Festival of Deaths(88)
“Shouldn’t I call nine one one?”
“Nine one one serves the entire city. St Elizabeth’s will be faster. John, do you want to call in to your people yourself?”
“Yeah, I’ll do it.”
“Good,” Gregor said. “That will be faster, too. Go on now, Ms. Kroll. We don’t have a lot of time.”
DeAnna Kroll looked in the direction of Carmencita Boaz’s body, which meant she looked at John Jackman’s back, because it was blocking her view.
“Is she going to die? Is she—”
“She is if the ambulance doesn’t get here soon,” Gregor said.
“The ambulance,” DeAnna said. “Yes. And I have to call Lotte.”
Gregor didn’t know what good Lotte was going to do. DeAnna probably didn’t know either. She hurried off. Gregor went over to John Jackman. He was doing all the right things for head wounds and concussion. Hard as it was to believe, what had happened to Carmencita Boaz was going to be technically called a concussion. To Gregor, concussion was what boys got playing sandlot baseball when they came from families too poor to afford helmets.
“Go,” Gregor told John. “Let’s get this moving. I’ll take over here.”
“Right,” John Jackman said. He turned Carmencita Boaz over to Gregor and straightened up. Gregor was relieved to see that the woman was breathing more regularly now, and more deeply, if still not deeply enough. When they had first arrived on the scene, Carmencita had had the hitching, shuddering breath of someone in the throes of tachycardia.
John Jackman disappeared through the fire door. Itzaak moved in beside Gregor and looked into Carmencita’s face.
“She is breathing,” he said, and even though he must have known she would be, he sounded awed.
Gregor found himself wondering how long it would be before they could calm Itzaak down and question him.
2
HAVING THE MOST FAMOUS homicide cop in the city and the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot on the case had its advantages. The ambulance responded with alacrity, and four pairs of uniformed cops showed up at the scene in one and a half minutes flat. Gregor was glad to see every one of them. Being an FBI agent is a manner of being a policeman. The Bureau as federal police force was a concept much stressed when Gregor was training at Quantico. The first time Gregor had ever been present at an actual crime scene, he had discovered the difference. The FBI was always coming in after the Sturm und Drang was over: after the kidnapping had happened and somebody was needed to set up and monitor a ransom drop; after six local police forces in three states had racked up a string of seemingly related killings and needed someone to coordinate an interstate hunt. When the FBI wasn’t doing that, it was dealing with paper crime. The FBI was very good at paper crime. A well-trained Bureau agent to track the course of a million dollars in drug money from the streets of New York to the bank vaults of the Cayman Islands. Of course, he couldn’t actually get his hands on any of it. International banking regulations would keep him from doing that.
The first time Gregor had stumbled onto a real crime scene, he had been astounded. All the blood and confusion and mess: How did they work under such conditions? He had also been a little embarrassed. There he was, the expert, the country’s most famous specialist in murder, with his picture on the cover of Time—and he hadn’t known a damn thing. That the murders he was an expert in were the serial kind—or that his expertise in solving them depended heavily on computers—hadn’t seemed to absolve him. He had thought he ought to know something. He had thought he should at least not feel out of place.
The first crime scene Gregor had stumbled onto had contained the body of Bennis Hannaford’s father. The investigating officer had been John Henry Newman Jackman. It had all happened in Bryn Mawr three years ago.
Carmencita Boaz was going out into the foyer on a stretcher. She was not conscious, and Itzaak, walking along beside her, wasn’t exactly conscious either. Gregor saw one of the stretcher men turn to say something to Itzaak and decided to intervene.
“Let him go with you,” Gregor said. “If you don’t, you’ll have two cases of shock on your hands besides the concussion.”
“It’s against regulations,” the stretcher man said.
Itzaak looked like he was going to cry. At that moment, DeAnna Kroll came up to him, put her arm around his shoulder, and whispered in his ear. Itzaak brightened immediately.
“Watch that woman get a limousine to bring the two of them to the hospital,” John Jackman said. Behind him, uniformed cops and teenies and a lot of other people were milling around, taking samples, trying for fingerprints. There was no sign of the murder weapon and Gregor didn’t expect there to be any. He didn’t expect there to be much physical evidence, either. It wasn’t that kind of crime and it wasn’t that kind of crime scene.