Quoth the Raven

by Jane Haddam

  “We do not all react with lye, Krekor.”

  “I’m not saying we do. Most of us never face the crisis in the first place. Identities are private, and the population at large usually tries to be polite. Sometimes there’s a situation where the crisis can’t be avoided, but then I think most people would do what most people have done in situations like that. Simply self-destruct.”

  “Suicide?”

  “Sometimes. Also nervous breakdown, psychotic break, chronic clinical depression. In this case what we had was a kind of double whammy. What Donegal Steele was doing not only threatened to burn our murderer’s house down, it threatened to destroy our murderer’s vision of the world as well. Think about Cavanaugh Street.”

  “I have been thinking about it all this afternoon, Krekor. I would very much like to get back.”

  “So would I. But before Bennis and I left there yesterday, Lida and Hannah and all their kind were doing a very stupid thing. They were leaving their doors unlocked. We haven’t had a frantic phone call, so I suppose it’s been all right, at least so far—but it might not be. You know what the world is like. You know what kind of a chance that is to take. They won’t even consider it. They have invested an enormous amount of emotional energy in their belief that Cavanaugh Street is different from the rest of the world. That is—no, that they have found a vaccination to make their small corner of the world immune from all the diseases of humanity.”

  “And that is what our murderer is doing?”

  “Oh, everybody does it,” Gregor said. “I remember a case once that came up when I was on jury duty in Washington, DC. I never had to serve on a jury. I just had to show up one day and explain I was with the FBI. While I was waiting around in the hall with everyone else that day, I heard a number of men talking about a case that had come up for trial. A young man had stabbed another young man twenty-five times with a penknife, because, according to the defendant, the victim had made a pass at him. The defendant was just in from some small town in Idaho. I remember wondering at the time why the prosecuting attorney had bothered to bring the damn thing to court. Things like that happen every day and they’re perfectly understandable. I’m sure that defendant was telling the strict truth. He belonged in a mental institution, but he wasn’t lying. But the point I’m trying to make, Tibor, is that the men who had been called and rejected for that jury were all vociferous in their insistence that the defendant was lying, that he had to be lying. A little while after that I ran into the first man I had ever met who refused to believe that rape—the rape of women I’m talking about now—actually existed. It hit me then that he and the men who had been rejected from that jury were doing the same thing. They were all reconstructing the universe in the only way they could to make it comfortable for themselves. They were eliminating that part of reality that would have made it difficult or impossible for them to be the kind of people they had to believe they were.”

  “But Krekor, this is not a case of rape. This is not even a case of attempted rape.”

  “I know. But look at what Donegal Steele did. In the first place, he posed a concrete threat. His mere existence on this campus posed a concrete threat—to someone’s career, to someone’s advancement. In the second place, the way he was going about taking control—and that was what he was doing, Tibor, taking control—emotionally and psychologically as well as practically—everything we’ve heard about the man and what he did in his short tenure at this college says that’s the kind of person he was—anyway, the way he did that jeopardized not only someone’s self-image, but that same person’s future. In the third place, the fact that he could show up here at all, that he could land on our murderer in a way that was totally out of our murderer’s control—”

  Tibor sighed. “Is this what you did, Krekor, in the Federal Bureau of Investigation? No wonder you were a wreck when you came to Cavanaugh Street. Aristotle and Augustine spent their whole lives thinking about human nature, and if they had thought like you, they would have been wrecks, too.”

  “Dostoevsky was a wreck. Wasn’t that what you told me?”

  “Dostoevsky was an epileptic.” Tibor shivered.

  “Well, Tibor, maybe I just needed to make it make sense to myself after the fact. The hard evidence is incontrovertible. Hard to present in court, maybe, but incontrovertible. The only alternative I can think of is to have you stand here right now and tell me it was you who murdered Donegal Steele.”

  Up above them, not only in Constitution House but all over the quad, lights in windows were being blocked out, the windows themselves covered tightly with cardboard and construction paper. Gregor found himself thinking irrelevantly that it had to be seven thirty, that he and Tibor had taken a longer time with their talk than he would have expected. Seven thirty was when the blackout was supposed to go into effect, turning the entire open expanse of the college over to the forces of Halloween. In the suddenly deepened darkness, the torches looked brighter and fiercer and much more dangerous. Flames seemed to lick at the air and the black skeletons of trees like the unquenchable fires of Hell. Gregor wanted to get in out of the atmosphere. He wasn’t even happy about the idea of having to walk across this benighted lawn on the way to the hall where he would give his speech. He held firmly to his original ambivalence about Halloween: fun was fun, but there was a point beyond which no sane person would go.

  He tugged the edge of Tibor’s cassock and said, “Come on. Let’s go up and see if Markham is back yet. Maybe Bennis is even finished editing my speech.”

  But Tibor held back. “Krekor,” he said slowly, “I think there is something now I should have to tell you.”

  “Sure. Tell me anything you want.”

  “Yes, Krekor, I know. I can tell you anything I want. I cannot tell you I killed Donegal Steele, and so upset all your theories. I did not kill Donegal Steele.”

  “Of course you didn’t. Good Lord, Tibor, what made you think I thought you capable of killing anyone?”

  Father Tibor Kasparian sighed. “Krekor, Krekor. Before I came to Cavanaugh Street I had another life in another place among another kind of people. In that place, I was not only capable of killing a man, I was guilty of it. In fact, I killed two.”

  “What?”

  But Father Tibor Kasparian was already halfway up the steps to the doors of Constitution House, moving through the flickering light with his spine straight and his head held high up into the wind. The breezes caught at his sparse hair and lifted them in and out of the light. It was so odd to see him like that, not the fumbling little priest with the talent for languages, not a kind of ecclesiastical comic relief, but a grown man who had once lived in hiding in dangerous places among dangerous people and who had managed not only to get out but to make some kind of stand for the things he believed in. Christianity and Constitutional Law, that was Father Tibor Kasparian. Gregor found himself wondering what else was Father Tibor Kasparian, what in God’s name could have happened to make what he had just said true.

  Out in the middle of the quad, somebody sent up a firecracker. The rocket whistled and burst into a green chrysanthemum in the air. Firecrackers were illegal in the state of Pennsylvania unless licensed and properly supervised, but Gregor didn’t think anyone was going to harp on those rules tonight.

  Tibor was disappearing through the Constitution House doors, and Gregor decided to follow him.

  2

  UP IN TIBOR’S APARTMENT, Bennis Hannaford was sitting on the living room floor, the pages of Gregor’s new speech spread out before her, her reading glasses sliding down her nose. She had taken the books that had migrated to the coffee table off the coffee table and put them on the floor. She had unearthed a trio of bright red pencils from God only knew where, sharpened them to points, and stuck them into her hair. She had a fourth in her hand. When they came in,’ she looked up, blinked at them, and sighed. That was when Gregor noticed Lenore, sitting on page six of his magnum opus and looking wise.

  “Bastard,” Lenore said throat
ily. “Bastard, bastard, bastard. You’re a bastard.”

  Bennis put the pen she was holding down on page eight. “It’s too bad you can’t take a bird into court. Lenore and I have been having a very interesting conversation.”

  “Leonard,” Gregor corrected automatically. “Have you seen Markham? We thought he’d be done by now.”

  “He’s in the bedroom making phone calls. I’d be done by now if it wasn’t for that damned blackout. I spent ten minutes getting the windows covered up. Oh, by the way. The Merry Pranksters called.”

  “The Merry Pranksters,” Gregor said acidly, “were a drug-soaked band of overgrown adolescents who thought Ken Kesey was God.”

  Bennis was unperturbed. “Call them what you want. They checked in. Your contact person was someone named Freddie Murchison. That mean anything to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. To me he sounded like a complete flake. At any rate, everything is copacetic. The doors to the hall have been taken care of,” Bennis was counting out the points on her thumb, “everybody you want to see will be there, the solderer will be on the shelf under the top of the lecturn and you’ll have somebody standing by to help you operate it—”

  “I can operate a solderer, Bennis.”

  “You’ll burn yourself to a crisp,” Bennis said, “you can’t operate your own toaster. Hi, Father Tibor. How are you?”

  “I am fine, Bennis. How are you? You are not done.”

  Bennis blew a raspberry. “I don’t think it really matters,” she said. “He’s just going to get up there and say whatever comes into his head anyway. Nobody’s going to be able to tell he doesn’t know a comma from a banana split.”

  She bent back over her work, scooting sideways just a little on the floor to give Tibor room to sit beside and behind her on the love seat. Tibor had bent over the speech—which, of course, wasn’t a speech at all, but the notes Gregor had made while outlining the situation for Markham in detail this afternoon after he’d realized the importance of the solder. The speech he had intended to give when he first came up here was lying untouched and unread at the bottom of his suitcase. Collation techniques. Requirements for the collection of evidence at the scene of a crime. Guidelines for the federal coordination of state and local police forces. Gregor was sure that all that was much more scholarly, much more in tune with the “spirit of intellectual inquiry” the college brochures were always talking about, than what he was actually going to do. He was also sure that it would have been a good deal less fun.

  For the spectators.

  Gregor gave Bennis and Tibor a last look—sometimes he thought that what the people on Cavanaugh Street provided him with was an Armenian-American version of a Norman Rockwell world; and that included Bennis, even if she wasn’t Armenian-American and even if he knew perfectly well that her life up until the time she had first come to the neighborhood was nothing Rockwell would have recognized—and then went down the short hall to Tibor’s bedroom. Markham was indeed in there, sitting on the edge of the neatly made bed, the phone plastered to his right ear and a look of mutiny on his face. When he saw Gregor come in, he pumped his eyebrows frantically and motioned with his left hand to the chair.

  “I don’t care about your procedure,” he said into the phone. “I don’t care about the goddamned official lines of goddamned authority in the goddamned state of Pennsylvania, either. All I care about is that you get me five men in storm troopers’ outfits and Smokey the Bear hats and you get them for me in the next half hour….How the Hell am I supposed to know what’s going to happen? Do I sound like the Oracle at Delphi to you?…No, no, no. Just get them here. And get me a tech van. And make sure the paramedics have something to counteract lye just in case….No, I do not have a homicidal maniac…. No—oh, to Hell with it. Just get here and get here on time.”

  Markham wrenched the phone away from his ear, held it in the air over the cradle, and slammed it home. Gregor thought the crash must have been loud enough to have been heard all the way to King’s Scaffold.

  “Staties,” Markham said in mock solemnity. “I hate Staties. Have I ever told you I hate Staties?”

  “All municipal police officers hate Staties,” Gregor said. “With reason, in my experience.”

  “Yeah, well, in my experience, the goddamned local commander of our goddamned local troop is a neofascist with all the guts of a Puritan spinster. That’s sexist. You can tell anybody you want I said. On this campus, they’re disappointed when I’m not sexist. Do you want this information we’ve dug up?”

  “I hope you’ve dug up more than information,” Gregor said. Up to that point, he had remained standing, Markham’s invitation to the chair notwithstanding. Now he sat down and stretched out his legs. “Let’s start with first things first. Did you find any evidence that Steele was kept at Constitution House?”

  “That we did. On the roof, if you can believe it. We’d just about given up. There’s this little protected shedlike thing up there, I think it used to cover roofing equipment and that kind of thing. You know how that works? In the days before power ladders and things, you’d get your heavy maintenance equipment up when the building was built and leave it there for when you needed it because you needed it a lot. Bad winters. Anyway, it’s empty now. The floor of the damned thing was streaked white with the effects of lye. And clawmarks. Oh, Jesus. You were right about that, too. He was alive up there.”

  “He would have had to be,” Gregor said. “Even with popping beers, he wouldn’t have swallowed enough of it to kill him outright. They never do. I like the idea of the roof, by the way. I kept thinking it had to be the cellar because that was the only place I could think of where he wouldn’t be heard if he thrashed around. And he must have thrashed around.”

  “Too many people go into the cellar,” Markham said. “There’s an incinerator down there. What I want to know is how our friend managed to get him up to the roof. The man’s enormous.”

  “He was also probably conscious, in the beginning. Don’t forget that. Conscious and in pain and not thinking clearly.”

  “He wasn’t conscious when our friend brought him down.”

  “Ropes,” Gregor said.

  Markham nodded. “Yes, Mr. Demarkian, ropes. We did what you suggested. We got ourselves a search warrant before we even started out, back-timed, by the way, just in case—it’s amazing what you can do when you were on the high-school football team with the local judge. Anyway, we got the warrant and we searched and we found the ropes, we found the harness thing he was hooked into—there was what looked like lye on that, too—and we found a very interesting article you hadn’t managed to anticipate. I’m glad there was something. We found a heavy-duty luggage carrier.”

  “Very good,” Gregor said. “Wheels.”

  “Right. Get him down to the ground at about two or three o’clock in the morning when nobody else is around, tie him to the wheels, and just pull him up and out of here. Even you or I could have done it with a little work.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “Then, once you have him up there, gravity will help. Did you find the body?”

  Markham snorted. “Oh, we found it, all right. It was getting it out of there that was the problem. As you can imagine, we had a lot of help.”

  “How bad was it?”

  “You don’t want to know. Christ, it was incredible, the kind of mess lye can make, three days down somebody’s throat without anything to slow it up. And that isn’t all. Our friend didn’t just feed the Great Doctor Donegal Steele a lot of lye. Our friend added a little extra no-frills attraction. More lye, all over Steele’s face. It ate his skin.”

  “Dear God.”

  “It might have been done after death,” Markham said. “By the time we got to him, it had eaten through his eyelids and started on his eyes. Dear sweet Lord in heaven. And our friend has been walking around here for the past two or three days, looking perfectly normal as far as anybody can tell.” He stood up, stretched, and looked around the room. It
was filled with books, as all of Tibor’s rooms were always filled with books. Markham paced around among them as if they were so many pieces of furniture.

  “You know,” he said after a while, “we actually got a piece of luck, with the body. I was going to save it for later and spring it on you, just to have something to look brilliant with.”

  “What is it?” Gregor asked.

  Markham reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a little solder cylinder, so much like the one Tibor had found on the floor of the dining room, it could have been a clone. He handed it over and said, “It was caught in the collar of Steele’s shirt. Just stuck there. I suppose we should have bagged it for evidence. Procedure, like the Staties would say. The prosecutor wouldn’t have been allowed to present it anyway.”

  “Too easy to plant,” Gregor agreed. “But we don’t have to tell anyone that, David. Not tonight.”

  “Oh, Hell. Now it’s David. Why not? Are you all ready to go on?”

  “Of course I am.”

  Markham shook his head. “I never thought I’d see the day. Me, the world’s most pragmatic small-town sheriff, taking part in a scene straight out of Ellery Queen. Gather the suspects! Produce the revelations! The master detective will—”

  “David.”

  Markham’s movements had ceased to be random. He was heading for the bedroom door and the hall and the living room, tucking in his shirt as he went. Gregor thought he didn’t look all that displaced to be on his way to “a scene straight out of Ellery Queen.”

  At the bedroom door, Markham stopped, turned around and smiled. “You know that stuff you asked for? The soda and the beer?”

  “What about them?” Gregor asked.

  “Well, the person you asked to get them for you was Freddie Murchison, and Freddie is Freddie no matter what happens. He got you a can of soda. He also got you a case of beer.”

  Seven

  1

  FROM THE MOMENT GREGOR Demarkian had stepped off the path from the parking lot onto the campus of Independence College proper, he had thought the schedule he’d been given—a lecture to be held at eight o’clock on Halloween night—was self-defeating. The essence of Halloween at Independence was a kind of movable street fair, an all-campus party that dispersed only during the early hours of the morning. Every once in a while, there would be a planned activity of some sort—a snake dance, a parade, a talent contest—but those seemed as superfluous as icing on a marzipan cake. The real action was in the quad, with the milling costumed crowd that swayed and jerked and giggled to the music being blasted through the windows of the dorms. Gregor didn’t believe even a few of them would be willing to give that up to hear an overweight, underexercised middle-aged man talk for two hours about “The Technological and Intellectual Investigation of Crime.” He wouldn’t have had any respect for them if they had. Bennis always said that adolescence was supposed to be about love unconsummated, and early adulthood about sex celebrated. Gregor was a little too old-fashioned to buy into that, but smart enough to see its relevance. He didn’t expect more than thirty people to show up at his lecture, at least a dozen of whom he would have arranged to have there himself.