3.
Miles away, in the Sheraton Society Hill hotel in central Philadelphia, Karla Parrish was lying in the middle of a big double bed, trying to make sense of a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer. This story said that a woman named Patricia MacLaren Willis was assumed to have shot her husband Stephen to death with a semiautomatic pistol, destroyed her car by fire bomb in a Philadelphia parking garage, and then disappeared. It said this more than once, and it repeated the name in every other paragraph.
Patricia MacLaren Willis.
Patricia MacLaren Willis.
Patricia MacLaren Willis.
It didn’t make any sense.
Karla rolled over on her stomach and tried again. No matter how many times she read the story, it still said the same thing. But it couldn’t, she was sure of that. It would be far too much of a coincidence.
“Evan?” she called out.
Evan was in the living room of the suite, unpacking her photographic equipment. He stuck his head in through the bedroom door and wagged it.
“Not now,” he told her. “I have some work to do.”
“Did you ever take drugs?” Karla asked him. “Hallucinogenic drugs?”
“I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.”
“Well, I never took any drugs,” Karla said. “I never even tried cigarettes. And right now I feel like I’m on some kind of acid trip.”
“Nobody says ‘acid trip’ anymore, Karla. It’s passé.”
“Whatever. What do you do when you see something that can’t possibly be real?”
“I go back to bed. Preferably with company.”
“Be serious. Have you ever heard of somebody named Gregor Demarkian?”
“Sure. The world’s most famous private detective. Except I don’t think he really is a private detective. He’s a consultant or something like that.”
“Is he good at what he does?”
“He’s supposed to be.”
“Do you think you could put me in touch with him?”
Evan leaned against the doorjamb, curious. “I could, but I don’t really have to. He’s been invited to that reception Julianne Corbett is giving for you. I could call and see if he’s intending to show up.”
“Do that,” Karla said positively.
“You want to tell me what this is all about?”
Karla shook her head. “Not yet. I’m probably just having the vapors. You want to get us some breakfast?”
“Sure,” Evan said, but he hesitated one more moment in the doorway before he disappeared.
Karla rolled over on her back. She was exhausted. That was the trouble. She was exhausted and jet-lagged, and if she wasn’t she wouldn’t be having this fantasy.
And she wouldn’t be so scared.
SEVEN
1.
DONNA MORADANYAN DIDN’T CHANGE the ribbons. All the next day, and the day after that, Gregor watched, getting up from his kitchen table every hour or so to look out his window at Cavanaugh Street, going out four different times to get a pot of takeout coffee at the Ararat. His table was covered with forensics reports, background checks, financial tracking schemas, lateral witness interviews. John Jackman was good and the organization he had built the homicide department into was better than Gregor had ever imagined it could be, but most of this, Gregor knew, was confetti. It was impossible to know anything about the woman from reports like these. Preferably, Gregor would have been able to meet her, to hear her talk and see her walk. Since that was impossible at the moment—coming in after the fact on cases did that to you—the next best thing would be to find someone who had heard her and seen her. But that was proving surprisingly difficult. Gregor and John Jackman and Chief Exter had gone out to Fox Run Hill to conduct some interviews, but the only interviewing they had done had been of a woman named Molly Bracken, and they had talked to her before.
“She invents things,” Dan Exter had said when the interview was over—and of course it was true. Molly Bracken wanted to be part of a great adventure. She was clearly overjoyed that John Jackman and Dan Exter, who had interviewed her initially on the evening of the day the murder and the explosion happened, had returned with Gregor Demarkian.
“She doesn’t know Stephen Willis was involved in bigamy.” John Jackman shook his head and sighed. “She has no real reason to believe Stephen Willis was involved in bigamy. She just wants to think Stephen Willis was involved in bigamy.”
“She got it out of one of those damn supermarket tabloid newspapers,” Dan Exter said. “Trust me.”
“Fox Run Hill doesn’t look like the kind of place where people read those supermarket tabloid newspapers,” John Jackman objected.