Hearts of Sand(83)

“You’ve got something better?”

“There are facts here,” Gregor said, “and I don’t think the facts fit a hired assassin. For one thing, he was stabbed.”

“A knife in the back,” Andy said. “The symbolism is incredible.”

“I agree with that, too,” Gregor said, “but you see what kind of problem it makes for a theory like yours. The person who killed him had to be somebody he neither feared nor mistrusted. He wasn’t in a crowded room when he was killed, or in a crowd of people. He was in a deserted overflow parking lot at the local hospital. He’d have heard virtually anybody coming up behind him, and he wouldn’t have allowed somebody to come up behind him if he thought he had any reason for fear.”

“Okay,” Andy said. “But—”

“No buts,” Gregor said. “I didn’t say I was dismissing your idea outright. I think we ought to look into it, and so should you. I’m just saying that, right now, my best guess is that this isn’t going to be your problem, but Alwych’s. That whatever happened, to both Kyle Westervan and Chapin Waring, is personal.”

“Personal? You mean not even connected to the robberies?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I think I dreamed my way through several possible solutions, and then lost them all when I woke up. And it’s the Fourth of July.”

“So?”

“Nobody’s really working,” Gregor said. “My guess is that the ME’s office is off at the same parades as everybody else, on the assumption that there isn’t anything that can’t wait for twenty-four hours. And I don’t know if I can get hold of anybody on the police force here. The uniforms are going to be out directing traffic and conducting the parades.”

“Yeah,” Andy said. “I see that.”

“Just be patient and let us sort this out,” Gregor said. “I suppose you’re going to want to come down here eventually—”

“Yes, I definitely will.”

“So come down and get it over with,” Gregor said. “You might want to wait, but that’s up to you. I’m sure once you explain it to local law enforcement, they’ll give you what you need.”

“Yeah,” Andy said. “There’s that. All right. We’ll do it that way.”

“Then I’ll talk to you later.”

“There’s just one thing,” Andy said.

Gregor looked at the hash browns. They were real hash browns.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s about Kyle Westervan,” Andy said. “He was like Joan of Arc. In that old movie, you know it? It starred Ingrid Bergman, and she played Joan of Arc. And right from the beginning, that was who Kyle Westervan reminded me of. As if he’d seen God, or talked to God and God talked back, and now he was on some kind of a crusade. He didn’t ever say that, you know. He didn’t go around talking about visions or giving speeches about justice and truth and right, but there was something about him that made me think he was thinking all those things. And that’s part of the reason why I’m so unnerved about this. Because those kinds of people, the people who are acting for justice and truth and right, well, in operations like the one we’ve been running here, those people tend to get killed. And there’s Kyle, dead.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “That’s what he is. Dead.”

3

It took a good ten minutes to convince Jason Battlesea that he was going to have to stop whatever he was doing and get to the Alwych Police Department. It took another five to get Juan Valdez to bring around the car.

By then, Gregor was dressed and carrying his attaché case. He had his laptop and his first headache of the morning. He stepped out of the Switch and Shingle and saw his next headache gearing up. Down at the end of the driveway, there were people. There were lots of people. Some of them were a band.

Gregor gave Juan Valdez directions and sat back to see how bad the problems would be. The people at the end of the drive were gearing up for a parade, but the parade wasn’t due to start for an hour. The police keeping the road clear all knew who Gregor Demarkian was and what he was doing in Alwych. They passed him on from one watch post to the next as if he were visiting royalty.

The arrangement was worse when they got into the middle of town. The parade would be coming right down the middle of Main Street, and although that meant the police were more or less keeping Main Street clear, it really was only more or less. There were hundreds of people milling around, waiting for the parade to start. Some of these people were children, who didn’t care at all that cars needed to move or that the barriers had been put up to keep the marchers safe. Some of these people were vendors, who only wanted to sell as much red, white, and blue cotton candy and little flags as they possibly could.