“The point was that it was Jack Bullard’s gun,” Gregor said.
“Do you mean somebody was trying to implicate Jack?” Clara Walsh said. “That doesn’t make sense. It would make more sense to mail the gun to the police station, or to me.”
“Nobody was trying to implicate Jack,” Gregor said. “Turn it around, and see what you have. First, the person who planted the gun in Annabeth’s house thought that it was the gun that had been used to kill Mark Anderman. Second, the person who planted the gun in Annabeth’s house knew that both Arrow Normand and Marcey Mandret had been in that living room all the afternoon of the storm. The idea wasn’t to implicate Jack. It was to implicate Arrow Normand.”
“But she was already in jail,” Clara Walsh said.
“She was in jail, but not for long,” Gregor said. “In fact, even you admitted to me, yesterday, that you couldn’t understand why she was still in jail. She has good legal repre sentation. She could have been out any time she wanted to be. The only reason she wasn’t out was that she didn’t want to be. She used a few days in jail to hide from the crazy people around her, and having met her, and several of the crazy people, I’m not entirely unsympathetic. I don’t think anybody,anywhere, thought that you were going to end up prosecuting Arrow Normand for the murder of Mark Anderman, not as things stood, at any rate. And nobody thought you’d ever get a conviction. But the person who planted the gun didn’t care whether you got a conviction or not. The only point was to get you to concentrate on Arrow Normand and not on anybody else.”
“We didn’t have anybody else to concentrate on,” Clara Walsh said. “I wish we had.”
“So let me get this straight,” Jerry Young said. “First the perpetrator murdered Mark Anderman. Then the perpetrator attacked Jack Bullard. Then the perpetrator hid Jack’s gun in Annabeth Falmer’s house—”
“No,” Gregor said. “The perpetrator murdered Mark Anderman, but since then, everything we’ve been looking at has been the work of somebody else. It’s been smoke, pure and simple. And that was what I had to get past before I could understand what was happening. It wasn’t the work of only one person, but it also wasn’t the work of one person and an accomplice, because the person who killed Kendra Rhode wouldn’t have agreed to the attack on Jack Bullard, and if that person had known about the planting of the gun, the gun wouldn’t have been the wrong one, or it wouldn’t have been planted at all. And as for Kendra Rhode, the last thing the murderer of Mark Anderman wanted was the death of Kendra Rhode.”
“You keep saying ‘death,’ ” Bram Winder said, “not ‘murder.’ Wasn’t Kendra Rhode murdered?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I don’t think the person who killed her knows. My guess is that there was a single murderous moment, but I know there was no planning, and no conscious intent. Which is very different from the murder of Mark Anderman, which was not only planned but plotted out, and then followed up. It had to be, because if it hadn’t been it would have been too obvious. So I’ll hand over to you the murderer of Mark Anderman, and tell you how it happened, and lay out what you need to get your conviction, but the death of Kendra Rhode is going to be solved only if the person who killed her tells you about it, and I have no idea if that’s going to happen or not.”
“So where do we go from here?” Jerry Young said. “We’ve got enough staties in town to open a barracks, and the paparazzi are going to be back, and you know it. What can we do about any of this?”
“We can go and ask one more set of questions,” Gregor said. “Why don’t you all come with me. I need to have you along. With any luck you’ll be able to make your arrest before the paparazzi get back, and then you can try to equip the Harbor with advanced security equipment to keep them under control.”
“They haven’t actually left the island,” Jerry Young said gloomily. “They’re just hiding. And not doing that good a job at it.”
“If we’re going to go somewhere, we ought to go,” Clara Walsh said. “Where are we going?”
“To see Jack Bullard,” Gregor said. “I talked to Mike Ingleford half an hour ago. Mr. Bullard is up and around and due to go home as soon as Dr. Ingleford stops stalling so that we can get there first.”
2
The Oscartown Hospital was actually named the Betty Larkin Halle Memorial Hospital. Gregor had no idea how he had missed that the first time through, especially since it was spelled out in shiny letters over the hospital’s front door, and then again in the glass next to the emergency room entrance. Then again, he only noticed it now because he was looking at the places in which the glass was broken and boarded over, a relic of the half riot of just yesterday. Gregor looked up and down the street as Clara Walsh’s car pulled to a stop right in the middle of the curving front drive. He had no idea why they had driven from the Oscartown Inn, which was close enough to see from where they were now, but Clara had insisted, and here they were. Nobody else was here, though, at least as far as he could see. Linda Beecham was not entirely wrong when she said that nobody was interested in somebody like Jack.