A Stillness in Bethlehem(70)

“Why?”

“I thought we weren’t asking why, Gregor. I thought this was an argument in favor of a crazy.”

“I wish you’d disabuse yourself of the notion that crazies are people who leap and whirl in supermarket aisles and can’t remember their names from one minute to the next. There are people like that, Bennis, but they don’t become serial murderers. They get institutionalized.”

“That’s wonderful to know.”

“Serial murderers—and we would have to be talking about a serial murderer here, even if Dinah Ketchum’s death wasn’t connected to the other two, as long as the motive for the other two was some kind of psychological kick—serial murderers are very organized people. The psychopaths are by definition, of course, but even the other ones, the ones who think the moon is delivering messages from aliens on Saturn or whatever, even those are extraordinarily coherent. That’s why they don’t get caught.”

“But they do get caught, don’t they?”

“Some of them do and some of them don’t. Most of them take a damned long time.” Gregor got up out of the chair he had been sitting in and paced moodily to Bennis’s window, looking out on the snow-covered tips of buildings occasionally decked with plastic Santas and reindeer. Bennis was winding ribbons into her hair, green and red, traditional Christmas colors.

“Anyway,” Gregor said, “it had to be somewhere there already before the performance started, because he couldn’t have gotten it there during, so where could it have been? And that’s when this boy Demp said something about the trajectory—about how there had practically been no trajectory, the bullet almost seemed to have gone straight through. And then he laughed and said he realized that couldn’t have been possible. For that to have happened the killer would have had to crouch, because sitting on our level of the bleacher, Gemma was actually lower than most standing people would be—”

“Not so much lower than me,” Bennis pointed out. “I’m only five-foot-four.”

“All right. Somebody five-foot-four could have been standing up. Anybody taller would have to be crouching over. Whatever. I looked around and there were the bushes, one of only two sets of bushes in the whole park. They don’t let the bushes grow over there because they don’t want vegetation getting in the way of the viewing, but they let these two sets because they help with the play. They’re kind of living props. And that’s when it hit me. All somebody had to do was leave the rifle in the bushes beforehand—maybe even set it up for aim beforehand—and then wait until the moment was right.”

“Whoever it was would have had to know where Gemma was going to be sitting beforehand,” Bennis cautioned.

“Exactly,” Gregor said. “That gives us, who? Peter Callisher. Peter’s girlfriend, Amanda Ballard. That semi-retarded man who works for them, Timmy Hall. Kelley Grey. Anybody who might have been in the newspaper office when Peter Callisher gave Gemma Bury the tickets. Anybody any such person might have told—”

“Oh,” Bennis said.

“Exactly. You see where we are. Leave the rifle in the bushes. Wait until Gemma is alone, the stands are mostly clear and you aren’t being watched—which wouldn’t be that hard. Those bushes are right near where the animals come through into the park. There’s a board hold-back near there that would effectively screen most of you from the people behind you, and what would they see if they saw you anyway? Someone standing pressed against a bush? Would they even notice?”

“It was still quite a chance.”

“It was definitely quite a chance, but it wasn’t the miracle Franklin Morrison and the state police want to make it out to be. Did I tell you Franklin called in the state police last night after everybody else had gone?”

“I was part of the everybody else who had gone.”

“Of course. Well. They were called. They came. They made utter nuisances of themselves. Give me local cops over state police all the time.”

“I know how you feel about the state police,” Bennis said. She wound herself off the bed and went searching under it with her feet. A couple of seconds later, Gregor watched her come up with a pair of leather-topped clogs. She slipped her feet into them and went rooting around in the mess on her night table. Her cigarettes were there. So was her copy of something called The Hilton Head Metabolism Diet. The copy was dog-eared and destroyed. It even looked like it had been written in. Gregor frowned.

“I’m going down to breakfast,” he said. “You could come with me.”