His instinct was to sit back and wait for Mark Granby to do what he had asked him to do. This might take a long time, which made him edgy. He went to see Stefan every chance he got, and he paid attention to what was happening with the case. Nothing was happening with the case. The judge was dead, and everybody was milling around, talking but doing nothing. Stefan was supposed to have another hearing. He couldn’t have another hearing until a hearing was scheduled. As of this morning, no hearing had been scheduled. Not until a hearing was scheduled could they know which judge would preside, and until they knew that, they couldn’t do anything.
“It’s very important,” Mark Granby had said. “We don’t do these things right out in the open. And I can’t go. You have to go.”
Mark Granby’s voice sounded odd. It reminded Petrak of the noise people made in their throats when they were being strangled in the movies. He was also whispering, as if he were close to other people and afraid of being overheard. It made Petrak uneasy.
“You have to go,” Mark Granby insisted.
All Petrak could think of was that the man was setting him up for a mob hit.
The impression of an impending mob hit was so strong, Petrak nearly ignored the whole thing. It occurred to him that Mark Granby now knew something he hadn’t known before. He knew that Petrak had been lying. Petrak did carry the phone on him. He carried it on him at all times. There was no place safe to put it. Aunt Sophie cleaned religiously and often. She’d find it no matter where he put it in his room. She’d look at it, too.
And that would be the end of everything.
Petrak thought about the phone. He thought about the mob hit. He thought about the place where he was supposed to be meeting a woman named Lydia Bird. It was a ridiculous name, Lydia Bird. He couldn’t find her name on the list of city employees. But maybe judges were not city employees, and maybe Lydia Bird was not a judge. It was impossibly difficult to know what to do.
In the end, he went, all the way down to the center of the city, in a part of town he knew nothing about. He had a vague impression that he should know where he was, that he didn’t know only because he had come the wrong way around. Since he could not connect that thought to any solid information, he let it go and concentrated on the three-by-five card where he had written down the information.
There were big official-looking buildings all around him, but when he made the next turn, there were mostly small stores and filling stations and pawnshops. Petrak didn’t like pawnshops. They made him depressed.
Petrak made one more turn and found himself in an alley. The alley was lined with big garbage bins, but at the very end of it was a door into the back of one of the brick buildings that backed on the alley. That would be their garbage cans he was passing.
That would be the door he was supposed to go through.
It looked … wrong.
Petrak swallowed his fear and walked all the way down to the door, all the way past the garbage cans. Of course it felt wrong. It was wrong. All the things they were doing here—it was all wrong. It had to be wrong to take a kid like Stefan and lock him up for years for shoplifting a couple of video games.
The last instruction was the easiest to follow: “Don’t knock. Walk right in.”
Petrak did not knock.
He stood in front of the door. He took deep breaths to calm the shaking in his arms.
He grabbed the door and pulled it open.
There was no mob hit waiting for him. There were no thick men with machine guns. There was no hired assassin in black spandex with a silencer on his rifle.
There was only the dead body of a man Petrak Maldovanian knew, but took a few minutes to recognize.
THREE
1
It took Gregor Demarkian three calls to George Edelson—and George Edelson seven calls to people as far away as Harrisburg—to get Gregor into the juvenile detention center to see Stefan Maldovanian. It took that long, and yet Gregor still wasn’t sure why he wanted the interview.
Mark Granby told Gregor about “the kid,” and the kid had turned out to be Petrak Maldovanian. That gave Gregor not one, but two possible motives for the murder of Martha Handling, both of them more plausible than the motive now on the table. More than that, it gave him a possible explanation for Tibor’s behavior. That was more than anybody had had up to this point, and it was also the weak spot in the prosecutor’s case. What was even better, that explanation did not require Tibor to have killed anyone.
Still, there were pieces, pieces that didn’t fit, pieces that bothered him. The most logical explanation would be that Mark Granby, or somebody like him, somebody involved in the corruption, had killed Martha Handling before she had had a chance to rat them all out. But even Mark Granby had seen the flaw in that.