And One to Die On(22)

“It didn’t.”

Bennis went down a one-way street, turned right onto another one-way street, turned right again. It was getting close enough to rush hour so that the streets were filling up. There were a lot of eighteen-wheeler trucks on the road. There were a lot of people on bicycles weaving in and out among the cars. Bennis was driving as if she were on a pristinely clear test track at the Bonneville Salt Flats, and they hadn’t really gotten started yet.

“Maybe we should take U.S. One,” Gregor suggested. “You know, the scenic route.”

“Too slow,” Bennis answered. “I want to get on I Ninety-five.”

Gregor gave up. He checked his seat belts twice, making sure that both the lap belt and the shoulder strap were tight. Then he closed his eyes. He got along so much better with Bennis driving if he couldn’t actually see what it was she was doing.

What was it again that Bennis had said, about Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh and all those other people who were supposed to be in Maine for the weekend, that had upset him so much? Oh, yes. Cavender Marsh’s daughter. Some lawyer had insisted that Cavender Marsh’s daughter be on hand for the birthday party, even though she hadn’t seen or heard from her father since she was three months old.

Gregor Demarkian had spent twenty years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had spent the last ten of those years either organizing or heading the Department of Behavioral Sciences, which was the division of the Bureau that coordinated nationwide manhunts for serial killers. He had stood at the edge of a shallow grave and watched a team of forensic pathologists bring fourteen bodies up into the light. He had sat in a darkened room and listened to a boy of seventeen tell him—in a voice that was eerily reminiscent of an old-fashioned grade-school teacher’s lecturing a class on the proper way to parse a sentence—that before he slit the throats on the prostitutes he abducted, he cut off the smallest toe on each of their right feet for a souvenir. Gregor Demarkian knew crazy when he saw it, and he didn’t throw the word around carelessly.

In this case, however, he thought he was justified.

Whoever had decided to ask Cavender Marsh’s daughter along on this weekend was crazy—and Cavender Marsh was just as crazy to have gone along with it.





CHAPTER 2


1


SHE WAS STANDING ON the boardwalk leading to the piers when Bennis and Gregor drove up, a trim, compact woman with pure white hair and small hands and a deep purple suit that somehow wasn’t flashy. Gregor Demarkian noticed her right off. In fact, she gave him something of a shock. There he was, bouncing along in his self-inflicted stupor, ignoring Bennis’s driving completely—and then he was sitting straight up in his seat, rigid and cold and eager all at the same time. It took him a minute to understand what was wrong. Bennis was guiding the tangerine orange Mercedes into the big open lot with the sign on it that read, “PARKING SHORT AND LONG TERM.” The wind was turning the sea into black glass and whitecaps and crawling down his neck. The trim, compact woman with white hair was pacing back and forth on the boardwalk, moving very carefully in her mid-level stacked heels. Bennis backed the car into the space closest to the parking lot attendant’s shack, and Gregor finally got it: the trim, compact woman reminded him of Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was the reason Gregor had left the FBI and gone back to the small Armenian-American neighborhood where he had grown up, on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia. Elizabeth was Gregor’s wife of many years, and just before he had retired she had died of cancer after a last, long, agonizing year that Gregor still saw over and over again in his dreams. He had been so exhausted by her dying, he had decided he never wanted to deal with death again. He certainly never wanted to deal with death delivered by lunatics and psychopaths again. He hadn’t realized how wearing living with all that was. Elizabeth had always protected him from it. Elizabeth had made it possible for him to be an emotional blank at the Bureau, because she had always been waiting at home to warm him up when he was through. Once she was gone he had two choices. He could either go on working and become an emotional blank for good, the law enforcement equivalent of the psychopaths he chased. Or he could quit.

The woman did not really look like Elizabeth. Her body type was very similar, but her face was too tame. Elizabeth had been an Armenian-American woman with high cheekbones and large black eyes. This woman was some derivation of Northern European and rather middle-of-the-road in terms of looks. Hazel eyes. A short, straight nose. Small, pretty teeth. It was her attitude that reminded Gregor of Elizabeth, and the way she carried herself. This, Gregor thought, was a woman of enormous self-respect and enormous competence. This woman believed that manners were important and that true femininity resided in common sense.