Hardscrabble Road(60)

“Occam’s razor,” Giametti said solemnly.

“Try applying Occam’s razor in this case,” Gregor said. “What was Drew Harrigan doing in a barn full of homeless men on the edge of the city—I mean, look at this route; it’s not like we’re right next door to the Liberty Bell—what was he doing there? Do you know what the simplest explanation is?”

“That he went there to visit his sister for some reason,” Rob Benedetti said.

“Exactly,” Gregor said. “And that he was dressed as a homeless person and pretending to be one so that he didn’t get spotted, because, let’s face it, he’s an unusual-looking person. Was. Big and fat and florid. Got his picture on a million things, including a book that’s in the stores now. That’s the simplest explanation here, except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” Marbury asked.

“Why bother with the barn,” Gregor said. “If he wanted to see his sister, why didn’t he just go right up to the monastery and ask to see her? Under most circumstances, the simplest explanation would be that he didn’t want anyone to know he was seeing her, but that doesn’t make sense, either. He’s dressed as a homeless person. Nobody is going to know it’s him to begin with. He doesn’t gain anything by sleeping in the barn, assuming that’s what he was doing. Turn it around. Maybe it was the Reverend Mother who insisted on the barn. Maybe she’s the one who didn’t want to be seen talking to her brother, or even to a homeless man. But there’s no reason for that, either. She’s his sister. Why shouldn’t she talk to him? Especially since he’s in trouble and she’s a nun.”

“Do you really think it’s going to turn out to be something like this, something this simple?” Rob Benedetti asked. “Do you really think we’re going to end up arresting a nun?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

“We’d like to avoid it,” Rob Benedetti said. “Not because we’re soft on the Catholic Church, but because it’s always bad news when we arrest a little old lady. A little old lady in a habit is going to be worse.”

“And they’re going to be really impressive habits,” Giametti said. “I didn’t think nuns wore habits like that anymore, all the way down to the floor.”

“The nuns on EWTN do,” Marbury said.

They were getting farther and farther out now, into the areas Gregor had already decided weren’t really in the state of Pennsylvania at all. They could have been anywhere, the remnants of an industrial city that had long since lost both its industry and its claim to civilization.

“Every once in a while,” he said, “you do get cases where the simplest explanation isn’t the right one, but when you do, it’s almost always because there’s a perpetrator in the picture who feels the need to star in his own movie. Somebody who has to devise patterns, make plots, see the world as a functioning whole without a single element out of place. And that’s worrisome.”

“Because they tend to get away with it?” Rob Benedetti said.

“Oh, no,” Gregor said. “They’re the last kind of murderer to get away with it. The ones who get away with it are the ones who act on impulse and just disappear. That was the whole point of Murder Incorporated. It’s hard to catch a murderer who just walks up, gets it over with, and has no other connection to the victim. No, what’s worrisome about the murderer who does the not-simplest thing is that he, or she, is almost always a fanatic.”





FOUR



1


Where were you on the night of January 27? That was the basis of a play Marla Hildebrande had read when she was in high school, and now it struck her as odd, that she was sitting here in her office trying her best to answer it. The play was by Ayn Rand, she was sure. She’d read it during her only period of “political engagement,” except that nobody is ever really politically engaged with Ayn Rand, except maybe Alan Greenspan. If politics was something like Ayn Rand envisaged it, Marla could get herself interested in it. It wasn’t the particulars of Randian politics that had intrigued her, though, it was the tone. High moral drama, intensely personal statements of commitment and conviction, conspicuous heroism conspicuously observed—it would be like being in the kind of movie whose television ads involved a lot of trumpets. When she wasn’t happy being what she was, Marla could see herself starring in one of those, something with Russell Crowe in it, and boats, something with an execution scene at the end, so that she could brave death and give a speech in the most affecting possible circumstances. Anne Boleyn. Sir Thomas More. Mary, Queen of Scots. Marla could see herself playing all of them on the scaffold, as long as she didn’t have to be on a scaffold herself.