As soon as they had pulled away from the scene, Gregor pulled out his notebook and started jotting. John Jackman sat on the other side of the seat and watched him.
“I could never figure out what you were writing down all the time,” John said. “You never seemed to read those notebooks. Why do you write in them?”
“It helps me remember things.” Gregor finished the page and looked it over. It wasn’t true that he didn’t read what he’d written. “This is what I need somebody to do. First, that idea of yours about the picture of Kathi Mitten-dorf. Can we get one fast and get it out for Krystof Andrechev to see?”
“Sure. Have it done in a couple of hours.”
“It may be harder to get a picture than you think.”
“No, it won’t. She was being watched by the FBI, remember? They’ve got surveillance pictures, and our department has copies.”
“Fair enough,” Gregor said. “I just want to know, as soon as possible, if she was the one who brought the gun to Cavanaugh Street.”
“Do you think she was?”
“Yes. If she wasn’t, my whole theory goes to hell, so let’s hope I’m not wrong. I hate having to start again this late in the day. It wastes time.”
“You think Kathi Mittendorf bombed Holy Trinity Church? Or you think she murdered Tony and Charlotte Ross? And Steve Bridge, if they’re all connected.”
“They’re all connected,” Gregor said, “unless, as I mentioned, Krystof An-drechev doesn’t identify Kathi Mittendorf, at which point I don’t know what’s going on. As for the other things …” Gregor shrugged. “I don’t think she’s killed anybody, no. About Holy Trinity Church, it depends. My guess is not. I don’t think he would have entrusted her with anything that important. Not, as it turned out, that it made much difference.”
“I love it when you’re being inscrutable. It satisfies my need to explode ethnic stereotypes. Who’s ‘he’?”
“Michael Harridan.”
“You’ve found Michael Harridan? I thought you said Michael Harridan didn’t exist.”
“No, I never said that. Obviously, Michael Harridan exists. He writes a newsletter. He writes a lot of editions of a newsletter. Here’s something I’d like to know, just for curiosity’s sake. How often does that newsletter come out? I’m willing to bet almost anything that it’s started coming out a lot more frequently in, say, the last six months.”
“He’s been planning all this for the last six months?”
“At least. Maybe longer.”
“So where is he?” John Jackman said. “You can’t just say he exists and committed a bunch of murders and not tell us where he is. We want to talk to him. The Lower Merion police want to talk to him. After what we saw back there, the FBI is going to want to talk to him too, and big time.”
“We have talked to him,” Gregor said. “Or at least I have. I have no idea what your people have been doing about him one way or the other. The problem is, proving he’s himself, so to speak. Or rather, proving he’s not himself, part of the time. Do you know off the top of your head when the bomb went off in Holy Trinity Church?”
“I think it was just about eight-thirty,” John Jackman said, “or a little before. Why?”
“I was thinking about the principle of calculated risk. He calculates a lot of risk, Mr. Harridan does. If he wanted to be as sure as he could be that he wasn’t going to kill somebody—and he could never have been one hundred percent sure—he’d have had that bomb go off at midnight, when there was a good chance nobody at all would be in the church and nobody at all would be on the street. That’s a very conservative neighborhood in some ways.”
“I’ve noticed. Why did he want to make sure nobody would be killed? I thought that that’s what these guys did. They went out and murdered a bunch of people in the name of home, the flag, apple pie, and an interpretation of the United States Constitution so wrongheaded it could qualify for the founding document of a totalitarian space colony.”
“Very nice. But he didn’t want to kill anybody that night. He just wanted to make a mess. A very big mess. And distract my attention.”
“Distract your attention?”
“That’s right. Do you know of any celebrity murder anywhere on the Main Line or in Philadelphia that I haven’t been involved in in the last ten years?”
“I think you’ve got delusions of grandeur. No matter what the Philadelphia Inquirer may tell you, you’re not the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. You’re not better than the police. And one of the things I always did like about you was that you never considered yourself better than the police.”