Horowitz and Morabito had information. They had stacks of printouts, computer screens full of the same information, form after form of impenetrable jargon accompanied by footnotes on subjects Gregor couldn’t identify. What it came down to was this: the blood and hair on the tire iron was mixed. Most of it belonged to Miguel Hernandez. Some of it, near the curved end, belonged to Marta Warkowski. That suggested that Hernandez had died from being hit, not being shot. The coroner concurred. What had looked at first sight like a bullet hole was a gash from the small hook near the tire iron’s curve. The gun on the floor of Marta Warkowski’s room had not killed Hernandez. The rest of the forensics team had come up with a set of fingerprints from the gun, but little else. It had not been recently fired. It had not left a bullet or a shell in the room.
Gregor’s feeling that he was only being consulted on this case because Horowitz and Morabito thought the brass wanted them to consult was stronger than ever. These were two experienced detectives. They knew how to do their job.
He tried anyway.
“You have to assume she was attacked somewhere outside her apartment,” he told them. “There doesn’t seem to be anything in these reports about finding her blood or skin or hair in the apartment, other than what would be usual because she lived there. If what caused the coma was that she was hit on the back of the head with the tire iron, there would be something.”
“She was hit on the back of the head with the tire iron,” Morabito said. “The reports say so.”
“They do,” Gregor admitted. “But that blow could have been secondary. If she was hit with something else, or if she fell against something else, and everybody assumed she was dead—”
“Right,” Horowitz said. “They moved her. They were going to dump the body. They realized she was still alive. They decided to finish the job and make sure, so they hit her again.”
“I don’t know that they hit her the first time,” Gregor said. “Cary Alder said she came up to the office that evening. He says Meera Agerwal will corroborate that. I don’t see Hernandez coming up to the office here on his own. I really don’t see Juan Morales going there, or anyone like Morales. There wouldn’t be any point. But if Marta Warkowski was hit, or fell, in the office, the person who hit her or caused her to fall—”
“Cary Alder? Meera Agerwal? You don’t think they would have called the cops?”
“If they thought she was dead?” Gregor asked. He had to remind himself that these two men didn’t know all the circumstances, although they’d heard rumors. “It would depend on what happened and who did it. But you’ve got to keep a sense of place. These men don’t belong here. It was late. Most of the building would have gone home. If they parked in the back and came up the service elevator, they wouldn’t look too out of place. I’m sure that happens all the time. But now consider St. Catherine’s Parish. Cary Alder would look out of place there. So would Meera Agerwal—in fact, she did, when she let us into that apartment. Remember? And the people in the parish wouldn’t tell us anything about Hernandez or Morales. They’re their own people. There would have been somebody in the vicinity who would have been more than happy to give up Cary Alder.”
“Somebody legal,” Morabito said sarcastically.
Gregor ignored him. “The van was mostly clean except for the tire iron,” he said. “That means they must have parked the van in the local garage and then cleaned it, then brought the tire iron with them to Marta Warkowski’s apartment. With the tire iron as sticky as it was, there was no way they could have made that van look as clean as it appeared to us if it had been sitting in the back there after it had been used on Hernandez. Still, I can’t believe they’re Good Housekeeping. Forensics went over the van?”
“With tweezers and black light,” Horowitz said.
“Some of the crap they find there should belong to Marta Warkowski,” Gregor said. “I wonder where they were taking her. A public park, maybe? Somewhere without people and without too many surveillance cameras. Maybe they thought they’d bring her to Jersey and the sea.”
“That’s a long drive,” Horowitz said. “They could have been stop-ped at any time.”
“They could have secured the body so it didn’t roll around and secured the doors so they didn’t pop open,” Gregor said. “They didn’t.”
“You’re saying they also didn’t hit Marta Warkowski,” Morabito said. “Which means we’re not going to be able to get them on that.”
“True,” Gregor said. “But I’ve been receiving updates from the hospital, which means you must be, too. She’s actually in good condition. She could wake up. If she does, she might be able to tell us what really happened and who did it.”
“I wonder what’s going to happen to her now,” Morabito said. “Would you go back to that apartment if all this had happened to you? People who try to force you out. People who treat you like garbage. People who act like you’re invisible. That’s the thing, isn’t it? She doesn’t even have anybody there she can talk to. And it’s supposed to be her home.”
“Things change,” Horowitz said.
“Things only change as much as we let them,” Morabito said.
Gregor had the feeling he had just walked in on the middle of an old and continuing argument.
“I think there are things I’d better make myself do,” he said, getting up from the desk where he had been looking at the forensics reports. The stack looked like hyperbole. There was something that had changed in the forty years since he had first joined the Bureau. He could remember crime scenes with agents pacing back and forth through the area, flicking the ashes from the cigarettes they were smoking right into the grass or the carpet. He could remember car phones that hooked up to receivers that couldn’t be removed from the dashboard.
Some things changed, and that was a good thing. He didn’t want to go back to polio epidemics, or women who died in childbirth because antibiotics hadn’t been invented yet, or men screaming in battlefield hospitals because anesthetics hadn’t been invented yet. He didn’t want to go back.
He gathered up his things. Horowitz actually had a plate of doughnuts on his desk, as if he were trying to reinforce all those stereotypical jokes about the police. Gregor cocked an eyebrow at Horowitz, got permission, and took one. There were, of course, things he did not want to change. Doughnuts were one of them.
Out on the sidewalk, he realized the weather was actually better. The sun was out. It was warmer. Days had been going by, and he had not noticed them. He did not like this part of Philadelphia. In spite of being on the edge of half a dozen vibrant neighborhoods, it was overindustrialized and dead.
Even Cavanaugh Street had changed in the years he had been away from it. It was just a change for the better.
He got out his phone and called Bennis. Then he wondered what would have happened to her if his wife had still been alive, and he had still been married, when he had met her. But that didn’t make sense. If his wife had not died, he would not have retired from the Bureau. If he had not retired from the Bureau, he might never have come back to Philadelphia at all.
Thinking about that kind of thing could make you a neurotic.
Bennis picked up.
“Hey,” Gregor said. “Are you home?”
“I am.”
“Is Javier there with you?”
“He is,” Bennis said. “And Tommy Moradanyan is here, too. And Pickles. They’re going through the first communion catechism.”
“Even Pickles?”
“Absolutely. Pickles is very fond of being read to.”
“I’ll let that one pass,” Gregor said. “I was wondering if you could do something for me. I’m going to be another couple of hours, I think. It might be longer, but I don’t think it will be. Could you by any chance stay in the house and not go out until I get back, and not let anyone in unless they’re somebody you know?”
“I could do it. You could tell me what’s going on.”
“Don’t let them in unless you know them well,” Gregor said. “Don’t just open the door because you’ve seen the milkman a couple of times before.”
“We don’t have a milkman,” Bennis said. “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what’s going on?”
“I will when I get home.”
“Am I supposed to be expecting someone to storm the place with AK-47s?”
“Keep Tommy there with you if you can.”
“I really don’t like the sound of this,” Bennis said.
“It’ll probably be fine,” Gregor told her. “I just need a piece of information I don’t have.”
Gregor Demarkian did not know the exact timetable the Feds intended to use to arrest Cary Alder for bank fraud. He didn’t know if that timetable included today, or next week, a direct raid on Cary Alder or a subpoena delivered to his lawyer. It didn’t matter, because the issue for him was now Javier. He had to get that out of the way before anybody did anything else.
It took him nearly an hour to find Alder, and when he did, he felt like an idiot. He’d gone to the office first, then to one Aldergold venue after another. In one or two places, he was sure the young men at the reception desks were lying to him. They were that kind of young men—affable enough, but with an air of obstruction. They stood between the outside world and their employer like a lead wall between Superman and Lois Lane.
Javier had been watching Superman this morning. That was why he was thinking about Superman. Superman and drug kingpins in Central America.
Gregor finally found Cary Alder at home, in his own apartment. There was no wall of any kind between them. Gregor gave his name to the doorman. They doorman sent him right up. It was as if Alder had been waiting for him, maybe for a long time.
Alder let Gregor in by himself. Gregor could tell, from the feel of the apartment around them, that they were alone. He followed his host through a magnificent foyer with a patterned parquet floor, then into an even more magnificent living room with a cathedral skylight. Standing in the middle of the living room, it was possible to see across most of the city.
Cary Alder dropped into a chair next to a side table with a bottle of scotch on it. There was a glass on the side table, too. It was full.
“I’m surprised,” he told Gregor. “I expected to see you with a couple of cops. Those two detectives who came to see me. Uniforms. Somebody.”
“I wanted to talk to you before they put you out of circulation. Assuming they’re going to put you out of circulation. The last I checked, they didn’t have anything on you one way or the other.”
“But you do?”
“About the Marta Warkowski business? I have common sense. You hit her. You had to have. She came to your office. You blew up. Then what? She hit the back of her head on the sharp edge of one of those desks?”
“Something like that. I don’t think I meant to do it. She was just … she was just being Marta. Angry. Threatening. Impossible. And a complete wall of noise. When that woman got talking, God Himself couldn’t get a word in edgeways. And I just—went.”
“Which is where the common sense comes in,” Gregor said. “We know enough about what happened after that for me to know you were the only one who could have set it up. Hernandez wouldn’t have taken that body out of there for anybody else. It would have been too much of a risk. Did you see who he brought to help him?”
“No,” Cary Alder said. “I barely even saw him. I thought she was dead. She looked dead. I tried to figure out if she was breathing, but I didn’t want to get too close to her. It was one of the girls’ desks she fell against. I wiped the edge down. I didn’t do much. Nobody knew she was there. Nobody was going to know she was there. I didn’t think there’d be any reason for anybody to check. In some ways, I’m quite an idiot, Mr. Demarkian.”
“In some ways, you seem to be a saint.”
The glass of scotch was two-thirds empty. Cary Alder drained the entire thing in one swift gulp.
“Never think that, Mr. Demarkian. You know the jerk and the asshole you read about in the press? Well, that really is me. Little Cary Corporatist. Donald Trump’s mini-me. Do you know why I really didn’t get close enough to figure out she was still alive? Because I couldn’t stand being near her. I can’t stand being near any of them. They smell, poor people do. The poorest ones smell like they’ve shat on themselves. Marta smelled like camphor. And they’re all ugly. My God, their women are unbelievably ugly.”
“You rent apartments to them.”
“I rent apartments to anybody who can pay their rent on time and without a fuss. I employ people to collect those rents. I don’t—deal with those people unless I have to.”
“Then you should have stayed out of the coyote business,” Gregor said. “I don’t know if you realize it, but if it hadn’t been for that, the chances are good that you’d end up with a form of probation or house arrest.”
“For bank fraud? Really? Because I did some really spectacular defrauding of banks. I think I’m into one bank for close to eight million dollars. Hardly a Trump-level operation, but not bad for a local boy.”
“The agencies kept picking up on information that said you had to be running a coyote operation, but they could never nail you for it, because they couldn’t figure out where the money was coming in. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? There was no money coming in. You were bringing people into the country and you were not charging them. Not a dime. They were, what? Children?”
Cary Alder poured himself more scotch. The stuff was disappearing like smoke.
“Do you know what goes on, on those trips north? Oh, you hear a lot of garbage in the press, long lists of all the crimes committed against ‘unaccompanied minors.’ But they’re not unaccompanied. They have those coyotes with them. They have those guides. Guides. Do you know what it’s all about? It’s all about sex.”
“Sex?”
Alder nodded. “Six-year-old boys. Twelve-year-old girls. Anybody, really. All traveling north and all of them getting nailed night after night after night. Sometimes by one guy. Sometimes by gangs of guys. Sometimes getting rented out to the guys in the towns they pass through. It’s the price of getting across the border.”
“And the parents send the children unaccompanied anyway?”
“I don’t know if they know,” Cary admitted. “I expect some of them do.”
“So you did something else,” Gregor said. “You paid to get the children up here, and you paid enough to get them here without—all that.”
“It was very expensive,” Cary Alder said. “They like all that, the guides do. It’s what they’re in business for. The money is just … dessert.”
“But you did it.”
“I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. I’m not good at knowing who to trust.”
“But you know now?”
“I know who’ll do what he’s paid to do.”
“What happens to the children when they get here?”
“There are people waiting for them,” Cary Alder said. “People who have been through the drill. People who know what goes on. And no, Mr. Demarkian. I’m not going to tell you how those people found me or how I found them. There are considerations in too many of those cases. Other people in other places who might want to get the children back.”
“That was mostly what I was interested in.”
“Then you should get uninterested in it fast,” Cary Alder said. “In fact, if we do get raided by half the law enforcement in the United States, it might turn out that I don’t know anything about this at all. Why should I? Half the midlevel businessmen in this city are running some kind of coyote operation. Why shouldn’t they? They need the labor and they sure as hell don’t want the hassle that comes with hiring legal. Or hiring black people.”
“Black people,” Gregor said.
“They smell, too.”
Cary Alder got up. Gregor realized that the bottle of scotch on the side table was now empty. There was a bar along one wall of the room. Alder went there and got another bottle of scotch.
“I’m getting thoroughly plastered here,” he said. “I think it’s the right thing to do.”
Tommy Moradanyan was pacing in the family room when Gregor got home, watched intently by Javier from the couch. Bennis was sitting at the kitchen table, going through yet more stacks of papers. Gregor never ceased to be amazed at how many stacks of papers there were, for everything. Was that something else that had changed over the last however many years?
Tommy and Bennis both stopped what they were doing when Gregor came in. Javier put down his book and threw his arms around Pickles.
“There you are,” Bennis said. “Are you all right? Are we in some kind of an emergency?”
“You almost sounded like Russ to me for a minute there,” Tommy said. “Don’t leave the house. Don’t let anyone in. Lock all the doors—”
“I didn’t tell anyone to lock all the doors,” Gregor said mildly. “And I didn’t talk to you at all. Are you in a hurry to get somewhere?”
“I’m in a hurry to get back to my house,” Tommy said. “Assuming my mother is going to let me back in.”
“Your mother has locked you out?”
Bennis coughed. Tommy shrugged.
“She’s on the phone. She told me to come over here and make myself useful for at least an hour.” His backpack was on the kitchen table. He went over to it and started to zip up compartments. “She’s on the phone to Russ,” he said.
“Ah,” Gregor said. “I take it she did that on purpose.”
“The phone rang, she got the caller ID, she picked up.”
“We’ve been talking about it,” Bennis said. “Tommy doesn’t know what it means. I don’t know what it means. It must be two years since the last time they talked to each other.”
“I even want them to talk to each other,” Tommy said. “I keep thinking we could get some of this straightened out, people could get more back to normal, if they’d just talk to each other. Once, even. Except I don’t want him to talk her into anything.”
“Do you think she’s going to talk him into something?” Gregor asked.
“If you mean do I think she’s going to talk him out of thinking the world is about to set itself on fire, no,” Tommy said. “I’ve been thinking about my trip up during visiting hours. It was one of the things I wanted to know. I don’t think he’s making it up. I don’t think it’s an act. I think he really thinks the whole world is about to explode in civil war and people like my mom and Charlie are going to be targets and we all have to do something to protect ourselves. I think he believes it. I think he may believe it even more being where he is. I think there might be a lot of other people who agree with him in there.”
“Then I don’t understand what you think your mother is going to talk him into,” Gregor said.
“Maybe I just don’t want him to talk her into what he’s got going,” Tommy said. “I don’t know. I just want to get home and make sure she isn’t buying assault rifles on the Internet. I’m talking crazy. I’m feeling crazy.”
“If it helps any,” Gregor said, “I’ve met quite a few people over the last few days who have … let’s just say similar ideas. There seems to be a lot of this kind of thing going around.”
“To tell you the truth, Mr. Demarkian, that doesn’t help.” He went over to Javier and patted him on the head. “Keep studying the catechism. You’re going to need it for the first day at school. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then he gave Pickles a scratch between the ears. “Father Tibor says Pickles is going to stay here with Javier and he’s going to get another rescue dog. That would be good. Thanks for the cookies. I’ll see everybody later.”
He took off, faster than Gregor had expected him to be able to go. Gregor and Bennis listened while the front door opened and shut. Then Gregor shrugged out of his coat and sat down next to Bennis.
“It’s New Year’s Day the day after tomorrow,” Gregor said. “Which makes New Year’s Eve tomorrow. Did you know that?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Bennis said. “We don’t usually do much of anything for New Year’s Eve. And I never really liked New Year’s Eve parties. Too many people getting drunk and too many people getting stupid. Why? Is there something you want to do tomorrow night?”
“No. Maybe Javier would like to see the ball come down at midnight.”
“Javier will be fast asleep at midnight, even if we don’t put him to bed. You want to tell me what this was all about? You really did sound like Russ for a minute there, like we were the Bastille and somebody was about to storm us.”
“Well, it’s an interesting situation,” Gregor said. “I don’t think we have to worry about anybody storming us, at least for the moment. I don’t think anybody knows what’s happening here, with one exception. Unfortunately, that exception is Russ.”
“Russ knows something.”
“Russ knows who Javier is, and how we got him.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“It could be. It depends.”
“It depends on what?”
“On whether Russ is still mostly Russ, or if he’s become mostly this new conspiracy theorist who seemed to pop out of nowhere two years ago. Except that can’t be right, either. People don’t change that drastically if something doesn’t happen to them. I don’t think they change that drastically short of a traumatic brain injury. If this is a part of Russ, it must always have been a part of Russ, down there somewhere where the rest of us couldn’t see it. So I don’t know.”
Bennis got up and started clearing things away reflexively, because it was something for her to do now that he’d made her restless. Gregor watched her move. The cloud of black hair hovered over her perfectly symmetrical face. The long fingers ended in blunt, unvarnished fingernails meant for typing and doing and not display. Gregor could remember the first time he’d ever seen her. She was older now. He didn’t care.
He got up himself and started to help her clean up. “Let’s go down to the Ararat for dinner tonight,” he said. “We’ll take Javier with us and let him eat his way through the appetizers menu. He can order three desserts. We’ll get Tibor to come with us.”
“You can have yaprak sarma,” Bennis said. “Do you think he misses it? His home? His people? I can’t believe he was some orphan living in the streets. He was too well cared for.”
“He wasn’t some orphan living in the streets,” Gregor said. “But you’d better give some thought to this. He can’t go home again. If we’re going to take him on, we should assume we’re going to take him on permanently. I don’t know how you envisioned this when we first started it, but that’s where we are now. Either we decide right away that we’re going to keep him, or we find somewhere else for him to go immediately. And I know you never particularly wanted children. We never talked about it, but I know.”
“I never particularly wanted children in the abstract,” Bennis said. “I think I could want this one.”
They both turned to look at Javier. Javier was looking at them.
He was very happy.