Fighting Chance(54)

“All right,” Gregor said. “Interesting.”

“More interesting than you know yet,” Ray said. “There’s a connection. There are a couple of connections. Loftus is a member of this group called Philadelphia Justice that tries to get cases reconsidered they think were wrongly decided. Sort of a local version of the Innocence Project.”

“Those aren’t bad ideas,” Gregor said. “People do get wrongly convicted.”

“To hear them tell it,” Ray said, “people get wrongly convicted because people like me are racist crapholes who do it on purpose.”

“And you think she may have murdered Martha Handling for handing out long sentences to juveniles because—” Gregor stopped. “I don’t think that makes any sense when you’re trying to use it for a motive for Tibor.”

“There’s something else,” Ray said. “We didn’t know it until this morning, or we’d have held her longer yesterday. It turns out there’s another connection, and this one is a lot more interesting.”

“And what’s that?” Gregor asked.

“Janice Loftus and Martha Handling were roommates back in 1979, when they were freshmen at Bryn Mawr College,” Ray said. “So we Googled it just to see what we could get. And we didn’t get much, but we did get the information that the two of them were fighting all the time and then ended up being split up for the second semester.”

“It still sounds very thin,” Gregor said.

“Right, it is,” Tony said, “but it’s a connection. But the other one’s better. Look at ten thirty-two. Mark Granby.”

“Oh, God help us,” George Edelson said. “Here we go.”

“Who’s Mark Granby?” Gregor asked.

“Mark Granby is the local representative of a company called Administration Solutions of America,” Ray said. “It’s the company that now runs most of the prisons in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, including the juvenile prisons.”

“Remember how we were talking about the rumors about Martha Handling taking bribes?” George Edelson said. “These are the people she was rumored to be taking bribes from. The general idea was that she took money and gave longer sentences so that the cells would be full and Admin Solutions would get more money. The Commonwealth pays them per prisoner per day served. More prisoners with more days served, more money.”

“I did understand that,” Gregor said. “And I can tell you what I thought of that from the beginning.”

“The thing about Mark Granby is that there’s no reason for him to be there. Absolutely none.”

“And there was reason for Janice Loftus to be there?” Gregor asked.

“Yes,” Ray said. “Janice Loftus drove Petrak Maldovanian to his brother’s hearing. Janice Loftus is Petrak Maldovanian’s professor of something or other—”

“American Government,” Tony said.

“American Government,” Ray repeated. “Petrak Maldovanian was just getting out of that class and he was worried about making the hearing on time, so Loftus gave him a lift over to the courthouse. Maybe that was some kind of a setup and she was just looking for an excuse to get to Martha Handling, but at least it’s a reason. As far as we know, there’s no reason for Granby to be there at all.”

“Have you talked to him yet?”

“We were trying to work up an excuse,” Tony said, “but we think it would be better if you talked to him. Assuming you can get him to talk to you. But technically, we’re done with this.”

“There’s a suspect in custody,” Ray said. “And the prosecutor is concentrating on the suspect.”

“So is CNN,” Tony said.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” George Edelson said.

Tony Monteverdi looked like he had something to say to that, but he didn’t, and the two detectives began to print out material they knew Gregor had to have.

There was a lot of it.

3

Twenty minutes later, Gregor was back out on the street, carrying what felt like a twenty-pound weight.

George Edelson was carrying nothing, but he was visibly stunned. “I don’t believe it,” he kept saying. “I really don’t. There really is material in this case for you to work with.”

“I don’t find that all that remarkable,” Gregor said. “From the little I’ve been able to find out about this woman, she was in a position of power, she was generally disliked, and she didn’t mind throwing her weight around. We were almost certainly going to find something somewhere if we looked long enough.”