by Jane Haddam
The cigarette had burned down to the stub. She threw it on the ground and stubbed it out. She was, Tim thought, a very beautiful woman.
“I thought we ought to talk about something else,” Virginia said, sounding more than a little abrupt. “That man is here. Gregor Demarkian.”
“I know,” Tim said.
“I’m not worried about him, exactly,” Virginia said. “I know I didn’t kill Chapin. I’m pretty sure you didn’t, either. And I don’t know who did. If you want to know the truth, it astonishes me that anybody would after all this time.”
“Evaline Veer?” Tim suggested. “That’s the best I’ve been able to come up with.”
“Hope called me,” Virginia said.
“She came here, too,” Tim said.
“She was out of her mind frantic,” Virginia said. “I mean completely out of her mind. She doesn’t—handle things well.”
“No,” Tim agreed.
“I kept thinking she was going to make people think she was guilty of something whether she was or not.”
“She did go and talk to that man,” Tim said. “You know, the one with the books. Knight Sion Publishing, or whatever that was.”
“I can’t see what she had to tell him that he didn’t already know,” Virginia said.
“He paid her a few hundred dollars,” Tim said. “She came and talked to me about it this morning. She said she was feeling guilty about betraying us, and I said I didn’t think it was much of a betrayal. You’re right. There isn’t much the man didn’t already know, and not much he hadn’t published, either. I was glad she had the money. There isn’t much teaching available in the summers. I don’t think she eats right.”
“There wasn’t any need for it to ruin any of us. It didn’t ruin you. Or me. Or Kyle.”
“It ruined Marty and Chapin.”
“Marty is dead,” Virginia said. Then she shivered. “Chapin is dead, too, but it doesn’t feel real to me. I think I’ve been assuming she’s been dead all these years. But Marty—well, I don’t think about the robberies much. I didn’t take part in them, and I didn’t suspect Chapin and Marty did until there was all that fuss on the news. But I do remember that damned accident.”
“I don’t think it would be possible to forget, either,” Tim said. “I remember the screeching noise and then being slammed into the back of the front seat and then being twisted around like a pretzel. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt.”
Virginia took out her cigarettes again, looked at them for a moment, and put them back into her pocket.
“I’d better go,” she said. “They’re probably looking for me.”
“You know I’m not praying that you win your election.”
“I do know,” Virginia said. “And I don’t pray, but I’m not hoping you get out from under the laws of the State of Connecticut. I’m not hoping that you have to close, mind you. I do hope you’re going to see the light.”
“I have seen the light,” Tim said, “and if the state prevails and demands that I hand out the morning-after pill, I will close. I will shut the place down cold and I’ll make it entirely clear why.”
“And everybody will call you a hero for doing it,” Virginia said. “I do have to go, Tim. I have to get back to the fight to make the world safe for selfish, shallow feminists.”
“Your words, not mine.”
“I don’t understand why it’s always all right to shortchange and restrict and disadvantage women,” Virginia said. “Except, on some level, mostly I do. I’ll see you later.”
“Probably sometime next year,” Tim said.
Virginia gave him a little smile and then ran up the concrete steps as quickly and as smoothly as if she really had been still eighteen. Tim watched her go with a feeling that was a lot like pain.
SEVEN
1
Gregor Demarkian’s instructions to the Alwych Police Department did just what he’d expected them to do. They’d made the entire population of the APD headquarters start running around in circles. By the time he arrived back in Alwych, officers and technicians had been dispatched to the Waring house to “fingerprint everything in sight,” as Jason Battlesea put it, and a couple of people had been called in from the state police to help. Gregor had an almost irresistible urge to ask if the state police forensics people had lost their accreditation along with their lab, but he managed to choke it back and then to go over, once more, what he needed them all to do. He had no idea if he would actually be able to get Ray Guy Pearce arrested for something, but he did know he was going to try.
“We got the FBI on the phone,” Jason Battlesea said, “and some guy named Fitzgerald said to tell you that this man you’re interested in has never been fingerprinted. So if you’re going to check for his fingerprints, you’re going to have to have some reason to bring him in. He’s some kind of lawyer.”
Gregor considered this. Ray Guy Pearce a lawyer? There was nothing impossible about it, and given the man’s mental state on every level, it had probably been a smart move. Lawyer or not, though, there were ways to get a man fingerprinted.
“I’m surprised somebody hasn’t insisted over the years,” Gregor said, “but it doesn’t matter. We’ll get him fingerprinted. And then I’m going to break his head.”
“But I don’t understand,” Jason Battlesea said. “Is this the person who killed Chapin Waring? He came in from outside and killed her? But why would he do that? If he knew her in Queens, why didn’t he kill her in Queens?”
“He didn’t know her like that,” Gregor said. “He thought he was shielding her from the agents of the worldwide reptilian conspiracy.”
“What?”
Gregor shook his head. “Mr. Pearce believes,” he said, “that the entire world is run by thirteen families, the richest thirteen families on the planet. The members of these families are not human. They are the descendants of the union of human women with Satan’s demons. And these thirteen families have been the same families since the beginning of time. They just pretend to be other people in order to fool the public about the true nature of the world. So, you see, they’ll create the illusion that someone like Bill Clinton was born and grew up in poverty, when in reality he was the son of one of these families, and being groomed to take power.”
Jason Battlesea looked bewildered. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that sounds like gibberish. Are you trying to tell me that this Pearce guy is crazy?”
“Not in the way you mean, no,” Gregor said. “There are a lot of people in the world—in the world, mind you, not just in the United States—who believe versions of that story. And there are a lot of versions. There are Catholic and Protestant versions, atheist versions, Muslim versions. A little twist here and there, and the story works for anybody. Ray Guy Pearce thought Chapin Waring was a member of one of those thirteen families, and that she had escaped from that family and now wanted to tell the truth to the world. But she couldn’t poke her head above the radar, or they would find her, capture her, and destroy her.”
“She was wanted for a double homicide,” Jason Battlesea said. “Of course we wanted to find her and capture her.”
“Mr. Pearce believes that was all just a cover story for the forces of evil who were afraid she’d blow their cover. So, he covered for her when she needed covering, he taught her how to live underground and without being noticed—”
“He published books. He wasn’t trying not to be noticed.”
“Some of the books he published were manuals on how not to be noticed,” Gregor said. “And I have to admit, he was smarter than most of these guys. The usual thing in trying to hide is to take yourself off to some remote area and do what’s called ‘going sovereign.’ That means trying to stay off the grid entirely. No hooking up to the electrical system. No buying oil for the furnace. No going to the grocery store. You build yourself a place out in the middle of nowhere. You hunt and grow your food and use firewood to heat your house in winter. You don’t use money and you don’t let yourself get seen. And it fails
every time.”
“It sounds like the Unabomber,” Battlesea said.
“It is like the Unabomber,” Gregor said, “and like a half dozen other people you’ve heard of. The Weavers at Ruby Ridge, for instance. Do you know what the two big problems with going sovereign are?”
“Is one of them that it’s crazy?”
“No,” Gregor said. “The first thing is that it’s really hard to hide out in areas with sparse populations. We’re talking about really small towns here. There’s not much to do. There’s not much to see. And there’s nowhere to go. That means that people watch other people. They see somebody new, they notice him. They check out the new guy’s behavior. They try to figure out what he’s doing. Of course, they know about going sovereign. They’ve seen these guys before, and they know a lot of them aren’t stable, and a lot of them are wanted by somebody or other. So they watch, and they watch television, and when the guy’s picture shows up on America’s Most Wanted, they pick up the phone and give the authorities all the necessary directions.”
“Okay,” Battlesea said.
“The second problem,” Gregor said, “is that these guys almost always want guns. And, by the way, I think we’re going to find that was true of Chapin Waring, too, as soon as we find the apartment she was living in. The gun she used to shoot up the mirrors while she was dying is going to be one she brought with her. Not that we’ll necessarily be able to prove it, but I think that’s a pretty good bet. But that’s the thing. They’re running, they feel hunted, and they want guns. Even if they’re smart enough to have given up modern transportation. Even if they’ve gotten themselves to the point where they don’t need to buy gas or tires or spare parts because they’re relying on horse and mule power. They want guns, they want a lot of them, and they want good ones. They’ve got to hunt, and guns are better for hunting game than traps or bows and arrows. But the big reason is that they’re convinced they’re under siege and have to protect themselves from the forces of the United States government. That means they want an arsenal. And if there’s one thing the United States government pays a lot of attention to, it’s indications that some guy or group of guys somewhere is stockpiling a lot of firepower.”
“Didn’t you just say Chapin Waring was stockpiling firepower? Why didn’t they pick up on that?”
“I don’t think she was buying bazookas and Uzis,” Gregor said. “She probably picked up a few Saturday night specials, the kind of thing you can get off the street. And she didn’t need to have bought anything herself. Ray Guy Pearce could have gotten a couple of hand guns for her without raising too much of a profile. The Bureau has been looking into him, on and off, for years, but the general opinion is that the man is a flake and a crank and not particularly dangerous to anything but your sanity. He hasn’t been buying bazookas and Uzis either.”
“But he was out here, right? He was in the Waring house?”
“On and off the whole thirty years,” Gregor agreed. “Chapin Waring gave him a key and the security codes. Which means she had them, at least at the very beginning. I don’t think anybody would have noticed he was there. All he wanted was the photographs. He wouldn’t have stolen the silver or anything obvious that would have triggered a police investigation. And he didn’t take the photograph albums, just in case they might be missed. I think Chapin Waring told him where the albums were in the house. He went in and took whatever photographs he wanted and then put the albums back in place. He got out as quickly as he could. As long as he wasn’t stupid, as long as he was careful to time it, he would have been fine. Just take off down the beach.”
“But how did he get into the house without leaving signs of forced entry?” Jason Battlesea said. “I get you about the first time. Chapin Waring could have given him a key. But after a while, the locks were changed. And they were changed a lot.”
“There are plenty of lock-picking tools that won’t leave much if anything of a trace,” Gregor said. “They’re not very popular, because they take a long time to work. You have to have about half an hour or so to go at it without being afraid of being caught.”
“Well, he couldn’t have used something like that,” Jason Battlesea said. “He couldn’t just hang around, picking a lock for half an hour. Somebody would have seen him.”
“Would they have? If he’d tried to pick a lock on the beach side, then yes, I think there’s a good chance he would have been seen, at least at certain seasons of the year. But the front door is shielded from the road by hedges, and so is the side door that leads to the kitchen. He could have spent all the time he wanted at either of those two without having to worry about being interrupted. He would have parked somewhere on the beach, walked down and come around to the side door or the front door. Beach Drive is as closed off and isolated as any residential road I’ve ever seen. People don’t look out their windows. They don’t spy on their neighbors. They take privacy to an extreme. Did you get one notification that Chapin Waring was anywhere near her house the day she died? Because there’s none in the notes. People saw her all over the place, including on the parts of Beach Drive that are closest to town, but nobody seems to have seen her in the strictly residential area where the house was.”
“Right,” Battlesea said. “But you still don’t think he killed her.”
“No,” Gregor said. “He had no reason to. In fact, he had good reason to want to keep her alive. Technically, he wasn’t harboring a fugitive, and they’d done all the right things to make sure she’d be very hard to find. She’d stayed in a major city, with lots of people around, and in a very diverse area, so that nobody stood out no matter what they were like unless they started behaving outrageously and dangerously. He said she was wearing a hijab, which would have been an excellent way for her not to get seen, even before there was a significant Muslim population in the area. As long as there was something of a population, a hijab would have turned her into somebody nobody really looked at. Most people, when they see a woman in a hijab, look at the hijab, not the woman.”
“Right,” Jason Battlesea said.
“I’ve got to take a walk,” Gregor said. “There’s somebody I want to talk to.”
Jason Battlesea looked mulish. “I don’t understand why we shouldn’t think this guy killed her,” he said. “Then we could arrest him.”
2
Sometimes, near the middle of consulting cases, Gregor Demarkian felt as if he were going to explode. The local police who called him in were often either incompetent or unwilling to be competent. More often the latter. A friend of Bennis’s had once told him that that was what being a management consultant was. Nine times out of ten, you went into a business and found—although nobody ever told you—that it was desperate to fire some idiot and just couldn’t bring itself to the point.
With Alwych, the problem wasn’t incompetence or unwillingness to be competent so much as it was an ingrained sense of what was and wasn’t “done” here. The Alwych police didn’t have a suspect they weren’t afraid to name or nervous to arrest. They didn’t have any idea at all of what might have happened here. They only knew that they were suddenly famous, and they had to do something about it.
Juan Valdez was sitting in the car in the parking lot behind the station, but Gregor didn’t go to him. He walked out the front door of the police station instead and looked around on Main Street. The clinic was next to the hospital, up on a hill and easy to spot.
Gregor started walking in that direction. Twilight had begun, and it was sliding inexorably into darkness. Some of the stores were open, selling little American flags and American flag pins and American flag hats and even American flag bikinis.
After Gregor had gone about three blocks, there was a little square sign with a large H on it, and a smaller sign under that that said HOSPITAL with an arrow to the left. He followed the arrow and found himself on a wide road with a sidewalk only on one side. It curved around to the right in a wide sweep. Halfway up the sweep, there was another sign with another arrow.<
br />
He had gotten nearly to the top of the curve when he saw them: the hospital, modern and shiny and a little farther up the incline, and the clinic, also modern, also shiny, but very much smaller. He went through the little parking lot to the front door.
He saw the man he had come to see almost immediately. He looked just like all the pictures of him in newspapers and magazines. And he would have been a noticeable person even if he hadn’t been semifamous. He was very tall and very dark and very—there. Bennis would have called him one of those people who glowed in the dark.
The tall man was leaning up against the reception counter, talking to one of the nurses. He did not seem to be in a hurry, or in the middle of an emergency. Gregor walked up to him and held out his hand.
“Dr. Brand?” he said. “My name is Gregor Demarkian.”
Tim Brand looked up, looked puzzled for a moment, and then smiled. The smile was wide and broad and completely unaffected.
“Excellent,” he said. “I knew you were going to come and talk to all of us, but I thought it was going to be with Jason Battlesea or one of those detectives. Come right in. We’re having a very slow night.”
“It’s the Fourth of July eve,” the woman behind the counter said. “Of course it’s a very slow night. You watch what happens tomorrow. We’ll be full up and frantic.”
“Some of the guys who drink seriously don’t like to go to the emergency room to get dried out,” Tim Brand said. “The emergency room people tend to feel like they have to refer these guys to alcohol programs or get them to talk to social workers. We try to do what the earliest Christians did. You need help, we give it to you, no questions asked. If you want to talk to us, we’ll listen.”
“We listen to too much, if you ask me,” the woman behind the counter said.
Tim Brand gestured to the corridor behind the desk. “Come with me. I have an office of sorts, if you want to be private.”
Gregor let the doctor lead him first down the corridor that had been visible, then around a corner, then to an open door. The office inside was very small, and there was so much stuff strewn around that Gregor wasn’t sure he’d have a seat.
