Quoth the Raven (32 page)

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.”

F
ROM 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.

What he did expect, when he walked out of Constitution House with Bennis and Markham and Father Tibor to make his way to the lecture hall, was a torchlit campus full of capering students. He got the torchlights. While he was busy noticing other things, the torches had been fastened to makeshift holders spread out along the edges of the paths and in a circle around the broad expanse of Minuteman Field. The students, however, had disappeared. Between the torches and the blacked-out windows and the emptiness of the quad, Independence College looked like a ghost town, reliably haunted.

“What the Hell is going on here?” Gregor asked the air.

Markham came back, “It’s the blackout. No activity until the procession to the bonfire.”

“But where is everybody?” Bennis asked.

Markham pointed down the angled path on which they were walking, to a tall oblong building with something that was not quite a steeple and not quite a spire rising from the front of it. It was a building Gregor had noticed before, the first one visible when you came off the parking lot path. He had never been required to go into it, or seen anyone else going into it, and so he hadn’t paid it any attention.

“A lot of them are probably in there,” Markham said. “That’s Concord Hall, the old chapel. It’s used as an auditorium now.”

“That’s where I’m supposed to give my speech?”

“That’s where.” Markham contemplated the back and side of Concord Hall. “It’s got its advantages, considering. They modernized it about ten years ago. Took one whole wall of the auditorium and turned it into windows. The windows look out on King George’s Scaffold and Minuteman Field.”

“They’ll be blacked out,” Gregor said.

“They’ll be blacked out with a blackout curtain, installed special at the time it was renovated. The bonfire is an annual event around this place.” Markham smiled thinly. “All we have to do is haul the curtain up and there we are.”

“Where will we be?” Gregor asked. Nobody answered him. There was something about all this silence that was contagious. He pressed on, ahead of the others, until he got to the back door of the hall. It was propped open, and when he got to it he saw that it was guarded, too—by Freddie Murchison, standing just inside it in the dark. Freddie was, as usual, dressed up as Dracula, with a mouth full of fangs. If his face hadn’t been so naturally sappy-silly round and childish, he would have been frightening. Gregor pushed past him, made way for the others and said, “Well?”

“Well,” Freddie told him, “we couldn’t lock the front doors because of the fire regulations, but we’ve got guys strung out all along the front hall, the whole football team in fact. They’re not much of a football team, but they ought to be all right.”

“I’m sure they’ll be fine,” Gregor said. “What about our friends?”

“Take a look for yourself.”

Freddie was leering at Bennis, who had declined to come in costume but had put on one of her best black silk shirts. She had a lot of them, all so fine they might as well have been transparent, and she always wore them with the top two buttons undone. Gregor pushed past them both and went up the small flight of stairs that was the only other way to go than out. The flight led to a fire door that led to a short hall that led to another fire door. Gregor pushed this open and stuck his head through.

The “auditorium” was really the entire second floor of the old church, fitted out now with curving rows of cushioned chairs like a movie theater, its east wall an unbroken curtain of black cloth. The room itself was brightly lit and packed full, mostly of students in varying degrees of self-conscious absurdity. Gregor saw a couple made up as Barbie and Ken, a boy dressed up as a beach ball, an entire row of girls dressed up as pumpkins. He scanned the room until he picked out the faces he was looking for, and the costumes: Dr. Ken Crockett and Dr. Alice Elkinson sitting side by side on the third row center aisle; Dr. Katherine Branch, red hair floating in the air like liquid flame, sitting by herself and looking furious in the middle of the front row; Jack Carroll and Chessey Flint, in costume but easily identifiable, surrounded by friends in the back toward the left. When Jack saw Gregor he nodded slightly, reached down into his seat, and came up with his bat hood mask. Then he pulled it over his head.

“Look,” Tibor said from somewhere behind Gregor. “Look what Freddie kept for us.” He pushed in on Gregor’s left side and held out his hand. Perched there, pecking at a fine dust of honey-sticky crumbs, was Lenore.

“Krekor?” Tibor said.

Gregor was capable of making up his mind in an instant. Sometimes he even wanted to. “Have you got any more of whatever you’re feeding it?” he asked Tibor. “Can you put some of that stuff on my hand?”

Tibor reached into the pocket of his cassock, came up with a mangled piece of Lida Arkmanian’s honey cake, and held it out. Lenore followed it, pecking as she went.

“Usually they sleep in the nighttime, I think,” Tibor said. “But this is a good bird, Krekor. This is a bird who knows how to be an ally.”

In Gregor’s opinion, this was a bird who knew how to eat, but that was irrelevant. He had just made up his mind about something else. Back at the apartment, he and Markham and Bennis and Tibor had gone over and over the choreography of this scene. First Tibor would introduce him to the Dean, who was waiting patiently in the front row to finally be allowed to participate in this event. Then the Dean would introduce Gregor, reading from a vita supplied by Tibor and containing Gregor didn’t want to know what. Then—

But it was all too complicated and it would take too long. Gregor had always been a man more comfortable with formality than chaos, but there was a limit. He smeared his own left hand with honey and cake and watched while Lenore climbed onto it. Then he stepped out onto the stage and crossed to the lectern. Behind him, Tibor was scrambling frantically to catch up. He was not quick enough and he didn’t make it. On Gregor’s hand, Lenore pecked, hopped, pecked again, and then cawed out “Bastard, bastard, bastard” in a chillingly venomous voice that carried to the back of the hall.

On the floor behind the lectern there was a can of Belleville Lemon and Lime soda and Freddie Murchison’s case of Belleville beer. Gregor tapped the mike on the lectern’s surface and was relieved to find it live and loud. By then, Tibor had caught up with him and begun hissing in his ear.

“Krekor,” he said, “Krekor, what are you doing? I’m supposed to speak first. You’re supposed to meet the Dean.”

Because Gregor had never met the Dean, he didn’t know which one of the faces in the front row belonged to him, and he thought that was just as well. He leaned into the mike and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I was supposed to come here tonight and tell you how the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of which I was a part for many years, goes about the tracking and the capture of serial killers. I have decided to talk instead about a topic much more interesting to me at the moment, and probably much more interesting to you. I have decided to discuss the maiming and mutilation of a secretary in this college’s Interdisciplinary Program in the American Idea, Miss Maryanne Veer—and the murder of a professor in that same department, Dr. Donegal Steele.”