Gregor Demarkian did not go to see Alice McGuffie in jail. For one thing, it was too far a drive at a time when he had a lot to do much closer to home. For another, he knew almost everything she had to tell him without asking, and he didn’t like the idea of asking her. There are some people in this world who are always in a state of crisis, no matter what is happening to them. A mildly offhand remark in the supermarket is interpreted as a gross insult, or a racial slur, or the first step in sexual harassment. A driver who won’t get out of the way so that the people behind him can pass is an example of incipient road rage, or deliberately attempting to prevent our heroine from getting to work, because he’s always been jealous, even back in the third grade. It went on and on, with no good ever coming of it, and often a lot of harm. Its practitioners were male as well as female, every possible color, every possible nationality. Gregor sometimes thought that some nationalities—the Armenian, for instance—practically turned it into an art form. It didn’t matter, because what it came down to was that it was tiring, and he avoided that kind of person, and the events they generated, when he could. Fortunately, there really was nothing Alice McGuffie could tell him that he didn’t already know. He listened to her brother when he called and agreed to take a look at the photograph Alice wanted him to see, and that was that.
“It won’t kill her to sit in jail for a few hours,” Gregor told Gary, Eddie, and Tom, as he spread papers out across Gary’s desk. He’d given up on using his own desk. The space was too cramped, and he needed room. “My guess is that she has a picture of the building launch. Would there have been any reason for her to go to that?”
“Sure,” Gary said. “She was president of the PTA when that happened. Say what you want about Alice, she’s very concerned about her kid’s education. Why would she think it would be important to see a picture of the launch?”
“Because there’s somebody who’s not in it,” Gregor said.
“Who’s not in it?” Eddie asked.
“Catherine Marbledale,” Gregor said. “She should be in it. She’s the principal of the high school. But my guess is that she’s not in it.”
“And that’s important?” Gary asked.
“In a peripheral way, yes,” Gregor said, “but not in the way Alice thinks it is. You’ve got to understand that all of this, from the very beginning, was about money. And if Annie-Vic Hadley hadn’t been elected to the school board, nobody would ever have gotten hurt. Except the taxpayers of the town, of course. They’d have been out several million dollars with nothing to show for it. But there’d have been no reason to go running around town, bashing people on the head with baseball bats. Note I said bats, plural. I’m fairly sure they were each of them disposed of as soon as possible after the event. There’d be no point in keeping them around.”
“I want a case like on CSI,” Eddie Block said. “You know, there’s a forensics lab, and they take a hair, and they get everything, name, rank, serial number, DNA, phone number, last known location—”
“Why was it Annie-Vic who had to be elected to the school board?” Gary asked. “Wasn’t it the case that anybody new who was elected to the school board would cause the same problem? I mean, just because you have one group of people hoodwinked doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to pull the wool over the eyes of the new ones who come along.”
“I wish they’d call in and tell me that they’ve found it,” Gregor said, looking at his cell phone as if it were personally responsible for the delay. “And I wish they’d find that woman, just in case. Never mind. No, it couldn’t have been just anybody. Look who else was elected to that school board. There was you, Gary. Was there ever any danger of you pulling out the files on that construction project and looking them over?”
Gary Albright considered this. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t really have that kind of time, and I explained that to Franklin when he asked me to run. I could come to meetings. I could do a reasonable amount of homework. But I couldn’t take on a major project. I’ve got work here. I’ve got my family.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “And you would have had the brains. But you know, even if you did decide to get involved, my guess would be that it would have taken a long time before you figured out anything was wrong, and even longer before you figured out what. You’re not a trained accountant, or anything close.”
“Annie Vic isn’t a trained accountant,” Eddie Block said.
“No, she isn’t,” Gregor said. “But she manages her own investments. I don’t know how many times people told me that. She manages her own investments, and she’s good at it. So she must have at least a rudimentary idea of how deals are done, and what disclosure forms mean.”
“I know what a disclosure form means,” Gary said.
“You might, but I’ll bet you don’t know how to read one,” Gregor said. “And then who do you have? Alice McGuffie and Franklin Hale. Franklin Hale runs a business, so there should be some expertise there. And there probably is. It’s just that Franklin Hale doesn’t seem much interested in looking into the practical aspects of running the schools in Snow Hill. There’s no sign in any of these papers I have that he’s ever so much as asked to see the operating budget. I called the secretaries down at the high school. Not a single one of them has ever had a request for any information from him, except for information about the biology curriculum. He wanted to see lesson plans. He wanted to see textbooks. He did not want to see budgets and disclosure forms.”
“None of us realized he was so single-minded about the evolution thing,” Gary said. “When he ran for the board, his campaign was all about competence, not evolution. He talked a lot about the construction project then.”
“That was because he knew he couldn’t win an election in this town saying he was going to get evolution out of the schools,” Eddie Block said. “Even most of the people who’ve lived here all their lives wouldn’t have voted for that.”
“And why not?” Gary asked. “Does that make sense? I don’t mean getting evolution out of the schools. I mean not letting anything else in. We didn’t vote to remove evolution from the curriculum. We didn’t even vote to let Intelligent Design into the curriculum. We just wanted to put a book in the library—”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Enough. The fact remains that Franklin posed no danger to anybody, because he wasn’t looking into any of the financials and probably wasn’t going to. Alice McGuffie posed no danger to anybody because no matter how often she might have looked at the paperwork, she’d never have the first idea of what she was seeing. Her husband might, I admit. He runs a business. But why would she show it to him? The only reason Alice McGuffie cared about the money the Snow Hill schools were spending was that she resented any money being spent on schools at all. She would have looked at a bunch of numbers and complained that they were too high, but she’d have had no idea of what she was seeing and no interest in learning. Franklin Hale may have gotten himself elected to the school board to get evolution out of the public schools, but Alice McGuffie got herself elected to the school board so that she could stick it to all the teachers she’d hated since she was in high school.”
“Middle school, probably,” Gary Albright said.
“The thing is,” Gregor said, “the one person on that board who did care about the financials was also the one person on that board who would know what she was seeing when she saw it, and that was Annie-Vic Hadley. And there was no way to distract her. She didn’t care about the evolution and Intelligent Design debate, except that she was willing to lend her name to the lawsuit. After that, from what I can tell, she paid no attention to that at all. I looked at the papers on her dining room table three times. The first was when Judy Cornish was killed. The second was when I walked up to the house the next day and the officers offered to let me in to look around. The third was just after Shelley Niederman was killed. And in between those times, I had Annie-Vic’s grandniece Lisa look again. And all those times, all I found, all Lisa found, was financial paperwork on the Snow Hill school accounts. That was it.”
“Nothing on the lawsuit?” Eddie Block said. “That surprised me. She didn’t keep any material on the lawsuit?”
“She probably did,” Gregor said. “When Judy Cornish was killed, the papers on the table were pretty badly messed up. I think the papers on the lawsuit, whatever Annie-Vic had, were taken away in order to make it look like the killer was interested in the lawsuit. Eventually, somebody would have mentioned the fact that Annie-Vic had a lot of material on that. If we’d followed the plan, we’d have gotten suspicious and started looking into people who might hate or resent the woman because she was part of the lawsuit. In fact, everything about the way all this was set up, right from the beginning, was meant to direct our attention to that lawsuit. Because that was the one direction we could look in that our murderer was sure would not help us in any way.”
“But I still don’t see how it makes any sense,” Gary said. “How long could somebody keep this up? School boards are elected. They come and go. Eventually, there would probably be somebody with a real accounting degree on the board. Somebody from the development, maybe. And then what would happen?”
“Nothing, if that day took long enough in coming,” Gregor said. “Look, the paperwork was sloppy. It was so sloppy that Molly Trask, who’s a rookie agent, knew what was wrong with it the minute she saw it. It was a question of getting your hands on the paperwork and fixing it, or fixing some of it and making the rest of it disappear. And once it was gone it was gone, because the Dellbach Construction Company does not exist. It’s a post office box in Harrisburg. Eventually, after everything was tied up, it would just vanish, and the chances were good that unless our murderer got enormously stupid, nobody would ever be able to pin anything on anybody.”
“You’d think it would be harder to get away with than that,” Gary said. “You see all these things on Court TV—sorry, Tru TV. Anyway, you see all these things about the FBI going after fraud perps. You’d think it would be harder than that.”
“If our murderer had wanted to steal fifty million dollars instead of just five, or if there had been multiple sources for the income, it would have been harder than that. But this was a very simple case. It was like raiding a cookie jar. It was not particularly sophisticated from an accounting standpoint, and it didn’t require a lot of fancy footwork to be kept out of sight. Unless somebody went deliberately looking for it, the chances were good that nobody would ever guess.”
“And Annie-Vic went looking for it,” Gary said.
“She saw the disclosure form and knew there was something wrong, and then she went looking for it,” Gregor said. “Exactly. And if she’d died when she was attacked, nobody else would have had to. You would have filed the case under ‘unsolved’ and put it down to juvenile delinquents in your head. Her family would have come in and boxed up all her stuff and put it in storage. Our murderer would have had all the time in the world to clean up the garbage, and that was that. As long as Annie-Vic was alive, those papers stayed put and anybody with access to them became a danger.”
“But Shelley Niederman didn’t have access to them,” Eddie protested.
“Our murder thought she did,” Gregor said. “Or maybe I’d better say that our murderer had no guarantee that she hadn’t, and it was better safe than sorry. So Shelley got a call from somebody she trusted. She went up to the Hadley house for what she probably thought was a meeting. The officers were diverted to the back by—”
Gregor’s phone went off. “There it is,” he said.
“That’s Molly and Evan. Thank God.”
They came trooping back to the Snow Hill Police Department, not just Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker, but two state police officers of the small platoon that had been left at the Hadley house.
“No more chances that two of us go missing at the same time again,” one of the officers explained to Gregor that morning, back when he’d told Tammaro and Weeks to find out what was in those woods behind Annie-Vic’s.
Gregor did not blame Dale Vardan for this one, although he still blamed Dale for a lot of things. Even Dale’s belligerent opportunism was serving some good today, though, and so he let it go.
Molly had the evidence bag when she came in, and she laid it down on Gary Albright’s desk in front of Gregor.
“There it is,” she said. “Or, I should say, they are. There are two of them. There was one about fifty feet or so behind the house. The other was right at the back. On the lawn. It was close enough to the house to have started a fire if something went wrong.”
“What are those?” Gary asked, holding up the evidence bag and looking at its contents in the light. “Are those caps? Like for cap pistols?”
“They’re caps,” Gregor said, “but not for cap pistols. They’re what special effects departments used to use to make the sound of rapid gunfire. They’re probably three or four hundred times as powerful as a cap pistol cap.”
“And all you have to do is light them,” Molly said, “because they’re primed to a delay when they go off. And they’re really loud. And they sound so much like real gunfire, I’ve never met anyone who can tell the difference if they haven’t been told.”
“But why two of them?” Eddie Block said. “It looks like they each make, what, three or four shots? Why put one so close to the house?”
“Oh, I know that,” Molly said. “To get the officers to come on back. I’ll bet there are more of these around somewhere, unpopped ones, just in case those two weren’t enough to get the officers to come looking.”
“Very good,” Gregor said. “There were two officers posted guard, both of them had to be away from the front of the house when Shelley Niederman arrived. Our murderer put one of these sets in the woods, then another closer to the house. Our murderer went around one way and the officers came around the other, and a few minutes later Shelley Niederman arrived and headed for the front door.”
“It was an awful risk to take,” Gary Albright said.
“It was,” Gregor admitted. “But there’s a lot of risk taking here. Judy Cornish died because the house wasn’t empty when she went inside. That was a bigger risk than the one with Shelley Niederman. For one thing, there was Shelley Niederman, sitting out there in that Volvo the whole time the murder of Judy Cornish was going on. But it was the only thing that could have been done, under the circumstances, so it was done. And that’s how we got here.”
“And we can make an arrest?” Gary Albright asked.
“Not quite yet,” Gregor Demarkian said. “There’s one more question I need an answer to. After that, you can arrest away.”
There was actually more than one question Gregor Demarkian needed the answer to, but those other questions did not need to be answered before they made an arrest. There were always loose ends at the close of cases, always things he had to keep hounding people for after the main action was over. In this case, he would want to know something of what happened to Alice McGuffie after her several hours in jail. He wished he could look inside that woman’s head and see what had finally sparked that small bit of intelligence, the one that made her realize that that picture she had had something important to say. He wondered if she knew what it was that was important there and decided she probably did not. Alice McGuffie’s hatred and resentment of Catherine Marbledale were so deep and so hot, she would have done anything she thought would get the woman in trouble. It frightened him, sometimes, how much bad emotion there was in the world, as if human beings could never completely accept happiness as a state of mind. So much of what went wrong everywhere, so much of crime, so much of violence, so much of murder, was just this: that human beings cared only about other human beings, and half the time that care was expressed as a wish for annihilation.
He wasn’t making any sense, and he knew it. He was tired, and he wanted to get this done in time to catch Dale Vardan unawares. Or something. That was a wish for annihilation, too. Even so, he had a life waiting for him. He had Bennis, and the wedding coming up, and Tibor and Donna and a dozen other people he hadn’t spoken to in days. He had a world where he felt comfortable.
Now he looked up and down Main Street from his vantage point at the police department’s front door and felt suddenly wonderful that he did not live in a place of this kind. The diner was still closed. The mobile news vans looked deserted. Even Nick Frapp’s church complex seemed to be devoid of people for once. In a day or two things would be back to normal here, but Gregor did not think they would be any better. The problem here was the people themselves, and he didn’t think that would change no matter how long Nick worked at changing it. People had to want to change, and even then they usually didn’t.
He crossed the street and went up the block a little to the offices of Wackford Squeers, the faux old-fashioned sign hanging in the air next to the door. Gregor could see through the front window to the empty receptionist’s desk. He wondered why the secretary had quit and where she had gone when she left. He walked up to the front door and opened it. It wasn’t locked. Secretary or no secretary, Henry Wackford was open for business. Gregor supposed he would have to be. Appointments don’t cancel themselves just because secretaries quit.
Henry Wackford’s office door was closed, but Gregor could hear him in there, walking around, talking to someone, or maybe just to himself. There was nobody waiting in the outer room. Gregory looked at the pictures on the walls. They were bland pictures, reception area pictures, nothing that would offend anyone anywhere: There was a scene of horses in a field. There as a landscape of an old mill over a river. Gregor thought he had seen these same pictures in hundreds of places. He thought he might be wrong.
He listened to the talking coming from Henry Wackford’s office and decided there was only one voice. There was no client in there. Henry Wackford was talking to himself.
Gregor went up to the door and knocked. The talking stopped, abruptly. The door was opened. Henry Wackford looked disheveled and sweaty. It made him seem older.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
Gregor walked past him into the office. The pictures on the walls here were no less vapid than the ones in the reception area. Here, though, there were the diplomas, the degrees, the awards, and there were quite a few of each. There was a time when Henry Wackford must have looked like the next big thing.
“There was a lot of promise here, in the beginning, wasn’t there?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about,” Henry Wackford said. “Christine’s gone and I’m up to my neck, so if there’s something you need—”
“A confession would be nice,” Gregor said. “Gary and his boys ought to be here in a minute or two, and a confession isn’t strictly necessary, since I know who and how and why pretty thoroughly at this point, but a confession would be nice. It saves time.”
“A confession to what?” Henry demanded. “To murdering a couple of women I barely know?”
“Oh, it’s a lot worse than not knowing them,” Gregor said. “You murdered Shelley Niederman for no good reason at all. It was Judy Cornish who was the accountant before she decided to have children and stop out to raise them. Shelley Niederman was a dance major in college. She wouldn’t have known a disclosure statement from a restaurant menu even if Judy tried to tell her about it. You went to all that trouble. You killed a woman you had no need to want dead. And you hanged yourself when you did it.”
“I’ll repeat,” Henry Wackford said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do,” Gregor said. “You know what your big mistake was? You put Catherine Marbledale’s name on that disclosure form. I suppose you thought it was clever. After all, Miss Marbledale and her sister had just come in to a nice pile of money that nobody knew about, but you did. I wonder how you did.”
“I know no such thing,” Henry Wackford said. “Catherine Marbledale came into money? When? How?”
“About seven years go, I think,” Gregor said. “But you did know this, Mr. Wackford. You had to. It was the only reason to put that woman’s name on that disclosure form instead of making one up out of thin air. The social security numbers didn’t matter. You could have made those up, too. But just so that you know I know, Catherine Marbledale and her sister Margaret won the jackpot in the New Hampshire state lottery. It was a small jackpot, but it was big enough. And New Hampshire is one of only three states in the country that allows winners to remain anonymous, so there was no publicity. But you knew. I don’t know how you knew, but you did, and we can find out how later. We can find out anything if we know what we’re looking for.”
“What difference does it make if Catherine Marbledale won the lottery,” Henry asked. “These murders weren’t about money. They were about religion. And you know it. Those people are dangerous, Mr. Demarkian, and you know it. They’re one step away from being a mob with torches out to burn the heretics at the stake.”
“The difference it makes,” Gregor said, “is that Catherine Marbledale was the one suspect in this case who could not have killed Shelley Niederman under any circumstances and might have had a hard time killing Judy Cornish. But with Shelley Niederman, it’s just impossible. There’s been nothing but trouble up at the school for the last few days. There’s been a fight. There was a sit-in this morning. Miss Marbledale hasn’t been able to run out and get a cup of coffee, never mind set up a meeting with Shelley Niederman, plant delayedaction caps at the back of the Hadley house, and then commit a murder. Never mind the problem with the car. Somebody would have seen her car.”
“Maybe somebody did.”
“But you didn’t need a car,” Gregor said. “It took me a while to get geographically oriented, but you’re right at the bottom of the hill from the Hadley house. All you had to do was go out your back door and go up, on foot. And nobody would have seen you. The buildings would have shielded you from the sight of anyone on Main Street. You called Shelley Niederman and told her—what? That you had information about Judy’s death, but you needed her to confirm it? Or that you had proof of the conspiracy to kill all the supporters of evolution involved in the lawsuit? It doesn’t matter. You just had to get her up there. It didn’t even matter if the cops saw her there. The caps would go off and sound like gunshots. The officers would go investigate. All that mattered was that they didn’t see you, and you were sure that they wouldn’t, the way you had it set up. Are we going to find the caps in your office, in your car, or in your home?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said.
“Sure I do,” Gregor said, “and it doesn’t even matter, because Annie-Vic is awake and she’s alert, and there’s a good chance she’ll be able to identify you as the person who beat her up. You left a living witness, and that’s always a bad mistake.”
It was one of those odd moments. Gregor had had a number of them in his career. The air seemed to become almost palpable. It rippled and warped. Henry Wackford had been standing next to his desk. The desk was still piled high with file folders. There were a pair of expensive pens in a brass pen holder. There was a wallet lying out on a green felt blotter.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said again. “You don’t know what it’s like, being stuck out here, living with these people. Welcome to Snow Hill, Pennsylvania. Stupidity is our business, and our passion. We’ve got so much of it, we’re giving it away cheap.”
“The women you killed weren’t stupid,” Gregor said, “and it wouldn’t be an excuse if they were. And you’re not nearly as intelligent as you think you are.”
“I’m intelligent enough to know that I’m not going to give you a confession,” Henry Wackford said. “And I’ve been around the law long enough to know that you’re going to have a Hell of a time proving any of this if I don’t. Reasonable doubt is a wonderful thing.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. “But you keep forgetting. You left that living witness.”
Henry Wackford smirked, and shrugged, and turned away, so that he was looking out his back windows.
There were two state policemen out there, armed.