Quoth the Raven

by Jane Haddam

  “If you weren’t going to take it anymore, you wouldn’t be here,” Katherine said. “Jesus Christ, Vivi, where do you think you’re going to go?”

  “Vivian,” Vivi said. “That’s my name. Vivian.”

  “What I’m talking about is you,” Evie Westerman said. “Yesterday. Up in the shed where they keep the tools for fixing cars. Up in the parking lot.”

  Lenore had made her circuit and was coming back at Constitution House, cawing and cawing, screaming really. Katherine closed her eyes against the sight—it was amazing how distracting that damn bird could get—and tried to think. Vivi had gone into a full-force pace, back and forth, back and forth, practically bumping into the walls. She was working up a real head of steam. Katherine kept expecting to see smoke pour out of her ears, the way it did out of Sylvester the Cat’s when Tweetie Bird trounced him again.

  That was what Vivi looked like. Sylvester the Cat. Same short-legged, pear-bottomed figure, only shorter.

  “Look,” Katherine said into the phone, “I still don’t understand what you think you’re—”

  “Of course you do,” Evie Westerman said. “Gregor Demarkian is looking for someone who was in that shed yesterday, messing around with the soldering equipment.”

  “I was not messing around—”

  “Yes, you were,” Evie said. “I saw you. I’ve been sitting right here for the last hour, thinking about whether or not I ought to tell Demarkian about it.”

  “Evie,” Katherine said, “where are you?”

  “In the Finger Lickin’ Bar and Grill.”

  “Where in God’s name is that?”

  “On the other side of Belleville from campus. Out on Route Fifty. It’s a roadhouse.”

  “I’d guessed that, Evie.”

  “I think you ought to be here, too,” Evie said. “I think you ought to get here right away. Because if you’re not here by the time I finish my beer, I’m going to get back into my car, drive back to campus, and go straight to Gregor Demarkian. And you in that shed isn’t the only thing I’m going to tell him about.”

  “Evie—”

  “There’s also you and a certain bat suit. And you and a certain pair of buckets of lye. And you breaking into Dr. Crockett’s apartment and Dr. Elkinson’s apartment and—”

  “Evie.”

  “I’m going to hang up now,” Evie said. “Then I’m going to go to the bar and order that beer. Don’t be late.”

  The phone was hung up with a smash so hard and so loud, it made Katherine wince.

  On the other side of the room, Vivi had stopped pacing and taken up leaning against the windowsill. Her posture was terrible. Her spine was made of spaghetti and everything slumped. Katherine stared at her in exasperation. Anyone else on earth would have had the sense to get out of here minutes ago. Anyone else would at least have had the sense to be getting out of here now.

  “If you think I’m going to let you get away with this,” Vivi said, “if you think I’m going to let you fob me off with a lot of pious platitudes and abusive bullshit—”

  Katherine walked over to the closet, opened it up, and grabbed her coat. She didn’t have time right now to think about how many times she had played this scene, or with how many people. She didn’t have time right now to think about anything. It didn’t matter a flying damn that her entire history seemed to come down to confrontations like this one, wars fought on worn carpets with women who didn’t have the sense God gave a kangaroo.

  Women.

  Her coat was a heavy green parka filled with goose down and stitched to look like puffy waves of soap on chemically polluted waters. She threw it over her shoulders and said,

  “Vivi, the best advice I can give to you is put your head in the toilet bowl and flush.”

  Then she left.

  3

  FOR KEN CROCKETT, THE only thing on earth at this precise moment in time—five thirty on Halloween, sharp black splinters of clouds against a grey-dusk sky—was fire. He knew it shouldn’t be. He had known ever since five fifteen, when his phone rang and he’d heard Jack Carroll’s voice, low and threatening, spelling out what he had to do. He had told Jack he had written the directions down on the back of an envelope, and that was true. The envelope was sitting right there in his apartment on the narrow strip of end table next to his phone. Ken distinctly remembered covering it with ink. He even remembered holding down the edge of it with the knuckles of his left hand, while the fingers of that hand were still wrapped around the hem of the bat suit he had found on his closet floor, just as Katherine Branch had said he would.

  “We’ve got to talk,” Jack Carroll had said to him. “You do realize that, don’t you, Ken? We’ve got to talk.”

  “Yes,” Ken had told him. “I suppose we do.”

  “I can’t just walk away from something like that and pretend it never happened. Do you understand that?”

  Yes, Ken had thought at the time. He did understand that. What he didn’t understand was what he was supposed to do about it. Sometimes he didn’t understand what he was supposed to do about himself. Was it some kind of psychosis, not wanting to be what you so obviously were, what you couldn’t do anything to change? They had been up at the top of Hillman’s Rock that clay and getting stupid. It was much too late in the afternoon for them to be that high up and still be sure they could get safely down. The sun had been melting into the trees behind them in a flare of red and gold. Even with evening coming on, it had been oddly hot. Jack had taken off his down vest and unbuttoned his flannel shirt. And he—

  But he couldn’t remember what he’d done. That was the problem. He could never remember what he’d done when he got himself into a spot like that, and the spots were coming more and more frequently lately, especially with Jack. Ken walked around these days feeling flayed alive.

  “I’ve been thinking about going to the Dean,” Jack had said on the phone today. “I’ve been thinking about it for over a week. I don’t think it makes much sense.”

  “No,” Ken had said. “I don’t think it makes much sense, either.”

  “I couldn’t come up with any sane idea of what I’d tell the Dean. But I can’t just sit here driving myself crazy with it, Ken. You must know that.”

  “Yes,” Ken had said. “I mean no. Of course not.”

  “I want you to come out here right now, okay? Neutral territory. Where we can talk.”

  There were men at Berkeley and Chicago and Yale who walked around with lavender scarves tied around their throats. There were men in Washington and Los Angeles and New York who bought apartments with their lovers and were buried together under linked headstones engraved with the poetry of passion and AIDS. They were on the lip of the third millennium and there was no sense, no sense at all, to the way he was behaving.

  Except, of course, that there was. He was not any of those men. He was Dr. Kenneth Crockett. He didn’t live in any of those places. He lived here, in Belleville, Pennsylvania, where every member of his family since the year 1692 had made his home and his life and his name—and that name definitely had not been fag.

  “Ken?” Jack had said. “Look. I’m up at the cabin. I’m going to leave in a few minutes.”

  “Where to?”

  “Not to campus. I don’t want to talk on campus. I thought I’d go over to Harrison’s in Chelton and have a steak. Can you meet me there?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, Ken, of course now. I have to be back in time for Demarkian’s lecture. I have to introduce the man.”

  “Oh.”

  Ken had looked at his clock automatically, seen the time, seen Jack’s point. Harrison’s was a good half hour away by car, no matter how hard you pumped the gas pedal. He felt himself start to sweat and closed his eyes against the rain of salt that poured into them.

  “Jack? Look, right now—”

  “It’s got to be now, Ken. It’s got to be.”

  “But—”

  “I’m going to leave right now. Meet me at Harrison’s.�
��

  He had looked down and seen that the bat suit was bunched and knotted in both his hands, trailing across his face, wound around the telephone receiver. He had been pulling and twisting it while he talked and he hadn’t even noticed. Then he had heard Jack hang up without saying good-bye and he had let the receiver fall to the end table. It had seemed like much more than he would ever be able to do to put it back in its cradle.

  In San Francisco, there were entire neighborhoods full of nothing but men like him. In New Orleans, there was a section of the city with its own place on the tourist maps, celebrating everything he thought he wanted to forget. Even Minneapolis, Minnesota, had a temple of the masculine all its own, where men who were what he was didn’t have to hide.

  And he was here.

  He looked down at the bat suit now and told himself to get on with it. He was in the basement of Constitution House, standing next to the incinerator. He was all ready to go. All he had to do was throw the damn thing in there and make sure it caught.

  Fire.

  At the last minute, he got the tin of kerosene off the shelf on the west wall and dosed the bat suit thoroughly. Then he threw it into the black cast-iron tank and watched it flare.

  He knew what came next, what always came next, just when the pain got so bad he thought he was going to shred into blood and skin and bone in the blades of it.

  He was going to start to get angry, and once he started he wouldn’t be able to stop.

  He was going to be ready to kill someone.

  4

  IT WAS FIVE THIRTY-FIVE, and up in Chessey Flint and Evie Westerman’s room in Lexington House, Jack Carroll was trying to open a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne. Evie Westerman had given him explicit instructions about what he was and what he wasn’t supposed to do. It was apparently the height of stupidity to pop a cork on a bottle of anything quite this expensive. Evie had even gone into just why it was this expensive, but Jack hadn’t been listening to her. The phrase “vintage years” always reminded him of old women who wore white lace gloves to lunch.

  Over on the more neatly made of the two double beds, Chessey was sitting cross-legged in a pair of jeans and one of his shirts, looking happily disheveled but a little guilty.

  “Do you really think we should have done all that?” she asked them. “I think that was a really awful thing I did to Dr. Elkinson.”

  “I don’t,” Evie said. “I think you were brilliant. I didn’t know you had it in you. That makes two things I didn’t know you had it in you for over the last two days.”

  “Oh, that,” Jack said. “I knew she had that in her. What did you think the problem was?”

  Evie made a face. “In my opinion, it was a case of pathological nostalgia for the fifties. But what do I know?”

  “Got it.” Jack waved the cork triumphantly in the air and reached for one of the glasses Evie had set out along the desk. They weren’t what he thought of as champagne glasses—they were narrow and tall instead of wide and squat—but Evie had assured him that they were what champagne glasses were really supposed to be, and she should know. He poured the glass he was holding full and handed it to Chessey.

  “To all the brilliant things only I knew you were going to be,” he said.

  Chessey frowned at him. “Still—” she began.

  Evie snorted. “Look, what we had to do was get them off campus and out of the way for at least an hour and a half each, right? And we did it, right?”

  “You bet,” Jack said.

  “Still,” Chessey said.

  “Still nothing,” Evie said. “I say we ought to be knighted by the Queen. Except that we don’t have a Queen. Never mind. I’ll think of something.”

  Jack poured the second glass full and handed it to her. He saw her point. He even believed in it more than he believed in Chessey’s. He did have to give Chessey one thing.

  It was not only an awful thing she had done to Dr. Elkinson, it was a thoroughly shitty thing he had done to Ken Crockett.

  Necessary or not.

  Six

  1

  THERE HAD BEEN TIMES in Gregor Demarkian’s life when the case he was working on had blotted out everything else. Seasons and sentimentalities, weather meteorological and emotional, even friendships and family had been drowned as surely as words on a page under a sea of spilled ink. In the early days of the Behavioral Science department, that sort of case had been almost routine. Those were the days before he—or anyone else—realized that the man who murdered thirty young women with an ice pick and a cheese board wasn’t an anomaly, but the representative of a class. Gregor thought he had been on the job with the new department for five years before it hit him that that class was not only vast, but growing. Somehow or other, this society seemed to be breeding a prolific race of the morally dead. It had taken Elizabeth’s dying to pull him out of that one. For a while—even after Elizabeth had been diagnosed; in the calm days before they both knew how bad it was going to be—the phenomenon of the serial killer, cold-sane and self-conscious in the Bundy style, had taken over Gregor’s mind and heart and soul, like a demon possession. He hadn’t even been able to eat without thinking about it. He would sit at the desk in the ridiculously huge office they had given him, perquisite of a man raised to the rank of senior administrator, with a half-eaten sandwich at his side and a thermos of bad coffee threatening to fall off the desk’s edge, trying to write it all down on paper in a way that would make it make sense.

  Of course, at Independence College on the thirty-first of October, it was not really possible to ignore Halloween. The campus was too bizarrely caught up in the holiday for that. It was now seven o’clock in the evening and full dark and very cold. In an hour, Gregor was due to give his lecture on criminological methods and the FBI. In five hours, the great pile of wood shored up against King’s Scaffold would be doused with kerosene and lit, sending flames as big as tidal waves against the star-dotted blackness of the sky. The gently glowing globe lights that lit the paths of the quad and the sidewalks that stretched out to the more far-flung technical buildings every other night of the year were all extinguished. What light there was came from the flaming kerosene-soaked torches carried by Jack Carroll’s legions of senior boys. Because there were a lot of those boys there should have been more light rather than less. It didn’t work that way. Flames flickered and danced and were pushed about by the wind. They sowed light one minute and shadows the next. Coming across from Liberty Hall to Constitution House for what Gregor thought might be the last time, he had a hard time holding the features of anyone’s face.

  Next to him, Father Tibor Kasparian trudged along with his hands wrapped into the folds of his cassock, looking infinitely tired. Gregor knew Tibor had been brought up among psychopaths—raised by them, really, except in the tight protective womb of his unshakably religious family—but he hadn’t expected Tibor to be taken like this by what had happened here. He thought he might have read. Tibor’s psychology exactly backward, the way he had once tried to read words in a mirror when he was a boy and pretending to fight crimes with magic superpowers, like Spider Man. After all, what they were dealing with here was not a psychopath, but an ordinary human being who had invested too much in superficialities and too little, in inner strength. It hadn’t occurred to Gregor that Tibor might find that worse than the prospect of a man who had decided to play out the fantasies of Stalin and Hitler in private life.

  He put his hand on the priest’s shoulder and said, “Tibor? Are you all right?”

  “I am fine, Krekor,” Tibor said. “I am thinking. You are very sure you have this set up exactly right?”

  “I think so, Tibor, yes. I have it set up the only way I think it will work.”

  “It seems like a very large chance, Krekor. You are counting on—”

  “On guilt,” Gregor said simply.

  “Yes. On guilt. But Krekor, I am not sure, in this case, if guilt applies. What you have shown me is something that takes much work, much concentration, mu
ch coldness to effect. It is not like hacking away at someone with an ax in a fit of rage. It is not—normal.”

  “No, of course it is not normal.”

  “Do you read G. K. Chesterton? He said once somewhere that in order for a man to break the fifth commandment he must first break the first. That the murderer’s problem is not with ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but with ‘I am the Lord Thy God. Thou shalt have no other Gods before Me.’ ”

  “I’ll have to read Chesterton.”

  “It seems like a paltry reason, Krekor. A little thing. For all this blood and pain and trouble.”

  “I know.”

  He did, too. For the past hour, he and Tibor had been walking, from one end of campus to the other, from one place that needed to be checked out to the other, nailing it down, making sure he hadn’t forgotten anything or assumed something he shouldn’t have assumed. Markham’s men were out doing the important work, gathering the information and making the discoveries that would later have to be presented in court. That was necessary. The rules of evidence were so convoluted by now it didn’t do to tamper with them. What Gregor had wanted, and what he and Tibor had set off to get, was confirmation of the fine points. They had gotten them, but at a price. Gregor’s feet hurt. He was sure Tibor’s feet hurt, too. They would have taken Donna Moradanyan’s van, but neither of them was really able to drive. Tibor didn’t have a license. Gregor had one, but he was, as Donna and Bennis and everyone else who knew him always put it, “a positive menace on the road.”

  They had reached the steps of Constitution House and Gregor stopped, letting a Siamese-twinned version of Tweedledum and Tweedledee pass between them before he spoke.

  “The mistake you’re making,” he told Tibor, “is the same one I made up until a couple of hours ago. People invest their lives in all sorts of things that may seem silly to you or me, but mostly what they invest them in is their own image of themselves. We construct identities like houses and then we live in them. If someone comes along and threatens to burn the house down, we react.”