Hearts of Sand(27)

“Do you think any of those sightings were real?”

“I think Chapin Waring was to this town what Bigfoot was to everyplace else. I think now that she’s dead, we’re going to start getting sightings of her ghost.”

“All right,” Gregor said.

Jason Battlesea looked him up and down and up and down again, as if Gregor were an actress trying out for a role where the physical fit had to be perfect. Then he shook his head slightly and sighed.

“You’re not what I expected you to be,” he said.

The next sigh he took was very deep, as if he were trying to suck in all the air in the universe.

“Thank God,” he said.





SEVEN

1

One of the things Virginia Brand Westervan liked best about being a member of the United States Congress was the geography. No matter where you came from, no matter whom you were supposed to represent, you had to spend most of your time in Washington, D.C. It made the ritual returns for constituent contact feel like bad vacations.

This morning, though, what was striking her was that she was not going to be able to stay this far south for too much longer. She had to go back to Connecticut to campaign, and she had to go back soon because July Fourth was coming up. Nobody stayed in Washington on July Fourth, except tourists who came in to see the monuments and watch the fireworks.

Virginia leaned over her desk and buzzed Susan in the outer office. It always astounded her how old-fashioned all the technology in the Capitol building was.

Susan stuck her head in the door, her eyebrows halfway up her forehead.

“Have we heard from Alwych yet?” Virginia asked.

Susan came all the way into the office and closed the door behind her. “Sara in the constituent office called to say that Gregor Demarkian has arrived. She said he got picked up at the train station by a plain car driven by a man in a chauffeur’s uniform. It’s all right, Virginia. We had him thoroughly checked out when Jason Battlesea first said he was going to hire him. The only thing I found interesting in that entire file was that his first wife died of cancer and he just married again a little while ago, to this woman who writes fantasy novels.”

“Bennis Hannaford,” Virginia said. “I know. You know what I’d like to know?”

Susan shook her head.

“I’d like to know just how good he is at his job,” Virginia said.

“Oh,” Susan said. “I don’t think you have to worry about that. He’s solved a number of high-profile cases, and practically everybody who’s ever hired him has thought it was worth it.”

“Is he staying at the Switch and Shingle?”

“Yes.”

“Has there been a press conference down in Alwych? Or is there going to be?”

“No word on that,” Susan said. “I can call down and find out.”

“That would be a good idea.”

“I still think you’re worrying unnecessarily,” Susan said. “Isn’t it better to have somebody who doesn’t have a stake in the outcome? You can’t even say that about the FBI anymore. Everybody has some way they want it to turn out.”

“I suppose,” Virginia said.

She made a face and stood up.

“I take it that there’s been nothing at all on the other thing,” she said.

Susan took a minute to process that. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” she said. “If you’re talking about Kyle, we’ve still got the same intelligence on him and we’re doing the best we can, but he just does what a lawyer does. He meets with clients. The only way we could get any better intel on him is if we bugged his client conferences, and you know as well as I do that we couldn’t do that. If anybody found out about it, we’d be dead.”

“I don’t mean Kyle,” Virginia said. “Although, God only knows, I expect him to get hit with insider trading charges any minute. And now with this Gregor Demarkian in the picture—”

“I don’t know why you’ve got so much trouble with Gregor Demarkian,” Susan said. “You liked the idea when you first heard about it.”

“I know I did. I still like the idea. It’s just—I don’t know. Maybe you just had to have been there at the time. It was a very strange time, the weeks right after Chapin disappeared. I think we were all under suspicion, the four of us who were left. Nobody ever said so out loud, but we were. And there was a lot to be suspected of. There were two people dead. And the rumors were—the only word for them would be insane.”

“Did any of them turn out to be fact?”

“I don’t know,” Virginia said. “I expected that people would look into them now that things had started up again. But nobody seems to be very interested.”