Blood in the Water(35)

FOUR

1

When Gregor Demarkian had first started to do the work he did now, he had not given much thought to the people he would do it for. Even the word “client” had been foreign to him. He had worked for twenty years as a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not have clients, and did not think well of most of the people who did. Lawyers had clients, and lawyers were always trying to get the perpetrators off, or to pretend that the perpetrators were crazy, or just filing motions because otherwise they’d get bored. Even federal prosecutors were lawyers. Their job seemed to be to tell everybody else that the case was hopeless, and that there would need to be at least another hundred man hours of scut work before they could even think of getting anything done.

Of course, when Gregor had joined the Bureau, all special agents had been required to be either lawyers or accountants, so many of the agents Gregor had known had been lawyers, too, but that somehow hadn’t seemed to count. Gregor himself had been trained as an accountant and had become a CPA before first arriving at Quantico. Once he was in training and part of the organization, nobody had ever mentioned that again.

Part of the reason Gregor had never thought about clients was the timing. He had come back to Cavanaugh Street after Elizabeth died, just after. He’d bought his apartment in a kind of daze, not really knowing where or who he wanted to be. As long as Elizabeth had still been alive and there had still been something to do he had been “all right” in the sense of “pretty nearly functional.” It wasn’t until it had been all over for months that he’d realized that “pretty nearly functional” had been a euphemism for “just like a zombie.” Still, as long as he had doctors to talk to and a hospital to visit and medical bills to negotiate, he’d been able to get along day by day, doing the things people did, lying down in a bed he could never remember sleeping in, putting away food he could never remember eating.

At the end, he hadn’t even been living in the apartment he had shared with Elizabeth all those years. He’d put that up for sale and moved into something efficient and modern closer to the hospital, and he’d gone on leave so that he didn’t show up at the office every morning just to spend all day listening for the phone. It had been a long, bad stretch that last year. When it was over, he had not really had any idea of what he wanted to do next. He hadn’t even had any idea that there was a “next,” and coming home to Cavanaugh Street—coming home—had just seemed like something natural that might one day make sense.

Working as a consultant to police departments with difficult-to-solve murder cases had not seemed like something natural or something that might make sense, but that was because he had not thought of it at all. His very first case had been an accident and not one he’d gotten paid for. His next had been set up by friends who thought he needed something to do with his time. Then the cases had come on down the line and people had started sending him money, and it was only when old George Tekemanian’s grandson Martin had gone out on his own as an accountant that Gregor had been forced to think about making the whole situation regular. Now he had a “billing department” of sorts, and a standard hourly fee that seemed to have been concocted out of thin air. He had somebody to send people to when they asked him what he charged. He still had no handle at all on clients, or where they came from, or what they really wanted out of him. It was easy to say that what they wanted was their cases solved, but it was never that simple. If all you wanted was your case solved, you could hire somebody a lot cheaper who wouldn’t suck up all the publicity as soon as he arrived in town.

“What they want is cover,” Bennis told him, over and over again. “They want you to suck up all the publicity. It’s usually bad publicity. They want to be able to sit back and say, look, we went out and got the hottest guy out there, it’s not our fault this is the way it turned out.”

“I don’t usually leave a case until it’s been solved,” Gregor pointed out. “I don’t usually leave them with an open murder file.”

“It’s not just a matter of solving the case,” Bennis said. “It’s also how it gets solved and who it gets solved in the face of. That didn’t make any sense, I know. But I think a lot of these times, a lot of these cases, what they’re worried about is not necessarily solving it, but solving it by arresting the wrong person.”

“They bring me in as a kind of Innocence Project?”