“Surely there are some bodies that have no next of kin,” Caroline said. “Surely you run across murder victims or accident victims you can’t identify. I’m sure you don’t let them just sit in a cold box in the morgue for fifty years.”
“Oh,” the officer said. “Oh. No. We have procedure for John Does. But those are John Does. Nobody knows who they are.”
“And nobody wants this one,” Caroline said.
“Oh,” the officer said. He took a great, big breath. “You don’t really have to decide until Thursday.”
“Once the body’s gone, I can finally get that woman out of my life forever,” Caroline said. “It’s a nice idea, but the Internet is eternal. Chapin Waring is going to be a cult figure for a generation and some idiot is going to put up Skycam footage of my front yard on their Web page for all that time. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
“Still,” the officer said.
Caroline waved him away. “I’ll talk to my sisters. Maybe they want to do something. I don’t know.”
“That’s a good idea. Talk to your sisters.” He’d started backing up again.
Caroline watched him get into his police cruiser and listened to the engine gun up, and the car began to move.
She didn’t move herself, because she didn’t see any need to.
Then something in her head broke, and she stood up abruptly.
She had Babycise and two soccer games and a trip to Home Depot to worry about.
She had a life that was made up of events on a schedule board, and she would have to live it.
FOUR
1
Gregor Demarkian had always liked New York City—sort of. It was closer to the truth that he had liked every version of it he had ever seen, and that he liked this one, too, at least as it appeared in the morning. That was the trouble with New York, as far as he was concerned. It never stayed the same from one visit to the next.
Of course, it didn’t help that the city had a thousand hotels or more, so that he never found himself staying in the same one. The one for this trip was in Greenwich Village, and he was here because Bennis picked it out for him.
“My publisher is always trying to check me into the Hilton,” she’d told him when she printed out the reservation confirmation on her computer, “but I prefer the Village. It’s calmer, for one thing. And it’s manageable. Of course, in a way, it’s a bit like Paris. You think you’re walking into a world of great writers and genius painters, and what you find is tourists and lawyers.”
Gregor didn’t know about the tourists and lawyers, but his appointment at the FBI wasn’t until afternoon, and what he wanted to do more than anything was walk around. Part of him was a little miffed that he was too far from Midtown to walk to it. There were bookstores up there he liked, and he would have been happy to see if the Mysterious Bookshop was still doing business at the same old stand. Of course, it wasn’t. Bennis had told him something about the store moving to TriBeCa, wherever that was.
The hotel was a good one, although Gregor had some trouble finding it on the map Bennis had given him as a guide. It wasn’t large and shiny the way an uptown hotel would have been, but Gregor was willing to bet it had cost the earth. He had a bedroom and a sitting room with a window that looked down on a street that might have been part of the last century, if it weren’t for the fact that everybody walking on it was talking on a cell phone.
Gregor kept his opinion of cell phones to himself and went downstairs in search of coffee. The hotel itself did not run a restaurant, but there were a few open places just down the block, and more across the street. Gregor picked one that looked less determinedly artful than some of the others and ordered a cup of coffee that cost less than a parking space.
The coffee shop was full, and loud, and the longer he sat there, the more he felt as if he shouldn’t. There were people waiting for tables. He couldn’t settle in.
He went out onto the street and began to look around. He went to Washington Square Park and sat down on a bench. He checked his watch. He really had managed to waste a fair amount of time. It was nearly noon. He looked at his notebooks and wished he’d managed to get something done.
He got up and started walking again. He was restless. He didn’t like all these consultations and conferences, all these different people wanting different things from him. It was never a good idea to put yourself in a position where you couldn’t tell where your loyalties should lie. The town of Alwych had hired him. He wished he could just leave it at that.
He was coming around a corner when he saw a young woman busily unhooking and unlatching things on the street. He stopped where she was and found himself in front of a long expanse of plate glass, very bright and very clean—so clean, he wondered if they washed the glass daily. He looked across at the books in the window.