Gregor pulled down the visor in front of him. There was a mirror clipped onto the back of that. It made it much easier for him to see Hope in the backseat. He got the side of her face, now fading from the flush. She looked, oddly enough, very cold.
Jason Battlesea had pulled into yet another road. This one distinctive in that most of the houses on it were right up next to the pavement. They were also all old. He pulled up in front of a small brown one.
Hope got her door open quickly and started to get out.
“I’ll be all right,” she said. Gregor was tired of hearing it.
“I just need to lie down,” Hope said. “I need to lie down for an hour and then I can talk to Mr. Demarkian.”
Gregor sighed. “You know you can’t lie down for an hour,” he said, “and you know I’m not going to let you.”
“Why not?” Jason Battlesea said. “Do you want to kill her?”
“I don’t want her to kill herself,” Gregor said, “and that’s where this is going.”
“Hope Matlock is going to kill herself,” Jason Battlesea said.
“No,” Hope said.
“I don’t think you are either,” Gregor said, “at least not as long as we’re here. But I’d really like you to tell me why you killed Chapin Waring and Kyle Westervan before you decide to give it a shot.”
Hot air was coming in through the open passenger door. Hope put her face in her hands and bent over.
It took a little while before Gregor realized that what he was hearing was sobs.
2
When they got her inside, the first thing Gregor could think of was how small the house was. It wasn’t square-foot small. Gregor could tell from looking at the outside that no matter what size the building was when it was first erected, it had been added on to over and over again through the years. There was a lot of it sprawling out along the road and back toward what looked like a stand of trees.
It was the rooms that were small, the ceilings lower than the modern custom of at least eight feet, the total dimensions cramped and strictly limited by thick walls with doors in them.
They came through the front door directly into the living room. There was a great wing chair near the fireplace. Jason Battlesea helped Hope Matlock into that, and she went without protest. She was bent over when she went into the chair. She stayed bent over once she was settled in it.
Gregor looked around and saw that there were papers and books everywhere, as if someone had taken the contents of a small office and thrown them over the furniture without caring where they landed.
Hope had stopped sobbing, but she was still crying. Gregor could see her shoulders going up and down above the face she still had hidden in her hands. He walked through the living room into the dining room. This room, too, was full of papers and books. Nobody could have found a place to eat at the dining room table.
He went through the dining room into the kitchen. This room was just a mess. There were dishes piled up in the sink. There were bags of chemicalized snack foods on all the counters and on top of the refrigerators. On an impulse, he opened the refrigerator. There were things in there in bowls that looked like they might have been there for a decade. He opened the little freezer compartment above that and found big bags of something called Pizza Rolls, a stack of Swanson Hungry Man TV dinners, and a big bag of frozen chicken nuggets.
When Gregor got back to the living room, Jason was waiting for him, scowling. “You can’t go looking around the place as if you owned it,” he said. “We don’t have a search warrant.”
“I wasn’t searching for anything,” Gregor said. This was actually true, although beside the point. “I was just noticing the obvious. Aside from some on the dining room table, that don’t look as if they’ve ever been displayed anywhere, there are no photographs.”
Hope looked up at the two of them.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she said. “You’re going to say it was wrong of me to kill Kyle. With Chapin, and with Marty—”
“Marty? Jason Battlesea asked.
“I told you we were looking at the wrong crime,” Gregor said. “Chapin Waring wasn’t killed because of the robberies, or at least not directly because of the robberies. She was killed because of the murder of Marty Veer.”
“Marty Veer died in an accident,” Jason Battlesea said.
Hope was staring at a small window on the other side of the room. “I grabbed the wheel,” she said. “We were in the car, sitting right next to each other, and he was drunk as hell, and I knew, I knew from seeing the tapes on the news, I knew what they were doing. Chapin and Marty. Chapin and everybody. I’d seen it coming for months. I wasn’t stupid. But then they started to air those tapes from the banks and I could see what they’d done. And they’d gone out and done it deliberately.”