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Fighting Chance(17)

By:Jane Haddam


Gregor knew that his best bet would be to calm down and wait until they came to somewhere where he would both have service and where the train was going to be at a full stop for fifteen minutes or more. God only knew that there were plenty of places where the train felt it had to stop for fifteen minutes or more. If the Acela WiFi worked anything like reliably, we could use that. But right this minute, it wasn’t working at all.

When the train arrived, Bennis was not waiting for him on the platform. Gregor got out with his single airline bag and his briefcase and headed straight for the waiting room.

He got to the waiting room and looked around. It was full of people. None of the people looked like Bennis. He tried peering at all the places she’d waited for him before and got nowhere. Then all of a sudden she was there, right next to him.

“Let’s go,” she said, grabbing him by the arm. “I just paid a cab a hundred dollars and promised to pay him a hundred more if he waited for us around the corner. I made him put his off-duty light on.”

“Why do you have a cab?” Gregor asked. “Is something wrong with your car? Did you have an accident? What the hell—?”

“My car is bright orange,” Bennis said, tugging at him without mercy. “It’s the easiest thing to spot in three states. Cavanaugh Street is full of reporters, and I do mean full of them. They’re jamming the street solid, and they’re waiting for you. I called John Jackman, and he sent out some cops to disperse them, but when I left, it wasn’t going very well.”

“They’re waiting for me,” Gregor said.

“Of course they are,” Bennis said. “Who else would they be waiting for? I left by bus. It was the only way I could get out of the neighborhood without being seen. And there isn’t a hope in hell that we’re going to be able to get you back into our house without being bombarded.”

“I couldn’t watch that video you sent me,” Gregor said. “The service problems were ridiculous.”

They were outside. They were around the corner. They were moving so fast, Gregor was losing any spatial organization that he ever had, and he had never had much. Then Gregor saw a cab parked at the curb with its off-duty light on.

“In,” Bennis told him, opening the cab’s door.

She crawled in behind him and handed a thick stack of twenties to the cabdriver.

“Thank you,” she said.

“We going somewhere in particular?” the cabdriver asked.

“1207 Markham Street,” Bennis said.

The driver was an older black man who looked like he’d heard it all by the time he was seven. He pulled away from the curb.

“Markham Street?” Gregor said.

“It’s practically right behind us. Think about it for a minute.” Bennis handed over her phone. “I’ve got it downloaded. All you have to do is hit Play.”

Gregor hit Play.

For what seemed like forever, the video—it looked handheld, and not very well. The picture kept bouncing all over the place—the video went on and on and on. Tibor was holding the outsized gavel. He was raising it over his head. He was bringing it down. He was raising it over his head. He was bringing it down.

“For God’s sake,” Gregor said.

“It was the most watched video of the day on YouTube before somebody complained about the violence and they took it down,” Bennis said.

“What’s YouTube?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Bennis said. “You know what YouTube is. It’s the Web site where Tommy Moradanyan put up that video he made of the cats getting into the cabinets in Donna’s kitchen. And I keep telling myself that the way these things work, they’ll never let that in as evidence in a trial, but you know what? I don’t really know that. And it looks like—it looks like.”

“You can’t see the body,” Gregor said. He had started the video playing again. “Where’s the body?”

“Presumably it’s on the floor under where Tibor’s arm is going—where it’s—oh, for God’s sake, Gregor, this can’t be right. There has to be some other explanation. He can’t have done that.”

Gregor had gone very, very cold. “Who took the video? Where did the video come from?”

“Nobody knows at the moment,” Bennis said, and now she was crying. “The first thing I thought of was that it must be a security tape, but I’ve been talking to John’s office all day, and according to them, there’s not really any security tape, because something was wrong with the security tape. I don’t know.”

“If this isn’t a security tape,” Gregor said, “then somebody must have been standing there with a camera filming this on purpose. A phone camera, something like that. And if what was going on was that Tibor was bludgeoning someone to death, then the person taking the video was either part of the project or a bystander who decided to film it instead of running off to get help.”