Living Witness(139)

“Do you have the murder weapon?” one of the reporters in the crowd called up.

“No,” Dale Vardan said. “We do not have the murder weapon as of yet, but we’re confident that we’re going to find it. I have men searching the Hadley residence, the McGuffie residence, and the diner. We think the most likely place for it to be is in the Hadley residence, since none of our witnesses saw her carrying it.”

“Hasn’t the Hadley residence already been searched?” another reporter asked.

Dale Vardan looked smug. “A cursory search of the premises was done on the day of the murder under the direction of the local police,” he said. “But the search was inadequate, and no useful evidence was found. I am now personally heading up the investigation into these crimes, and we are making rapid progress.”

“What about Gregor Demarkian?” yet another reporter said.

“I have no information on what, if anything, Mr. Demarkian is doing. He is not assisting me or my men and was not a part of this morning’s arrest.”

Up until then, Gregor hadn’t been sure that Dale Vardan had spotted him. Now Dale looked directly at him and smiled, and Gregor sighed. The only thing he wanted, absolutely, was to get into that hospital without being swarmed by reporters, and he knew it wasn’t going to be possible. Dale Vardan was going to make sure it wasn’t possible.

“There’s Mr. Demarkian now,” Dale Vardan announced, pointing in the direction of the Snow Hill police car and its three occupants. “If you’ve got something to ask him, ask him. I’m sure he’ll be more than happy to take your questions.”





3




Gregor was not happy to take their questions, and he wasn’t happy about anything else that happened to him for the next half hour or so, but he lived with it, because he had to live with it. He’d been in messes like this one before.

“The great detective,” Dale Vardan said to him at one point, when they were both away from the microphones. “It’s all a bunch of bullshit, that’s what it is. There’s not a damn thing a great detective can do that solid police work can’t, and that’s what I’ve got to offer, Demarkian. Solid police work. And once I started using it, it didn’t take me any time at all to figure out who did it and get those people safely locked up in jail.”

“That’s where you’ve got Mrs. McGuffie?” Gregor asked. “She’s in jail?”

“As we speak,” Vardan said. “And her husband with her. They’re domestic terrorists, that’s what they are. They’re no better than Timothy McVeigh. And we’re going to get the death penalty for both of them.”

The morning might have gone better if there had been better news about Annie-Vic, but there wasn’t. The news wasn’t exactly bad, of course. Dr. Willard had been quite right. Annie-Vic was awake and alert, which was a vast improvement over what she’d been like when Gregor first arrived in town. She followed them with her eyes. She looked directly at them when they talked to her. Unfortunately, she was still unable to move any of her limbs, and she was still unable to talk. Unless a miracle happened, and she was able to communicate by using her eyelids to deliver Morse code, they weren’t going to be able to get anything like testimony from her yet.

“Maybe we should try that Morse code thing,” Gary suggested. “I mean, she’s the kind of person who would know Morse code, don’t you think? She was probably in the Girl Scouts when she was a kid. Everybody in Snow Hill does scouts. She probably had every merit badge in the book, too.”

“I couldn’t possibly agree to an experiment of that kind,” Dr. Willard said. “Even if she could do it, it would leave her exhausted.”

Gregor couldn’t believe that anybody had taken him seriously. Still, Annie-Vic’s condition had improved even in the few hours since Dr. Willard had talked to Gregor on the phone, and that meant there was reason to hope it would improve even more, to the point of making it possible for her to name her attacker. Once they had that, all the rest of the evidence would be just back up. That was the kind of assurance Gregor liked when he was winding up a case, and he almost never got it.

They drove back to town at a slower pace than they had driven out to the hospital, and on the way Gregor contemplated, once more, the emptiness of rural areas. If somebody attacked you out here, you could scream for hours without anybody hearing you. It was like that scene in that movie Fargo, where the bad guys kill a policeman and a couple of high school kids on a lonely stretch of road, their guns going off full blast, and it didn’t matter. There was nobody to come to the rescue. Gregor hated the thought of there being nobody to come to the rescue. He had no idea why he was always thinking of the need for rescue, but he did.