Conspiracy Theory(111)

“What makes you think it took place at night?” the second plainclothes-man said.

“Day is too risky,” Gregor said, not wanting to point out that the other two murders he’d seen something of in the last week had both taken place at night, or at least at early evening. There was no reason for these men to assume that the three deaths were automatically connected. Gregor wasn’t even sure why he was so sure they were. “Thank you,” he told both the men, suddenly catching sight of the tiny fish pin tacked to the first plainclothesman’s suit lapel. The first plainclothesman was wearing a heavy coat, unbuttoned but still wrapped tightly against his chest. The lapel hadn’t been visible before.

Gregor turned away and went back down the ramp to John Jackman, who was leaning against the side of his limousine and watching the action. Somebody had brought him a coffee. Gregor wished somebody would bring him a coffee too.

“Well?” Jackman asked when Gregor got back to the car.

“Bullet hole in the right side of the skull, small but obvious. The detectives are guessing a rifle. I would too. Still, you won’t know until you know. Definitely fired at a distance.”

“That you know?”

“If it hadn’t been, the entry wound would have been a lot larger,” Gregor said. “The bottom line, though, is that it’s the same M.O. Virtually identical. Of course, we have no way of knowing the time of day, but I’d be willing to bet we were talking about evening or night, probably evening. It’s dark enough.”

“And that would be in keeping with an identical M.O.?”

“Something like that. Listen, John, where are we, exactly? Near Adelphos House yes. It didn’t take us too long to get here. What about Kathi Mitten-dorf’s place?”

“Nearly two miles in that direction,” John said, pointing at the horizon. “I don’t know, Gregor, what are we near? It’s an inner-city minority neighborhood, mostly Spanish now, working-class, not a war zone. The schools suck, but then all the schools in Philadelphia suck, except the private ones and a few of the charters. There are dozens of neighborhoods like this all over the city. They’re not really ‘near’ anything except maybe each other, and sometimes they’re not even near each other.”

“Kathi Mittendorf lives in a neighborhood like this,” Gregor said. “The same general atmosphere. Frame houses, some of them three-deckers, all of them run-down. I doubt if it’s a minority neighborhood, though.”

“Ethnic, then,” Jackman said confidently. “The kind of place that revolves around the local church. Catholic, Lutheran, different churches for different neighborhoods. It’s all going, Gregor. Even the poorer people are beginning to move on out to the Main Line. In a few more years, there’ll be nothing left but the very poor and the very rich. And not very many of the very rich. This isn’t New York. They move on out to the Main Line too.”

“In New York, they move on out to Westchester and Connecticut.”

“Yeah, well. They still have Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue and the Upper East Side. I’m sorry to be such a pessimist, but I don’t like what’s happening. I haven’t liked it for a long time. And you put this other stuff in it, this stuff like America on Alert and, yes, God help me, all the stupidity surrounding the Harry Potter books, you put that mental set into the mix and you’re going for real trouble. I keep waiting for something to happen. I’m not sure what.”

“Riots?”

“No,” Jackman said. “I’m embarrassed to say it, but when I saw the World Trade Center thing, I thought it was that. I thought it was one of our own, another Tim McVeigh, a whole rash of Tim McVeighs, and the whole thing was about to crash down on our heads. And then the anthrax thing did turn out to be a Tim McVeigh, didn’t it?”

“I think it turned out to be a lone nut,” Gregor said. “Not Tim McVeigh so much as the Unabomber.”

“Whatever. The landscape’s changed. Policing’s changed. Everything is caught up in this crap, and that includes a big chunk of the guys on the force, and I’ll be damned if I know what to do about it. Never mind me. You want to go home?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I think I do.”





2


There was one advantage to being driven around in a limousine, in spite of the fact that it made Gregor a little uncomfortable, and especially uncomfortable when he was with John Jackman, who loved the experience out of all proportion to its significance. The advantage was that he had his hands free to write, and that he was far enough in the back of the vehicle not to need to mentally apply the brakes every time the driver did something that made him want to cringe. All drivers made Gregor Demarkian want to cringe more often than not. Bennis and Donna caused him to feel grateful for traffic lights.