’d have had no idea of what she was seeing and no interest in learning. Franklin Hale may have gotten himself elected to the school board to get evolution out of the public schools, but Alice McGuffie got herself elected to the school board so that she could stick it to all the teachers she’d hated since she was in high school.”

  “Middle school, probably,” Gary Albright said.

  “The thing is,” Gregor said, “the one person on that board who did care about the financials was also the one person on that board who would know what she was seeing when she saw it, and that was Annie-Vic Hadley. And there was no way to distract her. She didn’t care about the evolution and Intelligent Design debate, except that she was willing to lend her name to the lawsuit. After that, from what I can tell, she paid no attention to that at all. I looked at the papers on her dining room table three times. The first was when Judy Cornish was killed. The second was when I walked up to the house the next day and the officers offered to let me in to look around. The third was just after Shelley Niederman was killed. And in between those times, I had Annie-Vic’s grandniece Lisa look again. And all those times, all I found, all Lisa found, was financial paperwork on the Snow Hill school accounts. That was it.”

  “Nothing on the lawsuit?” Eddie Block said. “That surprised me. She didn’t keep any material on the lawsuit?”

  “She probably did,” Gregor said. “When Judy Cornish was killed, the papers on the table were pretty badly messed up. I think the papers on the lawsuit, whatever Annie-Vic had, were taken away in order to make it look like the killer was interested in the lawsuit. Eventually, somebody would have mentioned the fact that Annie-Vic had a lot of material on that. If we’d followed the plan, we’d have gotten suspicious and started looking into people who might hate or resent the woman because she was part of the lawsuit. In fact, everything about the way all this was set up, right from the beginning, was meant to direct our attention to that lawsuit. Because that was the one direction we could look in that our murderer was sure would not help us in any way.”

  “But I still don’t see how it makes any sense,” Gary said. “How long could somebody keep this up? School boards are elected. They come and go. Eventually, there would probably be somebody with a real accounting degree on the board. Somebody from the development, maybe. And then what would happen?”

  “Nothing, if that day took long enough in coming,” Gregor said. “Look, the paperwork was sloppy. It was so sloppy that Molly Trask, who’s a rookie agent, knew what was wrong with it the minute she saw it. It was a question of getting your hands on the paperwork and fixing it, or fixing some of it and making the rest of it disappear. And once it was gone it was gone, because the Dellbach Construction Company does not exist. It’s a post office box in Harrisburg. Eventually, after everything was tied up, it would just vanish, and the chances were good that unless our murderer got enormously stupid, nobody would ever be able to pin anything on anybody.”

  “You’d think it would be harder to get away with than that,” Gary said. “You see all these things on Court TV—sorry, Tru TV. Anyway, you see all these things about the FBI going after fraud perps. You’d think it would be harder than that.”

  “If our murderer had wanted to steal fifty million dollars instead of just five, or if there had been multiple sources for the income, it would have been harder than that. But this was a very simple case. It was like raiding a cookie jar. It was not particularly sophisticated from an accounting standpoint, and it didn’t require a lot of fancy footwork to be kept out of sight. Unless somebody went deliberately looking for it, the chances were good that nobody would ever guess.”

  “And Annie-Vic went looking for it,” Gary said.

  “She saw the disclosure form and knew there was something wrong, and then she went looking for it,” Gregor said. “Exactly. And if she’d died when she was attacked, nobody else would have had to. You would have filed the case under ‘unsolved’ and put it down to juvenile delinquents in your head. Her family would have come in and boxed up all her stuff and put it in storage. Our murderer would have had all the time in the world to clean up the garbage, and that was that. As long as Annie-Vic was alive, those papers stayed put and anybody with access to them became a danger.”

  “But Shelley Niederman didn’t have access to them,” Eddie protested.

  “Our murder thought she did,” Gregor said. “Or maybe I’d better say that our murderer had no guarantee that she hadn’t, and it was better safe than sorry. So Shelley got a call from somebody she trusted. She went up to the Hadley house for what she probably thought was a meeting. The officers were diverted to the back by—”

  Gregor’s phone went off. “There it is,” he said.

  “That’s Molly and Evan. Thank God.”

  2

  They came trooping back to the Snow H
ill Police Department, not just Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker, but two state police officers of the small platoon that had been left at the Hadley house.

  “No more chances that two of us go missing at the same time again,” one of the officers explained to Gregor that morning, back when he’d told Tammaro and Weeks to find out what was in those woods behind Annie-Vic’s.

  Gregor did not blame Dale Vardan for this one, although he still blamed Dale for a lot of things. Even Dale’s belligerent opportunism was serving some good today, though, and so he let it go.

  Molly had the evidence bag when she came in, and she laid it down on Gary Albright’s desk in front of Gregor.

  “There it is,” she said. “Or, I should say, they are. There are two of them. There was one about fifty feet or so behind the house. The other was right at the back. On the lawn. It was close enough to the house to have started a fire if something went wrong.”

  “What are those?” Gary asked, holding up the evidence bag and looking at its contents in the light. “Are those caps? Like for cap pistols?”

  “They’re caps,” Gregor said, “but not for cap pistols. They’re what special effects departments used to use to make the sound of rapid gunfire. They’re probably three or four hundred times as powerful as a cap pistol cap.”

  “And all you have to do is light them,” Molly said, “because they’re primed to a delay when they go off. And they’re really loud. And they sound so much like real gunfire, I’ve never met anyone who can tell the difference if they haven’t been told.”