Deadly Beloved(91)

“Reasonably sure of what?” John Jackman sounded exasperated.

“Reasonably sure of just who Patsy MacLaren really is. She really is a very cautious person, you know. Careful to a fault.”

“Right,” John Jackman said. “Pipe bombs blowing up the landscape in all these public places. India, for God’s sake. If Patsy MacLaren is running around blowing up everybody who’d seen her in the last ten days or whatever, who died in India with Julianne Corbett in attendance?”

“Patsy MacLaren.”

“The next time I need a consultant, I’m not going to get you, Gregor. I’m going to hire a psychic. It’ll be easier on my nerves.”

Gregor stepped out into the lobby. The elevator shaft was open and two firemen were working over it, directed by a bald man in a white lab coat from the mobile crime unit. The bomb squad, having done the emergency work of making sure there was nothing else around to go off, was standing by. Just in case.

“Let’s go up,” Gregor said again, gesturing to the door at the side that led to the stairwell. They had already been up it once since the rescue teams started arriving.

John Jackman sighed. “If they don’t have that body in the bag when we get there, I’m leaving right away. Stabbings I can deal with. Shootings I can deal with. People getting blown up make my stomach turn. I think it’s a good thing I never got drafted.”

“I got drafted,” Gregor said. “I never saw anybody blown up until I joined the FBI. Let’s go.”





2.


Out of the lobby, the building got better and better: neater, cleaner, brighter, newer. It was really a very nice place, except that it was in this neighborhood and guarded by a rogue troll, or whatever that doorman was. The stairwell was well lit. The hallways were well kept and newly painted and well lit too. Every once in a while Gregor saw a door with a bit of decoration on it, bright plastic eggs left over from Easter, little wooden “Pennsylvania Dutch” welcome plaques. Teachers and nurses, second assistant bookkeepers and car insurance agents—most of them, Gregor was sure, living alone. If you got married, you moved out of a place like this, to a little house somewhere in one of the less important suburbs. You only went on and on about how convenient it was to be close to the museums and the theaters when you didn’t have children to put through school.

They got up to the fourth floor and found the fire door shut. Gregor opened it and looked through, only to be confronted by the massive head of a fireman in a very bad mood.

“This entrance is not operative,” the fireman said. “The staircase is not operative. I don’t know where you came from, but—”

John Jackman pushed himself forward. “Jackman,” he said, holding out his shield case. “Homicide.”

“Oh,” the fireman said. He stepped back.

If anything, the fourth floor was in even worse shape than it had been the last time Gregor had been there, right after John Jackman arrived, when they were looking through the debris trying to figure out what happened. Still, Gregor thought, it was obviously a pipe bomb that had gone off, and not something bigger. The door to 4C was off its hinges, but the firemen or the bomb squad had done that. There was a lot of mess on the hall carpet and a little singeing on the hall wallpaper. There was not much else, except in 4C itself, and that was a total mess.

“We cleaned it up some,” the big fireman said. “And the cops from forensics, they’ve put a lot into plastic bags.”

Gregor went to the door of 4C and looked inside. The corpse was in a bag, lying on the living room floor, blank under white canvas. A pair of orderlies in white fatigues was unfolding a stretcher next to it. A tall man in a black suit was standing next to the orderlies, taking off a pair of clear plastic gloves. The man in the suit looked up, saw John Jackman, and nodded.

“Mr. Jackman,” he said. “We’re all done here. I’ve got to do an autopsy. Pipe bomb, my ass.”

“It was certainly a pipe bomb,” Gregor pointed out. “One of the first things we found was the pipe.”

“This is Dr. Halloran,” John Jackman said formally. “From the medical examiner’s office. This is—”

“Gregor Demarkian,” Dr. Halloran said. “I know. Phil Borley’s here from the bomb squad. You ask him. Pipe bomb. Bunch of Chinese fireworks, that’s what it was.”

“Now, now,” John Jackman said. “Let’s not get too politically incorrect here. We haven’t even been drinking.”

“Are you trying to tell me it wasn’t a pipe bomb?” Gregor asked.