28 Hearts of Sand

by Jane Haddam

  Caroline hadn’t realized that she knew so many women, or that she was as distant and antagonistic to them as she’d ever been to the girls she’d known at Miss Porter’s School.

  Now it had been a week, or eight days, or whatever, and she was still sitting at that kitchen table, as if she’d never moved. The young officer from the police department was standing in front of her, holding his hat in his hand. She’d asked him to sit down, but he had refused. He had come with a big sheaf of papers he had put down on the table when he first came in.

  He looked like he was squirming.

  “We don’t want to be insensitive,” he said, clearing his throat for the fourth or fifth time. “We do have to follow procedure. We will be ready to release the body on this coming Thursday—”

  “Why Thursday?”

  “It’s because of the consultant we hired,” he said. “Just in case he wants to, you know, look things over himself.”

  “This is this Gregor Demarkian person.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Is he a pathologist?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am. But he will be here on Monday, and then we need to ask him what he needs. It’s for your own good as well as ours. If we don’t get this thing cleared up—”

  “This thing hasn’t been cleared up for thirty years. What makes you think you’re going to clear it up now?”

  “I think the point is to clear up the murder,” the officer said. “The thing is, we have to release the body to the next of kin. That’s the law. And you’re the next of kin. I’m sorry to intrude on what I know must be a difficult time.”

  “Do they teach you to say things like that at the police academy?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Never mind,” Caroline said.

  “I’ll just be going,” the officer said.

  “What happens if I won’t take the body?” Caroline said.

  The officer stopped his slow backward crab walk to the door. He looked totally flabbergasted. “But you have to take the body,” he said. “You’re the next of kin. The next of kin always takes the body.”

  “Surely there are some bodies that have no next of kin,” Caroline said. “Surely you run across murder victims or accident victims you can’t identify. I’m sure you don’t let them just sit in a cold box in the morgue for fifty years.”

  “Oh,” the officer said. “Oh. No. We have procedure for John Does. But those are John Does. Nobody knows who they are.”

  “And nobody wants this one,” Caroline said.

  “Oh,” the officer said. He took a great, big breath. “You don’t really have to decide until Thursday.”

  “Once the body’s gone, I can finally get that woman out of my life forever,” Caroline said. “It’s a nice idea, but the Internet is eternal. Chapin Waring is going to be a cult figure for a generation and some idiot is going to put up Skycam footage of my front yard on their Web page for all that time. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

  “Still,” the officer said.

  Caroline waved him away. “I’ll talk to my sisters. Maybe they want to do something. I don’t know.”

  “That’s a good idea. Talk to your sisters.” He’d started backing up again.

  Caroline watched him get into his police cruiser and listened to the engine gun up, and the car began to move.

  She didn’t move herself, because she didn’t see any need to.

  Then something in her head broke, and she stood up abruptly.

  She had Babycise and two soccer games and a trip to Home Depot to worry about.

  She had a life that was made up of events on a schedule board, and she would have to live it.

  FOUR

  1

  Gregor Demarkian had always liked New York City—sort of. It was closer to the truth that he had liked every version of it he had ever seen, and that he liked this one, too, at least as it appeared in the morning. That was the trouble with New York, as far as he was concerned. It never stayed the same from one visit to the next.

  Of course, it didn’t help that the city had a thousand hotels or more, so that he never found himself staying in the same one. The one for this trip was in Greenwich Village, and he was here because Bennis picked it out for him.

  “My publisher is always trying to check me into the Hilton,” she’d told him when she printed out the reservation confirmation on her computer, “but I prefer the Village. It’s calmer, for one thing. And it’s manageable. Of course, in a way, it’s a bit like Paris. You think you’re walking into a world of great writers and genius painters, and what you find is tourists and lawyers.”

  Gregor didn’t know about the tourists and lawyers, but his appointment at the FBI wasn’t until afternoon, and what he wanted to do more than anything was walk around. Part of him was a little miffed that he was too far from Midtown to walk to it. There were bookstores up there he liked, and he would have been happy to see if the Mysterious Bookshop was still doing business at the same old stand. Of course, it wasn’t. Bennis had told him something about the store moving to TriBeCa, wherever that was.

  The hotel was a good one, although Gregor had some trouble finding it on the map Bennis had given him as a guide. It wasn’t large and shiny the way an uptown hotel would have been, but Gregor was willing to bet it had cost the earth. He had a bedroom and a sitting room with a window that looked down on a street that might have been part of the last century, if it weren’t for the fact that everybody walking on it was talking on a cell phone.

  Gregor kept his opinion of cell phones to himself and went downstairs in search of coffee. The hotel itself did not run a restaurant, but there were a few open places just down the block, and more across the street. Gregor picked one that looked less determinedly artful than some of the others and ordered a cup of coffee that cost less than a parking space.

  The coffee shop was full, and loud, and the longer he sat there, the more he felt as if he shouldn’t. There were people waiting for tables. He couldn’t settle in.

  He went out onto the street and began to look around. He went to Washington Square Park and sat down on a bench. He checked his watch. He really had managed to waste a fair amount of time. It was nearly noon. He looked at his notebooks and wished he’d managed to get something done.

  He got up and started walking again. He was restless. He didn’t like all these consultations and conferences, all these different people wanting different things from him. It was never a good idea to put yourself in a position where you couldn’t tell where your loyalties should lie. The town of Alwych had hired him. He wished he could just leave it at that.

  He was coming around a corner when he saw a young woman busily unhooking and unlatching things on the street. He stopped where she was and found himself in front of a long expanse of plate glass, very bright and very clean—so clean, he wondered if they washed the glass daily. He looked across at the books in the window.

  “You’re a bookstore,” he said to the young woman.

  “Partners and Crime, Mystery Booksellers,” she said brightly. “Haven’t you visited us before?”

  “I don’t visit New York all that often,” Gregor said. “I almost never get down here.”

  “Well, if you have the time, you should come in and look around. We’re the largest mystery bookstore in New York. And we carry, really, just about everything.”

  “True crime?”

  “Of course true crime,” the young woman said. “Although I’ve got to admit, I prefer fiction. But lots of people want true crime these days. It’s a very hot subgenre.”

  The young woman flashed Gregor a smile and went back inside.

  Gregor backed up a little to look at the facade. The name of the store was painted in gold letters across a black expanse that reminded him a little of the old Scribner building.

  He went closer to the windows again. The young woman was fiddling with what looked like a cash register. He made up his mind and went through the front door.

 
“You’ve decided to come in,” she said, looking up. “That’s excellent. I’ve decided to sell you at least five books, all in hardcover. Is there anything special you might want to see?”

  Gregor said, “Do you think you can get me something about a crime that occurred thirty years ago, a series of bank robberies in suburban Connecticut—”

  “Oh, that,” the young woman said. Then she peered at him, suddenly seeming uncertain. “You know, you look very familiar. I’m not sure why. But the Waring case, with the murder and all the publicity—well, I do have some items you might find of interest.”

  “Already?” Gregor asked. “It’s been—what? A week?”

  “They’re not new books,” the young woman said. “But we stocked up. And I’ve got one that you might be interested in.”

  “Which one is that?”

  The young woman moved out into the store, waving at Gregor to stay where he was. She came back only moments later with a large, coffee table–sized volume that was obviously a picture book.

  “There’s not a lot of text,” she said, putting the book down on the counter, “but a year from now, we’re going to be inundated with very good work. We’ve heard that Ann Rule is doing something on the case, on the murder case, of course. And then there’s always the chance that Gregor Demarkian will finally decide to write one of his own. I figure someday, he’s almost going to have to.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t like to write,” Gregor said.

  “Maybe. Still, if he wrote one, that would be the one you’d want. Anway, this book has got literally hundreds of pictures from the time when the robberies happened, family pictures of some of the people involved, or people the police thought were involved. That kind of thing.”

  Gregor flipped through the wide tall pages, past one grainy black-and-white print after another. Every once in a while there would be a photograph in color that looked like an amateur snapshot.

  He closed the book.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll take it. You take American Express?”

  “We take everything,” the young woman said. “Let me ring this up for you. You really do look very familiar. If you hadn’t said you were just visiting, I’d have thought you were one of our regulars.”

  2

  When the time came, Gregor took a cab to the FBI office.

  Sitting in the cab, he leafed through the book. It was not only large and ungainly, but haphazard and sort of oddly printed. The title was Gone: The Real Truth About Chapin Waring and the Black Mask Robberies, but there was virtually no text among the pictures.

  Gregor stopped at one that took up an entire half of the page. There were six people, lined up more or less by height. He looked at the caption and found that the two enormously tall men were Kyle Westervan and Tim Brand, that the very tall woman just after them was Virginia Brand. That would be Tim Brand’s sister and, according to Gregor’s notes, later Kyle Westervan’s wife. Then the heights dropped off significantly, so that Martin Veer, who was next, barely made it to Virginia Brand’s shoulders, and Hope Matlock, who followed him, was almost as tall, but not quite. The two of them looked oddly out of place. They were boxy and lumpy instead of tall and willowy. They looked like members of a different species.

  The last figure in the line was Chapin Waring, and she was very small indeed. There was, however, nothing boxy or lumpy about her. She was like an exquisite miniature of a pedigreed dog.

  Gregor looked on the back of the book and found: KNIGHT SION BOOKS. He looked at the copyright page and found Knight Sion Books again, along with an address in Queens.

  He put the book back in the bag and got out at his destination, feeling the suddenly unmuffled sounds of city traffic as vaguely hostile. He went into the building and took out his authorization letter. The guard in the lobby looked it over and handed him a visitor’s badge.

  The elevator opened at his floor, and a young woman was waiting for him, holding a file folder. She was pleasant and bland and not particularly interested in him. She stepped forward and held out her hand to be shaken. Gregor shook it.

  “Mr. Fitzgerald is this way,” she said without bothering to give her name. “He told me to show you right in.”

  Gregor was glad not to have to wait. They went down one corridor and passed through a room of cubicles. The office they were going to was down a side hall. The hall was windowless. The office was small.

  Darcy Fitzgerald rose up from behind his desk as Gregor and his escort approached, and held out his hand.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “I know we’ve never met, but I’ve heard a lot about you. And not just from Patrick. Why don’t you sit down.”

  The young woman waited expectantly.

  Fitzgerald said, “Coffee is probably a good idea,” and she took off.

  Gregor took one of the two padded visitors’ chairs in front of the desk and put his bag from Partners and Crime on the floor. Fitzgerald raised his eyebrows slightly, and Gregor brought the bag up onto the desk.

  “I was wandering around the city earlier,” Gregor said. “I found this and picked it up. The clerk at the bookstore recommended it.”

  Gregor took the book out of the bag and put it on the desk. Darcy Fitzgerald’s face lit up.

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Well, I suppose it’s not all that surprising. The damned things are all over the city.”

  “This book is all over the city?”

  “All over the tristate area, probably,” Fitzgerald said. “You’ve got to give the guy credit. He’s got an obsession and he’s made it pay.”

  “What guy? And what obsession?”

  “Ray Guy Pearce,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s a—I don’t know what to call him. A conspiracy theory nut, that’s for sure. He’s been running Knight Sion Books out of his dining room in Queens for decades—all kinds of conspiracies, the government covering up alien landings, the government being manipulated by the thirteen richest families in the world, who aren’t really humans, but some kind of reptiles, and Clinton was one of them, they only made him look as if he’d grown up poor so that the rest of us would be fooled. That’s the kind of thing.”

  “And he does all this out of a dining room in Queens?”

  “It’s probably a lot easier now than it used to be,” Fitzgerald said. “Everything’s digital now. He’s got a couple of Web sites. But, yeah, Knight Sion is the largest publisher of conspiracy books in the country. Bigger even than Feral House. This murder must have been a godsend to him.”

  “The murder of Chapin Waring?”

  “Sure. She’s part of the conspiracy, or the robberies were, or something. I’ll admit I was never able to straighten it out. Knight Sion has been publishing books on the Waring case since maybe two or three years after Chapin Waring went missing. One of my predecessors took it seriously and looked into good old Ray Guy, but I don’t think he ever found anything that would link the man to the case. Except, you know, an obsession to see conspiracies in everything. We’ve got notes about Ray Guy and Knight Sion Books in the file, if you want to look into it yourself.”

  Gregor picked up the book and turned it over in his hands. “Maybe I will,” he said.

  Fitzgerald laughed. “The one you’ve got came out the first time a few years ago. When the news hit the wires, Ray Guy probably had a ton printed, along with a ton or two of the other titles on the case.”

  “And this man has no connection to the case at all?”

  “Not that we could tell,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s been sitting out there on his rear end for fifty years, just getting this stuff into print and trying to convince as many people as possible that we’re all being secretly prepared as sacrifices to the Antichrist by a cabal of—I don’t know. I never understood it.”

  “He writes all these books himself?” Gregor asked.

  “Nope. He’s got a whole stable of writers who do this stuff. Most of them specialize. And there are new ones coming in all the time. You’ve got to ask yourself how many of these peop
le there could possibly be, but the answer is—an infinite number. And I do mean infinite. He writes the stuff about Chapin Waring, though.”

  “I’d think it would be difficult to put five bank robberies and a flight from justice into the context of an international conspiracy of—did you say the Antichrist?”

  “I did indeed.”

  “Somehow, I don’t find Chapin Waring plausible as an agent of the Antichrist.”

  “I don’t either,” Fitzgerald said. “But she sure as hell is plausible as a reincarnation of Houdini. It’s been thirty years, and nobody caught so much as a glimpse until she turned up stabbed in the back at Alwych. That’s got to be some kind of record.”

  There was a noise at Gregor’s back. He turned to see yet another young woman coming in with coffee, faux cream, and sugar on a tray.

  “Here it is,” Fitzgerald said. “And now we can get down to the serious business of finding out what happened to all that money.”

  The young woman put the tray down on the desk and left. Fitzgerald handed Gregor a cup of very black coffee. Gregor reached for the faux cream and a spoon.

  “The money,” Gregor prompted.

  Fitzgerald shook his head vigorously. “Over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Quite a bit of it in bills we had serial numbers for. Gone without a trace for thirty years, just like Chapin Waring herself. Not a single bill has ever turned up anywhere. Not even once.”

  “Which means nobody was spending it,” Gregor said.

  “That’s what it means,” Fitzgerald said. “It also means that wherever Chapin Waring went, she either didn’t take the money with her, or she didn’t need to use it for anything. The best we can come up with is that it’s got to be sitting somewhere in a pile. It might be a couple of piles. But we want it back.”

  “I can imagine,” Gregor said. “It’s a lot of money for only five robberies.”

  “Yes, well, what we’re worried about now is that you’re going to go out to Alwych and solve their murder for them, and then that’s all you’re going to do. We’d appreciate it if you would look out for our problem while you’re there. We’ve got reason to think that at least some attempt may be made to keep you from doing anything but dealing with the present.”