“Could I come pick this up on my way back?” he asked. “I can’t see myself walking into a police station with it in hand.”
“I’ll take it over to the Inn and drop it off for you, if you want,” Sharon told him. “It’s on my way. I’m supposed to read for the kindergarten at the library today.”
“I think it’s too bad you didn’t come to town to investigate the shootings,” Maria said. “I don’t care what anybody thinks. They were creepy.”
Gregor didn’t know if they were creepy or not. He did know there was something very odd about that fact that no one at all—not Chief Morrison, not the newspaper article—had mentioned that there was any connection between Dinah Ketchum and Tisha Verek.
In fact, everybody seemed to have been going out of their way to imply that there wasn’t one.
2
If Gregor Demarkian had been a speculating man, he would have guessed that the Bethlehem Police Department would be a hole-in-the-wall operation—and when he first got there, that was what he thought it was. The hand-lettered sign that marked the turn from Carrow to Williams Street said TO POLICE AND NEW TOWN HALL. Just as Gregor had suspected from that oracle, the police department was in the basement of the New Town Hall. Just why Bethlehem, Vermont, needed a new town hall when the old one was apparently still in operation on Main Street, Gregor couldn’t begin to imagine, so he didn’t try. Instead, he made his way up the carefully shovelled steps to the New Town Hall’s wreath-adorned doors, let himself inside, and followed the meager directions on another hand-lettered sign to the basement. New Town Hall was better than he had expected, because it was very new, very clean and very well built. Most of what you got in very small towns was decaying infrastructure and secondhand accoutrements. There were more hand-lettered signs in the basement, and Gregor followed these, too, looking with interest at one that said “jail cells” and pointed to the back of the building. The jail cells in Bethlehem, Vermont, must have all the cheerfulness of the dungeon rooms at Glencannon Castle. Another sign said MCU and had been appended to: ANYONE TAKING OUT THE MCU MUST SIGN FOR THE KEYS IN THE OFFICE. For Gregor, “MCU” would always mean “mobile crime unit,” but here he didn’t believe it. Mobile crime units were enormously expensive. Towns the size of this one didn’t have them.
Gregor finally reached a door that said BETHLEHEM POLICE DEPARTMENT PLEASE COME IN with a sign that wasn’t hand-lettered at all. He gave a perfunctory knock and walked in, expecting to find himself in a small room with a few desks scattered around it and an ancient metal filing cabinet full to overflowing. What he got was a very large room and no metal filing cabinet. The desks were new, and each one of them held a computer work station that seemed to be hooked into some larger system. There were a fair number of desks and a fair number of work stations, but not very many people. In fact, there were only two. A young man was sitting at a desk at the front, tapping things into his computer and swearing under his breath. Franklin Morrison was standing at a desk in the back, talking on the phone.
Franklin saw him, nodded and waved. Then the younger man looked up, flushed and stood.
“Oh,” he said. “You must be Gregor Demarkian.”
“That’s right,” Gregor told him. “Who are you?”
“Lee Greenwood.” Lee Greenwood looked down at his computer terminal, swore again and retook his seat. He tapped a few more things into the machine and sighed. “Excuse me,” he said, “but someone stole one of the camels again last night, and we’ve got to track it down. I mean, it can’t have gotten very far.”
“Kids,” Franklin Morrison said from the back of the room. He had hung up the phone and begun coming forward. “The kids always steal the livestock, meaning our kids, and don’t you know it was a mess the year we had the elephants. I don’t remember whose idea that was. Anyway, their kids, meaning the tourist kids, steal cars.”
“We’ve got a couple of those, too,” Lee Greenwood said. “The staties will find them.”
“Yeah, they will.” Franklin nodded. “They drive ’em out to the roadhouses on 91, and then when they can’t get served they have a fit. I still say it makes more sense than stealing a camel and sneaking it into Betty Heath’s barn. No, it was the elephant that ended up in Betty Heath’s barn. Woman damn near had a heart attack. Hello, Mr. Demarkian.”
“Hello,” Gregor said.
Franklin Morrison shook his head. “I suppose we sound like a pack of hicks to you. I guess we might as well. We are a pack of hicks.”