The man who jumped up next was pudgy, middle-aged, and smug. “Lou Bandovan, Christian Reporter,” he said, without waiting for Gregor to call on him. “Wouldn’t you say that the disgraceful acts committed in this place are the result of a popular culture steeped in obscenity and lawlessness meeting up with an elite liberal culture committed to moral relativism?”
There were groans, and not just from the front of the room. Gregor didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t even sure that there was anything to say.
“Well,” he started, because he was sure he had to say something, “I don’t know about obscenity or relativism, but I do know that crime is a constant in all human societies, and murder especially is a constant. Some of the oldest anthropological artifacts are the bodies of men and women murdered millennia ago. In fact—”
Gregor didn’t have much to follow that “in fact.” He was spinning words in hopes that one of the reporters he thought he could trust would raise her hand. He was almost ready to get down on his knees and plead with the gentleman from MSNBC.
Then, at the very back of the room, an odd thing happened. There were a pair of double doors there, where the reporters had been let in before the start of the conference, and for a split second they pulled back and revealed the hall outside, along with two or three men in green blazers. Then the doors closed again. There were sounds from the hall. Somebody seemed to be shouting. Then the doors opened again, and Gregor saw, framed by the light coming in behind her, a very young woman with very red hair and the oddest assortment of clothes. She was poised and still for only a moment. Then she lurched forward, almost running, and fell into the last row of chairs.
“Shit,” she said, out loud, very much out loud. “Shit, shit, shit.”
The reporters were no longer the least bit interested in Gregor Demarkian. They were interested only in this young woman with her red hair and her odd clothes and this flailing performance she was putting on, falling into the lap of one person and then the other, pushing her way against the chairs instead of going around the block. She seemed to be trying to get to the front of the room, but that wasn’t entirely clear, because she was laughing and crying at the same time and cursing in the middle of all of it.
Finally, she got to a place in the middle of the sea of reporters, with all the cameras and their lights aimed at her face, and let out a long, piercing, wailing scream that could have broken ear drums. Gregor was sure that she’d managed to break his.
“Goddamn it!” the young woman screamed. “Will somebody around here fucking listen to me? Kendra Rhode is dead.”
Part III
Chapter One
1
Later, Gregor Demarkian would tell Bennis Hannaford that the scene around Kendra Rhode’s body had been “ crazy,” but that was almost as if he’d called the Mona Lisa “ cute.” Gregor had been at crazy crime scenes before. He’d been there in the dark when the Philadelphia Police Department had pulled an endless stream of bones out of a cellar, all thought to be the work of the Plate Glass Killer. He’d been in the middle of a hurricane in North Carolina when a young woman brought her smashed and bleeding baby out of the rain and blamed the death of it on witches. He’d even been on the scene at an attempted assassination of a president of the United States. He’d never seen a crime scene completely wrecked before. It was so completely wrecked that nothing and nobody could put it straight, and nothing the police managed to find would ever be credible evidence in a court of law. These were not crime reporters they were dealing with. The words “reasonable doubt” meant nothing to them, except as the hinge of suspense in a courtroom drama, which, like all dramas, they found inherently unreal. They were, however, much better at knowing where the news was than any other reporters Gregor had ever met, and they were fast.
The woman who had come careening into the Versailles Room in the middle of the press conference was Marcey Mandret, and in the beginning the photographers were concentrated on her. They should have been. She had been one of their main targets for weeks, and there she was, not exactly sober, unsteady on her feet, half undressed, hair a fright,screaming at them. It didn’t take them long, however, to realize that Marcey Mandret was talking about Kendra Rhode, and Kendra Rhode was a much bigger and better target than this everyday pop tart who had been in the tabloids far too often for far too little reason. They were out the door in a shot, and Gregor found himself staring across a vast expanse of empty space with only the old-line print reporters in it, and not many of those.