Living Witness(89)
“Yeah, sure, it only has to happen once. Let me tell you what’s happening here, Mr. Demarkian from the FBI.”
“It’s been close to a decade since I was with the FBI.”
“You just listen to me,” Dale Vardan said. “This is hillbilly country, up here. That’s what you’ve got, a bunch of hillbillies. You think you don’t, ’cause this is Pennsylvania and not West Virginia, but this is Appalachia and we all know it. And these people here, they like to think they’re a cut above that, living in town the way they do, and not up in some shack somewhere with a still in the back shed, but they’re nothing but hillbillies, either, and it shows.”
“Ann-Victoria Hadley doesn’t seem to me to be a hillbilly.”
“No, she isn’t,” Dale Vardan said, “but Gary Albright surely is, and so are his boys, and as far as I’m concerned they could all kill each other off one fine spring morning and the entire state of Pennsylvania would be better for it. The entire country would be better for it. And then there’s that other one. He’ll be involved in this somewhere.”
“What other one?” Gregor asked.
“Dale is talking about Nick Frapp,” Gary Albright said. “Dale has big problems with Nick Frapp.”
Gregor was going to point out that Gary himself had big problems with Nick Frapp, but he didn’t. “I don’t see what the Reverend Frapp has to do with any of this,” he said instead.
“The Reverend Frapp.” Dale Vardan spit on the ground. “Reverend, my ass. Went out to Oklahoma where they have an entire college for hillbillies, that idiot Oral Roberts, saw a nine-foot-tall Jesus in his backyard. That’s what hillbillies do when they’re not drunk on their asses. They see Jesus in the backyard. Jesus in a ham sandwich. You name it, they’ve got Jesus in it.”
Gregor looked at the small, round bald spot directly on top of Dale Vardan’s head. It was difficult for him to look at anything except the top of Dale Vardan’s head, because Vardan had not backed up.
“If you’re assuming, as I take it, that the assaults are the work of someone angry with the people who filed the lawsuit against the school board,” Gregor said, “then I don’t see what the Reverend Frapp has to do with it. He doesn’t have anything to do with the public schools. His church runs a private school. Why would he care, one way or the other, what happened with the lawsuit?”
Dale Vardan raised his eyes to heaven. “It’s Jaysus!” he said. “That’s the reason for everything. It’s Jaysus!”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“They’d kill their own mothers for Jesus,” Dale Vardan said. “Then they’d speak in tongues and roll around in the mud and writhe like they’re having a fit. That’s the power of the Holy Ghost for you. That’s the power of the Lord. Then they get bit and they end up in the emergency room half dead. Stupid assholes.”
“Ah,” Gregor said again.
“Sit back and watch me work,” Vardan said. “I’ve been waiting for this a long time. I’ve been waiting for one of them to pull something they couldn’t get out of by shutting all their people up. If you don’t know what you’re doing, I do.”
“I think I know what I’m doing,” Gregor said. “And I will repeat, I’ve been hired by the Snow Hill Police Department to run this investigation. They have the right to do that, and I have the right, as head of this investigation, to decide both what help I want from the state police and what help I’ll do without. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll make some use of your crime lab and your tech personal, both of which you have to put at my disposal. It’s the law, and don’t think I don’t know it. Beyond that, I doubt if your services will be necessary.”
Vardan backed up this time. He really was a small man, Gregor thought, tiny, and it was as if he was refusing to admit it to himself. He wore clothes that were too big for him the way some women always wore clothes that were too small, because they didn’t want to admit to their real size. Vardan was looking him up and down, back and forth, side to side.
“Well,” he said. “I can always start my own investigation. I can always declare this a state police matter.”
“Not without a plausible excuse,” Gregor said pleasantly, “or a way to claim jurisdiction, neither of which you have. I’ve got some people I need to talk to now. I suppose I’ll run into you later.”
“You’re just like all of them,” Dale Vardan said. “You come in here from the city, you think you know what’s going on. You don’t. You don’t understand these people. You don’t know them. You don’t even begin to get the picture.”