Actually, Franklin Morrison didn’t seem to Gregor to be a prime candidate for the role of nutcase. He was too old—if there was one thing Gregor had learned in twenty years in the FBI, it was that most stranger-to-stranger violence is committed by men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. Most acquaintanceship violence is committed by men in that age group, too, but Gregor didn’t have to worry about that. Franklin Morrison wasn’t an acquaintance. He wasn’t in very good shape, either. That was another thing about stranger-to-stranger violence. Acquaintanceship violence usually had a drug or alcohol element to it. Stranger-to-stranger violence, at least of the most serious kind, usually had a workout element to it. When Gregor had first noticed that, he had thought he was losing his mind. Then another agent had made the same observation, and the connection had become impossible to ignore. Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacey—fat or thin, in shape or out, it was remarkable how many serial killers and other assorted nasties worked out. The only one Gregor could remember who definitely hadn’t had been David Berkowitz. Gregor didn’t think that counted. He had always been uncomfortable with the verdict in the Berkowitz case. He was sure enough that Berkowitz had committed the crimes he had been charged with. He was also sure that Berkowitz was no psychopath. Gregor Demarkian knew the difference between a psychopath and a lunatic.
Psychopaths, lunatics—what am I thinking about? Gregor had wondered. Here he was, presented with what he had no sane reason to expect was anything but a harmless old man—and a harmless old man in a police uniform, at that—and he’s spinning interior movies in Technicolor about the repressed blood instincts of secret serial murderers. He had been worried about that kind of thing when he was still at the Bureau. Toward the last years of Elizabeth’s life, the two of them had talked endlessly about whether Gregor was getting “hard.”
Once on his own, away from the Bureau in the everyday world, he hadn’t expected to have to fear for his humanity—but here he was. Somehow, here he always was. There had to be a way he could keep his opinions of all that part of the human race that did not live on Cavanaugh Street from sinking to the level of his opinion of Vlad the Impaler.
Franklin Morrison had shifted from one foot to the other and back again, as if he were on a boat and correcting for the roll. Bennis had sat with her chin on her hands and her huge blue eyes wide and mischievous. Tibor had sat with his back very straight and his face frozen into gravity, but without being able to hide his excitement. That was when reality had come washing over Gregor like a tidal wave. He might obsess about serial killers and rogue fans. He might prepare himself for fantasized attacks from unexpected quarters. What Gregor was really in danger of was not violence, but imposition. Franklin Morrison had a gleam in his eye that Gregor knew well. It was the gleam of a man with an illness who has finally found a specialist. Franklin Morrison had a problem, and he couldn’t think of a single person on earth better qualified to solve it than Gregor Demarkian.
2
“It’s not that I mind being consulted,” Gregor told Tibor the next morning, leaning over the small basin in the bathroom and trying to see his lathered face in a mirror encrusted with poinsettia leaves, holly sprigs, Santa’s elves and leaping reindeer. The Green Mountain Inn may have taken its inspiration for its lobby decorations from the Place de la Concorde, but it had taken its inspiration for its room decorations from Donna Moradanyan. “In fact, I even like being consulted. It’s nice to know I haven’t lost my touch—”
“Of course you haven’t lost your touch,” Tibor said soothingly, and absently. He was sitting on a stool just outside the bathroom door, half lost in a book. Tibor was always lost in a book. His apartment behind Holy Trinity Church on Cavanaugh Street was not much more than a repository for books—in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, modern Greek, ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew. He had furniture no one had ever seen because it was so deeply buried under books. He now had hotel furniture no one could get to because it was so deeply buried under books. It had taken him less than half an hour last night to transform his room into a replica of the ones he remembered so fondly from home. Now he tapped the page of the book he was holding with the tip of a single finger and sighed. He had been reading all morning—it was now ten o’clock on the morning of Monday, December 16th—and getting gloomier by the second.
“Krekor,” he said carefully. “I am worried. I am very worried about Bennis.”