“It’s a mistake,” he told Eddie Block and Gary Albright as they drove out to the hospital, “to think that memory is your friend. We tend to think that way because there’s so much we want to remember—friends, people we love, good times we’ve had. But in reality memory is a trap, and it’s especially a trap when you’re trying to solve a case. New cases are not like old cases, no matter how much you think they are. The human element is always different.”
The drive out to the hospital took them through what seemed to Gregor like miles of empty country, empty not only of houses and people but of trees. Who mowed these meadows, stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no houses to watch over them? Somebody must have. If the grass had never been mowed, it would lie much longer in the field, and there would be the beginnings of bushes and trees. The emptiness out here was frightening. Gregor had been in gang-infested neighborhoods in major U.S. cities and had not been as frightened as he was by this. He wondered if he could explain this to Eddie Block or Gary Albright and didn’t think he could.
“So what did this case make you think of?” Gary said. “It doesn’t make me think of anything. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It made me think of the first kidnapping detail I was ever on,” Gregor said. “We were looking all over for this guy who had kidnaped his daughter, and he turned out to have gone up to the attic of his wife’s house and killed himself and the girl up there. We were in the house for days before anybody thought to do a thorough check. It was negligent as Hell.”
“Which is why you made us search Annie-Vic’s house after Judy Cornish’s body was found,” Eddie said.
“I hope I made you do that because I’ve learned to follow procedure every single time,” Gregor said. “But that took a long time to learn. And I’ve let myself be distracted by memory, and then I realized that I had it backward. The murderer wasn’t in the attic. The murderer wasn’t in the house at all. And that’s the point.”
“If that’s the point, I’m dead, because I have no idea what it means,” Gary Albright said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Gregor said. “I can’t prove it yet anyway. I need some more information. I should have that some time this afternoon.”
“And then you’ll know who did it?” Gary Albright said.
“I know who did it now,” Gregor said, “but it’s like I told you, I can’t prove it. And I suppose that, if I’m perfectly honest about it, until I have the information I need, I can only speculate that that information does indeed exist. It’s possible that I’ll go to my meeting this afternoon and find out that I have it all wrong. That nothing of the kind I’m thinking about ever happened.”
“But you don’t think you’re wrong,” Gary Albright said. “You think you know who did it.”
“I do indeed.”
“And it isn’t one of us?” Gary Albright said. “It isn’t somebody trying to get rid of evolution, or anything like that?”
Gregor wanted to chide him for saying “one of us,” as if the parts of Snow Hill that were not Christian did not really belong to him, but that was another discussion. “No,” Gregor said. “It’s not somebody trying to get evolution out of the public schools. It’s got nothing to do with evolution or Creationism or Intelligent Design. That particular controversy was a gift our murderer had no reason to expect. Because, from what everybody has told me, when Franklin Hale ran for the school board and got his friends to run, he didn’t say a single thing about wanting to bring in Intelligent Design.”
“He didn’t even say it to me,” Gary said. “I had no idea that that was what he was thinking of. I was floored. He might have told Alice.”
“He might have,” Gregor agreed. “If you’re interested to know, we can find out later. But it isn’t important to the case. The only thing that is important is the way in which the controversy worked as a blind to let our murderer get away with—well, murder. That, and the fact that the killing of Shelley Niederman was completely gratuitous. I have no way of knowing if she knew what the murderer was afraid she knew, but I do know she didn’t know she knew it.”
“How do you know that?” Eddie asked.
“I know because we talked to her, and she didn’t tell us anything,” Gregor said. “She was sitting outside the Hadley house in that car, completely distraught, and she couldn’t think of a single reason why Judy Cornish would want to go into that house. And I think that if she had known, she would have said something. She had no reason to shield the murderer, and there was no reason to shield herself, either. She hadn’t done anything wrong, and Judy Cornish wasn’t doing anything wrong.”