The drive was long and winding, twisting through a stand of trees as dense as a forest. The car did a dip and a turn and another dip and came out at the start of a broad lawn. In the distance, Engine House itself rose like the castle the society writers insisted it was, its stone-facaded wings stretching across the horizon like petrified snakes.
Haunted house, Gregor thought automatically. Just as automatically, he amended it. No house could be haunted when it was so dramatically lit up.
Lit up.
Gregor felt the breath go out of him before his mind had a chance to recognize what it was seeing.
It wasn’t Engine House that was lit up. There were lights on the terrace and other lights over the door and one more coming from one of the rooms on the house’s east side, but that was all. What was lit up was the ambulance, and the four police cars keeping it company.
He switched into the rumble seat, to be closer to the partition and therefore to the windshield. What he was seeing he had seen many times before. He knew it the way a classical dancer knew the choreography of a ballet. When they got up close enough, there would be a young patrolman guarding the door and a pair of medics waiting with a body bag. Inside the house, there would be a dozen men with nothing to do and one in an ordinary brown suit with a notebook. Somebody would be asking a lot of questions.
At the moment, Gregor Demarkian had only one question he wanted to ask: had old Robert Hannaford finally let loose and killed someone, or had someone decided to kill him?
PART TWO
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 24–TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27
THE SECOND MURDER
ONE
1
IT WAS SOMETHING HE would never have done, if he had still been with the Bureau. In fact, it was something he instinctively knew was wrong. If there was one thing he had learned in twenty years of federal police work, it was how to respect jurisdiction. He had no jurisdiction here. He didn’t even know if he had a technical right to be on the property. If it was Robert Hannaford who was dead, then the invitation to Gregor Demarkian had died with him.
On the other hand, there was no uniformed patrolman at the door, as there should have been. The door was wide open and the foyer was lit—and empty. The place looked deserted, as if a passel of guests had arrived and then gone underground.
You’re getting itchy, Gregor told himself. Then he thought he ought to feel guilty, but didn’t. For one thing, he was much too curious. For another, he was getting angry. If he had been the chief of police in this town and walked in to find the place in this unsecured state, he would have had somebody’s head.
Because there was nobody’s head he could have, he left the driver standing at the foot of the terrace and climbed the steps toward the front door. The driver was babbling, going on and on about how poor Mrs. Hannaford must have died of her illness, but Gregor paid no attention. It just proved what Gregor had thought in the car—that the man was singularly unintelligent. If this had been a natural death, there wouldn’t have been a whole pile of patrol cars and a medical examiner’s van cluttering up the drive.
He stepped into the foyer and looked around. There were doors to his right and directly in front of him, but they were both closed. The doors to his left were open. He peered down the long hall they opened on and found the first sign of activity: a young patrolman standing in the middle of the carpet at the far end, looking green.
“I’m not going back in there,” the patrolman was saying to someone out of sight. “That thing makes me dizzy.”
Gregor sighed. “That thing” was probably the corpse. Why did they let these people join police forces when they couldn’t stand the sight of an ordinary corpse? Gregor had no doubt this was just an ordinary corpse. If something really strange had been going on here, there would not only have been a patrolman at the door, the entire journalist population of the Philadelphia ADI would have been out there, too.
Fortunately, he had learned a few things besides the etiquette of jurisdiction in the Bureau. He was a middle-aged man beginning to run to fat, not Clint Eastwood, but he could make people think he was the president of the United States if he wanted to.
Gregor squared his shoulders, straightened his spine, and sailed toward the green young man. His strategem must have worked. The green young man came immediately to attention.
“Sir?”
“Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.
The green young man nodded sagely, as if he’d been hearing the name all his life. Gregor almost felt sorry for him. The boy was scared to death, thinking with fear instead of his brain—and here Gregor was, about to get him in a great deal of trouble.
Another young man came out of a room on the right, not scared this time but sullen and belligerent. He reacted to Gregor’s stiff-backed presence like a dog to a mailman. He didn’t question Gregor’s authority. He assumed it and hated it on sight.