Hearts of Sand(67)

“Right,” Jason Battlesea said.

“I’ve got to take a walk,” Gregor said. “There’s somebody I want to talk to.”

Jason Battlesea looked mulish. “I don’t understand why we shouldn’t think this guy killed her,” he said. “Then we could arrest him.”

2

Sometimes, near the middle of consulting cases, Gregor Demarkian felt as if he were going to explode. The local police who called him in were often either incompetent or unwilling to be competent. More often the latter. A friend of Bennis’s had once told him that that was what being a management consultant was. Nine times out of ten, you went into a business and found—although nobody ever told you—that it was desperate to fire some idiot and just couldn’t bring itself to the point.

With Alwych, the problem wasn’t incompetence or unwillingness to be competent so much as it was an ingrained sense of what was and wasn’t “done” here. The Alwych police didn’t have a suspect they weren’t afraid to name or nervous to arrest. They didn’t have any idea at all of what might have happened here. They only knew that they were suddenly famous, and they had to do something about it.

Juan Valdez was sitting in the car in the parking lot behind the station, but Gregor didn’t go to him. He walked out the front door of the police station instead and looked around on Main Street. The clinic was next to the hospital, up on a hill and easy to spot.

Gregor started walking in that direction. Twilight had begun, and it was sliding inexorably into darkness. Some of the stores were open, selling little American flags and American flag pins and American flag hats and even American flag bikinis.

After Gregor had gone about three blocks, there was a little square sign with a large H on it, and a smaller sign under that that said HOSPITAL with an arrow to the left. He followed the arrow and found himself on a wide road with a sidewalk only on one side. It curved around to the right in a wide sweep. Halfway up the sweep, there was another sign with another arrow.

He had gotten nearly to the top of the curve when he saw them: the hospital, modern and shiny and a little farther up the incline, and the clinic, also modern, also shiny, but very much smaller. He went through the little parking lot to the front door.

He saw the man he had come to see almost immediately. He looked just like all the pictures of him in newspapers and magazines. And he would have been a noticeable person even if he hadn’t been semifamous. He was very tall and very dark and very—there. Bennis would have called him one of those people who glowed in the dark.

The tall man was leaning up against the reception counter, talking to one of the nurses. He did not seem to be in a hurry, or in the middle of an emergency. Gregor walked up to him and held out his hand.

“Dr. Brand?” he said. “My name is Gregor Demarkian.”

Tim Brand looked up, looked puzzled for a moment, and then smiled. The smile was wide and broad and completely unaffected.

“Excellent,” he said. “I knew you were going to come and talk to all of us, but I thought it was going to be with Jason Battlesea or one of those detectives. Come right in. We’re having a very slow night.”

“It’s the Fourth of July eve,” the woman behind the counter said. “Of course it’s a very slow night. You watch what happens tomorrow. We’ll be full up and frantic.”

“Some of the guys who drink seriously don’t like to go to the emergency room to get dried out,” Tim Brand said. “The emergency room people tend to feel like they have to refer these guys to alcohol programs or get them to talk to social workers. We try to do what the earliest Christians did. You need help, we give it to you, no questions asked. If you want to talk to us, we’ll listen.”

“We listen to too much, if you ask me,” the woman behind the counter said.

Tim Brand gestured to the corridor behind the desk. “Come with me. I have an office of sorts, if you want to be private.”

Gregor let the doctor lead him first down the corridor that had been visible, then around a corner, then to an open door. The office inside was very small, and there was so much stuff strewn around that Gregor wasn’t sure he’d have a seat.

Tim Brand leaned over a chair and took a huge wad of papers off it. “You’re in luck,” he said. “Kyle was here not too long ago, and I had to clear a chair for him. I expect you’ll be talking to Kyle, too, eventually. You’ll be talking to everybody that hung around with Chapin Waring thirty years ago.”

Gregor thought about the notes. “Westervan,” he said finally. “Kyle Westervan. There were six of you. You were linked to Chapin Waring. Kyle Westervan was linked to—”