She put the cap back on the aspirin bottle and the bottle back in the cabinet. She went to the big drawer she kept hammers and screwdrivers in and opened it up. She had a .357 Magnum pistol in there. It was twenty years old, but it had never been used, and it was fully loaded. She had put it in there only last night, when the word had come from Michael that they were about to be attacked and that she had to start getting ready for what was likely to be a very messy operation. She’d lain in bed for an hour, wide awake, thinking about all the guns and the explosives and the ammunition stored all around the house. None of it was easily accessible. She hadn’t even left herself a handgun for self-protection. Finally, she hadn’t been able to handle it. She’d gone down to the basement and opened up one of the wall panels and found herself this and loaded it. Then she’d had second thoughts—Michael had been adamant; she was not to start getting ready until the morning; she was to leave everything in place until then— and left the gun down here. It had felt safe where she’d put it. She had no idea why.
I’m really not good at making decisions, she thought now. Then she took the gun out and took it off its safety. It felt heavy and cold in her hand, very different from the way it had felt when she’d been handling it before. She had fired similar weapons on firing ranges. That hadn’t felt like this, either. Everybody has to grow up sometime, she thought, and then that didn’t make much sense, so she let it go. She was all grown up. She was part of an underground organization whose purpose was to defend the freedom and sovereignty of her country against the forces of darkness. She was, in a way, really more of a soldier than a civilian.
She felt the weight of the gun in her hand. She went out of the kitchen and through the dining room. She stood in the arch there, watching Susan sipping Diet Coke.
“I’m just trying to be reasonable,” Susan said.
Kathi Mittendorf raised the gun in both her hands and fired.
THREE
1
It was a question of making lists, and making sure everything was in its proper place in line, and not getting blinded to the obvious by the obscure but interesting. Gregor Demarkian didn’t think he would have expressed it like that to anybody, but that was how he felt. The first thing he did when he woke up on the morning after the Philadelphia police found the body of Steve Bridge was to get on the phone with the Lower Merion police, and for once he did not feel guilty for getting anybody out of bed. The whole thing was beginning to feel more and more wrong to him, not because he expected another murder— he was fairly sure that this murderer would not kill again, unless something very unusual happened, or unless he was cornered in the wrong way, which Gregor prided himself on knowing how not to do—but because some of the elements in motion here were not under anybody’s control, and never had been, no matter what they’d looked like a week ago. He did not examine the fact that he got a great deal of satisfaction out of waking the director out of a sound sleep to get information that he could have gotten by asking Walker Canfield. He never had examined his feelings for directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation generally. It would have been embarrassing to admit that he had never entirely recovered from his deep, abiding, and well-founded hatred of J. Edgar Hoover. It would have been even more embarrassing to admit that he now somehow held the office of director as tainted, as if Hoover was haunting it.
“I could have faxed you this from the office if you’d waited an hour,” Frank Margiotti had complained as he reeled off the one list Gregor really cared about.
Gregor hadn’t answered him. There was no point. He wrote the list down carefully. He made notations next to two or three of the names. Then he hung up.
By ten o’clock, when Bennis came back from Donna’s house after a morning of consulting on What to Do About Tibor—as far as Gregor could tell, Tibor was doing fine, and busily involved in planning the building of a new church, which is what he ought to be doing—Gregor had sheets of paper full of lists spread out all across the kitchen table. His coffee was in a mug on one of the kitchen counters, because he didn’t want to spill any. He’d put together a plate of toast and forgotten about it. He heard her come in and grunted in her direction. A second later, it occurred to him that he was behaving as if they were married.
“So,” she said, “what exactly is this?”
He took the paper out of her hand. “This is a list of all the people on the grounds at the time the gates were closed just after the shooting.”
“Not at the time of the shooting?”