Hardscrabble Road(86)
“—The woman who came to get me said you had a phone call.”
“We did,” Rob Benedetti said. “That’s part of the reason why we’re assuming. Crap. This makes no sense. Assuming this was the guy who killed them both, and this is Markey, dead from I don’t know what, why not just leave him wherever he fell? Why bring him out here in the wretched cold and dump him behind the DA’s Office?”
“Lots of reasons,” Gregor said. “Markey may have died in a place that could incriminate the murderer, although I doubt it. I can’t see any of the people we’ve looked at in this case so far, not even any of the people on Ellen Harrigan’s list, inviting a man like Sherman Markey onto their property for any reason. It would make more sense for them to pick a neutral place to meet. My guess is that somebody needs us to know that Sherman Markey is dead.”
“Needs us to know that?” Rob Benedetti said. “Why?”
Gregor shrugged. “There’s something somebody gets if Sherman Markey is dead. Rather than just missing, I mean. I don’t suppose it’s possible that Sherman Markey made a will.”
“I’ll ask the people over at the Justice Project about it,” Rob Benedetti said, “but somehow, I doubt it.”
“So do I. Is it possible Sherman Markey was left anything of value in Drew Harrigan’s will?”
“If he was, I’ll join the circus.”
“My feeling exactly,” Gregor said. “I don’t know. There has to be a reason to go through all this elaborate nonsense to make sure we found the body, right away, and to make sure we got it identified right away. I don’t believe in detective story murderers who go through a lot of elaborate rigmarole in order to commit the perfect crime. Murderers don’t do that kind of thing in real life.”
“Charles Stuart,” Rob Benedetti said solemnly.
“Yes, well,” Gregor said. “Any man stupid enough to shoot himself in the stomach is a wild card nobody should make any predictions about. Let’s get inside.”
“Let’s get inside,” Rob Benedetti agreed.
He walked over to the teams surrounding the crime scene, and had a few words.
2
Gregor Demarkian liked crime scenes. He liked the concreteness of them, the mundane specificity of forensics before the analysis got underway and the medical examiner started to think of himself as a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Sherlock Holmes. He liked them a lot better than having to investigate in their absence, which happened sometimes, as it had with Drew Harrigan. The problem was that, in a way, it had happened now, too. Sherman Markey, assuming it was Sherman Markey, had not been killed in that back alley. There was too much of that going around in this case. None of the bodies was ever found where they died, and none of them was found where he’d been murdered. It made Gregor wonder how it had been done and why it had been done that way. To kill someone as Drew Harrigan had been killed, you either had to not care how long it took before the death occurred, or you had to be sure that the victim would ingest the poison close to immediately. If there was no urgency to the murder, why commit it? And was it ever possible to be absolutely sure that your victim would swallow a pill just when you wanted him to? Drew Harrigan could have taken those pills on the bus coming up to the monastery, or right away, as soon as he got them. He could have stepped out the murderer’s door and chugged them down dry and dropped dead half a block away.
Actually, there were a lot of questions to be asked about Drew Harrigan that nobody was asking yet, and others that were being asked, but without results. Back up in Rob Benedetti’s office, Gregor looked around again at the prints on the walls and the furniture, utilitarian and drab, so much like what anybody would expect the furniture to look like in a District Attorney’s Office that Gregor wondered if the person who had decorated it had taken her cues from old episodes of Perry Mason. He didn’t like the unusual in murder cases. He didn’t even believe the unusual in murder cases. When the unusual did exist, it was the sign of a serial killer, and that was not what was happening here.
Rob Benedetti was on the phone. He got off and came over to where Gregor was looking at a print of Connecticut’s Charter Oak. Gregor had no idea why the print was there.
“Marbury and Giametti will be up in a minute. I just talked to the ME. He’s standing by waiting for the body to be brought up to him. I want identification and confirmation of identification within the hour. This is making me crazy. I used to be a police officer, did you know that?”
“No,” Gregor said, “but I guessed.”