That was when Gemma Bury slid sideways, into Kelley Grey’s uninviting lap, and her head fell back across Kelley’s knees and onto the bench on the other side. At that moment it was all clearly visible.
The wound in the shoulder, half-hidden by the thickness and the color of the coat.
The wound in the throat.
Gemma Bury was dead.
Part Two
But in the dark night shineth
The everlasting light…
One
1
LATER, THEY WORKED OUT how it could have happened—how she could have sat there for nearly an hour, with nobody knowing she was dead. That it had been almost an hour was something Gregor was sure of from the moment he had discovered the death. Each act of the Bethlehem Nativity play took exactly fifty minutes, with that long twenty-minute break in between. Gregor knew Gemma Bury had been alive for at least part of the intermission. He had spoken to her and she had spoken back when he and Bennis returned to their seats after he’d bought his calzone. Gregor also knew Gemma could not have been killed during the second act of the play. The play had been absorbing, but nothing could be that absorbing, not to him, not after twenty years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If he had been sitting in his bleacher seat, staring straight ahead at the performance going on in the gazebo, in relative quiet, with nothing going on to distract him, he would at least have felt the impact. Bodies hit by bullets shudder and jump, even if death is so close to instantaneous that the dying makes no noise. Gregor had felt that shudder and jump three times in his life—once when he was in the army, twice when he was on kidnapping detail for the Bureau. There was nothing on earth like it. He would have recognized the feeling in his sleep.
As for the sound of the gun, that was an easier thing. Gregor suspected they would find the remains of a homemade silencer somewhere, meaning a raw potato that had been stuck at the open end of the barrel of the gun—or maybe rifle, in this case. A raw potato was a dangerous silencer to use, because guns as often blew up as had their noise muffled by the method, but if you were in a hurry or didn’t want to call attention to yourself, it was the kind of thing you might decide was worth the making do. If the killing had occurred when Gregor thought it had, that would have made it easier, too. The park was anything but quiet during intermissions. Even a minute or two after the lights were dimmed, there was noise: talking, giggling, rustling, shushing. Before the lights were dimmed, Christmas carols played loudly and enthusiastically from the loudspeakers. The sound made by a small-caliber gun—or a small-caliber rifle—would have been negligible. Gregor gave a long thoughtful look to the tall stand of evergreen bushes near the animal corridor and then returned his attention to Gemma Bury.
The reason Gemma hadn’t fallen over was that she had been propped up by her large canvas tote bag, occupying the stretch of bench directly between Gregor and herself. Her back had been resting against the edge of the bleacher behind her, forcing the two women back there to do their best not to smash their knees into her head. At least, that was what the two women said when Franklin Morrison questioned them, as he questioned everybody in the immediate vicinity, as soon as he arrived at the scene. Gregor was impressed. The Bethlehem Nativity Celebration was important to the town. Everybody had been telling him that since he got here, and before. Gregor thought any other small-town cop would have done his best to cover up and tone down—to hustle the tourists out, to hide the fact that a murder had been committed, to do everything possible not to upset the paying customers. Instead, Franklin had gotten his Mobile Crime Unit and his regular deputy and his three special deputies and the Dempsey boy from MIT and had gone to work.
The Dempsey boy from MIT was, in fact, Asian. His name had originally been something Franklin couldn’t remember, but his parents had changed it as soon as they’d come to the United States from Cambodia. The Dempsey boy was sixteen years old, more American than Mickey Mouse, and the single most intelligent human being Gregor had ever met. Gregor Demarkian was not subject to many cultural stereotypes, except about Armenians, which, because he was an Armenian-American, didn’t count. He had known dozens of Asian men and women in his career, and he knew they were not all cookie-cutter academic achievement clones. Quite a few of them had been gangsters in the old-fashioned use of the term. Quite a few others had been drug lords. A fair number of prostitutes. This one might have been the prototype from which the myth of Asian intelligence had been manufactured. He liked to be called Demp. That was because his real name was Jack.
“My father did it on purpose,” he had told Gregor this afternoon, soon after they had been introduced. “My father said Jack Dempsey was a great fighter and if I had his name I would be a great fighter, too. He said I was going to need it. I love the old man, but if you want to know the truth, I think all that refugeeing made him cracked.”