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Conspiracy Theory(34)

By:Jane Haddam


“That’s ridiculous,” Ryall said. “Nobody would shoot anybody just in the hopes that it would give his career a boost. Nobody would even think of it.”

“People think of everything.”

“Besides,” Ryall said, “you already said it. It looks like a professional hit. I couldn’t carry out a professional hit if I wanted to. I can’t even hit skeet.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to be the kind of argument that impresses anybody. Look, Ryall, for God’s sake. I’m just trying to save your ass. You’ve already got them so focused on you they can’t think about anybody else. Tone it down a little.”

“I don’t have any reason to tone it down a little,” Ryall said. He sounded constipated, even to himself. “I’m only telling the truth.”

“You’re only saying what you have to say to keep getting asked back to those programs,” Nick said. “This isn’t going to work, Ryall. You’re not going to be the next Greta Van Susteren.”

“I’m only telling the truth,” Ryall said again. Then he pulled the cell phone away from his ear and switched it off. He could hear Nick’s voice coming out of it right to the very end. He didn’t care. He could always say they’d been cut off. Nick wouldn’t believe it, but he wouldn’t press the issue. It happened with cell phones all the time.

On the little screen, a tiny, overanimated version of himself was jumping and squirming on the padded seat of a guest chair. He hadn’t understood how the camera would catch and magnify his every mood. He didn’t just look like Porky Pig. He looked like Porky Pig on amphetamines, sixty seconds before a serious psychotic break. Nick was wrong. He would be the next Greta Van Susteren. He had been plucked out of relative obscurity by the crush of great events and a major news story. By the time it was over, he would be familiar to everyone in America. It astonished him to realize just how much he wanted this. It went deeper than any other emotion he’d ever known. It brought him bolt upright in the middle of the night and made it impossible for him to sleep for more than four hours at a time. It was the miracle he’d been waiting for, and he hadn’t even known he’d been waiting.

God, he thought. What I wouldn’t do to be rid of every last one of them. It was too bad that this wasn’t a case of serial murder, so that he could watch them dying in agony one by one. He would reserve a very special death for Charlotte Deacon Ross, who looked down on the English royal family and thought that Ryall Wyndham existed only to provide an uncontroversial escort for women temporarily unaccompanied by their husbands—that, and just the right amount of just the right kind of publicity, when she decided she wanted publicity.

The tape had run its course again. It had only been a half-hour talking heads show. Ryall pushed rewind and waited for the tape to scroll back to its beginning. He pushed play again and pulled up one of the chairs as close to the screen as he could manage. It was a question of studying and working and thinking and planning. If he did everything right, he would be released.





THREE



1


These days, the trip out to Bryn Mawr was like taking no trip at all. If you went by car—and Gregor was going by car, because Bennis was driving him— it hardly looked as if you’d left the city. The nicer parts of Brooklyn, that’s what it reminded him of. The buildings were lower and set further back on the road than they were in Philadelphia proper. There was grass along the edges of the sidewalks. There were more gas stations and sit-down fast-food restaurants in small ponds of parking lots. It was not the Bryn Mawr he remembered from his childhood, when he used to come out here with friends just to drive through the winding streets and look at the big houses behind their gates. The big houses were still here. He had first met Bennis in the one that had belonged to her father, which also happened to be one of the oldest and biggest in the township and a landmark of railroad robber-baron excess. Tony Ross and his wife had their house here too. From what Gregor had seen on the night of Tony Ross’s murder, that one was big enough to be a boarding school. Still, there was something about Bryn Mawr experienced the way he was experiencing it now. It was as if it had somehow, inexplicably, shrunk.

Bennis was bouncing along a widish, two-lane main road with too many cars parked at the curb on both sides. Every once in a while, she swore. Every once in a while, she slowed to a crawl so that she could read the signs on the cross streets. They were no longer in Bryn Mawr, which was fine, because Bryn Mawr didn’t actually have a police station. Lower Merion did, in Ard-more, which covered Tony Ross’s house. Both Bennis and the Lower Merion detective who had approached him at the Ross house after the murder had explained all this in detail, but it made his head hurt.