Clara Walsh was up at the makeshift podium, introducing him. Gregor only half listened. Everybody said the same things about him when they were presenting him to an audience. They covered his career in the FBI and his time with the Behavioral Sciences Unit. They mentioned the latest case or two that had received some serious publicity. They stressed the fact that he was a consultant and not a private eye. Gregor was still fixated by the audience. The seats were in a block, without a row up the middle, even though the room had been set up horizontally, along the length instead of the width. It felt odd. He wondered why it was so.
Clara had turned to look at him, which probably meant he ought to get up. He did get up. He thanked her, although he didn’t know for what, and stood at the podium, looking out. In spite of all the deference paid to the broadcast and cable media, the woman from The New York Times was front and center. From what he remembered, the reporter from The New York Times was always front and center, no matter what the story was, or where. Maybe there was some kind of protocol here, where everybody was required to acknowledge the importance of The Times above all other newspapers.
I’m up here blithering inside my head, Gregor thought, and then called on the woman from The Times because she was right there in front of him.
“Mr. Demarkian,” she said, “there have been rumors for the last few days that you have been asked here by members of Arrow Normand’s family because they are unsatisfied with the level of professionalism exhibited by the local police. Is there any truth to those rumors?”
“No,” Gregor said, relieved beyond measure to be able to give a straight answer to the first question out of the box. “I’m sure Miss Normand has a wonderful and loving family who care deeply about her interests, but I’ve never met or heard from any of them as far as I know. I was asked to come here by Clara Walsh, in consultation with the Oscar-town Police Department.”
The woman from The Times sat down. There were a hundred hands in the air. Gregor knew he wasn’t going to be able to get away with calling on only people in the front row. If he tried, it would be all over the Internet in seconds. He squinted into the distance and picked a young man midway into the block of seats. The young man was clean-cut and reassuringly ordinary looking. He didn’t even go in for flam-boyance in ties.
Gregor pointed to him. The young man stood up and said, “Tom Carlyle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Could you tell us what you’re charging the Oscartown Police Department for your services? Do you think the Oscartown Police Department would be willing to pay your fee if this case had not involved celebrities?”
Gregor sighed. You couldn’t trust anything these days. Back when he’d been with the FBI, “clean-cut” had almost always meant “respectful.” There was a pitcher of water and an empty glass on the podium. Gregor poured himself some water and drank it. “In the first place,” he said, “I’m not sure it’s the Oscartown Police Department that’s paying my fee. It may be Clara Walsh’s office. In the second place, most of the cases I’m called in to consult on do not include celebrities. I have no particular expertise at working with celebrities, but I do have some expertise at working with the analysis and classification of evidence, which is what I’m doing here.”
“Are you trying to say that the fact that the accused in this case is Arrow Normand makes no difference at all?” The question came from a very young man all the way in the back of the room, and he was nothing like clean-cut. In fact, Gregor wondered what he’d done to get that hair. It looked as if he’d been electrocuted.
Gregor cleared his throat. “You are…?” he said.
The young man with the electric hair said, “I’m Bobby Gedowski, from Caught in the Crosshairs dot com. And I’ll repeat. Can you really say that the fact that this case is about Arrow Normand makes no difference at all? That you and the police are handling this the same way you’d handle a domestic disturbance in a trailer park?”
“No,” Gregor said, “but not necessarily for the kind of reasons you’re implying. A domestic disturbance, in a trailer park or elsewhere, isn’t usually a matter where it is difficult to unravel the facts of the case. The facts are presented to the officers who respond to the call. The officers may have to deal with differing claims of culpability, and who hit whom first, but almost always the universe of their investigation is right there in front of them, and there’s no need to go further afield. This case, like most of the ones I’m called in to consult on, contains a high level of ambiguity. Evidence is there, but its import isn’t clear. Some of the evidence is missing. What is and is not a fact is not clear. And in cases like that, whether they involve celebrities or not, it is in the interests of justice for everybody to be very careful. The system should be as good a system as we can make it. The fact that it can never be perfect, that it will convict the wrong person on occasion and release the wrong person on occasion, is no reason to stop trying to eliminate error in all its forms wherever we find it.”