“Yes,” Stewart said. “Of course I would.”
Carl Frank allowed himself a full, unrestrained smile. Then he said, “Good.”
Chapter Five
1
Gregor Demarkian needed to think, and the last thing he needed when he needed to think was something to think about. He realized that this sounded contradictory, put the way he’d put it, but he knew what he meant. The world was full of distractions. It contained more distractions than information. You had to be careful about what you allowed to grab your attention, or you’d find yourself spinning your wheels about nothing at all.
The first call he made was to Clara Walsh, and he made it on the hotel’s landline. He didn’t care about what Bennis said about the expense—and she didn’t have to worry about expenses, and he had enough to use a hotel landline if he wanted—but cell phones still made him nervous, and he was under the impression that they were easy to intercept. He had no idea why somebody would want to intercept his calls at this point in the proceedings, but he was dealing with people who risked death to get photographs of other people nobody could figure out what they were famous for. He didn’t think he was dealing with rationality.
He put the call in to Clara Walsh and looked at the gun in the clear plastic freezer bag while he did it. It sat there like a child’s version of major military artillery, too big to have been anything but—but what? What was the point of this, after all? Did somebody think he was going to start suspecting Annabeth Falmer of killing Mark Anderman? Or maybe it was Stewart he was supposed to suspect. At least Stewart had a hope in hell of actually being connected to the dead man. Gregor hated gestures. He especially hated gestures that were made gratuitously, by adolescents who thought they were smarter than everybody else.
It took Clara Walsh eight rings before she picked up. Gregor was surprised that he hadn’t been routed to her voice mail.
“Yes?” she said, sounding distracted.
Gregor realized that she probably had call waiting, and that she hadn’t recognized the number that had shown up on it. He made a mental note about one more thing to hate in modern technology. Then he said, “It’s Gregor Demarkian. I need to ask you to do something for me.”
“Oh.” Clara Walsh sounded confused. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—we’re supposed to meet in three-quarters of an hour, right before the press conference. Can it wait until then?”
“I’d rather it didn’t. Jerry Young is handling the details of this case, isn’t he?”
“More or less,” Clara Walsh said, “but there are things, you know. Forensics. The state has had to handle the forensics because we don’t have anything like the facilities for that here.”
“Somebody has to be coordinating the details,” Gregor said. “The forensics. The background checks. Who would that be?”
“I really don’t think there’s any one person,” Clara Walsh said. “I could check if you want me to.”
“I’d like you to check, and then I’d like you to get whoever that is over here in the next ten to fifteen minutes. Before the press conference. I need to know something about Mark Anderman. You know, Mark Anderman. The man who died. The guy nobody ever talks about.”
Clara Walsh let a long stretch of silence go by on her end of the line. “Mark Anderman,” she said. “It’s not that we never talk about him. It’s that there isn’t much to say.”
“There has to be something to say,” Gregor said. “Somebody killed him, and he didn’t die in a mugging or an attempted robbery. At least I assume that’s been fairly well established.”
“It has been,” Clara said. “But—”
“Somebody who has been murdered deliberately,” Gregor plowed on, “is somebody with something about him that made somebody want to kill him. That may seem simplistic to you, but it’s an important point. I can’t believe it was blackmail. I can’t believe it, for one, because there’s nothing to blackmail these people about. I’ve been on the Internet. They live their lives in public, and the more public the better. Besides, hangers-on in this group don’t blackmail their celebrity friends, they take the information to the tabloids and get paid for it. That makes them more money, and it has the added advantage of being legal. So there must be some reason why somebody wanted this man dead. The best way to find out what that was is to find out something about him. Do you think we could do that?”
“I,” Clara Walsh said. “Well. All right. Yes. We could do that. You said in fifteen minutes?”