Fighting Chance(89)

“Yes,” Russ said. “Yes, I do see that. But Petrak wasn’t charged, so no matter what the police may have said when you talked to them, they probably aren’t taking that theory all that seriously. I think that they were just trying to come up with a suggestion—”

“They could have said Petrak was the Easter bunny, and it would have been more plausible,” Sophie said.

“I am not the Easter bunny,” Petrak said.

There were times when dealing with Cavanaugh Street that Russ Donahue thought he needed antipsychotic drugs.

“Yes,” he said finally. “But the theory isn’t all that odd. Petrak and Mikel knew each other. Petrak may have said something in Mikel’s hearing or to Mikel himself, or Mikel may have seen something Petrak carried on him—”

“Where?” Sophie demanded. “At church? Because that’s the only time Petrak saw the Dekanians, at church. We don’t live in the neighborhood. It’s not like he’s around there all the time.”

“I know that,” Russ said. “I was just trying to show you how the police were thinking about it when—”

“And Petrak called them,” Sophie said. “He found the body and then he called them. Would he have done that if he had just murdered the man?”

“Actually,” Russ said, “people do do things like that, sometimes—”

“Are you now saying you think Petrak killed Mikel Dekanian? And—what?—that he killed that judge, too?”

“I don’t think Petrak killed anyone,” Russ said. “It’s not that. I’m just trying to explain how things stand and what we ought to prepare for—”

“That’s what I want to do,” Sophie said. “I want to prepare. I want to be way out ahead of this before they do arrest him.”

“Then the most important thing to do,” Russ said, “is to try to figure out what happened with that phone call. Gregor says he was with Mark Granby when Petrak says he got the phone call, and those two things can’t be true at once. If we could just figure out who made the phone call, we’d almost certainly have the murderer, because whoever it was must have known the body was there.”

“It was Mark Granby who made the phone call,” Petrak insisted. “He killed the judge. He was paying her bribes. He didn’t want it to get out. He killed Mikel Dekanian. He set me up to find the body and be accused.”

“It makes as much sense as anything they’re trying to pin on Petrak,” Sophie said.

Russ Donahue had never had a migraine headache in his life, but he thought he was about to get one. There was so much pressure inside his head, it felt as if his skull were going to pop any second.

“No,” he said, speaking slowly and clearly. Why you always thought people would understand you better if you spoke slowly and clearly, he didn’t know. “No, it doesn’t make as much sense. Mark Granby didn’t know Mikel Dekanian. Okay, I should say Mikel Dekanian didn’t know Mark Granby. On any level. There’s no reason to assume the two of them ever met. But Petrak and Mikel have met. They met at church if they didn’t meet anywhere else. Therefore, there is an established connection—”

“And you do think Petrak murdered Mikel Dekanian,” Sophie said. “His own lawyer. Isn’t that nice.”

“Miss Maldovanian,” Russ started.

And then the miracle happened. The phone rang.

Russ excused himself and picked up, and his assistant announced, “Gregor Demarkian is calling for you. He says it’s urgent.”

Russ had never been so happy to hear from anyone in his life.





FIVE

1

It took longer than Gregor had expected it to, and it required so much cooperation from so many people at so many levels of city and state government, Gregor began to think he was running for office.

“The only reason you’re getting away with this,” John Jackman said, “is that I know you’re good for it. If you say you know who, what, when, where, and why, then you know who, what, when, where, and why. And if Barack Obama hadn’t already become the first black President of the United States, I still might not let you get away with it.”

“Technically,” Gregor said, “Barack Obama is the first mixed-race President of the United States, so you could still—”

“Get out of here,” John said. “Get out of here before I kill you myself. That’d be an interesting news cycle.”

Gregor was not feeling flippant, even though he sounded that way some of the time. He hated these situations where, in order to get anything done, he had to sit around passively while other people helped him. He hated situations where he had to sit passively for any reason. There was, in his mind, something essentially wrong with passivity itself.