by Jane Haddam
“And?” One word. One word. One word.
“Another sixteen thousand dollars, paid on time and in full,” the woman said. “If I was you people, and Mr. Demarkian, that’s the kind of thing I’d look into. If you think there has to be something strange enough to explain what happened to this woman, I’d start there.”
Marta could feel herself falling into sleep again. She fell in and out, in and out, without rhyme or reason. What had happened to her? She could hear Hernandez coming down the stairs, but they were the wrong stairs. She could hear the sleet pinging against the windows, but there were no windows on the staircase.
The woman and the men were still talking, but they were too far away from her now to matter.
THREE
1
Gregor Demarkian had spent most of the night sitting up reading through papers on Cary Alder, and even though those papers were extensive and detailed, they hadn’t done much good. He could, if he wanted to, get even more detailed papers. The Bureau would bring him in as a consultant if John Jackman asked him to. That way, he could go look at the banking and transaction files in the raw. At the moment, he didn’t see how that would help. It hadn’t taken him long to understand what was getting everybody from the city of Philadelphia to the federal government in a twist. The weird thing was that the Alder files were entirely straightforward, with one vital omission. If that omission hadn’t existed, he would have understood immediately what was going on. But then, if that omission hadn’t existed, everybody else would have understood exactly what was going on immediately, too, and he wouldn’t be there.
It made no sense to bring Gregor Demarkian onto the case to follow hidden sources of cash or streams of revenue. There were people who spent their lives doing that. It only made sense to bring Gregor Demarkian on if what it looked like was happening wasn’t what was actually happening. That could be a mistake. Maybe everybody was seeing complications where they didn’t exist.
The other question was whether or not the Cary Alder problem was related to the cases of Marta Warkowski and Miguel Hernandez. The simple fact that these two people had lived in an Alder Properties building didn’t establish the connection. Alder Properties owned a lot of building. It owned a lot of buildings in bad neighborhoods, and that meant it was home to a fair number of crimes. If it hadn’t been for that Aldergold, it wouldn’t have occurred to John Jackman or Michael Washington that there was any connection to be made.
Gregor found it hard to admit he had no idea where this was going, but he had no idea where this was going.
Now he went around the back of the church and up the small flight of steps to Father Tibor’s apartment door. He had Pickles on a leash, in a red, white, and blue sweater, a red, white, and blue cap, and red, white, and blue booties. Tommy Moradanyan was right on both counts. You felt like a damn fool walking around the streets with Pickles dressed up this way—and Pickles absolutely loved it. She pranced around like a diva model appearing before the paparazzi.
Tibor came to the door as soon as Gregor rang the bell. Pickles greeted him ecstatically and then raced inside in search of a food bowl. The food bowl was there, full and waiting. So was the gigantic dog bed set up in front of the gas fire.
Gregor unbuttoned his coat. “Tommy Moradanyan has a point,” he said. “I feel like an idiot.”
“I have been thinking about the dog,” Tibor said. “I think there is a real bond. Between Pickles and Javier.”
“That’s why Bennis is being careful to take Javier out every day without her,” Gregor said. “I understand the concept of therapy dogs, but stores and restaurants aren’t always accommodating. And we did think you’d probably want her back eventually.”
“Well, yes, Krekor. That’s what I’ve been thinking about. I think maybe it would be best if you and Bennis kept Pickles with you. For Javier.”
“Permanently?”
“As permanently as possible.” Tibor had started to fuss around the big open space, setting up the machine that made Armenian coffee, setting out one of the tiny, ceramic cups. “We do not know, do we, how long Javier will stay?”
“No,” Gregor said. He sat down on the long leather couch and leaned over to free Pickles from her leash. “We don’t know what’s going on at the moment. I know Bennis hopes it will be a long time.”
“And you?”
“I’ll admit the kid’s been growing on me.”
“There are a lot of rescue dogs out there,” Tibor said. “There are a lot of dogs and cats and even children who have been neglected or abandoned. Or both. Or worse. I’ve been thinking about that.”
“About neglected dogs?”
“About abandoned everything,” Tibor said.
The coffee machine made a sound between a cough and a burp. Tibor brought the small cup to it and filled up. The coffee came out looking like sludge. Tibor brought the full cup to Gregor and put it down on the side table.
“It’s new, I think,” he said. “At least, new here. Or maybe I’m wrong. When that thing happened, with Russ. Paying judges to give children longer sentences so they have to stay in juvenile hall. Paying lawyers to do bad work on their cases. Private prisons. Sometimes I think that before Russ did what he did, I was … too sentimental.”
“That’s a word for it.”
“You wouldn’t think somebody with my history could be sentimental,” Tibor said. “I don’t know. I just think there’s too much of it now. And I was thinking Javier and Pickles are very close. They were close right from the first time they saw each other. Two abandoned persons. I was thinking that if Bennis wouldn’t mind it, Pickles could stay with Javier and keep Javier calmed down.”
“What about you? I thought you and Pickles were bonded, too.”
“Yes, yes, Krekor. I know. But there are other abandoned dogs who need a home. I even know of one. And it has been a long time since I lost everything.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “I’ll talk to her about it.”
“I will talk to her about it, too,” Tibor said. Then he picked up his own tiny cup of Armenian coffee and came to sit down in the overstuffed chair opposite Gregor. Pickles had taken up residence in the dog bed and curled up for a nap.
“So,” he said. “Have you come to grill me about the woman in the garbage bag?”
“Not really,” Gregor said. “I’m told you have a date at the police station to make a formal statement. And, for what it’s worth, it wasn’t really a garbage bag. It was two of those enormous leaf and lawn bags you can get at Costco or Walmart.”
“It’s still metaphorical. A real person, like that. Like trash.”
“They got fingerprints off the bags. Of course, some of them are going to be Tommy Moradanyan’s, since he says he handled the bag when he went to see what it was. Did you handle the bag at all?”
Tibor shook his head. “When the van came down the street, it was making an awful noise. Tommy pushed me back toward the buildings. I think he wanted me out of the way of any possible accident. Then the van skidded and—fishtailed? And the back of the van hit the pole of the streetlamp. Then the doors popped open and the garbage bag came bouncing out. Then the van got traction and took off.”
“With its back doors still open?”
Tibor nodded. “And flapping. Flapping and banging.”
“And nothing else fell out and onto the street.”
“No, no. The police would have seen it. Tommy would have seen it.”
“Did you by any chance see anything through those back doors? Anything inside the van?”
“No, Krekor, I’m sorry. It happened very fast and it was very frightening.”
Gregor took a sip of the Armenian coffee and decided he couldn’t go on with that without killing himself.
“Well, there’s one thing I do know, even if it isn’t doing me any good.”
“What’s that?”
“That van couldn’t have gone very far without stopping,” Gregor said. “It couldn’t have been moving at th
e pace you say it was with its back doors flapping open through the streets of Philadelphia in the middle of an ice storm without being spotted by a cop or a maintenance crew or something. They’d have hunted it down or taken enough digital video to be able to identify it later. Most people on the street would have tried to get a picture of it. The driver must have pulled off within a block or two to fix the doors. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to disappear.”
2
It was not a long walk from Cavanaugh Street to St. Catherine’s School and the convent and the church that went with it. Gregor and Bennis had made that walk in both directions on the night they picked up Javier. In spite of the short distance, though, it required negotiating not one but three distinct neighborhoods. Cavanaugh Street was Armenian, and had been all Gregor’s life. He had grown up there when it had been poor and Armenian and most of its residents had come directly from the old country. Now it was rich and Armenian. Its residents were attached to it because they knew it. It was home. The Ohanians had run the grocery store forever. The Melajians had run the Ararat Restaurant forever. There was a little hole-in-the-wall store that sold religious articles only members of the Armenian church would recognize, including catechisms imported from Armenia itself and written in the Armenian language. Nobody on Cavanaugh Street would ever refer to that cup of sludge Tibor had just served him as “Turkish” coffee. Nobody on Cavanaugh Street would ever refer to “Turkish” anything, except the Armenian Genocide.
The other two neighborhoods were newer, at least in terms of population, part of the shifting population of every American city. Groups moved in and then moved out again. People immigrated and then took off for the suburbs at the first opportunity.
These days the first neighborhood next to Gregor’s own was Somali. It was a small patch of ground with a smaller population, but Gregor knew from what he was told by local law enforcement that the young men who inhabited it caused more than their share of trouble. They came from a country where women were veiled and monitored, and any women who were not veiled and monitored were fair game. Women who wandered through accidentally were likely to get hit on or worse. Bennis had once come close to breaking the wrist of a boy not more than twelve years old when he’d put out his hand to grab her breast when she was walking by. Bennis had considered calling a cop and having the kid arrested for assault. Gregor would have backed her up. In the end, she had decided not to. She was never sure why.
The next neighborhood after that was the fiefdom of people from a small nation in the Pacific. Gregor had never quite gotten them straightened out, but he loved being in their territory and he loved being around them. Every other storefront seemed to offer food. The food was undeniably exotic but also completely wonderful. They fried everything, which was definitely Gregor’s idea of a good time. There were also stores that sold clothes that seemed to consist of large sheets of fabric in bright colors. You could also get cloth like that to use as tablecloths or curtains. The only time Gregor had ever seen anyone angry in the neighborhood was when some boys stole some fruit from a fruit stand. The man who owned the fruit stand had chased them halfway down the block, threatening them with coconuts.
St. Catherine’s Parish was more familiar, one of a dozen or so Spanish neighborhoods in the city. Gregor came there on and off when he wanted to trade Armenian food for tacos or to bring home a quart of chili for dinner. They’d have to do that more often now that Javier was with them.
Detectives Horowitz and Morabito were standing in the doorway to the building directly next to the school—the convent, Gregor assumed. Two nuns were standing with them. One of them was Sister Margaret Mary.
“You people must be freezing,” Gregor said as he came up to them.
“Come right in,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “Our parlor is a public space.”
She opened the door behind them and shooed them all in. “I have Sister Peter here with us because she was with me when I saw the van the first night. Not that she noticed it particularly.”
“I thought Sister Superior was exaggerating,” Sister Peter said, as they came through to the stiffly formal parlor. “It was a very busy night, what with the foster parents and the Daisy Scouts and everything up in the air to get school started for the new year. That’s one of the things we didn’t think of when we started this whole project. If we’re going to run this by ourselves, we’re going to have to do all the work ourselves.”
Sister Margaret Mary sat down in the single large wing chair. Another nun, tall and very young, stuck her head in. Sister Margaret Mary nodded at her.
“Sister Evangelina will bring in the coffee things,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “I don’t know if you realize, but when nuns first came to the United States to open parochial schools, they staffed every school with sisters exclusively. It was the only way we made Catholic education affordable to the people of the parish. Nuns don’t have to be paid much, you see. Then when sisters started leaving the orders, we responded to that by putting one or two nuns into every school to serve as principals and vice principals, and hiring lay teachers for the rest. Unfortunately, that was very expensive. So, our order has turned that around. We gave up control of most of our schools. We now operate only three, of which this is one. But we staff them all ourselves.”
“Which lets you charge cheaper tuition,” Gregor said.
“It does once you finish arguing with the cardinal archbishop.”
Gregor had met the cardinal archbishop of Philadelphia. He let it go.
“So,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “The van. A big, black, shiny new van. Or at least it looked new. I’ve told you before. It just kept coming through the neighborhood. It must have passed the school half a dozen times that night.”
“Sister was worried it had something to do with ICE,” Sister Peter said.
Sister Margaret Mary drummed on the arm of her chair. “We have to be very careful here. These people are never safe, even if they’re in the country legally. A lot of them live in households where some of the members are undocumented. Then there’s the fact that we’re all mandated reporters. We’re supposed to call Child Protective Services if we’re even vaguely suspicious that there might be abuse or neglect in the home. But there’s a cultural disconnect. These people don’t have the same norms for the raising and disciplining of children that we do. They do things we find odd or disturbing that are perfectly normal to them. They’ve learned to isolate themselves as much as possible from us and from all official—well, official anything. And I saw this van, and I kept seeing this van, and it was all wrong. We don’t have vehicles like that around here. It was too new, or at least it looked too new. It looked too expensive, too. So, I started to worry that it had something to do with the ICE raids that have been going on the last few weeks.”
“But it didn’t,” Detective Morabito said.
“Apparently not,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “At least, it never stopped here, or anywhere else in the neighborhood I could see. And then, like I told you before, I sort of half forgot about it. And then there was poor Miss Warkowski. And then there was this morning.”
“This morning is when Sister found the van,” Detective Horowitz said.
“I don’t really know it’s the same van,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “It’s just that it seems likely. Black vans everywhere, when we haven’t had any before this. It was just sitting there on the street, two blocks down and around the corner.”
“Do we know if it’s still there?” Gregor asked.
“Surprisingly enough, it is,” Morabito said.
“I should have waited next to it,” Sister Margaret Mary said, “but it just didn’t occur to me. I took down all the information I could and ran right back here to call the police. And I had a cell phone on me, too. Just a flip phone, very basic, but I probably could have found a way to call if I’d kept my head.”
“When we got here, we were convinced it would have disappeared,” Horowitz said, “but it hadn’t. We’
ve got a couple of patrolmen waiting there in case anybody tries to pick it up. We haven’t heard anything, so we don’t think anybody has.”
“I did write down the license number,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “A New Jersey license plate number. It seemed like the least I had to do.”
“We called in to request a warrant,” Morabito said. “If we have any luck, the guy we sent to get it will be waiting for us when we reach the van. And so will the van.”
“A New Jersey plate,” Gregor said.
None of the three men had ever sat down. They were all half pacing and half fidgeting. Gregor didn’t blame any of them, even himself.
3
The van was parked at the curb like any other vehicle. It already had one parking ticket on it. If it had been left where it was, it would eventually have been towed, stuffed in an impound yard, and ignored. The city of Philadelphia had multiple impound yards full of cars that nobody wanted and nobody would claim. Gregor was willing to bet that most of those vehicles were not as shiny and new looking as this one was. Cars broke down. They became eligible for repo. Husbands stole them from wives and wives stole them from husbands and girlfriends who were just not going to take it anymore stole them from boyfriends. Cars became the hostages the city would pay to keep.
The man with the warrant hadn’t arrived when Gregor and the two detectives pulled up, all on foot, because Gregor was going to be damned if he was going to get into a car to drive a distance that short. There were other cars there, though, blocking off the space. One was a patrol car with its siren silent but its bubble lights flashing. One of the uniforms attached to it was standing near the license plate. The other was standing near the driver’s door.
“We had our hopes up, but we didn’t get lucky,” that uniform said, a small Spanish woman whose gun looked too large for the slenderness of her hips. “We kept hoping that somebody would just come up and try to get into the thing, but nothing happened.”
