Act of Darkness (32 page)

She took another piece of tape off her thumb. “I’m going to put this over your nose, Dan. The succinylcholine will keep you from pulling it off. You’re going to die and when you’re dead it’s going to look just as if you died from—crib death. Do you see?”

“No,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Victoria looked at the tape in her hand and then at Gregor Demarkian. Her eyes were wild and her face was ugly. She was electrified. She picked up the heart-shaped ruby brooch and held its sharpened bar in the light.

“Get the hell out of here,” she said, “or I’ll stick you, too.”

Outside, there was a rumble that turned into a roar, and the great plate glass window that was the Mondrian study’s north wall lit up in a thousand colors.

The fireworks had started.

I
F SOMEONE HAD ASKED
Gregor Demarkian, a minute or two after he’d walked in on Victoria Harte’s attempted murder of Dan Chester, how he was least likely to spend his Fourth of July, he would have said back on Cavanaugh Street, in Philadelphia, with the people he most wanted to spend it with. Even an hour later—when Dan Chester had recovered and been fortified with another huge glass of Scotch and Victoria Harte had been taken away, spitting and vile, by a young patrolman glass-eyed with terror and Janet Harte Fox had gone to call every lawyer she’d ever heard of—Gregor would have found the possibility of getting away from Oyster Bay before the passage of at least a week no possibility at all. There were details to be taken care of, questions to be asked, questions to be answered. The detectives in the murder mysteries Bennis gave him to read for relaxation always knew everything about everything before they presented the murderer to a baffled police department. In real life, Gregor had always been satisfied to know who the murderer was and how to bring him to trial. After that, he got what he could get when he could get it. Some puzzles were cleared up at the arrest. Some had to wait for the trial. Some had to wait for a conviction. Others had to wait through ten years of death penalty appeals. With Victoria Harte, he got lucky. Whatever else she had been after, in the whole long mess of passion and accident that had brought her to this place, concealment was not part of it. In the end, Henry Berman had to have her dragged out of Great Expectations by force, just to keep her from spilling everything before the lawyers got there. By then, the situation outside had reached its crisis stage. The crowd that had been waiting at the gate for all those hours had had enough of their passivity. As Berman’s patrolmen put Victoria in a black-and-white, a small crowd of tourists began to come over the wall, onto the lawn. Only quick work by one of the gate guards stopped them from getting any farther. In the dark that was too dark and too silent after the lights and noise of the exploding fireworks, there seemed to be vampires and shape changers on the grass.

In the meantime, Gregor had written his statement, answered what he could for a bewildered Clare Markey, and wondered vaguely what had happened to two people: Bennis Hannaford and Patchen Rawls. He got an answer to the question of Patchen Rawls before Victoria Harte left the house. He was writing out his statement at the coffee table in the living room, and she came into the foyer, breathing fire and carrying a plastic suitcase.

“I’m getting out of this place,” she said to no one in particular. “I just got back into my room. Someone put that mink bedspread back on my bed.”

On the other side of the coffee table, Clare Markey giggled. Gregor looked up at her and she winked.

Forty-five minutes later—when Victoria was finally gone and Gregor’s statement was finally finished and he was just beginning to wonder how long it would be before they let him get some sleep—Bennis found him. She came marching in from outside, walked straight up to his chair, and managed to look tall by staying on her feet while he found it impossible to rise to his.

“The car’s in the drive,” she told him. “Get into it. We’re going home.”

“Home,” he said.

“We’re going, Gregor. I’ve already called Donna. She’ll be waiting up.”

Bennis had also packed her suitcases and his own and cleared the trip with Henry Berman. Even if he hadn’t been happy with the thought of getting out of that place, he would have to have gone. Fortunately, he was very, very happy. So happy, he didn’t think of the obvious until they were out of the gate, past the still struggling crowd, and on the highway headed for the Triborough Bridge.

“Bennis,” he said then, “how did you get the car so fast?”

“I didn’t get the car so fast. I got it when we were in New York.”

“I know that, Bennis. But—”

“I got it for the weekend, Gregor. I had it on call.”

He stared at her in astonishment. “You had a Rolls-Royce on call for the entire Fourth-of-July weekend?”

“It doesn’t do to be cheap, Gregor. It causes you a lot of trouble in the long run.”

“With a Ford, you wouldn’t have been being cheap. With a Rolls-Royce—”

“With a Rolls-Royce, you get better service. I hope you don’t think we’re going to Penn Station to get the train.”

“Where are we going?”

“Back to Cavanaugh Street, of course. In this car. It’ll be much more convenient. I’d have died trying to manage trains and taxis at this time of night.”

Gregor thought it was a good thing her books sold as well as they did. The way she spent money, she’d go bankrupt trying to survive on any ordinary income.

A little while later, the car began to cross the Triborough, and Gregor began to fall asleep. By the time they reached the warren of bypasses around Manhattan, he was out. He stayed out until they were well into Philadelphia, bouncing along the potholed side streets and through the rapidly shifting neighborhoods of a city in transition. Then they turned onto Cavanaugh Street itself, and he woke up thoroughly and irrevocably.

It was a good thing he did. Donna Moradanyan was young and she had been brought up in the suburbs, but neither of those things kept her from being like every other Armenian-American woman in the neighborhood. First, she had called Lida Arkmanian. Then she had called Father Tibor Kasparian. Then she had gone downstairs and woken up poor old George Tekamanian. And those three, of course, had woken up everybody else.

It wasn’t only Donna Moradanyan who was waiting up.

It was very nearly the entire population of Cavanaugh Street.

They were sitting in tiers, on the steps that led to the apartment building where Gregor and Donna and George had the three occupied floor-throughs.

And they had brought food.

T
HERE WAS MORE FOOD
the next morning, in the kitchen of the little apartment at the back of Holy Trinity Armenian Church, where Tibor lived in the same cramped quarters as every other Armenian priest who had ever been sent to Cavanaugh Street. Because the kitchen, like every other room Tibor had, was piled with books, the food was piled
on
books. It was also decorated with tiny plastic American flags, a patriotic gesture Gregor was sure had been Tibor’s own. Gregor found a bowl of stuffed grape leaves sitting on a copy of Aristotle’s
Poetics
(in the original Greek) and a plate of fried pastry dipped in honey on a copy of Mickey Spillane’s
The Body Lovers
(original paperback cover, half-naked female draped over the edge of an invisible world). There was also a pan of deskewered shish kebab with microwave instructions taped to its side. That was sitting on a hardbound edition of
The Oxford Dictionary of Popes.
The wonder of it was that the place was so very clean. Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian did a good job when they came in to “look after” Tibor every other day of the week. Gregor took a huge piece of phyllo stuffed with spiced meat from a plate resting on one side on
Scruples
and on the other on something called
The History of Chinese Snuff Bottles,
and wandered back into the living room.

In the living room, Tibor was sitting on one of the only two chairs that had been cleared of books, holding Donna Moradanyan’s baby on his lap and showing it pictures from Janson’s
The History of Art.
Gregor dropped into the other cleared chair and took a big bite out of his phyllo.

“Don’t you think you’re pushing it a little? The child isn’t two months old.”

“That is very silly of you, Krekor. It is never too early to start. And my Tommy here likes the pictures of Vermeer. They make him smile.”

“It’s going to make me smile to see you change a diaper. Is that what she’s decided to call him, finally? Tommy? I thought the child was going to go to his wedding without a baptismal name.”

“Thomas Peter.” Tibor sighed. “Thomas is her father’s name, of course. And Peter,” Tibor looked at the baby. “I am going to have a talk with this Peter. He is coming to visit and ‘work things out.’ This is how he put it. Work things out. I am going to work things out on his head, and then Lida is going to finish him off.”

“And then Tom Moradanyan is going to get his shotgun? I thought you said this Peter had a brain the size of a pea. And I told you, Tibor, it’s not necessarily a good idea—”

“I know what you told me. Forget telling me. We who are not sophisticated will take care of this here. Tell me instead about your poor Victoria Harte. You said you would.”

Gregor sighed. He had, of course, said he would. He even wanted to. He always talked things over with Tibor. He had never been comfortable with the fact that he had not consulted the priest about this case before he had decided to take it. He should have, if only from practical considerations. Tibor might not be “sophisticated,” but he knew more about human nature than any human being since Dostoyevsky. With Tibor along, Gregor didn’t think he would have made half the mistakes he had.

“Well,” he said, “what started me going was two things. I told you about the first one. Carl Bettinger.”

“Who was not behaving as he should have been behaving,” Tibor said. “The man from the FBI. Yes, Krekor. I know.”

“Yes, you know. Well, there was only one way it added up, even before Victoria Harte came out with that bit about how Carl had been to visit her asking questions two months before Stephen Fox’s attacks started—although that clinched it. Carl had a red look around his eyes, the one he always got when he was on the computer too much. He was around those people at Great Expectations every chance he could get. When Kevin Debrett died, Carl actually got to the scene before the police did. Then when you told me he’d called asking for me twice, when he knew perfectly well where I was—”

“I thought it was very strange, Krekor.”

“It would have been, except that it’s standard procedure when you’re running blind agents in a serial murder investigation. You don’t tell them what they’re really doing, but you make sure they get where they’re going, and you make sure you know how they’ve gone. I think we’ll find he called the hotel in New York, too. And checked out the car rental companies until he found the one Bennis used.”

Tibor smiled. “That was a remarkable car, Krekor. I don’t think I have ever seen a car just that color blue.”

“Yes. Well. Leave it to Bennis. Anyway, once I decided he had to be investigating a serial murder, I also had to decide the serial murder suspect was among the people at Great Expectations that weekend. Nothing else could have justified Bettinger’s spending all that time in Oyster Bay. Then I was stuck with something else. As far as I knew, there was no serial murder case anywhere that could have involved any of these people. You may not think I read the papers the way I should, but I do read them. There’s an ongoing investigation in Washington and Oregon, a series of old women murdered in their garages. There’s another ongoing investigation down in Texas, all young boys. Whatever Bettinger was investigating, it had to involve a class of people whose murders could be made to look convincingly like something else. And whoever he was investigating had to be important enough to be a threat in the event of a lawsuit, somebody Carl would have to track without letting that tracking leak.”

“Stop,” Tibor said. “Here is what I don’t understand, Krekor. You say this Dr. Debrett was murdering infants—”

“That’s right, mentally retarded and otherwise damaged infants.”

“But I’d think that is the best sort of case for the newspapers. The very best. The sensationalism they could exploit—”

“They could exploit it if they knew it existed. Tibor, look at this. That nurse in Texas, Genene Jones, got caught because she made a drama about the deaths she caused, and because she sometimes went to work on perfectly healthy infants. But what if you didn’t make a drama about it, and what if you only killed those infants whose chances for survival were lower than normal anyway? Three years ago, there was a perfectly respectable pediatrician in Virginia who killed five or six newborn babies, all with Down syndrome, during his rounds in the maternity ward of a hospital. All of them but the last were attributed to either crib death or other natural causes. They would never have gotten on to him at all except that, with the last one, he talked to the parents first, and they got suspicious. They had a niece with Down syndrome, and the doctor, they said, was making it sound like the worst thing in the world, when they knew it wasn’t. When their child died, they insisted on an investigation.”

“Was it that way with this Carl Bettinger, too?” “Not exactly. One of the young agents assigned to headquarters had a child with Down syndrome, and he and his wife were given a referral to Kevin Debrett’s clinic. Somebody else’s child died while they were there having their own child tested, and the nurse said something about how common it was. She made it sound too common, and the agent got nervous.”

This nurse was part of the murders, Krekor?”

“I don’t think so. Actually, you’d have to ask Bettinger, but I’d guess not. Conspirators tend to cause more publicity than they avoid. Anyway, Carl showed up right after Debrett died, and he didn’t show up right after Fox died—Dan Chester had to call him and haul him in—so I knew it was Debrett, and I also knew Debrett had the most consistent access to infants. So—”