Feast of Murder(53)

“Loosen up,” Tony Baird told him. “Don’t think about it. If you think about it, you fall over.”

There had been an exercise like this for new recruits at Quantico, at least since the 1970s. Gregor had never had to go through it himself, but he had heard about it. He let go of the wall he was holding onto and willed his body to relax. He didn’t quite make it, but he did get close enough so that he could feel his body begin to move with the boat and not against it. For the first time since he had left the mess hall, he was in no danger of falling over.

“Thanks,” he said. “The way I was going, it would have taken me a year just to find Mr. Shay.”

“Charlie is probably as far forward as he can get, trying to do exactly what Dad told him to do.”

“Maybe we ought to go stop him.”

Tony nodded slightly and came forward, moving easily past Gregor and on toward the bow. Gregor followed him patiently. He could walk now, but not really well. Tony moved as easily as he did on dry land.

“What’s that?” he called back.

Gregor strained to hear something besides the ever-increasing wail of the wind and failed.

“What does it sound like?” he asked.

“It sounds like—Jesus H. Christ,” Tony said.

“What?” Gregor asked him.

Tony was in that narrow place that was the only open passageway between the main part of the upper deck and the bow. The other side was still clogged with tables and chairs from this morning’s breakfast. The place was like the hall downstairs, too small to take two people at once. Gregor had to push Tony forward to get into the bow and see. His task was made that much harder because Tony seemed glued to the deck beneath his feet.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Tony said again, as Gregor pushed on through.

And then Gregor saw it—or him, to be precise.

It was Charlie Shay, jerking and jumping and shuddering in convulsions, coming closer and closer to the low bow rail every time he moved.





Part Two

November 17–November 18





One


1


LATER, GREGOR DEMARKIAN WOULD wonder what on earth possessed him to go for Charlie Shay’s feet. Certainly it wasn’t anything he’d learned about fighting at Quantico, because he hadn’t learned about fighting at Quantico. Of course, even in the days when he had joined the Bureau, agents had been expected to know how to protect themselves. They’d been put through a short training sequence that had seemed to Gregor like a cross between boot camp and a National Rifle Association Expert Eye Gun Club. The thing was, in those days almost everybody who joined the Bureau was male and almost every male had been in the army. They were all assumed to be in good shape or capable of getting that way. That was good, because as a matter of fact Gregor Demarkian had never exactly been in good shape. He was not a physical man. He was not comfortable with guns, either. The Bureau had wanted him to learn how to shoot a machine gun—what had been going on in the minds of the people who set up training for the Bureau in those days, Gregor would never know—and so he had spent the requisite amount of time duly aiming one of the silly things at a target. He got muscle spasms in his right shoulder and a crick in his neck and a pass up at the insistence of an officer on kidnapping detail, who wanted him available for an assignment out in Palo Verde, California. After that, he’d been allowed to do what he was good at doing, meaning use his head. He’d used his head carefully and methodically for ten steady years of promotions and then been handed Theodore Robert Bundy. Never in all that time had he had to shoot anybody, or fight anybody, or even much raise his voice. In the higher echelons of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, crime—even the habitual pursuit of murder—was a very civilized way of life.

On the Pilgrimage Green, the death of Charlie Shay was anything but civilized. That he was dying, Gregor had no doubt. Gregor barely knew the difference between an Uzi and a Colt .45, but he did know poisons. Strychnine wasn’t even a very difficult poison to detect. The convulsions, the rigor, the look of shock on the face, that strange leaping St. Vitus’ dance of agony—there was nothing in the world like it. There was no question that Charlie Shay might live. He had probably been dead before Gregor or Tony ever saw him. The only mystery here was whether or not Charlie Shay would end up in the sea. The storm had built up around them now. The boat was pitching and yawing under their feet. The motion exaggerated Charlie Shay’s dance beyond the merely grotesque. In a more superstitious age, the assembled company would have taken one look at what was happening in the bow and started looking around for a witch.