“Come back to earth,” Dave said. “God, that was a disgusting demonstration. Did they get those pictures from your old department?”
“Those were computer graphics. They probably got the pictures they copied them from from my old department.”
Dave shook his head. “I don’t think I could have stood it. Getting up every morning to one more set of blood stains on the wall. I heard from Jim Fitzroy that you’d gone private, too, and done a whole stack of murder cases—”
“I haven’t gone private,” Gregor said, “and I’ve hardly done a whole stack of anything—”
“Jim said he saw a story about you in The Philadelphia Inquirer that called you the ‘Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.’ I didn’t know you were Armenian-American.”
“I’ve always thought of myself as just American. Here comes Schatzy.”
“If I’d just spent ten years of my life chasing guys who chopped up their girlfriends for spare parts, I wouldn’t go private and do murder cases. I wouldn’t go private and do anything. I’d get a job with IBM.”
“Here comes Schatzy,” Gregor said again, a little desperately. Dave got like this—he always got like this—it was some kind of reaction to all those years sitting alone in cars on stakeouts. What was worse, it was always on the mark. That was the other half of the truth of Gregor’s leaving. He had been unable to face one more set of blood stains on the wall, especially with Elizabeth gone. He didn’t want to think about it. It brought it all back much too vividly.
Unlike Dave, Schatzy was a big man, not as big as Gregor himself, but recognizably outsize. He was chugging along toward them from the dark center interior of the hotel lobby, carrying a magazine under his arm and looking both pleased and distracted. His full name was Bernard Isaac Schatz, and for the first ten years of his career, he’d been the only Jewish agent the Bureau had. Gregor hadn’t seen him for a decade before this conference. He hadn’t heard that Schatzy had been assigned to bank robbery and hated it. He hadn’t heard that Schatzy had quit the Bureau and gone into business manufacturing gourmet pizzas. He had no idea what Schatzy was doing at this conference or why he had been invited. In the reunion atmosphere of the conference room, it hadn’t seemed to matter.
Schatzy had taken the magazine out from under his arm and begun to wave it at them. Gregor caught a full-color cover picture of a cobra with its tongue in the air, with a small black-and-white inset beside it of a teenager with slightly buck teeth. Schatzy waved the magazine again and it all became a blur.
“Got it,” Schatzy said. “You can always count on People to give you what you want. It only happened last Thursday, too.”
“What only happened last Thursday?” Gregor asked.
“The murder,” Schatzy said.
“Oh, God,” Dave said, staring at the ceiling. “Let’s get off this and find a restaurant, can’t we? I’ve spent all morning talking about murder.”
“This is a good one.” Schatzy unrolled the magazine and shook his head. “That’s a cobra they’ve got here and it wasn’t a cobra at all. It was a water moccasin, or ten water moccasins to be precise, and that was weird enough because it was Upstate New York and water moccasins aren’t native to Upstate New York. Copperheads are native to Upstate New York. You in Boy Scouts, Gregor? You learn all that stuff about snakes when you went to camp?”
“I learned all that stuff about snakes at Quantico,” Gregor said. “I took both the poisons courses. And I have never been to camp.”
“I was the first Jewish Eagle Scout in the history of scouting in Dade County, Florida. Can you imagine growing up Jewish in Dade County, Florida, when I grew up in Dade County, Florida? It must have been terrible. I can hardly remember any of it.”
“I grew up WASP in Marblehead, Massachusetts,” Dave said. “I can hardly remember any of it, either. Adolescence is terrible.”
“How is it murder if the girl was bitten by snakes?” Gregor asked. “Did someone deliberately plant them in her bed?”
Schatzy grinned. “She wasn’t in her bed. She was in a storeroom at the public library, nobody knows why. And nobody knows where the snakes came from, either. That’s the best part. Pack of water moccasins all over the body, water moccasins not native to the state, hissing and snapping and the first thing that hits the Medical Examiner when they get them off her is that, of course, she hasn’t died of snake venom—”
“Wait,” Gregor said. “Hibernating. Why weren’t the snakes hibernating?”