Hearts of Sand(16)

He put the book back in the bag and got out at his destination, feeling the suddenly unmuffled sounds of city traffic as vaguely hostile. He went into the building and took out his authorization letter. The guard in the lobby looked it over and handed him a visitor’s badge.

The elevator opened at his floor, and a young woman was waiting for him, holding a file folder. She was pleasant and bland and not particularly interested in him. She stepped forward and held out her hand to be shaken. Gregor shook it.

“Mr. Fitzgerald is this way,” she said without bothering to give her name. “He told me to show you right in.”

Gregor was glad not to have to wait. They went down one corridor and passed through a room of cubicles. The office they were going to was down a side hall. The hall was windowless. The office was small.

Darcy Fitzgerald rose up from behind his desk as Gregor and his escort approached, and held out his hand.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “I know we’ve never met, but I’ve heard a lot about you. And not just from Patrick. Why don’t you sit down.”

The young woman waited expectantly.

Fitzgerald said, “Coffee is probably a good idea,” and she took off.

Gregor took one of the two padded visitors’ chairs in front of the desk and put his bag from Partners and Crime on the floor. Fitzgerald raised his eyebrows slightly, and Gregor brought the bag up onto the desk.

“I was wandering around the city earlier,” Gregor said. “I found this and picked it up. The clerk at the bookstore recommended it.”

Gregor took the book out of the bag and put it on the desk. Darcy Fitzgerald’s face lit up.

“Oh, God,” he said. “Well, I suppose it’s not all that surprising. The damned things are all over the city.”

“This book is all over the city?”

“All over the tristate area, probably,” Fitzgerald said. “You’ve got to give the guy credit. He’s got an obsession and he’s made it pay.”

“What guy? And what obsession?”

“Ray Guy Pearce,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s a—I don’t know what to call him. A conspiracy theory nut, that’s for sure. He’s been running Knight Sion Books out of his dining room in Queens for decades—all kinds of conspiracies, the government covering up alien landings, the government being manipulated by the thirteen richest families in the world, who aren’t really humans, but some kind of reptiles, and Clinton was one of them, they only made him look as if he’d grown up poor so that the rest of us would be fooled. That’s the kind of thing.”

“And he does all this out of a dining room in Queens?”

“It’s probably a lot easier now than it used to be,” Fitzgerald said. “Everything’s digital now. He’s got a couple of Web sites. But, yeah, Knight Sion is the largest publisher of conspiracy books in the country. Bigger even than Feral House. This murder must have been a godsend to him.”

“The murder of Chapin Waring?”

“Sure. She’s part of the conspiracy, or the robberies were, or something. I’ll admit I was never able to straighten it out. Knight Sion has been publishing books on the Waring case since maybe two or three years after Chapin Waring went missing. One of my predecessors took it seriously and looked into good old Ray Guy, but I don’t think he ever found anything that would link the man to the case. Except, you know, an obsession to see conspiracies in everything. We’ve got notes about Ray Guy and Knight Sion Books in the file, if you want to look into it yourself.”

Gregor picked up the book and turned it over in his hands. “Maybe I will,” he said.

Fitzgerald laughed. “The one you’ve got came out the first time a few years ago. When the news hit the wires, Ray Guy probably had a ton printed, along with a ton or two of the other titles on the case.”

“And this man has no connection to the case at all?”

“Not that we could tell,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s been sitting out there on his rear end for fifty years, just getting this stuff into print and trying to convince as many people as possible that we’re all being secretly prepared as sacrifices to the Antichrist by a cabal of—I don’t know. I never understood it.”

“He writes all these books himself?” Gregor asked.

“Nope. He’s got a whole stable of writers who do this stuff. Most of them specialize. And there are new ones coming in all the time. You’ve got to ask yourself how many of these people there could possibly be, but the answer is—an infinite number. And I do mean infinite. He writes the stuff about Chapin Waring, though.”