“Look at her eyes,” Evan said. “People are dead and still breathing all the time. That’s what those right-to-life cases are all about.”
“Gregor?” Bennis Hannaford’s voice said. “Gregor, can you move her at all? Can you get me out of here?”
Gregor and Evan both looked down at the figure of Karla Parrish. The light was not wonderful in this room, and there was so much confusion. It took Gregor several seconds before he saw the glittering black beads of Bennis’s dress.
“I’m under everything,” her voice continued desperately. “Gregor, please. I feel like I’m suffocating in here. And I think I’ve broken my arm.”
“You can’t move Karla,” Evan said. “You told me yourself that could make her worse.”
“We can’t leave Bennis lying underneath her either,” Gregor said. “Would you get control of yourself?”
“I’m in as much control as anybody could be. Don’t you think for a minute that you’re in any more control than I am. If you touch her, I’m going to beat you up, Mr. Demarkian. I swear to God, I’ll beat you up.”
Evan Walsh was the kind of person men like Gregor Demarkian never paid very much attention to. Slight of body. Seemingly slight of mind. Frivolous and foppish and dandyish and just a little too feminine in an old-fashioned definition of that word, catlike in the worst sense. The eyes, though, were not the eyes of a frivolous person. Suddenly, Gregor Demarkian didn’t like Evan Walsh at all. He didn’t even like having to look at him.
“Gregor?” Bennis Hannaford said from under the body of Karla Parrish. “What is that idiot talking about? Can’t you get me out of here?”
“Just a minute,” Gregor told her.
“I’ll break your arm,” Evan Walsh told him pleasantly, smiling through his teeth. “Just you try it and see if I don’t.”
“Gregor,” Bennis said again.
They were saved by the paramedics. Julianne Corbett had followed orders. She had dialed 911, and now the emergency services came barreling through the doors like a SWAT team in white coats, and one of them even yelled, “Nobody move!”
2.
Karla Parrish had a concussion and had to be rushed to the hospital. Bennis Hannaford had a broken arm and had to be taken to the hospital too. The woman with the fake fur button was dead. A dozen people were hurt. The two uniformed police officers kept wandering around the wreckage of the living room, muttering to themselves. Gregor hung around long enough to let one of them take his name and address, and then left. The one who took his address muttered something about “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” but they both had too much on their minds to pursue it, including the possibility that the bomb that had gone off was not the only one that had been planted. After looking Gregor up and down like a prize bull, they both went off to take the names and addresses of other people, and Gregor found himself outside the town house, free to do what he thought best.
Outside on the sidewalk there were more police, and cordons holding back the crowd. The crowd was large and good-natured and unlikely to want to leave anytime soon. They were spiced with camera crews from all the local news shows and reporters with press cards in plastic envelopes on cords around their necks. The reporter from the Inquirer recognized Gregor immediately and began to gesture frantically. Gregor walked off in the other direction and had one of the cops let him through the cord and into the crowd. A camera crew from the local NBC affiliate was there, and the reporter leaned a microphone toward him as soon as he came out.
“Mr. Demarkian!” the woman said. “What can you tell us about how it felt to be at the very site of the blast?”
Why did television reporters always want to know how people felt about things? Gregor had grown up in a generation that thought of emotions as private matters, like what went on in the bathroom, and didn’t talk about them in public if they could help it. Now even the most respected news shows paraded sobbing widows and orphans in front of their cameras and asked serial killers if they felt any remorse. For Christ’s sake. If serial killers felt remorse, they wouldn’t be serial killers.
Gregor evaded the microphone and made his way through the crowd. It went a full block without thinning out and then just disappeared. He was on a mostly empty street with small open stores and the amber glow of lights from apartments. He found a pay phone that hadn’t been vandalized and put in a call to John Jackman’s private number. He got the answering machine.
“Drop whatever you’re doing,” he told the buzzing tape after the beep. “There’s been another bomb. Meet me at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Bennis broke her arm.”