A Stillness in Bethlehem(58)

Now he moved carefully through the snow-encrusted grass under the bleachers, looking for spent bullets and calling up to Gregor as he went. Franklin was in the middle of the park, talking to more people. Bennis and Tibor were sitting with Kelley Grey only a few feet away. In the sky, the stars looked bright and hard and hostile. Eternity looked black.

“I’m looking for twenty-twos,” Demp called up, “because anything much bigger than that would have caused a lot of damage to the body and probably done some damage to the bleachers or the ground or the tent as well. That’s the thing about bullets. You don’t need a big caliber to kill a man—or woman either, of course—but it’s a lot harder to do any kind of serious physical damage. I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” Gregor said. “Tell me about trajectory. Can you figure out where the bullets came from, once you find them?”

“I can try. Wait. No. That’s a marble. There must have been some kid in about the fifth row spilling marbles out of his pocket. Anyway, yeah, I can probably work that out for you if I get a little help—and when the staties get here, they’ll try it, too—but I think what you were saying before was right. I think it had to be sometime in the intermission before the seats were all filled up again. Either that, or whoever’s doing the shooting is really nuts.”

“Of course whoever’s doing the shooting is really nuts,” Franklin Morrison said, coming up out of nowhere. “What the hell else could he be?”

“Nuts and lucky,” Gregor told him, moving aside to give the chief room to sit down. “Whoever it was could have fired into the crowd meaning to get Gemma Bury or somebody else and gotten only Gemma Bury—could have just by accident not managed to hit any innocent bystanders.”

“Nobody is that lucky,” Franklin Morrison objected. “And nobody is that good, either. You never know what a bullet is going to do once it gets inside a body. I don’t care what kind of killing-machine dream hit men show up in the latest spy-for-hire movies. There isn’t a man on earth who could put a bullet into someone and know for a certainty it wasn’t going to hit a stray bone or not hit anything and come out the other end and kill a passing dog.”

“Have you talked to everybody?” Gregor asked him.

Franklin nodded glumly and looked back out into the middle of the park, still surrounded by tented bleachers. Out on Main Street, the church clocks were ticking toward midnight. Gregor didn’t think there was far to go.

“Nobody heard anything,” Franklin told him, “and nobody saw anything, either, and nobody is going to, if you ask me. I suppose they’re all telling the truth to an extent. I can’t believe anybody would have seen somebody aiming a firearm across the park and not done anything about it or said anything about it or anything else. I can’t believe she sat there dead for so long and you didn’t notice, but there it is. You’re sure that’s how it happened?”

“It has to be how it happened,” Gregor repeated, “both because of what I told you before—I really would have noticed, during the play—and because of what we’ve just been talking about. Nobody is that good or that lucky. If the bullet didn’t exit from the body and hit something or somebody else, especially somebody else, the chances are there wasn’t anybody to hit. Bennis and Tibor and I were talking about knishes just before the lights went down. It had to have happened then.”

“There weren’t people on the bleachers behind you then?”

“Not many,” Gregor said, “and not those two women. People wander back late. You know how it is.”

“I know how it is. The actors hate it.”

“I can just imagine.”

“Got one,” Demp said from underneath them. His hand snaked up through the slats and he felt around for his black leather instrument case. It looked like a doctor’s bag, but not quite, so that it gave Gregor the uneasy feeling that it had been designed for a quack. He picked it up and put it in Demp’s hand.

“Thanks,” Demp said.

Franklin Morrison looked glum. “Whoever it was took an awful chance, even so. It’s like he didn’t care. You know it’s got to be somebody in town. You know it does—”

Gregor frowned. “The first two happened on the first day of the Celebration. I don’t know if you can rule out a stranger yet.”

“I can rule out a stranger,” Franklin said grimly. “This is the third one looks just the same and everybody dead has been somebody in town—”