Act of Darkness

by Jane Haddam

  “What did?”

  “Well, there was a rider to a bill that came up around that time, a Medicaid funding thing about prescription drugs. It would have prevented Medicaid from paying for any prescriptions that weren’t handled through a full-fledged M.D., no matter what those prescriptions were—”

  “I thought that was the definition of a prescription drug,” Gregor said, “a drug that can only be obtained on doctors’ orders.”

  “Mostly that’s true. But there’s a gray area, a whole line of drugs that have emergency uses or that can be prescribed by nurse practitioners. And that’s the point. The rider would have made it impossible for nurse practitioners to prescribe drugs they’ve been prescribing for many years, these sort of low-level prescriptive drugs, and have them paid for by the government. The rider was Dr. Debrett’s idea.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Clare shrugged. “Dr. Debrett’s or theirs.” She waved her hand in the direction of Stephen Fox and Dan Chester, taking in Patchen and Bennis in the process, although she didn’t mean to. “Senator Fox brought the rider to the floor.”

  “So what?” Dan Chester said. “It was a damn good rider, and you know it. It only made sense. Considering what happened later—”

  Clare smiled a stiff December smile. “It’s what happened later I’m talking about. The rider didn’t pass, by the way, Mr. Demarkian, but it almost did. Have you ever heard of a woman named Caroline Bell?”

  “No,” Gregor said.

  “Well, maybe the news wasn’t as big outside Washington as it was in. Or maybe you had your mind on other things. Caroline Bell was a nurse practitioner in one of those free clinics that operate in storefronts in the poorer parts of Washington. One of those places where they do birth control and prenatal work and that sort of thing. She had a patient named Debra Tescowitz—”

  “I remember Debra Tescowitz,” Gregor said. “She was a—”

  “Sort of a poster girl for homeless people,” Bennis said.

  “You could call it that.” Clare nodded. “She had three children and then her husband left her, just got himself a no-fault divorce and disappeared. He took all the money with him—they hadn’t been rich, but they hadn’t been poor—and then just didn’t bother to pay her any support. She ended up in a shelter with all three children in tow. Some reporter from the Post found out about her and talked his editor into putting her on the front page. Whatever. She used Caroline Bell’s clinic, and one day she went in for a refill on some blood pressure medication she was taking. It’s not legal, but the nurse practitioners in these clinics write a lot of prescriptions like that, refills, where they’ve already talked to a doctor and know the refill would be automatic anyway unless the patient reported problems. Quite frankly, if they didn’t do that, those clinics would be financially impossible. So Debra came in and got her refill prescription. Then she went over to the Debrett Clinic—”

  “How could she have done that?” Gregor asked. I thought Dr. Debrett’s services were—expensive.”

  “They’re unconscionable,” Victoria Harte said. “Even the insurance companies refuse to pay the total bill.”

  “Kevin had taken on Debra’s youngest daughter as a charity case,” Clare Markey plowed on, “after all the publicity came out. It got him a lot of publicity, too, of course. It was very good for his image. Anyway, she went there, and her daughter did her motor coordination therapy for the day, and then she left. She went straight to a pharmacy on Avenue C and had her prescription filled. She was dead less than twenty-four hours later.”

  “Of what?” Gregor said.

  “A stroke. It was the wrong prescription. Instead of being medicine to lower blood pressure, it was the kind that raised it in patients who have problems after surgery and that sort of thing. If she’d gone to a pharmacy where they knew her, it would never have happened. But she didn’t have a pharmacy that knew her. She hadn’t had a permanent address in three years.”

  “They were sure it was the prescription that was wrong and not a mistake on the part of the pharmacy?” Gregor said.

  “Absolutely. They got hold of the prescription. Caroline Bell lost her nurse practitioner’s license—she would have lost that even if Debra Tescowitz hadn’t died. After all, she wasn’t supposed to be prescribing that particular kind of drug under any circumstances. It was all over the papers. And all over the television news, too. And Congress got a lot of pressure to pass that rider, of course. They almost did it. And in the meantime—”

  “Yes?”

  Clare gave out another wintry smile. “The rumor going around the bars was that Kevin Debrett had switched that prescription deliberately.”

  “That,” Bennis said, “would have been murder.”

  “Not intentional murder,” Clare Markey stressed. “Nobody said he was trying to kill the woman. They said he’d switched that prescription and then thought somebody would catch it—the pharmacist, probably. And he couldn’t have known she’d die even if she took the pills. Chances were they’d simply make her feel awful and then—”

  “No.” Gregor Demarkian stood up. The chair was hurting him, but that wasn’t it. He had begun to think this thing through, and he couldn’t sit still any more. “It won’t work,” he told them. “It would have been a perfectly ridiculous plan. He would have known she was homeless. He couldn’t have counted on her going to a pharmacy where they would catch the mistake. And if she didn’t and she did, as you said, ‘start to feel awful,’ then what? Wouldn’t she have gone back to Caroline Bell’s clinic?”

  “Probably,” Clare Markey said.

  “What would they have done there? Reported the mistake? I don’t think so. They’d have taken the pills away and given her a new refill prescription and buried the whole thing. They would have had to. That wouldn’t have done him any good at all.”

  “I wasn’t saying he actually did it,” Clare said. “I was just trying to tell you what the gossip was at the time.”

  “The only thing that would have done him any good,” Gregor insisted, “is if he had set out to kill her deliberately. Very deliberately.”

  “Well, so what about that?” Victoria Harte shrugged. “I wouldn’t have put it past him. It’s just the kind of thing he would do.”

  Gregor turned to Clare Markey. “What about you? Would you say that was just the kind of thing he would do?”

  “If you mean, would I have found an accusation of murder in that case believable, then I’d have to say, yes, I would. He—worried about murder, you know. The first time he came to my room today, what he wanted to talk about was—you.”

  Gregor nodded. He’d file that and think about it later. He turned to Janet Harte Fox. “What about you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Miss Rawls?”

  “Everybody is capable of murder, Mr. Demarkian. We’re all just violent animals until we’ve merged with the Great Unconscious and freed ourselves of capitalist distortions—”

  “I don’t want to know about everybody, Miss Rawls. I want to know about Dr. Kevin Debrett. In particular. If you heard that story about him, heard that he’d deliberately murdered that woman, would you believe it?”

  Patchen Rawls screwed her face into a grimace. “Yes. especially about Kevin Debrett.”

  “What about you, Mr. Chester?”

  “I’d think it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard in my life,” Dan Chester said. “Kevin was ambitious. Kevin was even ruthless sometimes. He was not a psychopath.”

  “Senator Fox?”

  Senator Fox seemed to be hesitating. To be precise, Gregor thought, he seemed to be hovering, a not-quite-corporeal shift of shapes mysteriously bounded by the arms of his chair. Gregor found himself thinking that it was true, all those things other people had told him. Face-to-face, he made no impression at all, especially when surrounded by strong personalities like Dan Chester and Victoria Harte.

  He walked over to the senator’s chair. “Senator?” he said.

  Se
nator Fox started. “Oh. I’m sorry. I was just thinking. Thinking about Kevin.”

  “And?”

  “Well, Dan’s right, you know. Kevin wasn’t a—what do you call it? A psycho. He wasn’t. He wouldn’t have murdered anybody.”

  Gregor frowned. The answer sounded straightforward enough. It just didn’t feel straightforward enough. “Are you saying that if you heard that story, you wouldn’t have found it creditable?”

  “Kevin would never have killed anybody because of greed. He wasn’t like that. Kevin was always trying to help people.”

  “Oooh, yes,” Victoria trilled. “Kevin was always trying to, help people. I personally know a couple of people he helped a lot.”

  “Mother,” Janet Fox said.

  “Kevin Debrett was a saint.” The senator’s voice slid up the scale, getting tight, getting half-crazy. “He was a saint. He was the most compassionate man in the history of the world. He understood me.”

  “What the hell was that?” Dan Chester said.

  Gregor would have thought Dan Chester was trying to distract him from Senator Fox, except that there was a that to pay attention to. It started as a high-pitched whine, a Dr. Strangelove prophecy on the new music of a new war, and ended in a thunderclap. A moment later, the wall of glass doors that lined the back of the house was full of colored light.

  “The fireworks.” Janet Harte Fox jumped off the arm of her mother’s chair, appalled. “Oh, my God. Dan contracted for them with a service. We didn’t tell them to call it off. I can’t—”

  “To hell with the fireworks,” Dan Chester said. He was out of his seat, too, but moving in the other direction, toward the front door. “That’s someone coming up the drive.”

  [3]

  And, of course, there was someone coming up the drive. As Gregor found out a few moments later, standing under the portico at the top of the front steps, it was Carl Bettinger, veteran agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, long-time colleague, and the Bureau’s resident specialist in domestic subversion.

  As far as Gregor could tell, Carl Bettinger had come out of nowhere for no good reason at all.

  TWO

  [1]

  IN MOST PLACES, FIREWORKS are not set off until full dark. Gregor remembered that from a detail he had pulled his first year out of training, in the days when legal demarcations between law enforcement agencies were not as rigidly observed as they were today. It had been the Fourth of July then, too, and Lyndon Johnson had been president. Gregor couldn’t remember what else had been going on, but he got the distinct impression that the country had been a mess. Whatever. The country was still a mess. On that long-ago night in Lyndon’s only full term of office, the powers-that-be had decided the mess could be cleaned up at least a little by a celebration. A day of communal euphoria and bad food had been planned for the people willing to spend their Independence Day around the monolith totem of the Washington Monument. Gregor had been assigned to night duty near the monument itself, watching to be sure no one used the sound of exploding fireworks as a cover for murder or sabotage or worse. He had hated the whole night, from beginning to end. He had felt incompetent. In the dark, it was impossible to see anything, and it got more impossible once the fireworks began to explode over his head. He felt silly, too. Most of the people around him were drunk. The only trouble they were likely to get into was coordinational. They were going to trip over their own feet and fall into the fountains, or trip over somebody else’s feet and fall flat on their rear ends. Most of all, he felt cheated. His decision to join the Bureau had been a complicated one. He had spent a year of nights thinking it over, and a year of days talking it over, with his wife and his mother both. His yes had come out of a tangle of idealism and practical common sense—a tangle that would never be untangled in the twenty years he spent on active duty with the Bureau. That night, not only was the tangle not untangled, it was as hard and heavy as a boulder and sitting on top of his head. There were a lot of sacrifices involved in joining the Bureau: sacrifices of time in training; sacrifices of autonomy during the period of probation, when he was forced to be subject to the authority of people much less intelligent than himself. He hadn’t taken on any of these things to spend his nights on the Esplanade, dodging drunks and worrying that his walkie-talkie was going to be lifted by some idiot in a red-white-and-blue crepe paper hat.

  Now he stood under the portico on the front steps of Great Expectations, watching the reflections of lights exploding high in the air but far at the back of his head, watching Carl Bettinger walking toward him and a black-and-white with flashing lights pulling in behind Bettinger’s blue Ford—and it all felt wrong. The sky wasn’t dark enough yet. The reflections that reached him were less like fireworks than feeble sheet lightning. Bettinger wasn’t straight enough. Gregor remembered him as “the man with the perfect posture,” much the way Homer had always reported Achilles to be “brave,” but the Bettinger who was coming toward him was stooped and tense, as if he’d been wound tight for so long he had lost the resilience necessary to keep a shape. Then there was the black-and-white. Gregor knew he was probably projecting—he had to be projecting—but the flashing lights looked angry.

  Carl Bettinger reached the steps, walked up them, and stood looking at the wide double doors. They were open because Dan Chester had left them open, but Dan Chester had disappeared. Carl Bettinger seemed to be taking them personally, as if, no matter what else he had to put up with, he shouldn’t have to put up with double doors.

  “Nuts,” Bettinger said, and then, “Gregor. Gregor. Hello. I’m sorry. What’s going on around here?”

  Gregor Demarkian sighed. Carl Bettinger was ten years his junior. He was, from what Gregor remembered of him, a good agent and (possibly) a good man. That didn’t change the fact that he had no business being here. Whoever was driving the black-and-white had pulled to a stop and cut the motor, but left the lights flashing. Any minute now, he was going to get out of that car, and his partner was going to get out with him, and there was going to be a mess.

  “What are you doing here?” Gregor said. “You shouldn’t be within a hundred miles of this place. You know that.”

  Bettinger flushed and turned away. “I have an interest in this case.”

  The way the case had been described to Gregor, Bettinger couldn’t have an official interest in it. If he did, then somebody wasn’t telling Gregor something. “Even so,” he said. “This is a delicate situation. We have a suspicious death here.”

  “I know,” Bettinger said. And then he exploded. “Christ, Gregor, what do you take me for? I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be here. I have to be here. You have no idea what’s going on.”

  “A sting operation? Domestic espionage? What could possibly—”

  “It’s nothing like that.” Bettinger turned slightly. Two men had gotten out of the black-and-white, a uniform and a man who looked liked a western sheriff, but citified. He was wearing a good white shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled above the elbows, and the pants and vest to a first-class three-piece suit. Carl Bettinger stared at him longer than he had to and then looked away again.

  “I don’t,” he said, “get involved in that kind of thing. You know I don’t.”

  “I know you didn’t,” Gregor said.

  “This is just a favor I’m doing somebody, Gregor. I should say this is a favor the Director is doing somebody. Nobody wants Stephen Whistler Fox dead. Not now. Not with that act pending. Dan Chester—”

  “You’re squinting, Carl. You used to do that when you spent too much time on the computer.”

  Carl Bettinger’s flush bleached to the color of ash. “For God’s sake, Gregor, don’t say things like that. What would I be doing on the computer? The Director is very concerned about Stephen Fox—”

  “So you tell me. But Carl, it’s not Stephen Whistler Fox who’s dead.”

  Carl Bettinger looked miserable. “Could you just tell me one thing?” he said. “Was it murder? Was
it suicide? Was it a heart attack? What’s going on here—”

  “Wait,” Gregor told him.

  The uniform and the man in the vest had reached the bottom of the steps. They started up, the uniform hanging back a little, like a Chinese wife following her husband to market. Gregor moved away from Bettinger, making space. The portico wasn’t small, but it wasn’t as large as it could have been, given the size of the house. At the moment, even with openness on three sides and the doors wide open to the back, it felt damn near claustrophobic.

  From out ahead of them somewhere, maybe on the road and maybe already inside the gate, came the sound of more cars arriving: the techies, the medical vans. Gregor felt the dampness under his collar and loosened his tie. With all the excitement, he’d forgotten to notice how hot it still was beyond the reach of Great Expectations’s air-conditioning. Now his whole body felt as wet as it would have if he’d just stepped out of a bath.

  The man in the vest reached the top of the steps and stopped. He was a short man, square and muscular, with an incongruously intelligent face, and although he was at least Gregor’s age he had none of Gregor’s flab. He reminded Gregor of Spencer Tracy playing the Clarence Darrow character in Inherit the Wind, except that he didn’t look even’ minimally Irish.

  “My name,” he said pleasantly, “is Henry Berman. What I want to know right now is where I can find a man named Gregor Demarkian.”

  “I’m Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.

  “Good.” Berman turned to his patrolman, who had made it up the steps by then, too, but was hanging back. “This one,” Berman said, pointing to Carl Bettinger, “is a pain in the butt from the federal government. He’s been calling my office all week, trying to get me to run background checks on everybody he’s ever heard of. I don’t care what you do with him, but keep him out of my hair.”

  “But,” Carl Bettinger said.

  “Mr. Demarkian and I have work to do,” Henry Berman said. He grabbed Gregor by the elbow and began pushing him toward the house. He pushed them both far enough so that they began to feel the cold of the air-conditioning seeping through the doors. Then he gave one more shove, and Gregor found himself stumbling into the foyer, under the light, out of the dark.