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Cheating at Solitaire(31)

By:Jane Haddam


Gregor looked through the pictures again. Whoever had shot Mark Anderman had put the bullet in the side of his head, and that was not the safest way to shoot someone. It was better than a direct hit to the forehead, but it still risked the chance that the victim would survive.

“How many shots were there?” Gregor asked. “I can only see one probably.”

“There was only one.”

“He was killed with a single gunshot to the head?”

“That’s what the police say.”

“What happened to the bullet?”

“It exited the head on the other side. That’s why there’s so much blood on the window and the passenger-side door.”

“Did it go through the window?”

“Yes,” Stewart said. “Clean. When we got to the truck and I started taking pictures, I couldn’t even see something that looked like a crack. Not that the visibility was ideal, mind you. It was the middle of the afternoon, but it was dark.”

“Did they find the bullet?” Gregor asked.

“What do you mean, find it?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “if he was shot in the truck, which he seems to have been, and the bullet went through his head and then through the glass of the window, it has to be somewhere. If he was shot where you found him, it should be somewhere on the ground underneath the truck. I take it the police didn’t find it.”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“Interesting.”

“So it’s interesting,” Stewart said. “So you’ll do it. You’ll come to Margaret’s Harbor and do something about that bloody cow and the games she’s playing.”

“I can’t just come to Margaret’s Harbor and interfere with a police investigation,” Gregor said. “Cold cases, yes, those I can take on, but an ongoing police investigation is sacrosanct. I get involved in those only when the police themselves ask me in.”

Stewart Gordon’s face lit up. “That’s what she said. That’s exactly what she said. I take everything back about how stupid the police up there can be, I mean they all are pretty stupid, except for this one.” He reached under his sweater and came out with an envelope that had started out clean and white and straight but was now a wrinkled, squashed mess. “She gave me this. She said it was what you needed.”

Gregor took the envelope and opened it. It was not from a policeman. It was from the Margaret’s Harbor Public Prosecutor, and it was about as clear an invitation as it was possible to get. She’d even italicized the word “desperate,” and offered a fee she must have known was twice what he usually charged.

Gregor looked up at Stewart. Stewart shrugged. “Commander Rees of the Starfleet Cruiser Intrepid. You’ve got no idea how useful that television series has been in my life.”

Gregor thought he did have an idea of just that, and also of how useless it must have been on occasion, because the small boys had reached the limit of their patience. There was a groundswell of noise from the living room, and then they all came marching down the hall, led by Tommy Mora-danyan Donahue himself.

Half of them were carrying little plastic action figures that were supposed to look just like Stewart Gordon, and did.





Chapter Three


1

Before All the Trouble Started—as that silly real estate woman put it, as if what they were going through were a neighborhood feud or a bad divorce—Annabeth Falmer had heard a lot of the women on the island complain about the publicity “the Hollywood people” brought with them. She had even sympathized. Margaret’s Harbor was the kind of place, after all, where people who really wanted their privacy went to get it. In the rare cases where one of those people had become too famous, or infamous, to escape the relentless eye of public scrutiny, a silent bargain was struck, without anybody having to say anything, and that person either limited his visits or left the island altogether. This was something else, different not only from old-style infamy but from civilization as An-nabeth understood it. It was as if, during all those years when she had concentrated on her work and her children and the unending bills, something had happened to the world that she had known nothing about.

Now it was ten o’clock on the morning of January 3rd, and Annabeth was standing on Main Street in Oscartown, making her way through the camera crews and television vans toward the grocery store. She was feeling a little better. Stewart had called last evening to tell her that Gregor De-markian had agreed to come to the island to help with the investigation of the death of Mark Anderman. He had called her again, an hour ago, to tell her they had left Philadelphia for Boston, by plane, and would be in this afternoon. Anna-beth had very carefully sat down at the computer and looked for everything she could find on Gregor Demarkian, and she had found enough to feel reassured. He seemed like a very sensible man. He also seemed to be a good friend of Father Tibor Kasparian, who had to be the same Father Tibor Kas-parian who wrote about the Nestorians and the end of the Byzantine Empire and the demise of Greek learning in the Eastern churches. Annabeth was fairly certain there couldn’t be two Armenian priests named Tibor Kasparian living in Philadelphia at the same time.