by Jane Haddam
“What two problems?”
“Sex and Donegal Steele.”
“For God’s sake,” Chessey said, “don’t put it that way.”
“I’m not putting it any way, Chess, I’m just stating fact. We’ve got to do something about the physical thing between us that will work, and we’ve got to get Steele off your case. Right?”
“Dr. Steele isn’t on my case at the moment. He isn’t on anybody’s. He hasn’t been around.”
“He’ll be around again soon enough if we let him. The trick is to cut him off at the pass.”
“How?”
“The same way we solve the physical thing between us.”
“Jack, for God’s sake, what do you want to do? Relieve me of my virginity at high noon on Minuteman Field? What do you think will get through to him?”
“Chess, please, please, will you trust me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you will.”
He had managed to slide down farther against the trunk of the tree, to somehow seem to be sitting on his haunches—although how that was possible, stuck in the branches the way they were, Chessey didn’t know. He took her face between his hands and lifted her chin until he was looking into her eyes, so much like the way he had the first time he had kissed her that Chessey found herself unable to breathe again, for reasons that had nothing to do with her fear of heights.
“What we’ve got to do right now,” he said, “is we’ve got to get into your room and get you out of that pumpkin thing.”
“Men aren’t allowed in the rooms at Lexington House after ten o’clock on weekdays.”
“So who’s to notice? Evie? When we tell her what we’re going to do, she’ll pin a medal on us.”
“Only if it’s bloody murder,” Chessey said.
“It’s better than that. Please?”
Chessey looked away. “What about you? You’re still in your bat suit.”
“We’ll take care of me later. I’m all right for now just the way I am.”
Chessey thought he was all right with her just the way he was—he was always all right, no matter what he did—but it was too stupid a thing to admit in public and besides, he was pushing her out on the branch again, toward the window. She went without thinking about it, the space between her body and the ground eliminated from her imagination. She could feel his hands on her shoulders and his laughter in her ear. She wondered if he realized they’d never tried going in this way before.
The window was still open. She barreled for it, head first, anything to get her hands onto the sill. At the same time she thought: This time he’s going to want to do something really crazy.
3
OUT AT COUNTY RECEIVING it was midnight and Miss Maryanne Veer was lying in a bed on the intensive care ward, neither conscious nor unconscious, neither dreaming nor not dreaming, thinking about lemons. She had been thinking about lemons at least since she first remembered waking up. She had even thought about them while Margaret was here to visit. Margaret had been Margaret the whole time—weepy and hysterical when a doctor or nurse was in the room, fiery and hard when the two of them were alone. Maryanne and Margaret shared their secret lives only with each other.
Now the ward was dark and quiet. The only other patient was three doors down, suffering the aftereffects of having a heart attack in the middle of a fire. Miss Maryanne Veer closed her eyes and let her mind drift, over the lemons and onto the hand.
This is how it happened, over and over again, no matter what she tried to do to stop it: The lemons were piled in a pyramid on somebody else’s table in somebody else’s house, each and every one of them perfectly round, each and every one of them marked in ink like those Sunkist oranges but with a line that said: “full of sugar.” Miss Maryanne Veer was standing next to them and wishing they were hers. The hand came out of nowhere and handed one to her, taking it off the top. When Miss Maryanne Veer got it into her own hand, she saw there was a straw sticking out of one end.
Lemons, hand, straw: that was it. There was nothing sensible. It wasn’t even a hand she recognized, although she kept thinking she should.
Lemons, hand, straw: there was something there that was sensible, maybe even important, but she couldn’t pin it down. She ought to tell somebody about it, but she couldn’t do that either. She’d already heard them say it was doubtful if she would ever again be able to talk.
They had given her seventy-five milligrams of Demerol to deaden the pain and sent her into outer space instead.
Lemons, hand, straw.
She’d never gotten around to telling the people who mattered that Donegal Steele was missing.
Six
AT THREE O’CLOCK IN the morning, Gregor Demarkian, unable to sleep, got off the couch he had been lying on in the suite he was not supposed to be sharing with Bennis but was and went to look out the window. Bennis was behind the closed door of the bedroom, dead to the world. Even the acid smell of her cigarette smoke had faded hours ago. Gregor’s back felt as if it had been worked over by a curling iron for days. This was the guest suite in Constitution House, the best apartment in the building according to Tibor. It was on the fourth floor and looked out over Minuteman Field to King’s Scaffold.
At this hour of the morning, the campus was dead. There were no students wandering back from late study in the bowels of the library, no stray drunks reeling in from roadhouses out of town. Gregor had never seen a college campus so peaceful in the dark. He kept thinking that one good look at the Halloween decorations ought to change the atmosphere for him, but he couldn’t see any Halloween decorations. There were only the ominous lumps of logs rising up against the Scaffold and the straw man pumpkin head at the top.
He didn’t know how long he had been standing there at the window before he realized what he was looking at. Five minutes, ten minutes, a minute and a half: he found it hard to keep track of things when he was this tired. His gaze swept back and forth across the top of the Scaffold, back and forth, and finally it stopped.
There was somebody up there, prancing back and forth, doing God only knew what in the harsh light of a moon that looked like it ought to belong to another planet.
A bat.
Part Three
Thursday, October 31
Deep into that darkness peering,
long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal
ever dared to dream before.
—E. A. Poe
One
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER given any thought to the differences between large city police departments and small-town cop shops in the sealing and securing of crime scenes. If he had given it any thought, he would have said there wasn’t any. Crime scenes weren’t something he had been either trained or conditioned to consider. In his early years at the Bureau, he had mostly dealt with crimes without scenes. Kidnappers tended to snatch their victims off sidewalks or in department stores or out of playgrounds, and to do it where they couldn’t be observed. In his later years at the Bureau, Gregor was called in mostly as an afterthought. First there would be a series of killings in one state, then a similar series in a second state, then another similar series in a third. At that point, the local police from all three states would start talking to each other, and somebody would say: Doesn’t the FBI have a department that deals with this kind of crap? By the time Gregor or his agents got into it, there would be no scenes left, just bodies in drawers and evidence in bags. If something new came up while they were trying to get the “crap” coordinated and ultimately straightened out, it was the local police who handled the details of sealing, securing, and gathering evidence.
Still, walking up to the dining hall from Constitution House at five minutes to seven on Halloween morning, Gregor had fully expected to find the cafeteria closed. He thought he’d be meeting David Markham surrounded by empty tables and a nonfunctioning kitchen. It only made sense. Instead, he came into the dining hall foye
r to find the wide double doors to the cafeteria line open and stuffed with bleary-eyed students balancing more in the way of books than of food on their trays. The kitchen was, indeed, nonfunctioning—there was a neat little hand-lettered sign near the stacks of trays and pockets of tableware that said, “SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, BUT THE CAFETERIA WILL BE UNABLE TO OFFER HOT FOOD UNTIL 4 NOVEMBER”—but otherwise business was proceeding as usual. The Halloween decorations had not only been left up, but increased. A jack-o’-lantern cut out of a pumpkin so large it looked like it had grown in a dump for nuclear waste was sitting on the top of the plastic display cover where the hot food should have been, glowing evilly with the interior light of a dozen votive candles.
Gregor passed by the little individual boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Count Chocula cereal—he hoped the Count Chocula was a special just for Halloween—and by the little sealed containers of milk and orange juice until he came to the coffee. Then he took three coffee cups, filled them, and pushed the tray along to the cash register. From there, he could see David Markham, sitting alone at one of those tables by the window, surrounded by papers. It was remarkable about those tables near the windows. No matter how crammed the dining room got, there was always at least one of them left open. It was as if the students had mentally consigned a certain number of the best places to eat to the faculty, and neither common sense nor self-esteem could talk them into violating them.
The girl at the cash register was tense—understandably, Gregor thought—so he gave her his best reassuring smile as he stuffed his change into his pants pocket. Then he picked up his tray and, not looking at it, headed for David Markham. Linda Melajian back on Cavanaugh Street had taught him that about not looking at coffee while you were carrying it. For some reason—Linda had talked a great deal about natural balance and the inner ear—it helped you not to spill.
“This is something of a surprise,” Gregor said, as he put his tray down in one of the few spaces left by Markham’s paper blizzard, “I expected to find the place shut and in possession of the authorities.”
The sheriff looked at the glowing tip of his cigar and said, “It would be wonderful if we could do things like that, but we can’t. Not here. This is the only place on campus to eat. We had enough trouble keeping it shut last night.”
“You did keep it shut last night?”
“Oh, yes, until about nine o’clock. That was about how long it took for us to get done what we had to get done. You should have heard the screams from the President’s office, though. The nearest town to this is fifteen miles away and the nearest mall, meaning the nearest Burger King, is forty. Most of the kids don’t have cars. Whoosh.”
“What did they do about dinner last night?”
Markham grinned. “Some Dean or other got hold of a pickup truck and went fifty miles to the nearest serious pizza joint. By serious he meant run by actual Italians. Anyway, the pizzas showed up in the dorms around five o’clock and everybody had a party. Like they needed to have another one.”
“I’m surprised I missed all that,” Gregor said. “I was here.”
“You were outside,” David Markham said. “I saw you.” He began to pick up the papers he’d been working on, stacking them in ragged-edged piles without really looking at them. At Gregor’s quizzical look, he shrugged. “My notes. What do I need notes for? I could recite you chapter and verse what we’ve got so far.”
“What have you got so far?” Gregor asked him.
“Not damned much. You know what we were doing here until nine o’clock last night? Taking the food out. All of it. Also looking for available cleaning materials that contain lye—sodium…”
“Sodium hydroxide,” Gregor said. “Did you find anything?”
Markham sighed. “No. The last word on the food’s going to have to come from the lab, of course, and that’s going to take a couple of days. The lab’s up in the county seat. But we did what you sort of suggested yesterday. We opened all the sandwiches. We checked all the pies and cakes for tampering. We did stuff I couldn’t believe. Nothing.”
“What about the cleaning materials?”
Markham threw up his hands. “That was worse. Turns out, this campus is something called a central inventory ordering system. You know what that is?”
“No.”
“It’s this deal where everything the college needs is ordered by one department at one time, to take advantage of bulk rate discounts. The cleaning materials are ordered from there and then sent to Janitorial, and Janitorial keeps them. They had a little problem here a few years ago with a student who tried to unclog a drain by nuclear explosion or something. Anyway, he mixed a couple of different drain cleaners, poured them down the sink and blew up the plumbing. He caused a lot of expensive damage and he could have gotten himself and a lot of other people killed. You mix that stuff, you release fumes that are absolutely lethal. Point is, since then Janitorial doesn’t let the buildings have their own stuff. Something goes wrong, no matter how small, you have to call a college plumber.”
“I take it nobody called a college plumber yesterday,” Gregor said.
“You take it right. There was no lye, and no product containing lye, anywhere on these premises when Maryanne Veer keeled over. At least, not officially.”
Gregor had finished his first cup of coffee. He reached for his second and thought this over.
“You know,” he said, “this is actually a good sign. It means the lye was brought here deliberately. It makes it unlikely to the point of ridiculousness that what we’re dealing with is a Tylenol-poisoning type nut. Unless you found whatever the lye was in when Maryanne Veer ate it, I’d say someone came here yesterday to put Maryanne Veer in particular out of commission in a hurry. And went to a great deal of trouble to do it.”
“We didn’t find anything that came off that tray except the tea,” Markham said. Then he scratched his nose and looked speculatively up at the ceiling. “But you know, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve been working with this now for quite a few hours. And like I said, I’ve known Maryanne Veer all my life. You may not have noticed, you haven’t been talking to as many people as I have, but we’re a little stuck on motive.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. Actually, he had noticed. He might not have been talking to as many people as he should have been talking to, but he had been talking to Tibor. Tibor always knew more than he thought he did. He had also been talking to Jack Carroll and Chessey Flint.
“The impression I got,” he told Markham, “is that the only thing out of the ordinary in Maryanne Veer’s life yesterday was her—concern—over the disappearance of a man named Dr. Donegal Steele.”
“The Great Doctor Donegal Steele?” David Markham hooted. “Well, Mr. Demarkian, if someone had gone after Dr. Donegal Steele with lye, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Hell, I’d go after him with lye myself if I wasn’t a law-abiding type. The man is a complete turd.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“I don’t believe Maryanne was worried about him not being around, either. She hated the bastard’s guts. Everybody hated the bastard’s guts.”
“That may be,” Gregor said, “but according to Jack Carroll, Miss Veer was bound and determined to call the police, probably meaning you, as soon as she got back from lunch yesterday to report the man missing. Apparently, he hasn’t been around for a couple of days.”
“Hasn’t he?” Markham shrugged. “He was always blithering about how all this Halloween stuff was ‘infantile’ and anti-intellectual.’ That’s Steele’s kick, intellectual standards. They’re the only kind of standards he’s got, far as I can see. He’d been here about two weeks, he walked into the IGA down in Belleville, walked right up to Ed Leaver’s sixteen-year-old daughter and gave her an ass rub. Girl he’d never laid eyes on in his life, no joke. I had to stop Ed from breaking the asshole’s arm and I was sorry to have to do it. But if you think somebody killed Steele and tried to bump off Maryanne Veer because she’d figured it out—”
“No,�
� Gregor said. “I don’t like explanations like that. When they come up in mystery stories, they drive me crazy. Besides, I saw Miss Veer for a few moments before she fell over. From the reading I took, if that woman thought Donegal Steele had been murdered, she would have said he’d been murdered. And if she thought she knew who killed him, she would have said that, too.”
“Exactly.”
“I keep trying to think of some reason why someone would want to stop her from calling you and filing a missing persons report,” Gregor said. “If the man is missing because he has been murdered, it can’t be the fact that he was murdered, or even the fact that he was missing, that would account for what happened to Miss Veer. It wouldn’t make sense. This isn’t some tramp we’re talking about. This is a senior professor with a national reputation and a book on the best-seller lists. If he stays missing long enough, somebody’s going to file a missing persons report sometime. If he’s buried out in the back garden, somebody’s going to end up digging that up sometime, too.”
“I think I like the Tylenol-poisoning theory better than this,” Markham said. “Are you really going to drink that third cup of coffee?”
“I may drink two more than that. I’ve got something I want to show you.”
Gregor reached into his pocket and rummaged around carefully for the small square of paper he had folded into an envelope to contain the solder cylinder Jack Carroll had made for him last night. This, after all, was what he had been most excited about on his way to the dining hall. He probably should have brought it up first thing, even though he knew Markham was not as impressed by the original cylinder as he was himself. It was Gregor Demarkian’s opinion that a complete oddity found at a crime scene had to be important one way or another. It at least had to be explained. Now that he knew just how hard one of these things was to make, he was determined to find out what it had been made for. He threw the folded paper envelope, secured with a piece of electrical tape, down on the table in front of him and opened his mouth to make one of those pronouncements he secretly prided himself on as being “oracular.”
