Marcie went up to the girls and then past them, almost to the wall. Then she stepped back quickly and said, “Oh, my God.”
Tim Brand moved in swiftly. He stopped and stared at something on the ground. Then he stepped back, too.
“Bloody hell,” he said, and all three of the women looked at him, shocked.
Marcie started to move forward again. Tim Brand grabbed her by the sleeve and pulled her back.
“Don’t touch anything,” he said. “The most important thing right now is that you don’t touch anything. Has anybody touched anything?”
The two young girls shook their heads. The one who wasn’t pregnant started to cry.
Gregor moved up, past the girls, past Marcie and Tim, and right up to the low stone wall.
Lying right next to it on the ground was the body of a man in what Gregor could recognize even in the half darkness was a very good suit.
He was lying on his face.
He had been stabbed in the back.
PART THREE
“Why the hell don’t you sit in your office and let people come to you fully clothed?”
—Paul Drake to Perry Mason in Erle Stanley Gardner’s Case of the Half-Wakened Wife
ONE
1
It was an hour later when yet another high-voiced, much-too-young special agent returned Gregor’s call, and the too-young special agent was obviously bewildered.
“He’s giving a speech,” the special agent said. Gregor decided that it was a he, although the evidence was ambiguous.
“He’s been here since six o’clock,” the special agent said. “And he couldn’t have left, not even for a moment. There are hundreds of people here. He walked in at six, he went up onto the platform, and they’ve been staring at him ever since. According to the people here, he hasn’t so much as taken a bathroom break.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Good. That was better than I expected.”
“He’s also signing books,” the special agent said. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“Go right ahead.”
“Are all these people crazy? Because I’ve been listening to this stuff, and I’ve been looking at some of the books, and this stuff is—”
“‘Crazy’ is as good a word as any,” Gregor said.
Over near the wall, a state police forensics officer was guiding two uniformed Alwych police officers through collecting the fibers and the fingerprints and the fluids. On the other side of the open space, Tim Brand was leaning against the door to the clinic, where Marcie and the two young women had gone with another uniformed police officer. Jason Battlesea, Mike Held, and Jack Mann were standing in the middle of everything, looking useless.
“What was that?” Jason Battlesea asked when Gregor put his cell phone away.
“I asked the Bureau to do us a favor and check on the whereabouts of Ray Guy Pearce.”
“You did? That’s great. Is he in town?”
“He’s in a Midtown Manhattan hotel giving a talk and signing books in front of a couple of hundred people,” Gregor said. “He’s been there since at least six o’clock, and he hasn’t left the stage even once.”
Jason Battlesea looked confused. “But that’s not good, is it?” he asked. “I mean, how could he have been here committing a murder—”
“He wasn’t.”
“Are you trying to tell me that this Pearce guy killed Chapin Waring and then somebody else came in and killed Mr. Westervan here? Because—”
“No,” Gregor said. “I told you before. Pearce was responsible for the break-ins, but he wasn’t the person who murdered Chapin Waring, and he has what most people would call an airtight alibi for the murder of—Mr. Westervan.”
“Kyle,” Tim Brand said from his place at the door. “His first name was Kyle. And he was here, in this clinic, yesterday. And he was fine.”
Gregor turned to face Tim. “He didn’t die of a heart attack,” he said. “He was stabbed in the back.”
“And how did he get here?” Tim demanded. “I was out here just as it was getting dark, and Virginia—oh, crap. Virginia was here, too. She came down those stairs and we talked for a couple of minutes and then she left. And no, there wasn’t a body here when she was here. I was sitting right on that wall. I’d have seen it. And it couldn’t have been more than an hour before Maartje and Juliette came out here. What did he do? Come down the stairs and then what? Why would he come down the stairs? Why wouldn’t he just come right into the clinic by the front door? It’s what he usually did.”
“Oh, my God,” Jason Battlesea said. “The congresswoman was here? Right here? In back here?”