Hardscrabble Road(106)

Beata opened the Office to the relevant day, to the beginning of Morning Prayer, and stopped. The words came. The visions did, too. She had seen Dr. Richard Tyler before, she just hadn’t realized it was him. She’d not only seen him, she’d stared straight at his face and exchanged at least half a dozen sentences with him. Even at the time, something about him had been nagging at her, some feeling that he was somebody she knew or somebody she ought to recognize. But, of course, she’d pushed all that away. She’d just assumed that she’d seen him before at the barn. She saw so many of them, and so many of them came over and over and over again.

Out the windows of the bus the day was dark and cold and windy. The few sickly trees that lined the sidewalks were bent under the force of winds that whipped back and forth with no indication of what they would do next. It wasn’t just that she knew where she’d seen him, it was that she knew when she’d seen him, and that was, well, crazy. It got crazier the longer she thought of it. She should pray her Office. She should offer this up. God was supposed to provide you with answers to dilemmas like this.

At the moment, though, God was not providing, and Beata knew she was going to have to take it up with Reverend Mother.





FIVE



1


It was Rob Benedetti’s idea that they should all meet at Neil Savage’s office, and then his further idea that he himself shouldn’t be there, since he wasn’t really investigating “the case.” Gregor Demarkian had come to the conclusion that nobody was investigating “the case.” In several important respects, there was no “case” to investigate. There was only a series of not-quite-connected happenings, a lot of conjecture, and a confusion of jurisdiction. Surely a homicide detective working out of the Hardscrabble Road precinct should be investigating the death of Drew Harrigan, and a homicide detective out of whatever precinct it was where the DA’s Office was should be investigating the death of Frank Sheehy. Even assuming cooperation between those two detectives—or, more likely, detective teams—that would be confusion enough, without taking into consideration the fact that Frank Sheehy had almost certainly not died in the place he was found, and the further fact that a man dressed as a homeless person pushing a shopping cart could have walked for miles without being intercepted by anybody. Even the police gave the homeless people a wide berth. It would be easy for all this confusion to sink whatever case there might be altogether, and Gregor thought John Jackman should know that, but he didn’t want to tell him, yet. The lack of any clear jurisdiction was having the oddly salutary effect of leaving him free to work out the problems presented on his own, which was something he’d almost never had the luxury of doing, even at the FBI. There was always somebody around to second-guess you, or to insist that you do this first rather than that. Right now, they were all doing whatever he told them to do, in whatever order he told them to do it. Nobody else was competing for their time.

It was Marbury and Giametti who would be coming to Neil Savage’s office. Rob Benedetti had told him about it when he called last night to run the details of the ME’s report.

“Arsenic, again,” he’d said. “I know we suspected it, but it’s kind of disappointing. If it’s another case of filling a bunch of pill capsules with the stuff, it’s going to be impossible to trace to anybody in particular.”

“Did Frank Sheehy take pills?”

“I don’t know,” Rob said. “I had one of the uniforms up here go over and talk to that woman again, that Marla Hildebrande, and she didn’t seem to think so, but she was an employee. She could have not known.”

“The impression I got was that she was very close to Sheehy,” Gregor said, “but that doesn’t matter, because it almost surely won’t be another case of putting the arsenic in pill capsules. When you do that, you have to be prepared to wait. Unless you doctor every single pill, you’ve got to assume it could be a week or more before your victim is actually dead, and I’m pretty sure nobody could wait that long to get rid of Frank Sheehy.”

“So how would he deliver the arsenic?”

“In a cup of coffee,” Gregor said. “In a drink. Anything sweet would be all right. After that, all we need is somebody who would not be seen as out of place handing Frank Sheehy a drink—no, beyond that. Somebody who wouldn’t seem out of place talking to Frank Sheehy in the first place. Somebody Frank Sheehy talked to often enough so that nobody would take much notice of the fact when he was around.”