Baptism in Blood(115)

He hung up the receiver on his end and climbed out of the booth. The foyer was still dark. The building was still quiet. Stephen Harrow was probably still sitting in the rec­tory of the Methodist Church, thinking he had actually got­ten away with it.

It was amazing, Gregor thought, how hard it was for people to change the way they did their thinking.





Four


1


ONE OF THE COUNTY boys turned out to be a county girl—the county prosecutor, in fact, who was a short, shelf-breasted woman in her forties, pit bullish and extreme. Gregor didn’t think he was going to like her much, in the beginning. She wasn’t there when he first got back from his phone call to Bennis. Only Clayton and Jackson were. It wasn’t long, though, before headlights could be seen through the window well and cars pulled to a stop in the parking lot in back. Car doors opened and closed. High country voices talked about the weather. There was a sepa­rate entrance to the police department at the back. The county boys and the county girl came through there, their shoes clattering on the metal-tipped stairs.

Minna Dorfman didn’t like to waste time on triviali­ties. Whatever gene it was that other southern women had that made them want to talk for hours about the state of their gardens and their neighbors’ morals, Minna didn’t have it. As soon as she came in, she opened her briefcase and spread out its contents on the one decently large and uncluttered desk in the room. Then she pulled a wooden chair into the middle of the room, sat down in it, and crossed her legs at the knee. Minna had sharp blue eyes that were much too small for her face. They looked like bullet holes that had been drilled into a large white pillow.

Minna Dorfman also folded her hands in her lap. It was this gesture that Gregor found so foreboding. She looked like a psychopathological schoolteacher, getting ready to do her class in.

“Well?” she said.

Clayton Hall handed over the “suicide note” they had been meant to believe had been written by Zhondra. The prosecutor read through it more quickly than Gregor would have believed anyone could read through anything, then repeated: “Well?”

“We feel,” Clayton told her, “that that note is basi­cally accurate, but that the names have been changed to put us off the scent.”

“Why?” Minna demanded.

“It wasn’t really meant to be a confession,” Gregor explained. “He—I’m fairly sure it was Stephen Harrow—needed to confess psychologically, I think, but didn’t want to in practical reality.”

Minna Dorfman drummed her fingers against the near­est desktop.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” she said. “The first murder was the murder of the child, am I right?”

“That’s right.”

“And,” Minna went on, gesturing at the note, “that murder is confessed to in here. In a way. It’s not entirely clear how the child was killed. Is he confessing to that killing or not?”

“My guess is that he doesn’t know if he committed it or not,” Gregor answered. “He says in the note that the situation was confused, and I think that’s probably just what it was. There was a hurricane. There was the goddess worship with a live baby. I think it was a little like being drunk.”

“So I think that’s what the murder of the baby was,” Minna said slowly, “a matter of fooling around with something that got out of hand. Goddess worship.”

“I don’t think I would have believed it before I came down here,” Gregor said, “but it seems perfectly plausible to me now. Millennial fever, somebody called it. This place seems to be almost infested with religion.”

“I believe it,” Minna Dorfman said. “I grew up less than five miles from this room. But you know, Mr. Demarkian—it is Mr. Demarkian, isn’t it?”

Gregor nodded.

“You know,” Minna went on, “no matter how hyster­ical people from up North get, Holy Rolling is really not the last refuge of nut cases and homicidal maniacs. When there’s a murder or some child abuse on television, it seems like it’s always the Holy Roller that did it, but it isn’t like that in real life. When we pick a man up for murder and mayhem, he’s more likely not to belong to a church than to belong to one. This Stephen Harrow,” she continued, “didn’t you tell me he was a member of the clergy?”

“It’s the Methodist Church,” Clayton Hall put in, “and Mr. Harrow isn’t from around here. He’s from up North. He’s got a lot of fancy degrees in theology from fancy universities up there.”

“He’s not exactly a fundamentalist,” Gregor con­ceded. “But I don’t think that was the point of all this, either.”