A Stillness in Bethlehem(20)

She sat right back down in Kelley’s metal folding chair and gave due consideration to just how many people had known for just how long that she was having an affair with Jan-Mark Verek.





8


Exactly twenty-one minutes later, at nine forty-one, Jan-Mark Verek himself rose from the tangled torture of his bed, walked around his bookcase headboard, and went to stand at the rail that looked out over the living room of his house. His mouth was full of cotton and his head was full of cotton candy. He had aches in places he was sure aches ought to be fatal and that sour taste in his mouth that meant he had drunk just enough to be hung over without ever having had the pleasure of being first-class drunk. He was wearing a pair of Jockey shorts and nothing else. If he had been entirely sober the night before, he wouldn’t have been wearing the Jockey shorts. The balcony looked out not only on the living room but on a wall of windows. Through those windows he could see his driveway with its detached garage and circular sweep of gravel. It was definitely the case that he was sick of that circular sweep of gravel, as he was sick of his house and his trees and the deer that came down out of the hills when the mornings were especially cold. He’d started talking to anybody who would listen about how much he appreciated forest fires. Down in the driveway, a rust-red Cadillac Seville was pulling in, maneuvering gingerly along the curve, trying not to scratch itself on the rocks and trees that jutted out of everywhere in a random hash the landscape designer had assured them was “ecologically aesthetic.” Jan-Mark identified the car as the one belonging to Camber Hartnell just seconds before he saw Tish come out on the gravel, dressed in her most constipated New York lunch clothes and actually holding a handbag. Tish never carried handbags unless she was meeting with an editor from The New York Times. She came hurrying across the gravel, seemed to trip, and stopped to bend over and fuss with her shoes. She was just standing up straight again when it happened.

At first, Jan-Mark wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. It was all so fast and so neat. It was all so simple. First there was that odd popping sound, nothing too loud, nothing ominous. Then Tish seemed to rise a little in the air. Then she jerked backward at the neck and spun around. Then she fell. Jan-Mark stood at the balcony railing with his mouth open, staring. Tish was lying on the ground, seeping the smallest threads of blood onto the stones. The blood had to be coming from holes, but they were holes too small for Jan-Mark to see.

They were not holes too small for Camber Hartnell to see. He slammed his Cadillac into gear, revved his engine so abruptly it made the car squeal and took off in a spray of flying gravel.





9


Fifteen minutes later and six miles farther down the road, in a hollow on the side of the road that had once been the edge of a farm owned by a family that had ceased to exist, old Dinah Ketchum lay in a nest of twigs and snow, listening to her murderer get into a car parked on the shoulder not ten feet away. Her murderer was the murderer of Tisha Verek, too, and Dinah Ketchum knew that. She knew everything there was to know about everything that had happened in the last half hour, and the only thing that really bothered her was knowing she would never get a chance to tell anyone about it.

Old Dinah Ketchum was eighty-two years old, old enough, and as she closed her eyes, she told herself she should have known better. She should have seen. She should have understood. She should have wondered what the gun was doing there in the back of that car instead of up on Stuart’s rack at home where it belonged. Dinah Ketchum had never liked Stuart’s guns, and she didn’t like them now. The blood that was oozing out of her shoulder into the ground was so hot it was making the snow melt.

Go to sleep, she told herself. Go to sleep.

The only thing that matters now is to go to sleep.





Part One


Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

The silent stars go by





One


1


IT WAS CALLED J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets, and what Gregor Demarkian told people who asked him what he was doing with it was: Bennis Hannaford gave it to me for an early Christmas present. This, of course, was true. J. Edgar Hoover was a book, and Bennis Hannaford had indeed given it to Gregor Demarkian for an early Christmas present. She had even wrapped it up in shiny silver paper. Back on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia, where they both lived, Gregor thought Bennis had thought there might actually be sense in the idea. Gregor had spent twenty years of his life in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the last ten of them either establishing or heading the Department of Behavioral Sciences. He had chased serial killers from Florida to Oregon to Massachusetts and back around again. He had sat kidnapping stake-outs from Palm Beach to Palm Springs. He had known three presidents and more senators, congressmen and departmental functionaries than he cared to remember. He’d been spoken of as a possible candidate for Director of the Bureau itself, although that sort of talk had mercifully died an early death. To Bennis Hannaford, one thing and one thing only would have been important, and that was that Gregor had known J. Edgar Hoover himself.