He applied himself to the laptop. First, he did a Google search for anything and everything having to do with Chester Ray Morton. This time he got a “sponsored link” with a picture from some magazine somewhere. Apparently, the case was beginning to attract some media attention. Gregor wondered if they’d made the “Oddball” segment on Keith Olbermann’s show yet. He checked out the magazine and found absolutely nothing he didn’t know already.
He tried again, this time searching for “Chester Morton WY,” as if Chester were a town in the mountains. He got a small flurry of hits, most of them the same hits he’d had before, but targetted to the parts of them that mentioned that Chester had always loved Wyoming. He tried the Wyoming Citizen’s Crime Watch, and got nothing. He tried the New York Citizen’s Crime Watch and got a long lead story about a woman who had robbed a bank wearing a burka. Except that nobody was sure it really was a woman. The burka covered too much.
Gregor got up and moved away from his laptop. He went to stand at the windows that looked out onto the parking lot. He pulled the curtains back and stared at the darkening evening, the lights going on in the town of Mattatuck, the cars in their parking spaces. At the edge of the parking lot, there were grass and trees and what looked like a dirt access road—except that it might not have been dirt. It might just have been dusty from lack of use.
If you eliminate the impossible, Sherlock Holmes used to say, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Gregor had no idea if he was quoting that correctly. But he got the general idea, and the general idea was right. The problem was that everything in this case was improbable, and nothing was really impossible. What felt impossible were the really massive improbabilities—that body wandering all over creation like it was still ambulatory; the complete lack of anything like professional police work in a town that was large enough to qualify as a small city; the entire story of Chester Morton, which was half like a fairy tale and half like the kind of pulp novel that had been popular in the Forties.
One day, twelve years ago, Chester Morton had decided to leave. One day, a couple of weeks ago, Chester Morton had decided to come back and had brought with him a baby’s skeleton in a yellow backpack. There was no rhyme or reason to it. None. Maybe, twelve years ago, he’d left town because he’d killed the baby. Maybe that was the baby Darvelle had said he’d wanted to buy. But, what baby? There was nothing in any of the material Howard Androcoelho had sent him to indicate that there was a baby that had gone missing at the same time Chester Morton had. There was nothing to indicate that a woman had gone missing around the same time, either.
Gregor walked back across the room to the door, then back again to the window. He leaned his forehead against the glass. He counted to ten. Nothing shook itself loose.
He opened his eyes again, and looked out.
And that was when he saw it.
Out on the access road, half hidden by the trees and the grass and the puddled darkness beyond the security lights, a car had come to a stop. The light from the headlights hung in the air for a while and then went out. The interior light went on and stayed on for longer than it had any right to. Then that light went out and another light went on in the interior, as if somebody were using a flashlight.
It didn’t look right at all, and it didn’t feel right.
And Gregor Demarkian didn’t trust anything that happened in Mattatuck to be about anything but the Chester Morton case.
2
Gregor Demarkian didn’t think for a moment about what he was doing until he got past the parking lot and into the grass. Then it occurred to him that he was behaving like an idiot. It had been years since he’d done any kind of field work, and even that had required him to spend time sitting in a car, not thrashing through the underbrush. He wasn’t dressed for this. The slick soles of his wing-tip shoes kept threatening to slide out from underneath him. The landscape around him was too dark. The security lights in the parking lot were aimed inward, toward the hotel. The access road in front of him had no lights at all.
Whoever was in the car still had the flashlight going, though, and Gregor thought that was interesting. Batteries didn’t have all that long to run before they conked out on you, and whoever was using these was behaving as if that didn’t matter. Gregor tried to see what the person in the car was doing. The impression he got was that the person was … reading a book. But that made no sense.
After the tall grass, there was a stretch of marshy stuff and brush, and then some small trees. Gregor made himself move slowly. He didn’t want to be heard, but mostly he didn’t want to fall. The closer he got, the more obvious it was that the person in the car was a woman, and that the woman was at least middle-aged, if not edging toward elderly. It wasn’t anybody he recognized. It certainly wasn’t Charlene Morton. Whatever could she be doing here sitting alone on an access road with her engine off in the middle of the night?