GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER given any thought to the differences between large city police departments and small-town cop shops in the sealing and securing of crime scenes. If he had given it any thought, he would have said there wasn’t any. Crime scenes weren’t something he had been either trained or conditioned to consider. In his early years at the Bureau, he had mostly dealt with crimes without scenes. Kidnappers tended to snatch their victims off sidewalks or in department stores or out of playgrounds, and to do it where they couldn’t be observed. In his later years at the Bureau, Gregor was called in mostly as an afterthought. First there would be a series of killings in one state, then a similar series in a second state, then another similar series in a third. At that point, the local police from all three states would start talking to each other, and somebody would say: Doesn’t the FBI have a department that deals with this kind of crap? By the time Gregor or his agents got into it, there would be no scenes left, just bodies in drawers and evidence in bags. If something new came up while they were trying to get the “crap” coordinated and ultimately straightened out, it was the local police who handled the details of sealing, securing, and gathering evidence.
Still, walking up to the dining hall from Constitution House at five minutes to seven on Halloween morning, Gregor had fully expected to find the cafeteria closed. He thought he’d be meeting David Markham surrounded by empty tables and a nonfunctioning kitchen. It only made sense. Instead, he came into the dining hall foyer to find the wide double doors to the cafeteria line open and stuffed with bleary-eyed students balancing more in the way of books than of food on their trays. The kitchen was, indeed, nonfunctioning—there was a neat little hand-lettered sign near the stacks of trays and pockets of tableware that said, “SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, BUT THE CAFETERIA WILL BE UNABLE TO OFFER HOT FOOD UNTIL 4 NOVEMBER”—but otherwise business was proceeding as usual. The Halloween decorations had not only been left up, but increased. A jack-o’-lantern cut out of a pumpkin so large it looked like it had grown in a dump for nuclear waste was sitting on the top of the plastic display cover where the hot food should have been, glowing evilly with the interior light of a dozen votive candles.
Gregor passed by the little individual boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Count Chocula cereal—he hoped the Count Chocula was a special just for Halloween—and by the little sealed containers of milk and orange juice until he came to the coffee. Then he took three coffee cups, filled them, and pushed the tray along to the cash register. From there, he could see David Markham, sitting alone at one of those tables by the window, surrounded by papers. It was remarkable about those tables near the windows. No matter how crammed the dining room got, there was always at least one of them left open. It was as if the students had mentally consigned a certain number of the best places to eat to the faculty, and neither common sense nor self-esteem could talk them into violating them.
The girl at the cash register was tense—understandably, Gregor thought—so he gave her his best reassuring smile as he stuffed his change into his pants pocket. Then he picked up his tray and, not looking at it, headed for David Markham. Linda Melajian back on Cavanaugh Street had taught him that about not looking at coffee while you were carrying it. For some reason—Linda had talked a great deal about natural balance and the inner ear—it helped you not to spill.
“This is something of a surprise,” Gregor said, as he put his tray down in one of the few spaces left by Markham’s paper blizzard, “I expected to find the place shut and in possession of the authorities.”
The sheriff looked at the glowing tip of his cigar and said, “It would be wonderful if we could do things like that, but we can’t. Not here. This is the only place on campus to eat. We had enough trouble keeping it shut last night.”
“You did keep it shut last night?”
“Oh, yes, until about nine o’clock. That was about how long it took for us to get done what we had to get done. You should have heard the screams from the President’s office, though. The nearest town to this is fifteen miles away and the nearest mall, meaning the nearest Burger King, is forty. Most of the kids don’t have cars. Whoosh.”
“What did they do about dinner last night?”
Markham grinned. “Some Dean or other got hold of a pickup truck and went fifty miles to the nearest serious pizza joint. By serious he meant run by actual Italians. Anyway, the pizzas showed up in the dorms around five o’clock and everybody had a party. Like they needed to have another one.”
“I’m surprised I missed all that,” Gregor said. “I was here.”
“You were outside,” David Markham said. “I saw you.” He began to pick up the papers he’d been working on, stacking them in ragged-edged piles without really looking at them. At Gregor’s quizzical look, he shrugged. “My notes. What do I need notes for? I could recite you chapter and verse what we’ve got so far.”
“What have you got so far?” Gregor asked him.
“Not damned much. You know what we were doing here until nine o’clock last night? Taking the food out. All of it. Also looking for available cleaning materials that contain lye—sodium…”
“Sodium hydroxide,” Gregor said. “Did you find anything?”
Markham sighed. “No. The last word on the food’s going to have to come from the lab, of course, and that’s going to take a couple of days. The lab’s up in the county seat. But we did what you sort of suggested yesterday. We opened all the sandwiches. We checked all the pies and cakes for tampering. We did stuff I couldn’t believe. Nothing.”
“What about the cleaning materials?”
Markham threw up his hands. “That was worse. Turns out, this campus is something called a central inventory ordering system. You know what that is?”
“No.”
“It’s this deal where everything the college needs is ordered by one department at one time, to take advantage of bulk rate discounts. The cleaning materials are ordered from there and then sent to Janitorial, and Janitorial keeps them. They had a little problem here a few years ago with a student who tried to unclog a drain by nuclear explosion or something. Anyway, he mixed a couple of different drain cleaners, poured them down the sink and blew up the plumbing. He caused a lot of expensive damage and he could have gotten himself and a lot of other people killed. You mix that stuff, you release fumes that are absolutely lethal. Point is, since then Janitorial doesn’t let the buildings have their own stuff. Something goes wrong, no matter how small, you have to call a college plumber.”
“I take it nobody called a college plumber yesterday,” Gregor said.
“You take it right. There was no lye, and no product containing lye, anywhere on these premises when Maryanne Veer keeled over. At least, not officially.”
Gregor had finished his first cup of coffee. He reached for his second and thought this over.
“You know,” he said, “this is actually a good sign. It means the lye was brought here deliberately. It makes it unlikely to the point of ridiculousness that what we’re dealing with is a Tylenol-poisoning type nut. Unless you found whatever the lye was in when Maryanne Veer ate it, I’d say someone came here yesterday to put Maryanne Veer in particular out of commission in a hurry. And went to a great deal of trouble to do it.”
“We didn’t find anything that came off that tray except the tea,” Markham said. Then he scratched his nose and looked speculatively up at the ceiling. “But you know, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve been working with this now for quite a few hours. And like I said, I’ve known Maryanne Veer all my life. You may not have noticed, you haven’t been talking to as many people as I have, but we’re a little stuck on motive.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. Actually, he had noticed. He might not have been talking to as many people as he should have been talking to, but he had been talking to Tibor. Tibor always knew more than he thought he did. He had also been talking to Jack Carroll and Chessey Flint.
“The impression I got,” he told Markham, “is that the only thing out of the ordinary in Maryanne Veer’s life yesterday was her—concern—over the disappearance of a man named Dr. Donegal Steele.”
“The Great Doctor Donegal Steele?” David Markham hooted. “Well, Mr. Demarkian, if someone had gone after Dr. Donegal Steele with lye, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Hell, I’d go after him with lye myself if I wasn’t a law-abiding type. The man is a complete turd.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“I don’t believe Maryanne was worried about him not being around, either. She hated the bastard’s guts. Everybody hated the bastard’s guts.”
“That may be,” Gregor said, “but according to Jack Carroll, Miss Veer was bound and determined to call the police, probably meaning you, as soon as she got back from lunch yesterday to report the man missing. Apparently, he hasn’t been around for a couple of days.”
“Hasn’t he?” Markham shrugged. “He was always blithering about how all this Halloween stuff was ‘infantile’ and anti-intellectual.’ That’s Steele’s kick, intellectual standards. They’re the only kind of standards he’s got, far as I can see. He’d been here about two weeks, he walked into the IGA down in Belleville, walked right up to Ed Leaver’s sixteen-year-old daughter and gave her an ass rub. Girl he’d never laid eyes on in his life, no joke. I had to stop Ed from breaking the asshole’s arm and I was sorry to have to do it. But if you think somebody killed Steele and tried to bump off Maryanne Veer because she’d figured it out—”
“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t like explanations like that. When they come up in mystery stories, they drive me crazy. Besides, I saw Miss Veer for a few moments before she fell over. From the reading I took, if that woman thought Donegal Steele had been murdered, she would have said he’d been murdered. And if she thought she knew who killed him, she would have said that, too.”
“Exactly.”
“I keep trying to think of some reason why someone would want to stop her from calling you and filing a missing persons report,” Gregor said. “If the man is missing because he has been murdered, it can’t be the fact that he was murdered, or even the fact that he was missing, that would account for what happened to Miss Veer. It wouldn’t make sense. This isn’t some tramp we’re talking about. This is a senior professor with a national reputation and a book on the best-seller lists. If he stays missing long enough, somebody’s going to file a missing persons report sometime. If he’s buried out in the back garden, somebody’s going to end up digging that up sometime, too.”
“I think I like the Tylenol-poisoning theory better than this,” Markham said. “Are you really going to drink that third cup of coffee?”
“I may drink two more than that. I’ve got something I want to show you.”
Gregor reached into his pocket and rummaged around carefully for the small square of paper he had folded into an envelope to contain the solder cylinder Jack Carroll had made for him last night. This, after all, was what he had been most excited about on his way to the dining hall. He probably should have brought it up first thing, even though he knew Markham was not as impressed by the original cylinder as he was himself. It was Gregor Demarkian’s opinion that a complete oddity found at a crime scene had to be important one way or another. It at least had to be explained. Now that he knew just how hard one of these things was to make, he was determined to find out what it had been made for. He threw the folded paper envelope, secured with a piece of electrical tape, down on the table in front of him and opened his mouth to make one of those pronouncements he secretly prided himself on as being “oracular.”
He never got the chance. Just as he looked up, David Markham stood. It was like watching one of those sea changes Bennis went through when she decided to be “sophisticated.” Sitting down, Markham had been the Markham that Gregor had come to know, intelligent, traveled, down-to-earth, and a little cynical. Standing up, he was transformed into the worst kind of local yokel, complete with glazed eyes, bad posture, and insincere grin.
“Well, well,” he said. “This is really a pleasure. The little lady has showed up early.”
Gregor winced.
The twang was back.
THE LITTLE LADY THIS morning was Dr. Katherine Branch, looking considerably more normal this morning than she had on the only other occasion on which Gregor had seen her. Gone was the black and white greasepaint. Gone were the leotards and tights—if that, in fact, was what they had been. To Gregor, Dr. Katherine Branch was recognizable mostly from her hair, which had been blazing red yesterday afternoon and was blazing red now. The rest of her was barely recognizable as female. That, Gregor thought, was surprising. He’d had a good look at Katherine Branch yesterday, and she was most definitely female. In his experience, women with bodies that good—and bodies that good took work, especially in women over thirty; nobody got handed one free by the grace of genetics alone—didn’t hide their light under bushels. Or, in this case, sweaters. That was what Dr. Katherine Branch was wearing, sweaters, in the plural, over a pair of baggy pants. She had a turtleneck. She also had something that looked like a cross between a tent and a tunic. The effect was not entirely unattractive, but it was totally asexual.
David Markham was holding out a chair in his best gallant local yokel manner. Katherine Branch ignored it, walked around to the chair next to Gregor and slammed her tray on the table. There wasn’t much on it—orange juice in a little waxed cardboard carton, coffee, and an apple that had been sealed in plastic wrap—but it hit its target with a bang as loud as any sound a jackhammer could have made. She pulled a chair out from under the table, banged it into the floor, and sat down in it.
“If you two white male fascists think you’re going to intimidate me,” she said, “you better get rid of that idea right now.”
“Ahhh,” David Markham said.
Gregor took another sip of coffee. The interesting thing about that little speech was what hadn’t been in it: any real passion or conviction. Gregor wondered briefly what exactly was going on inside Katherine Branch. The signals were mixed.
David Markham had retreated to his own chair and his own coffee. Now he plastered a shit-eating grin across his face and said to Gregor, “I figgered, instead of us runnin’ all over the place gettin’ statements from ever’body in sight, I’d see if they weren’t willin’ to do us the courtesy of comin’ to us.”
“I’m not doing you a courtesy of any kind,” Katherine Branch said. “If you couldn’t throw me in jail, I wouldn’t be here.”
Markham’s twang had been so thick, Gregor was sure Katherine Branch would twig it. She didn’t. She accepted it as perfectly normal. Gregor wondered if she really believed that David Markham could throw her in jail for refusing to talk to him. She was an educated woman. She couldn’t be that naive.
She opened her orange juice, looked deeply inside it—to see if it were fizzing?—and drank. Then she turned to Gregor.
“I don’t have to talk to you at all,” she said. “You aren’t anybody. Unless you pull out a card and prove you’re still with the FBI, you can’t ask me any questions at all.”
“I can always ask,” Gregor said pleasantly. “You don’t have to answer.”
“Damn right I don’t.”
“Of course, I’ve only got one question,” Gregor told her. “And I could get the answer from a dozen places. Dr. Elkinson, for example.”
Katherine Branch made a face. “Oh, Alice,” she said. “Alice will be cooperative. Alice makes a goddamned career out of cooperating in her own oppression.”
“Mizz Elkinson is a very gracious lady,” David Markham said fatuously.
Katherine Branch corrected him. “Dr. Elkinson,” she said. “Believe it or not—and I find it very hard to believe, under the circumstances—Alice has the best degree on this campus with the exception of that shit Donegal Steele. Who, by the way, is who I think did in Miss Maryanne Veer. Not that he had anything to worry about from her, even if he thought he did. She wasn’t going to go out kicking. Not Miss “if-you-can’t-behave-like-a-lady,-you-shouldn’t-be-out-in-good-company’ Veer. I think he just got so damned tired of having his papers copied by someone he couldn’t feel up, he offed her.”
“Nobody’s offed her yet,” Gregor said. “The last I heard, she was in the hospital and doing quite well, considering.”
“Doing very well, considering,” David Markham said. His drawl was nearly gone, but Katherine Branch didn’t notice that either.
She took a long sip of her coffee. “I just hope this wakes her up,” she said. “I just hate it when women worship men. Alice, Miss Veer. It’s so damned stupid. We’re supposed to be smarter than that.”
“How can you think Miss Veer was—attacked—by Donegal Steele?” Gregor asked her. “I thought Dr. Steele was away from campus for some reason.”
“Well, he hasn’t been around, if that’s what you mean,” Katherine said. “It’s been a blessing to all of us, let me tell you. But he’s the one with the lye, isn’t he?”
“What?” David Markham sat straight up in his chair. “What do you mean, he’s the one with the lye?”
Katherine Branch was practically purring—and Gregor finally twigged something himself. Of course, she wasn’t so naive as to believe that David Markham could arrest her for not talking to him. That was beyond the silly. She was here because she had something to say, and this was it.
Sea changes, Gregor decided a minute later, were a matter of psychological aura. The way they happened could almost make him believe in the paranormal. Markham was too shocked to go on with his local yokel pose with any consistency. Looking at him was like looking at one of the reflections in a fun house mirror. Every time he moved, his image changed. But Katherine Branch was the real shock. Her defensiveness had vanished. So had her air of petty complaint, that strange body-language suggestion that she was about to attack from a position of weakness. There wasn’t a damned thing weak about her now. All she needed to turn herself into the Spirit of the Age was Helen Reddy music playing in the background.
She leaned across the table, pushed her face straight into David Markham’s, and said, “Lye. Donegal Steele is really big in the Climbing Club, really big on ruggedness, really big on a lot of macho bullshit. And don’t wince every time I say ‘shit,’ Markham. It’s a good old Anglo-Saxon word.”
“It’s not very ladylike,” Markham said, but the twang was faint and the words were automatic.
“I am not ladylike,” Katherine Branch told him.
“What does all this have to do with Dr. Donegal Steele having lye?” Gregor demanded.
Katherine Branch pulled away from Markham and turned to him. “Macho bullshit,” she repeated. “Steele is always going on and on about how the college boys need to toughen up and be men and God only knows what. You’d think it all went out with the Neanderthals. In the old days the Climbing Club cabin up on Hillman’s Rock used to have outhouses instead of plumbing. The outhouses are still there, but nobody’s used them in years. Steele wants to open them up again.”
“You mean Chessey Flint was right yesterday?” Gregor asked. “She did see buckets of lye up at that cabin?”
Katherine Branch shrugged. “How the hell do I know? I know that’s not where they were four days ago, though, if they were Steele’s buckets of lye.”
“Where were Steele’s buckets of lye?” That was Markham, in a croak.
Katherine Branch stood up and shoved the tray away from her, across the table, into Markham’s stacks of papers. Maybe she had done it on purpose. The stacks shuddered and some of the papers fell. She didn’t seem to notice.
“The buckets,” she said, smiling fully now, completely enjoying herself, “were at least until last Saturday on Alice Elkinson’s back porch. I saw them there. Dear Alice just can’t say no to a man, even if it’s a man she hates. She just has to be a perfect little lady.”
“Dr. Branch—” Gregor started.
Katherine Branch gave her tray one more shove. “Here,” she said. “If you two big strong powerful men absolutely insist, I suppose I’m going to have to let you take that up for me.”
She started to turn away, changed her mind, turned back and gave the tray one last vicious shove. It had all the force of muscles made hard by regular exercise and training in self-defense. The stacks of papers shuddered, slid and fell—first into David Markham’s lap, and then off that onto the floor. Katherine stalked out.
“Damn,” David Markham said. “Here we go again. Academia nuts.”
“She’s not nuts,” Gregor told him. “She’s been rehearsing. That was guerrilla theater we just witnessed.”
Markham was on the floor, gathering up papers. He stuck his head up over the table, threw some rescued sheets onto the surface, and sighed. “Dr. Elkinson. Dr. Steele. God knows who. Why didn’t she tell us any of this yesterday?”
“She didn’t want to.”
“Well, we’re going to have to go find them now. All of them. Including the Great Doctor Donegal Steele. Lord God Almighty.”
Gregor took the papers Markham had been throwing onto the table and started piling them neatly in stacks. Because Markham hadn’t bothered to sort them before, he didn’t bother to sort them now. He was staring out the great windows at his side into the quad, and through the quad at the faint suggestion of the rise of King George’s Scaffold.
He had just had a funny idea, one of the funniest ideas of his life—and yet it was so perfect, he couldn’t see how it could fail to be true. Of course, he couldn’t see how he was going to go about proving it, either, and that was a problem, but proving it was always a problem. It was what all real police work came down to. Gregor had to trust in the possibility that if he didn’t worry about that part of it, if he just followed his funny idea to its conclusion and made sure it worked out as well in practice as it did in theory, the proving would take care of itself.
David Markham’s head appeared over the top of the table again. The lines looked too deeply edged on his face. The worry looked too deeply buried in his eyes.
“We’ve got to get moving,” he muttered as he threw more papers in the general direction of Gregor’s tray.
“Stop,” Gregor told him. “Before we get moving, there are some things I want to tell you. About what I saw and did last night.”
From the look of exasperation on David Markham’s face, Gregor was certain the man was going to take the gun out of his holster and shoot him.