Blood in the Water(90)

“I know,” Gregor said.

His driver must have been waiting right inside the police station’s door. He came hurrying out as soon as Gregor was on the asphalt. Gregor got into his car as quickly as he could, nearly desperate not to have to go on with this conversation. He tried to think of what to say to mollify Larry Farmer for an instant. All he could come up with was, “You should check into the background of Horace Wingard. His name isn’t really Horace Wingard, and I think there might be something in his background.”

“Horace Wingard? You think the killer is Horace Wingard? Ken will have a cow.”

Gregor thought Ken Bairn probably had a cow every week, but that was one of those things better left unsaid, and so he left it.

3

For some reason, the trip to Philadelphia this time seemed to take forever. Gregor sat in the backseat of the sedan and went through his notes and the notes the police had given him. He understood how the police had felt about this one. Larry Farmer was not a good police officer. He was barely an adequate police officer. His “department” was not so much a department as an instant replay of Andy Taylor’s Mayberry.

Still, Gregor thought, he could see why they had thought what they had thought. It was what he had thought. It was what anybody would have thought. And that, he had finally realized, had to be the key.

He shuffled through the folders and found the pictures of Martha Heydreich the police had given him, the copies of which they had presumably given the FBI and America’s Most Wanted. The pictures were as impossible as they had ever been. The woman looked less like a human being than a piece of modern art. Her makeup was so thick, it practically had topography. Her clothes looked decent enough when they were viewed in black and white, but in any color picture they became immediately extreme. There was all that blinding, uncompromising pink. Nobody wore pink like that. This was a woman who was dressing to disguise herself in plain sight. She had meant to be unrecognizable.

He found the report from the lab again. There was really nothing more to read. The body had been so thoroughly burned there was almost nothing left of it. It was a miracle that they’d been able to get DNA. And it had burned fast. There was security tape of that room during the early hours of the morning, the hours before Arthur Heydreich had stopped because he thought he saw a fire. If there had been fire in there before he said he saw it, it would have showed up on the tape. The fire had to have started when Arthur Heydreich said it had, or close to it.

And that, of course, was impossible.

The driver pulled through the drive-through at some godforsaken fast-food place, and Gregor got a hamburger and a little bag of French fries. The stuff was so awful, he couldn’t even feel any satisfaction in the fact that Bennis and Donna wouldn’t approve.

He went back to his examination of documents, but the examination always came out the same. There should be the remains of a remote timer mechanism to start the fire, or there should be security tape of somebody entering the pool house just before or after Arthur Heydreich did on the morning the fire started. There was neither of those things.

The car got him back to Cavanaugh Street, and Gregor got out just as people began wandering out of the Ararat in little clumps. With his luck, Bennis would already have eaten. He did not count what he had done as eating, and he didn’t think anybody else should, either.

He paid the driver and made arrangements for the morning. Then he walked down the street toward the restaurant. Donna had been active while he’d been out and around. Her own house was neatly done up as a gigantic Thanksgiving turkey. Most of the other houses on the block had little dangly things of turkeys and pilgrims and Indian corn. Whatever had happened to Indian corn? It had been a staple of public school Thanksgiving decorations when he’d been growing up. He couldn’t remember seeing it for years.

He got to the Ararat and walked in, looking around the tables to see if he recognized anyone. In the morning and for most of the afternoon, the Ararat was the special province of the people who lived on Cavanaugh Street, but in the evenings they got a tourist trade, and they were very happy with it. Tourists meant money, and money meant a family restaurant that was not going out of business anytime soon.

Tibor and Bennis were sitting at a small table against the wall. Gregor almost missed them because he didn’t expect to see them outside the window booth. There they were, though, Bennis leaning against the wall at her side, having coffee.

Gregor made his way to the back and looked around for a chair. There wasn’t a single empty chair anywhere.

“Ah,” he said, when Linda Melajian came running out to him. She had a chair in her hand, and she looked flustered.