Murder, Gregor Demarkian had been told, when he was in training at Quan-tico, is the one crime without a reliable perpetrator profile. Every other crime—robbery, rape, assault, embezzlement—had its attractions for a certain segment of the population, a certain personality among all the possible personalties occurring among Americans in the twentieth century. Only murder was a wild card. Some murderers could be profiled. That was what the Behavioral Sciences Unit was all about. Serial killers were a definite personality type, more alike than different across the spectrum, and predictable, to a certain extent, because of it. The ordinary murderer was something else again. Go to any death row in any large state—go to Texas, Gregor thought sourly— and what you found was a hodgepodge of motives, social classes, educational backgrounds, religious convictions, car makes, tastes in books and coffee. The majority of the prisoners awaiting death would be what would be expected by anybody who spent significant time watching Bruce Willis movies. They would be poor, male, violent, senseless, addicted, the kind of people for whom nothing would ever be a deterrent if it required thinking. They would have killed their victims in robberies that hadn’t required anybody to die, or beaten their girlfriends or their girlfriends’ children into insensate pulps in an anger they were no longer able to explain. They were really rapists, or batterers, or thieves. The murders were side issues they never could quite figure out how to explain. Somewhere on that death row, or somewhere else in that prison, blessed with life instead of death because of their age or youth or status, there would be other murderers—the Diane Downses, the Charles Stewarts, the Jean Harrises, the middle class and the well-off, the envious, the resentful, the hateful, the cold. That was what they’d meant at Quantico when they told agents in training to be very careful about murder. It was far too easy to ignore the true perpetrator in a futile search for a mythical criminal type, hulking and monstrous, as if real human beings never hurt each other at all.
Gregor felt the taxi pull up to the curb and looked out to see that he was right in front of Le Demiurge, where he was supposed to meet John Jackman for lunch. His watch said that it was barely noon, and Jackman, being Jack-man, was always at least a little late. That had been true even when he hadn’t had the excuse of being commissioner of police to explain the habit away. Gregor got out a small clutch of bills and handed them to the driver. He got out of the cab and looked around at a pleasant but mostly unassuming neighborhood. He had no idea where John found these places. Even Bennis, who looked on eating out as a sacrament, hadn’t heard of most of them. This one had one of those arched canvas awnings stretched out across the sidewalk. Gregor had always wondered what the procedure was for getting the city to allow you to put one of those up. It was the kind of thing he thought about when he wasn’t able to get to sleep at night and he didn’t want to wake Bennis by getting out of bed and starting up the computer. Of course, she never worried about that sort of thing when it came to him, but she never woke him up, either.
The problem with Quantico’s dictum on murderers was that it was only about 90 percent right. Even those murderers who seemed to have nothing in common did have something in common, if nothing else the fact that they’d killed someone. It went deeper than that. Gregor thought he could say with certainty that virtually all murderers actually killed the person they had intended to kill. Those plots that showed up in crime fiction sometimes, where bodies were strewn across the landscape by mistake until the perpetrator finally got it right, were implausible. The key was to pay attention to who had actually died. In this case, that meant paying attention to Charlotte Deacon Ross, and not just to Tony Ross alone. The danger was in the possibility that they would find an explanation they liked so much for that first murder that they would do whatever they had to do to shoehorn the second one into it. It didn’t do to assume that all murders after the first, if there were more than one, occurred because somebody or the other “knew too much.” It happened. Gregor had seen it happen. Most of the time, it didn’t happen. If Charlotte Deacon Ross and Tony Ross were dead, it was because somebody had a reason to want Charlotte Deacon Ross and Tony Ross dead. That seemed to leave out America on Alert. Gregor was sure that Kathi Mittendorf considered Charlotte Deacon Ross to be a mind-controlled sex slave of the Illuminati, but he’d have been very surprised to find out that she thought Mrs. Ross was one of the people who ran the world. It also seemed to rule out a whole host of motives, like sex and jealousy. The kind of lover who might want one of them dead would be unlikely to want them both dead. The most obvious avenue of investigation would be the daughters. Gregor was sure they must stand to inherit something, and possibly a great deal. The problem was that Gregor couldn’t remember a case of murder for inheritance on the Main Line—ex-cept for one, and that had been an extremely odd and bizarre situation brought on by a paterfamilias who had a mind as warped and paranoid as Howard Hughes’s had been at the end. No, now that he thought about it, it was really remarkable. With all that money floating around, there should have been a fair amount of violence at the edges of that group of people, but as far as he knew, there had not been.
The other way in which all murderers were alike, every single one of them, was in that odd tunnel vision that allowed them to see only themselves as human. Me me me, Gregor thought. Then he looked around at where he was. He hated people who stood on sidewalks talking on cell phones, but he wasn’t really happy with the ones who sat at restaurant tables talking on cell phones, either. Bennis said that in London, bums on the street sat in doorways and talked on cell phones. Gergor went into Le Demiurge and gave his name to the hostess at the desk. She checked him off a list and began to show him to a table. John was not, of course, there. John would not be there for at least another fifteen minutes. A waiter came by to ask him if he wanted something to drink. Gregor ordered a Perrier and lime and asked where the pay phones were.
“I could bring a phone to the table,” the waiter offered helpfully. “Most of our patrons these days prefer their own cell phones, of course, but—”
“No, no,” Gregor said. “I don’t want to have this particular conversation in the middle of a restaurant. Are there pay phones?”
There were pay phones, in the narrow back hall near the men’s and ladies’ rooms. Gregor hoped to find the kind with a booth that could be closed, but had no luck. This restaurant was too new. It had only those weird wall cubicles that were supposed to surround the speaker’s ears, but were always too low on the wall to manage it. Gregor went into the men’s room and looked around. Nobody was there. He got out his phone and dialed Bennis’s number.
“Live goat escort service,” Bennis said, picking up. “We supply the billy to suit your lifestyle.”
“Jesus,” Gregor said. “What do you think you’re doing when you pull something like that?”
“Scaring off telemarketers,” Bennis said. “The national ones don’t faze no matter what you do, but the locals just freak. We’ve had three calls from some company trying to sell us vinyl windows. Where are you calling from?”
“It’s called Le Demiurge. It’s one of John Jackman’s restaurants.”
“That ought to be good. If you like it, we’ll go. Tibor’s out with the architect Russ Donahue hired, walking over the rubble and outlining the requirements for floor plans. Russ thought it would cheer him up, to be doing something about all this instead of just brooding.”
“Is it working?”
“Hard to tell,” Bennis said. “He looks solemn enough, but he walked out of here telling the architect that he’d have to lend him a copy of The History of the Theology of the Church in Armenia. I’ve seen it. It weighs about forty pounds.”
“It is working,” Gregor said. “I want to ask you something. Why aren’t there more murders on the Main Line?”
“What? There are murders on the Main Line. You said so yourself. You said—”
“No, no. I don’t mean those kinds of murders. I mean murders among people like your family. All those rich families out in Bryn Mawr and Sewickly and Radnor. Millions of dollars at stake. Sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. The sheer law of averages says there should be a certain number of murders for the inheritance money, and I don’t believe that Main Line debutantes are any less rapacious than anybody else—”
“They’re probably more,” Bennis said. “But they wouldn’t kill for the inheritance money. I mean, what would be the point? Most of them wouldn’t inherit anything.”
“Are you trying to tell me these people don’t pass their money down to their children? Or are you just saying that your father was typical, and they don’t give their daughters anything?”
“My father was never typical, on any point. No, I mean that if you’ve got serious money, you don’t leave it around in bank accounts or whatever to be handed over to your children when you’re dead. One of these days, George W. Bush or somebody will manage to get the estate tax repealed, but in the meantime, dying with a lot of money in the bank just means your heirs are going to hand a whole lot of it over to the government. So you don’t do that. You take care of that before you die.”
“You give your money to your children before you die? What do you live on yourself?”
“You give your money to your grandchildren before you die,” Bennis explained patiently. “You live on the income until you die. It’s called a living trust. I think. Ask somebody who knows about this stuff. But anyway, that’s what you do, and then you put other money in regular trusts so that your children have something to live on themselves. But most of these people die with very small estates, relative to what they were actually worth, or in control of. And the children and the grandchildren have their money affairs set up so that they don’t usually see any significant change just because somebody died. If you see what I mean.”
“Vaguely,” Gregor said. “Is that what the Rosses did? They’ve got four daughters.”
“Are you thinking that one of the Ross girls killed her parents? Well, I suppose the oldest one could do it, but the other three have IQs like miracle golf scores. I couldn’t see them doing the planning.”
“But they can all shoot, can’t they?” Gregor said. “You told me that—or somebody did. They weren’t talking about the girls, but what I remember was that all these people belong to some gun club—”
“I’m sure they all shoot,” Bennis said patiently. “I’m sure they’re all good at it too. They’d make a point of it. They probably all ride, as well, and they’re probably good at that too. Have you ever paid attention to who competes in the equestrian events at the Olympics? But that still doesn’t mean that they’re capable of planning a rifle murder in the middle of a charity ball. I should think that took an enormous amount of planning and forethought.”
“Maybe.”
“Only maybe?”
“I think we’ve been putting too much stress on the planning and forethought. There are other explanations. It might have been a matter of opportunity. Somebody happened to be there and saw his chance—”
“And where did he get the gun?” Bennis sounded impatient. “That place was crawling with security that night, and not just the firm Charlotte hired. And it’s a good firm. It had to be, given Tony’s position. But the secret service was there, for God’s sake.”
“I know. But something tells me there had to be a way. There were guns in the house, weren’t there?”
“I’m sure there were, but I’m also willing to bet almost anything that they were locked away in gun cabinets. They were at Engine House when I was growing up, and even after we all grew up. It’s just common sense.”
“Still,” Gregor said. “It keeps bothering me. That there’s something obvious, or close to obvious, and I’m just not getting it. What about the sister? Would she be likely to inherit money when her brother died?”
“Her brother, yes, but not Charlotte,” Bennis said. “Not unless something very dramatic has taken place in that family without anybody telling me about it. Charlotte and Annie hated each other practically as a matter of principle. Charlotte thought Annie was ostentatious. Annie thought Charlotte was a twit.”
“I’ve met Mrs. Wyler. She didn’t look ostentatious to me.”
“When you buy your clothes at Price Heaven and wear them to places where everybody else has Chanel, you might be accused of being ostentatious. I don’t see why you’re so off the original theory. I thought it made a lot of sense that they’d been killed by some conspiracy group who thought Tony was bringing on a one-world satanic government, or whatever it is this week.”
“And killed Mrs. Ross—why?”
“I don’t know,” Bennis said.
“I don’t know either,” Gregor said. “And that’s my problem. Never mind. I’d better go find out if John has arrived, or if I’m going to be left drinking Per-rier at the table until almost dinnertime. There is something about all this, though. Some organizing idea. I must be asking the wrong questions. I wish I knew what the right ones were.”
“Just don’t order everything with cream sauce,” Bennis said. “Are you all right? You sound depressed.”
“I’m not depressed, I’m annoyed. I’ll talk to you later. If you think of anything, write it down. Maybe this place serves that crème brûlée stuff you got for me a few weeks ago.”
“I’m never in my life going to feed you anything again but steamed vegetables,” Bennis said.
Gregor switched the phone off. The men’s room was still empty. No one had come in in all the time he’d been talking to Bennis. He put the phone away in his pocket and then—for no reason he could have put in his words—washed his hands. Remember who actually died, he thought, and then, me me me.
There was something there, right at the edge of his mind, and he couldn’t get hold of it.
Always, in the detective novels Father Tibor Kasparian insisted on pressing on him when he had a cold, the detective—usually a professional private investigator, but sometimes a little old lady living on her own in a village or a haute cuisine caterer active in the gay rights movement or a cat—would sit down halfway through the book, outline the details of the case, and know, immediately, not only who had done it and why, but how to catch the murderer in the way most likely to result in either an arrest or a suicide. Gregor did not remember a book in which the detective had arrived at the halfway point without actually knowing what the crime was. He had no idea if he was now at what would be the halfway point if this were a book, but he did know that the only thing he was sure of was that he wasn’t sure. Tony Ross was dead. Charlotte Ross was dead. Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church had been half destroyed and rendered completely unusable. All those things might go together or not, might say something about each other or not, might help find a solution or not—but he had no way of knowing, because he had no way of organizing all the elements into a coherent whole. It would have been much easier if he could have assigned the Ross murders to a straightforward money motive. The daughters wanted the money. The sister wanted the money. Then he could have put the bombing of Holy Trinity definitively aside, separate and not in need of being included in anybody else’s mosaic. As it was, he was going around in circles. If he’d been asked to explain the case to someone coming into it new, he would have had to say: Which of several possible cases are you referring to?
John was not, of course, at the table when Gregor got back to it, so he drank Perrier poured over lime and looked around for something to scribble on. He couldn’t scribble on the napkins here. They were cloth, and elegantly monogrammed. It was no wonder that great books were always conceived in bars and cheap diners. They had paper napkins their patrons could write on. Gregor went through his pockets and came up with another issue of The Harridan Report. He seemed to have dozens of them, stashed all over himself and the apartment back on Cavanaugh Street. He got out his pen and started to write names and draw lines and arrows. He filled up one sheet of paper and went on to another. He was on the third by the time Jackman did show up, and he was no better organized. On the third sheet of paper he had a list, although not a definitive list. His head hurt.
John sat down and asked the waiter for a Perrier of his own. Gregor thought idly that if they were in Italy, John could have had a glass of wine at lunch with nobody thinking anything of it. John looked at the paper upside down.
“What is that?” he said.
Gregor shrugged. “It’s a list.”
“A list of what?”
“I don’t know.”
“That won’t do, Gregor. It can’t be a list of you don’t know. You’re not allowed not to know anything.”
Gregor pushed it across to him and shrugged. John Jackman picked it up.
“Tony Ross,” he said. “Charlotte Deacon Ross. Father Tibor Kasparian. Ryall Wyndham. David Alden. Anne Ross Wyler. Michael Harridan and people connected to Michael Harridan. Krystof Andrechev. All right. Everybody who has anything to do with either of the cases you’re looking into at the moment. That’s what you were making a list of.”
“In a way,” Gregor said.
The waiter was back. John already knew what he wanted, which made sense, since John did not suggest restaurants for working lunches unless he was already comfortable with them. Gregor ordered something that sounded as if it might have beef in it.
“Why do you always go to these places where you can’t identify the food?” Gregor asked. “What’s the mania for cooking things in pastry crusts?”
“You’ll love it. Don’t worry about it. What else can this be if it isn’t a list of everybody connected to the two cases you’re looking into.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “for one thing, I doubt if it’s everybody. It’s just the people who have surfaced in connection to the two. There may be dozens of others.”
“Right,” John said, “that’s true enough. So?”
“So, then there’s the question of Michael Harridan. Who he is. If he is— no, no, don’t say it. I know there must be at least somebody who is playacting at being Michael Harridan, but it would be nice to know if there’s somebody who’s Michael Harridan full-time, or somebody who is someone else on this same list who is Michael Harridan only for publication. I talked to that woman today. Kathi Mittendorf.”
“And?” John looked interested.
“And it was like talking to a schizophrenic, although she obviously isn’t one,” Gregor said. “Everything was the script. But I’d bet my life that she was hiding something in that house.”
“Like what?”
“Guns, explosives, something like that,” Gregor said. “I could just smell it. And yes, I know you can’t get a search warrant on the basis of just smelling it. But she exhibited all the signs. If I had to guess, I’d say they were stashed in the basement somewhere. That’s what she couldn’t stop looking at. Not at the basement, you know, but at the floor.”
“You know, Gregor, it’s a whole different ball game if we can prove they’re armed. It’s one thing to be a kook living off conspiracy theories, but the feds do not take kindly to large caches of weapons and explosives. Almost nobody collects that stuff without intending to use it.”
“I know. What can I say? Get some decent intelligence in there and check it out. Except that decent intelligence has been nearly nonexistent in this case almost from the beginning. I talked to Walker Canfield too.”
“Who’s Walker Canfield?”
“One half of the team the Bureau sent out to infiltrate America on Alert,” Gregor said. “I told you about him. And his partner, who has now been missing for almost two weeks. It was almost like talking to Kathi Mittendorf. Is it just me, or have people become less and less rational in the last ten years? Or maybe I mean in the last ten days.”
“Well, your Mr. Canfield is not my problem. He’s Lower Merion’s problem, and from what I’ve heard, they’re welcome to him.”
“Except that, just like us, he’s concerned with America on Alert. Everybody is concerned with America on Alert. Have you noticed that? And that idiotic newsletter is everywhere.”
“That idiotic newsletter has been everywhere for months,” John said. “You haven’t noticed it because it’s not the kind of thing you notice, but those things have been floating around forever. And there’s a Web site too, that’s been up for a while. And some of the guys who say the same things have been at it for years. David Icke. A-albionics. In spite of all the hysteria these groups put out about storm troopers and black helicopters, we don’t usually pay much attention to them unless they shoot somebody, and most of them don’t.”
“I’d have noticed if somebody stuck one of those things in my mailbox,” Gregor said, “or if Tibor had them piled up in his apartment. I do pay some attention to my environment. My point isn’t that The Harridan Report hasn’t been around for a while, only that it’s suddenly become far more intrusive into the lives of people who aren’t exactly its target audience. Charlotte Ross had an issue of it in the room she was sitting in right before she went out on the walk and died—and then there’s that. Why did she go out on the walk?”
“I don’t know,” John said. “It’s not my case, remember?”
The food was arriving. The waiter put a large plate of something that looked like fish buried under grapes in front of John Jackman. Gregor seemed to be staring at a gigantic beef rose on a celery stalk. The waiter murmured anxious wishes for their satisfaction, half in French, and then disappeared.
“You’re a sensible man,” Gregor said. “I really don’t understand your attraction for this sort of thing.”
“Maybe it’s scar tissue from a legacy of discrimination and oppression. Maybe, deep down, I need to go to all those places that wouldn’t have served a black man at lunch even if he had a million dollars. Maybe—”
“Can it,” Gregor said.
“The fact remains,” John said, “that it really isn’t my case. There’s nothing I can do about the death of Charlotte Ross. There’s nothing I can do about the death of Tony Ross, either. I can probably get you information, if you think the Lower Merion police are holding out on you, but that’s about as good as it’s going to get.”
“Could you do something else? Could you follow through on that idea of yours and get one of your people to get a good picture of Kathi Mittendorf that we could show to Krystof Andrechev?”
John looked surprised. “Sure. Do you think that’s the explanation for that? I’ve got to tell you that our people are inclined to believe that there was no mysterious woman with a gun, that Andrechev—”
“Is somehow involved with the bombing of the church,” Gregor said. “Yes, I know. And it’s a sensible first impression. But there was no need for Andrechev to come to me with that story. There was no need for him to do anything but sit tight and keep his mouth shut. We might never have noticed him.”
“We would have noticed him eventually,” John said. “The investigators on that case have interviewed most of that neighborhood already. They’ll get to everybody before they’re done.”
“Did they check out the gun?”
“They’re working on it.”
“My guess is that they won’t find anything on it. It’ll be completely clean. New. Never used for anything. Which brings us to the question of why Kathi Mittendorf went all the hell way across town—way, way across—to deliver it to Krystof Andrechev.”
“You’re that sure it was Mittendorf?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “The description fits. And, I don’t know how to put it, it sort of fits the kind of thing I’d expect her to do, under the right circumstances.”
“What are the right circumstances?”
“Michael Harridan telling her to,” Gregor said.
“Why would he tell her to?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
“Look,” John said. “This scenario has the same problems as the one where she just shows up and gives him the gun. There’s no reason why. Especially if the gun is clean. If the gun had been used in a crime, we could say she was trying to ditch a piece of material evidence. But as it is, there’s no reason at all—”
“Don’t you wonder what would have happened if Krystof Andrechev had actually said something?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “they’re all hyperpatriots, aren’t they? America on Alert and all its members. And Andrechev is a Russian. He’s ashamed of his English, so he doesn’t talk much, and he was listening to this woman give him a lecture on how evil foreigners were, so he didn’t talk at all while she was in his store, but—and it’s not a small thing—if he had said something, she would have known immediately that he was an immigrant, and given his accent, she’d have had a fair chance of knowing he was Russian. Maybe she would have taken the gun away without giving it to him.”
“And?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
John threw his fork into his plate. “You’re impossible this afternoon, do you know that? Look, you’ve got a problem on the home front. Somebody blew up your church. We’re going at it in the way most likely to find the perpetrators, and the chances are that the bombing has nothing at all to do with what was going on out in Bryn Mawr. Is going on, I should say, since people seem to still be falling like flies. But it just doesn’t make sense to put them together the way you’re doing. What happened out in Bryn Mawr has all the characteristics of a professional job, and you know it. Professional-grade marksmanship, for one thing. Carried out under conditions of tight security—”
Gregor straightened up a little. “Maybe not,” he said.
“What? You told me yourself—”
“Yes, I know, but—” Gregor said. “Sometimes I think we’ve all read too many Tom Clancy novels.”
“I’ve never read a Tom Clancy novel in my life.”
“Seen too many Harrison Ford movies, then,” Gregor said. “Never mind. Did you clear your afternoon the way I asked you to? I want to get out of here.”
“Technically,” John said, “I shouldn’t be going anywhere. I live behind a desk now, and a big desk. So—”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Fine,” Gregor said. “The best instructor I ever had at Quantico used to tell us, nonstop, that the worst enemy we had was the things we thought we knew. And it’s true. Let’s go.”
“I haven’t finished my lunch.”
“That isn’t lunch,” Gregor said. “That’s performance art.”
“Well, it’s performance art made with Dover sole, and I’m fond of it.”
By now, Gregor Demarkian had heard so much about Adelphos House—from Father Tibor, from John Jackman, from the newspaper articles Bennis and Donna had taken to leaving for him after the church decided to provide volunteers for Anne Ross Wyler’s project—that he thought of himself as having already been there. As soon as they turned onto the six-block stretch of street that Adelphos House called home, he knew it wasn’t true. There was nothing unusual in the fact of neighborhoods changing quickly in Philadelphia. Turn a corner, and you might go from ethnic Italian to upscale shopping to African-American to something very much like a strip mall. What surprised him was the utter and unrelieved devastation of this place. This was not a rundown street in a city with too many of them. This was not the kind of area urban renewal claimed. This was a burned-out hulk. Better than two-thirds of the buildings he saw were abandoned. Windows were gaping holes without glass. What glass there was was on the streets. The buildings that were inhabited had boards put up over theirs, almost as if they feared that disappearing win-dowpanes were a communicable disease. Bricks were everywhere, along the sidewalks, even in the street. It was a good thing they had John Jackman’s driver to take them where they wanted to go. Gregor didn’t think there was a cab driver in Philadelphia who would be willing to come here, even in broad daylight. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like after dark. The vision he got was from one of those old Twilight Zone episodes that were supposed to take place after a nuclear holocaust. Whatever would hunt you here might not be human. Gregor could see no signs of humans. The abandoned buildings gave every indication of being empty. There were no homeless people pushing carts of clothes and debris along the blocks. There were no empty soda cans or bottles in the gutters. There were no bus shelters. There were no stores. There weren’t even any television antennae. Gregor supposed that these days everybody who had television had cable, but lots of buildings in other parts of the city had antennae on their roofs left over from the days when cable hadn’t yet been heard of, and he didn’t think it was likely that the cable people would be willing to come out here to hook somebody up, even if their agreement with the city said they had to.
“Tell me Adelphos House isn’t really on this street,” Gregor said. “Tell me we’re just driving through on our way to someplace more sane.”
“Nobody drives through this neighborhood,” John Jackman said. “Except the cops. And they’re armed. I wouldn’t come out here myself at night without backup.”
“Well, now I understand something Annie Wyler told me. She said they had two cars at Adelphos House because they had to have cars. I remember thinking at the time that it was a typical rich-girl attitude. Nobody in Philadelphia has to have a car. There’s always public transportation.”
“Not out here, there isn’t.”
“Yes, I see that. Why is Adelphos House here? Surely there had to be other neighborhoods, closer to what Adelphos House does. They couldn’t all have been too expensive. Do hookers work this street? Who do they sell to?”
“Hookers do not work this street,” John Jackman said as the car began to slow up. “From what I remember—I was working out on the Main Line at the time—she tried to buy something closer to the strip where the girls work, but she ran into all kinds of trouble. Zoning problems. Permit problems. Building code problems—”
“This sounds like a setup.”
“It probably was. I don’t have to tell you that there have indeed been some members of our esteemed city government who have been known to patronize underage prostitutes. Not that they admit to knowing the prostitutes are underage, you understand. But that hardly matters. And Anne Ross Wyler was a pain in the butt to those people before she ever opened Adelphos House.”
“Was she taking pictures back then too?”
“Uh, yeah,” John Jackman said. “She even landed in the hospital for it once. I don’t know how many cameras she’s lost over the years. This is it. Notice the windows—no boards. We’ve tried to tell her that junkies have no consciences because they aren’t really conscious, but she won’t listen. We haven’t told her that the people she annoys aren’t above and beyond taking potshots at her at home, but she probably already knows it. She won’t listen to that, either.”
“Has anything ever happened at Adelphos House?”
“From the outside, no. There have been a couple of incidents of the girls losing it. She lets girls stay if they want. She puts them back in touch with their families if they want. That isn’t always possible. Sometimes, the families sold the girls into prostitution to begin with. Don’t you just love junkie culture?”
“I think it’s wonderful,” Gregor said.
“That’s why I think we should end the drug war,” Jackman said. “Make it all legal. Let them kill themselves with it. I don’t give a damn. But free up police resources to go after things like child prostitution. We spend millions of dollars every year in this city chasing potheads, and there isn’t enough left over in the budget to even try to put an end to the people who put eleven-year-olds out to peddle their asses on the street.”
The car had pulled to a stop at the curb. “I never thought of junkies having a culture,” Gregor said. John Jackman climbed out onto the sidewalk. Gregor climbed out too.
“Everything has a culture these days,” Jackman said. “Mollusks have a culture. They probably also have an indigenous language they’re trying to protect from the cultural imperialism of the squid.”
Adelphos House was in one of those brick buildings—like the one Gregor lived in on Cavanaugh Street—that was built right up next to the sidewalk, so that all it took to get from the street to the front door was to go up a few small steps. Gregor went around the car to join John Jackman on the sidewalk. As he did, Aldelphos House’s front door opened and a gigantic woman stepped out, her hair pulled back in a bun, her flowered dress floating in the stiff cold wind. For a split second, Gregor was confused. His first impression was that he was looking at Kathi Mittendorf again, but that passed, and then he didn’t know why he’d thought it. Kathi Mittendorf was lumpy, but this woman was obese. Gregor wondered how she managed to get up and down even this small set of steps every day. Kathi Mittendorf had hair dyed so falsely blond it hurt to look at it. This woman seemed to be content with her salt-and-pepper natural, pulled back against her skull and pinned untidily at the back of her head. Besides, Gregor thought, Kathi Mittendorf would never have been caught dead in a neighborhood like this one. It would have been far too threatening, far too close to being the thing she was most afraid of happening to her life.
“Lucy,” John Jackman said, holding out his hand. “Go back in the house. It’s got to be nine degrees out here. You’re going to freeze.”
“I’ve been freezing for an hour,” the woman said. “The heat’s out. We’ve got the oil company wheezing and whining and trying to get out of coming out here, even though they know they have to come out in an emergency, and this is surely an emergency. Is this Mr. Demarkian? Annie told me all about you.”
“I’m Gregor Demarkian, yes,” Gregor said.
“Lucinda Watkins,” the woman said.
“Let me get to a phone,” John Jackman said, “and make a few calls. Maybe we can straighten out your heat problem for you while we’re here.”
“That’s why it’s good to know an honest policeman,” Lucinda said. “Too bad they’re not all like you.”
Gregor cocked an eyebrow. Jackman shrugged. “Some of the men on the force have been known to, ah—”
“You know you’ve got men on your force who are visiting child prostitutes?” Gregor said.
“No,” John Jackman said sourly. “Once I know who they are, I find a way to get rid of them. But I know there are always some. Christ, Gregor. How do you think that strip keeps operating?”
Lucinda Watkins had retreated into Adelphos House’s front hallway and left the door open. John Jackman followed her and Gregor followed John Jackman. Inside, the ceilings were high, but the house itself was not impressive, and never had been. This had not started out as a fashionable neighborhood, the way so many poor neighborhoods did. The people who had lived here had not always been poor, but they had never been the kind of people to go regularly to the opera or the art museums. If Gregor had had to peg it, he’d have said turn-of-the-century and mostly in the possession of Catholic immigrants, Italians and Poles. There was a discolored place on the wall of the front hallway in the shape of a cross. Gregor had no problem imagining a crucifix hanging there, with a shallow cup of holy water underneath it.
Lucinda scuttled behind him and shut the door. “I’ll go get Annie. She’s having a nap. She’s up all night with that stuff, and then she’s up early in the morning. It’s insane. She runs herself down. She gets a dozen colds every winter. And she won’t let anybody help.”
“I thought you were getting some volunteers,” John Jackman said.
“Oh, she’ll let people help with that sort of thing,” Lucinda said. “It’s the trawling the strip I’m talking about. She’s out there every night, rain or shine, it doesn’t matter what the weather is. She won’t let me go because she says I’ll be too conspicuous. I am very conspicuous, I know that. I know what I look like when I look in the mirror. Last time I had a physical, I weighed three hundred pounds. But still. I’m fast. You’ve got to admit I’m fast. And nobody would pay any attention to me out there. Nobody ever pays attention to middle-aged fat women. They pay attention to her.”
A door along the hallway popped open, and a young woman dressed in jeans and a heavy cotton sweater came out. Lucinda looked up and smiled.
“Melissa,” she said. She turned to Gregor and John Jackman. “This is Melissa Polk, one of our volunteers from Bryn Mawr College. Bryn Mawr provides us with a lot of valuable help during the school year. Melissa, listen, this is Mr. Jackman and Mr. Demarkian. Mr. Jackman is the commissioner of police. Mr. Demarkian—”
“Is the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” Melissa said politely.
Gregor winced. Lucinda ignored it. “Would you mind running up and telling Annie they’re here?” she said. “She’s lying down for a while. I’ll take them in to the living room.”
“No problem,” Melissa said.
Lucinda began shooing them toward a door. Gregor had forgotten how houses used to have all their rooms walled off from all the others, with doors that shut. He allowed himself to be pushed through this door into the smallish living room. He walked over to the bay window and looked out on the abandoned street.
“I’m surprised nobody’s ever broken this,” he said. “I’d think it would be the perfect target for a certain sort of person in a certain kind of mood.”
“What sort of person in what sort of mood?” Lucinda Watkins said. “There isn’t much of anybody on this street anymore. What little population there is is junkies, bad junkies, the nearly dead ones. They can’t work up the energy to throw rocks, not even when they’re out of dope. They just collapse.”
“Somebody broke the other windows,” Gregor pointed out.
“Years ago,” Lucinda said. “When this neighborhood was disintegrating, but before it actually died. When you had buildings full of angry young men with nowhere to go. You’ve got to wonder why they threw rocks at the houses in their own neighborhoods. If I was in their position, I’d go out to Society Hill or Chestnut Hill or the Main Line—”
“It’s not so easy to get out to those houses on the Main Line,” John Jack-man pointed out.
“There are trains,” Lucinda said. “There are cars to steal. It wouldn’t take so much. I’ve driven out there myself a few times. It’s not that complicated. You have to wonder—”
“What?” Gregor said.
Lucinda shrugged. “Oh, don’t mind me. I’m always on a tear. Just ask Mr. Jackman. There’s just a part of me that doesn’t understand why all this stays up. All those people out there, like Annie’s brother, living in thirty-thousand square feet when the girls we serve don’t have a room to themselves and the space they do have has cockroaches crawling all over it. Thomas Jefferson thought that the country should be made up of farmers and artisans, small businessmen, small craftsmen. He thought that the country would be ruined if there were any men richer or more powerful than that. Maybe he had a point.”
“Thomas Jefferson was a rich man who owned a plantation and slaves,” John Jackman said drily. “What’s this all about, Lucy? I didn’t realize you’d gone Communist on me while I was busy elsewhere.”
“Oh, Lucinda would never go Communist,” Anne Ross Wyler said, coming into the room with her hair so completely a mess that it looked like she’d put a wig on backwards. “She thinks the Communists are as bad as the capitalists, they just put a different name on doing the same old stuff. Hello again, Mr. Demarkian. Hello, John. Is there a reason for this visit in the middle of the day?”
“Ask him,” John Jackman said.
“I wanted to get a look at the place,” Gregor said. “And I wanted you to show me the cars. Where they’re kept. How they get in and out of the property. It hadn’t occurred to me before I saw this place up close, but you must have a certain amount of worry with the cars. You have two, don’t you?”
“Two, yes,” Annie said. “A station wagon and a two-door. Why?”
“Which one did you have on the night your brother died?” Gregor asked.
“The two-door,” Annie said. “The deal is to park inconspicuously, although I’m not very inconspicuous anymore. Still, a small dark car isn’t very intrusive.”
“They painted her trunk orange once while she was in some convenience store,” Lucinda said. “Annie likes to pretend it was just kids, but I know better. They were trying to mark her. They managed it for about a day.”
“Less than that,” Annie said. “Why do you think we’d have trouble with the cars?”
“With people stealing them,” Gregor said. “It’s one thing to break windows or not to break them, but a car is a valuable piece of property. And there are car thieves all over this city who wouldn’t think twice about coming into this neighborhood if they thought they could get a decent vehicle without much trouble.”
“Maybe,” Annie said, “but they haven’t yet.”
“We keep the cars in a little garage around the back,” Lucinda said. “We’ve even got a driveway. She bought a house just around the corner and had it demolished. She cut the driveway through and had the garage built. You wouldn’t believe what trouble we had getting all the permits.”
“It wasn’t as if anybody was ever going to live in that house again,” Annie said. “There wasn’t much more left of it than stray bricks and loose asbestos. This whole neighborhood is full of asbestos. And no, we don’t lock the garage, Mr. Demarkian. There isn’t any point. In the middle of the night, when we sometimes have to go out, we tend to be in a hurry.”
“They pick up the girls if they call,” John Jackman explained. “The ones who get scared by a john or who’ve just gotten beaten up by a pimp.”
“They go back, though,” Lucinda said. “You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like they’ve been brainwashed.”
“What kind of car is the station wagon? What kind of car is the two-door?”
“The two-door is a Honda,” Annie said. “I don’t know what kind of Honda. I don’t pay attention to that sort of thing. The station wagon is a black Volvo Cross Country. I know because we just bought it maybe six months ago, and the guy who sold it to us insisted on giving us the brochure.”
“He was just doing his job,” Lucinda said.
“I don’t know why everybody on earth seems to think his job is to sell me something,” Annie said.
There was a faint buzzing. John Jackman stuck his hand inside his jacket and came out with his cell phone. “Excuse me,” he said, retreating back into the hallway.
Gregor looked around the living room. It was a pleasant space, not too large, not too small, newly painted, newly carpeted, dusted to within an inch of its life. On one wall, there were bookshelves. On another, a plain brick fireplace. The furniture was serviceable and comfortable, but not extravagant.
“How big is this place?” Gregor asked. “How many bedrooms? How many square feet? And how many people stay here full-time?”
“Only Annie and I stay here full-time,” Lucinda said, “although there’s usually somebody or the other spending the night. And we’ve got, what, six bedrooms?”
“Seven, if you count what’s in the attic,” Annie said.
“Well, yes, but we never use the attic,” Lucinda said. “And that’s jury-rigged anyway, except for the bathroom, which is nicer than any of the other ones in the house.”
“What about the night Tony Ross died?” Gregor asked. “Was anybody staying in the house then?”
“I don’t remember,” Lucinda said. “There was somebody or the other doing something—a group, or something like that. There was a meeting. I remember that, because Annie here went out to take photographs while it was going on and we had Father Kasparian coming, and I was worried there wouldn’t be anybody to talk to Father Kasparian while he was here.”
“You could talk to Father Kasparian while he was here,” Annie said.
John Jackman came back into the room. “Gregor?” he said. “That was my office. We’ve got to go.”
“All right,” Gregor said.
Lucinda and Annie were both staring at Jackman, curious. “That doesn’t sound right,” Annie said. “What’s the matter, John? Has somebody shot the mayor?”
“No,” John said. “They’ve found somebody Mr. Demarkian has been looking for. Unfortunately, they’ve found him dead.”