Unless you were the police department of Penryn, Pennsylvania, Gregor thought, who had refused to direct traffic at the annual YMCA triathlon because, it said, the YMCA was encouraging witchcraft by reading Harry Potter books aloud to children in its after-school program. Maybe Tibor was right. Maybe the world really was going crazy. Maybe he himself was going crazy, standing next to John Jackman’s big black limousine and looking out across this rundown backstreet neighborhood as if this was all supposed to be making some kind of sense.
“What’s wrong?” John asked, coming back from a low conference with two of the uniformed cops now watching the scene. He looked around at the sky and the neighborhood and shook his head. “God, this is awful. Have you seen him yet?”
“Briefly.”
“There are maggots in his eyes,” John said. “I’ve seen a lot in my time, but that was unbelievable. Christ, you’d think whoever it was could have buried him.”
“Here?” Gregor asked.
They both looked around again. John shrugged. “Okay, maybe not here. But wouldn’t it have made sense to move him?”
“I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “Assuming we’re dealing with the same person as the person who murdered Tony and Charlotte Ross, and assuming one person murdered both of them—”
“I think we can assume,” John said drily. “At least about Tony and Charlotte Ross. I admit this makes something of a mess of things. At least it’s within the city limits.”
“Why at least?”
“Because now I have control of it,” John said. “I don’t want to say anything against the Lower Merion police, because they do a good job and they mean well, but they don’t deal with the real trouble out there and you know it. They don’t have the experience. And we do.”
“You ever heard of Penryn, Pennsylvania?”
“No.”
“Last fall sometime, a year ago, the police department there refused to do its usual duty at an annual YMCA event because it said the YMCA was encouraging children to engage in witchcraft because it was reading them the Harry Potter books.”
“And?” John Jackman said.
“Well, John, what the hell? Is that usual? Does that sort of thing happen so often that it doesn’t surprise you? Let me ask you a question Tibor asked me. When did we get to the point that we forgot that witches are pretend?”
“Does this have something to do with the case? With any part of the case? With the bombing of Holy Trinity Church? With the death of Steve Bridge? With anything?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Except that I want to answer yes, because it does, just not in the way you think you mean it. I get embarrassed for what’s happening to this country, I really do. It’s like we all took acid at a showing of Alice in Wonderland and now we think we’re really all the way down the rabbit hole.”
“Maybe you ought to go home to bed,” John said. “Maybe you’re coming down with something. Because you sure as hell aren’t making a lot of sense.”
“I want to go over there and take a better look,” Gregor said. “Can I do that without screwing up everything from fingerprints to footprints to DNA samples?”
“Sure. Tell the boys I sent you. Wear gloves.”
John Jackman meant latex gloves, which Gregor didn’t have, although he was sure one of the officers over at the scene would. He walked over and nodded to the uniformed man on duty. His progress was not challenged. By now, everybody at the scene probably knew he’d arrived in the company of the commissioner of police. The scene was a vacant lot between two small frame houses, overgrown with the kinds of vegetation that grow on vacant lots: a lot of grass, brown and dead in the cold; some small shrubs; too many boxes and crates and piles of debris. The police had put a wooden plank down leading from the sidewalk to the body itself, so that officers needing to come and go wouldn’t muck up the scene any more than they already had, but Gregor didn’t think that it had really been needed. The closer he got, the stronger the smell got. It was a wonder someone hadn’t noticed it long before now—or maybe they had, and maybe they had complained, but the city had dismissed it as just another mess from a pile of garbage left on a postcard-stamp bit of land nobody wanted or wanted to claim.
Gregor came to a stop about a foot behind the two plainclothes detectives who were standing directly over the body. Right here, the stench was overwhelming, and the body itself was still visible and uncovered on the ground. Gregor didn’t know if it had maggots coming out of its eyes, but it was badly decomposed, and at that stage of decomposition that made the most impact. The skin was black and had rotted away from the muscle and bone in several places along the jaw and the top of the hands. The skin along the nose was wet and oozing. Gregor shook his head. The plainclothesman closest to him turned around and nodded.