A Stillness in Bethlehem(54)

“Look at this,” he said. “Look at it carefully. Those little bubble things on the lines are stone walls.”

Bennis held the map in her hands and stared at it dutifully.

“Well,” she said. “So what?”

Gregor reached over Tibor and tapped the map at the place it said “Episcopal Church Property.” Tibor didn’t appear to notice.

“The state police,” Gregor said, “argued for two different gunmen causing two different hunting accidents for a number of reasons, but one of them was time. They said that there was no time for one person to have stolen a gun from Stuart Ketchum’s house, shot Tisha Verek, and then gotten to Dinah Ketchum and shot her, too—”

“I thought they didn’t know what time this Dinah Ketchum was shot,” Bennis said. “That was in the paper.”

“I know, but all that means is that they’re not sure in which order and all the rest of it. The two women were shot close enough together to present no differences in forensic examination even after having been discovered very close to the times of their deaths. Therefore the time differential can’t be huge.”

“Yes, but Gregor, you’re still talking about—”

“Bennis, I know. My feeling is that the state police were looking for any excuse they could find not to call these two deaths murders—at least, that’s my feeling now that I’ve seen what Franklin Morrison had to show me—but there’s nothing to say I’m right. It’s not like this was a poisoning, where I would have some specialized knowledge. Franklin Morrison doesn’t have any specialized knowledge at all. So we went looking for an explanation even an idiot couldn’t shake and we found one. Look at the walls.”



“I’m looking.”

“According to Franklin, the stone walls are lined on both sides by tall evergreen trees, but the walls themselves are the broad flat kind, not the pudding-stone bumpy sort that tend to be narrow. Delaford Road is lined with trees on both sides, too, and very wooded for several feet in off the shoulder anyplace past the Ketchum Road turnoff and for maybe half a mile or so before. All anybody would have had to have done was to park out of sight in the trees across the road from where the stone wall and the Verek driveway meet the Delaford Road close together, walk up the wall to the Ketchum house, steal a gun, and walk back again along the wall. Whoever it was could have been fairly sure of not being seen, at least according to Franklin. The trees would have provided good cover and the time of day would have ensured there wasn’t much to need cover from. There was no snow on the ground. The barnyard around the Ketchum house is dirt, and the ground had been more or less stiff with frost for weeks. When it’s all over, he gets back in his car—”

“But Gregor, it’s crazy. Why go to all that trouble? And where did he find Dinah Ketchum? He couldn’t have left her in his car and then toted her out another—how far along the Delaford Road?”

“Six miles. Don’t trust my scale.”

“I wouldn’t,” Bennis said. “If you really want to know the truth, I think this sounds nutsier than what I was telling you yesterday. And you accuse me of having a whodunit mentality.”

“I know,” Gregor said, “but there’s a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“If one person was responsible for both those shootings—and I know why Franklin Morrison wants that to be true; the hits are mind-numbing any other way—then whoever did it had to go through the process I’ve just described to you at some point.”

“You mean it could have been two separate hunting accidents, or one double murder, but it couldn’t have been two hunting accidents caused by the same person.”

“There’s always the town’s favorite explanation,” Gregor said. “It could have been one hunting accident and one murder.”

“But you don’t like that.”

“Do you?”

“Since when have you ever considered my opinions on law enforcement to have any more validity than a rogue troll’s?”

“I’m talking about common sense here, Bennis. When you put your mind to it, you have a great deal of common sense. Apply that common sense to this. One hit to the shoulder. One hit to the neck—to the throat, to be precise.”

“Gregor—”

On the seat between them, Tibor stirred. While Bennis and Gregor had been talking, and not noticing, Tibor had been shedding layers of clothes, all from beneath his cassock. His sweater had come off first, then his flannel shirt, then a pair of thick cashmere mufflers. He now looked twenty pounds lighter than he had when they had arrived, and strangely depleted. His chest had gone from convex to concave.