Fighting Chance(67)

“Then what?”

“Then we’ll be able to get Tibor out of this,” Bennis said. “And yes, I know how he’s been behaving, but forget it. There’s got to be some explanation of it. And we’ll find it out, and everything will be all right. My God, I feel sleepy for the first time in days.”

Gregor did not feel sleepy, but he went upstairs and did the ritual bedroom thing anyway. Bennis threw on a nightgown and was alseep, on top of the covers, on her side of the bed, before Gregor had finished brushing his teeth.

Gregor watched her for a while, in that way when he was surprised to find he’d ended up here. She was a beautiful woman awake and a beautiful woman asleep. Gregor often found her not quite real.

He was exhausted, but he knew he wasn’t going to sleep. He went downstairs in his pajamas and his robe and took his briefcase to the kitchen table. There he opened up his laptop and brought up the files he’d been given on the case. Then he took out the wads and wads of paper and spread them out.

He was still bent over the piles and piles of them at three o’clock in the morning, when the doorbell started ringing and somebody started pounding on the front door.





PART THREE





ONE

1

Gregor Demarkian had always thought of himself as the sensible one on Cavanaugh Street, the one who didn’t accidentally leave his doors open all night, the one who didn’t open up to strangers on the doorstep. There was something about the frantic ringing and pounding that went right through him. His first thought was that somebody must have been hurt on the street. He’d never known Cavanaugh Street to have a mugging, but that didn’t mean it was impossible. His second thought was that one of the people he knew was in the middle of an emergency and just too frantic to think of the phone.

He pulled the door open without thinking twice about what he might find there, and ended up face-to-face with Asha Dekanian. It had started raining sometime in the night. The rain was coming down hard. Asha was wearing a thick overcoat over what looked like it might be a nightgown. Her hair was wet through and plastered to the sides of her face.

Gregor stepped back away from the door to let her in, and immediately heard movement above him on the stairs. Bennis was awake.

“Asha, come in,” Gregor said, “get out of the rain. Are you all right? Are the children all right? What are you doing here?”

Asha scooted in rather than walked, and stood in the hallway while Gregor shut the door behind her. She was shaking so hard, her teeth were rattling. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she said. “I left the house, I was going to go to Mr. Donahue’s, but then I thought, there are very small children there, practically a baby, I would ring on the doorbell and I would wake the baby. But I was already out in the street and I had to go somewhere. I came here. I came here because I thought you could know.”

“Know what?” Gregor asked.

“Know where Mikel is,” Asha said. “He didn’t come home. He had an appointment but he went a little early to see about something and then he called me and then he didn’t come home. It is three o’clock in the morning and he didn’t come home.”

Bennis had come the rest of the way down the stairs. “I’m going to put on some coffee. Or would you prefer tea, Asha? Are the children all right? Are they at home? Is there anybody with them?”

“The children are sleeping,” Asha said. “I left them in their beds. They were sleeping. I had to come. You know Mikel. He would not go out and not come back all night. Mikel does not miss his dinner. I waited and I waited. I thought if I waited long enough he would have to come home. He always comes home. And now it is three o’clock in the morning, and I do not know where he is.”

“I’ll make the coffee and then I’ll run over to Asha’s house,” Bennis said. “Kids have a remarkable tendency to wake up in the middle of these things.”

She went to the back of the house, and Gregor started to urge Asha in that same direction.

“I did not know what to do,” Asha said, crying. “I knew something had to be wrong when he was not home for dinner. He never misses his dinner, my Mikel. Sometimes in Armenia we would be missing dinner because there was no dinner to be had, but here he never misses his dinner.”

It was one of those conversations that was going nowhere, but Gregor let the woman babble. He took her into the kitchen and found Bennis standing at one of the counters, putting out coffee cups.

Gregor herded Asha into a chair and got a cup to put in front of her. “Now,” he said while Bennis watched the coffeemaker. “Start from the beginning. Mikel was supposed to have an appointment.”