Living Witness(114)

3




The body was, in fact, dead. It was dead and lying in what seemed to be an untouched heap in the doorway to Annie-Vic’s house, while the two men from the ambulance stood around near the gate, one of them smoking. Gregor Demarkian dismissed images of oxygen canisters exploding in flames to concentrate on Dale Vardan, who was on the scene and giving orders, apparently to no effect.

“She has to have gotten here some way or the other,” Dale Vardan was saying, poking his finger at the chest of the same state police officer who had talked to Gregor this morning. “You were here. You were keeping watch. You must have seen something.”

“But I didn’t see anything,” the officer said. “I was around the back, I told you. She wasn’t here when I went around there and when I got back she was.”

“So what about you?” Vardan demanded of the other state police officer. “Didn’t it occur to either one of you idiots that one of you should be out front here keeping watch at all times? What were you doing, both going back there together?”

“It was gunfire,” the first state policeman said in exasperation. “Three gunshots, one right after another. They sounded like they came from a shotgun. Neither one of us wanted to let the other one go on back alone. Who knew what he was going to find?”

“Well,” Vardan said, “what did you find?”

The first officer looked away. “Nothing much,” he admitted.

“Nothing much,” Dale Vardan said.

Gregor stepped forward then. The two state police officers seemed embarrassed to see him, but he had no intention of humiliating them any more than Vardan had already done. It was not a management style he had ever found effective.

Dale Vardan caught sight of him. “Well,” he said. “If it isn’t the great Gregor Demarkian, the Hillbilly’s Friend. I don’t know where you’ve been this morning. I’ve been responding to a call about a murder. This murder.”

“Really,” Gregor said. He looked down at the body, but he did not find it immediately recognizable. For one thing, it was lying more or less facedown, although oddly crumpled, almost half in a fetal position. “Who called you?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” Vardan said. “It was an anonymous tip. But it was a good one, don’t you think?”

“And did you call the Snow Hill Police Department?” Gregor asked. “I know you didn’t call me.”

“I didn’t have to call anybody,” Dale Vardan said. “Why should I? You may impress people in Philadelphia, but you don’t impress me, and as far as I’m concerned, this investigation has been bungled from the beginning. Right from the beginning. None of these hillbillies know how to investigate a murder that’s any more complicated than some stupid redneck getting liquored up and shooting the face off his wife. We should have been called in from the start.”

“Possibly,” Gregor said. He had been staring at the body all this time. Now he looked at the state police officer he had talked to this morning. “When you went around the back, did you do a search, or did you just check it out to make sure somebody wasn’t doing God knows what right in front of your faces?”

“The second thing,” the officer said. “We knew we shouldn’t be too long away from the front of the house. We’re not idiots. We just went around to check and we didn’t see anything and the shooting had stopped, so we came around back. And there she was.”

“This woman,” Gregor said.

“Right,” the officer said.

“And you checked to see if she was breathing,” Gregor said.

“We did,” the officer said, “but it was pretty clear right away that she wasn’t. So we were careful, you know. We didn’t move her or anything. That’s pretty much the way we found her. All sort of twisted up like that.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“Bunch of assholes,” Dale Vardan said.

Gregor didn’t stop to ask which assholes those were. He leaned forward and pulled the body slowly onto its back, holding the left shoulder with his winter-gloved hand to make sure that he would leave no fingerprints. He couldn’t imagine that it would matter even if he did.

“She looks familiar, don’t you think?” he said. He supposed he was talking to Dale Vardan, or maybe one of the police officers, but he really didn’t know.

The body took the last few inches in an undignified plop, and then Gregor realized why it looked so familiar.

It was Shelley Niederman.





PART III




. . . . our intention is to show that the theory of evolution is not indisputable scientific truth, as many people assume or try to impose on others. On the contrary, there is a glaring contradiction when the theory of evolution is compared to scientific findings in such diverse fields as the origin of life, population genetics, comparative anatomy, paleontology, and biochemistry. In a word, evolution is a theory in “crisis.”