She made a right, past two vacant lots and a big building that might once have been a factory or a warehouse. She made another right, into the first faint stirrings of what could be called a neighborhood. She felt the muscles of her back ease a little, but only a little, because she knew she couldn’t stop here. She was too close to home.
In another three blocks, there was a street with some life on it. People sat on stoops. People went in and out of stores. People minded their own business. There was a big pharmacy there with pay phones in the back near the candy counter, old-fashioned ones with wooden booths. She would feel much better once she had made her call. History was an engine. It ground everything in its way to dust. If she wasn’t careful, they would all be dust too, and blood and skin and bone, lying out on the pavement, like those two people in Bryn Mawr.
FIVE
1
Murder, Gregor Demarkian had been told, when he was in training at Quan-tico, is the one crime without a reliable perpetrator profile. Every other crime—robbery, rape, assault, embezzlement—had its attractions for a certain segment of the population, a certain personality among all the possible personalties occurring among Americans in the twentieth century. Only murder was a wild card. Some murderers could be profiled. That was what the Behavioral Sciences Unit was all about. Serial killers were a definite personality type, more alike than different across the spectrum, and predictable, to a certain extent, because of it. The ordinary murderer was something else again. Go to any death row in any large state—go to Texas, Gregor thought sourly— and what you found was a hodgepodge of motives, social classes, educational backgrounds, religious convictions, car makes, tastes in books and coffee. The majority of the prisoners awaiting death would be what would be expected by anybody who spent significant time watching Bruce Willis movies. They would be poor, male, violent, senseless, addicted, the kind of people for whom nothing would ever be a deterrent if it required thinking. They would have killed their victims in robberies that hadn’t required anybody to die, or beaten their girlfriends or their girlfriends’ children into insensate pulps in an anger they were no longer able to explain. They were really rapists, or batterers, or thieves. The murders were side issues they never could quite figure out how to explain. Somewhere on that death row, or somewhere else in that prison, blessed with life instead of death because of their age or youth or status, there would be other murderers—the Diane Downses, the Charles Stewarts, the Jean Harrises, the middle class and the well-off, the envious, the resentful, the hateful, the cold. That was what they’d meant at Quantico when they told agents in training to be very careful about murder. It was far too easy to ignore the true perpetrator in a futile search for a mythical criminal type, hulking and monstrous, as if real human beings never hurt each other at all.
Gregor felt the taxi pull up to the curb and looked out to see that he was right in front of Le Demiurge, where he was supposed to meet John Jackman for lunch. His watch said that it was barely noon, and Jackman, being Jack-man, was always at least a little late. That had been true even when he hadn’t had the excuse of being commissioner of police to explain the habit away. Gregor got out a small clutch of bills and handed them to the driver. He got out of the cab and looked around at a pleasant but mostly unassuming neighborhood. He had no idea where John found these places. Even Bennis, who looked on eating out as a sacrament, hadn’t heard of most of them. This one had one of those arched canvas awnings stretched out across the sidewalk. Gregor had always wondered what the procedure was for getting the city to allow you to put one of those up. It was the kind of thing he thought about when he wasn’t able to get to sleep at night and he didn’t want to wake Bennis by getting out of bed and starting up the computer. Of course, she never worried about that sort of thing when it came to him, but she never woke him up, either.
The problem with Quantico’s dictum on murderers was that it was only about 90 percent right. Even those murderers who seemed to have nothing in common did have something in common, if nothing else the fact that they’d killed someone. It went deeper than that. Gregor thought he could say with certainty that virtually all murderers actually killed the person they had intended to kill. Those plots that showed up in crime fiction sometimes, where bodies were strewn across the landscape by mistake until the perpetrator finally got it right, were implausible. The key was to pay attention to who had actually died. In this case, that meant paying attention to Charlotte Deacon Ross, and not just to Tony Ross alone. The danger was in the possibility that they would find an explanation they liked so much for that first murder that they would do whatever they had to do to shoehorn the second one into it. It didn’t do to assume that all murders after the first, if there were more than one, occurred because somebody or the other “knew too much.” It happened. Gregor had seen it happen. Most of the time, it didn’t happen. If Charlotte Deacon Ross and Tony Ross were dead, it was because somebody had a reason to want Charlotte Deacon Ross and Tony Ross dead. That seemed to leave out America on Alert. Gregor was sure that Kathi Mittendorf considered Charlotte Deacon Ross to be a mind-controlled sex slave of the Illuminati, but he’d have been very surprised to find out that she thought Mrs. Ross was one of the people who ran the world. It also seemed to rule out a whole host of motives, like sex and jealousy. The kind of lover who might want one of them dead would be unlikely to want them both dead. The most obvious avenue of investigation would be the daughters. Gregor was sure they must stand to inherit something, and possibly a great deal. The problem was that Gregor couldn’t remember a case of murder for inheritance on the Main Line—ex-cept for one, and that had been an extremely odd and bizarre situation brought on by a paterfamilias who had a mind as warped and paranoid as Howard Hughes’s had been at the end. No, now that he thought about it, it was really remarkable. With all that money floating around, there should have been a fair amount of violence at the edges of that group of people, but as far as he knew, there had not been.