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Cheating at Solitaire(122)



“But it must have been the shortest honeymoon in existence,” Stewart said, “because by the time they got back here, Anderman was all over Arrow. They went everywhere together for weeks. It was worse than it had been with Steve.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I keep getting that impression. But that leaves us with a significant question. Why did Carl Frank get rid of Steve Becker but not Mark Anderman?”

“Maybe Mark Anderman refused to be got rid of,” Annabeth said. “I mean, he’d gotten one to marry him, maybe he was hoping to get another one. I can’t imagine that Kendra Rhode’s money wasn’t tied up legally six ways to Sunday. It’s what you do with trust funds, because there’s always the chance that the heir will be an idiot. Maybe he hadn’t realized that when he married Kendra Rhode, and then, when he did realize it, he decided to go for something else. Somebody else. To stay on the gravy train.”

“Nice,” Gregor said. “I don’t think I could have done better myself. There’s only one significant problem.”

“Only one?” Stewart said. “You always were a bloody genius.”

“This doesn’t take a genius,” Gregor told him. “The problem is simple. Carl Frank went to a lot of trouble to get rid of Steve Becker. He doesn’t seem to have gone to any trouble at all to get rid of Mark Anderman. And Mark Anderman might have refused to be gotten rid of, but if Carl Frank is Michael Bardman’s man on this movie, he could have gotten Anderman fired. And he didn’t. From what I’ve been able to find out, he didn’t do anything at all. Why not?”

2

Of course, Gregor thought, walking back to the center of town, there was always one thing Carl Frank could have done about Mark Anderman, and that was to kill him, or to get him killed. The problem with that would be motive, and the problem with motive in this case was that all of them felt completely inadequate to Gregor. It wasn’t that Gregor had illusions about murderers. He’d spent the better part of his career at the Bureau dealing with serial killers, and enough time since dealing with local police departments to understand without illusions that most people who killed did so with very little objective reason at all. Your average serial killer had a sexual itch he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help scratching. Gregor would have said that half the serial killers he had known had been mentally ill in the commonsense definition of the term, delusional, haunted by voices. The rest of them lived lives so disconnected from the everyday that they might as well have been aliens, but deeply insecure aliens, always convinced that the world looked down on them for their stupidity, always desperate to prove that they were smarter than the people who rejected them. That was true even of the ones it shouldn’t have been true of, which was why, when Gregor thought back on his life in behavioral sciences, the name that always came to mind was Theodore Robert Bundy. The average nondelusional serial killer was a nerdy nonentity or a pudgy loser. Ted Bundy was athletic, handsome, smooth. The average nondelusional serial killer was a constant failure in all things, large and small. Ted Bundy was an academic success, a man with a job in the governor’s office, a law student. It was as if Ted Bundy had been invented for Hollywood and the best-seller lists. He was the kind of killer who interested people because he was, in fact, interesting. It made sense to most people that a loser or an ugly would give in to rage and start lashing out.

Besides, they didn’t have to take that sort of person seriously, because they didn’t have to think of him as somebody like themselves. It made everything a lot easier for everyone if the general public could see crime as something committed by people so vastly different from themselves, so utterly unlike anybody they knew, that criminals were literally a different species.

Of course, most crime wasn’t committed by serial killers. Most crime was committed by ordinary people in the day to day, and most of the murders there made absolutely no sense at all. A couple of guys get into a fight at a bar and one of them has a knife. He probably never used the knife before, and he carried it only to make himself look cool to women. A guy stays home to babysit for his girlfriend’s baby and the baby cries. He can’t stand it and he can’t stand it and so he picks the baby up by the feet and bashes its head into the wall, and when he’s done he can’t even remember doing it. Real violence was not like the violence in Agatha Christie novels. It was just there, out in the middle of nowhere, with no rhyme or reason, committed in an instant, finished in an instant. People’s lives changed overnight. They ended whether the person you were talking about was the victim or the perpetrator. Often it turned out that the impetus was the same as the impetus for those serial killers who did not hear voices in their heads: the gaping nothingness of being nobody in particular, of trying to exist in the world with nothing and nobody to validate you. Gregor wondered if almost all crime might be like this, or at least if almost all violence might be. Maybe there was really only one motive, and that was the need to compensate for a deep and abiding sense of failure, a failure that went all the way down. He wondered how many people there were like that out there, and what they appeared to be on the surface. He wondered if his brain was beginning to freeze in the New England weather.