Deadly Beloved(60)

“I’m getting out of here,” he kept muttering. “I’m getting out of here right now.”

Gregor let him go.

One of the things that was on the floor under the photograph was the remains of another photograph, its cardboard frame twisted and broken, the long sheet of photographic paper ripped at the edges but still basically in one piece.

“Help me move this,” Gregor ordered Evan. “Pick it up at the edges and lift it straight up. There may be people under there with broken bones or concussions. You don’t want to move them unnecessarily.”

“I just want to find Karla,” Evan said stubbornly. “I’ll bet you think I’m a jerk, Mr. Demarkian, but I don’t care. I don’t care if I’m being responsible or compassionate or any of those things. I just want to find Karla.”

“I don’t think you’re a jerk,” Gregor said. “I just want to find Bennis Hannaford.”

Gregor grabbed one end of the photographic paper and a piece of broken cardboard from the frame. Evan went around the other side of the pile and grabbed another.

“It was aimed at Karla, I know it,” Evan said. “People don’t like what she does. The way she exposes the injustice in the world. They’ll do anything to stop her.”

Underneath the photographic paper there were pieces of cloth and wood and paper, but underneath those there was at least one person, and that person was breathing.

“I don’t think the Rwandan revolutionary forces are going to go around setting off bombs at cocktail parties in Philadelphia,” Gregor said firmly. “I think it’s much more likely here that this was somebody after Julianne Corbett. She is a political figure.” The person he could see beneath the wood and cloth and paper did not seem to be wearing Bennis’s beautiful beaded dress.

“She’s a political figure who doesn’t do anything,” Evan said. “And what about this thing Karla wanted to talk to you about? This thing about the murder.”

“What murder?” Whoever it was was definitely breathing. Gregor kept taking handfuls of garbage and tossing them aside. Evan was standing straight up and looking at the ceiling, doing no work at all.

“The murder,” Evan insisted. “That was why she was so anxious to meet you. I told you she was anxious to meet you.”

“I think so.” Gregor honestly couldn’t remember much of anything about what he had been doing five minutes before the blast.

“It was because of this murder,” Evan insisted. “This woman named Willis. Or MacLaren. Or there were two women, Willis and MacLaren—”

“There’s one woman. Patricia MacLaren Willis.”

“Whatever. She saw it in the papers. She was all worked up about it. She wanted me to get in touch with you so she could talk to you about it, but I said you were supposed to be here, you were on the list, and she said she’d wait.”

“Do you know what it was she wanted to say?”

“No,” Evan admitted. “She just kept laughing and saying that it was impossible. Patsy MacLaren couldn’t have murdered anybody. And then I said that anybody could murder somebody. They’re always saying that in, like, Psychology Today and Agatha Christie novels and all that kind of thing, and then Karla said, but yes, all right, except there are some limits, and Patsy certainly couldn’t murder anybody now. And then there were other things we had to do, you know, and we went and did them and do you think that was it? Whoever murdered Patsy MacLaren decided to get rid of Karla because of what she knew?”

“Nobody murdered Patsy MacLaren as far as we can tell. Patsy MacLaren murdered her husband. Stephen Willis.”

“Oh. And Karla knows her. Maybe that’s it. Karla thinks she’s innocent, but she isn’t, and Karla knows something about her that could be damaging, so to head her off at the pass—”

It was Evan whom Gregor had to head off at the pass. The breathing person beneath him was now clearly Karla Parrish.

The hollows of her ears were crusted with blood. Her eyes were half open and blank. Evan turned at just that moment and saw her. He jumped three inches into the air and dived toward the rubble, intending to drag her out.

“Don’t move her,” Gregor commanded. “She’s probably got a concussion, for God’s sake. You’ll make it worse.”

“I have to find out if she’s alive,” Evan insisted. “I have to know. I can’t just leave her there.”

“You have to leave her there,” Gregor insisted. “You can see that she’s alive just by looking at her. You can see that she’s breathing.”