Not a Creature Was Stirring(32)

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Another one.”

“This is Mr. Gregor Demarkian,” the first patrolman said diffidently.

“I don’t care who he is,” the second one said. “Christ, but I’m tired. Tired to death.”

“You’re not the one that’s dead,” the first one said.

“Oh, shut up.”

Gregor edged past the two of them, to the door of the room the second young man had come out of. The desertedness of this place was beginning to make him a little nervous. It wasn’t right.

He stopped at the door and looked in. He’d half-convinced himself that this wasn’t the crime scene after all. The young patrolman had been talking about something else when he’d said he wouldn’t go back in this room. The medical examiner and the rest of the patrolmen were wandering around upstairs somewhere, where something serious was going on. But something serious was going on here. There was indeed a corpse, stretched out against the fieldstone hearth of the fireplace, its skull smashed. There was a corpse, but there was nothing else.

Gregor had almost decided he’d followed Alice down the rabbit hole, when he heard steps behind him. They were very forceful steps, nothing that could have belonged to either of the two patrolmen. He turned quickly—and found himself staring into the most physically perfect face he had ever seen.

Male. Black. Furious. Familiar.

And dressed in one of those matte-brown suits bought only by the heads of homicide squads of major suburban police forces.

Gregor Demarkian did not have an exceptional memory for faces, but he remembered this one. It would have been hard to forget it.

“Oh, damn,” Gregor said.

“I don’t know what you’re swearing about,” John Henry Newman Jackman said. “I’m the one who ought to be swearing. What the hell are you doing in here?”





2


Gregor had never thought about the problems of beautiful men—or even their existence—but standing in this hallway with the broken body of Robert Hannaford in the room behind him, it occurred to him that John Henry Newman Jackman had an unfortunate face. It might have been all right if Jackman had been an actor. As a policeman, he was doomed to be an inhabitant of the worst of memories, and with that remarkable bone structure he was further doomed to be unforgettable. Maybe that was part of what was making him so jumpy, although Gregor doubted it. He’d encountered that kind of jumpiness before. It was called FBI Fever, and its most common verbal expression was: Get off of my turf.

Gregor stepped away from the door, to make room, and said, “It’s all right, John. I’m retired.”

“You’re retired?”

“Two years. Over two years.”

“But what are you doing here?”

Gregor supposed he could tell the truth, but that seemed less than tactful. He’d met Jackman in Philadelphia during Jackman’s rookie year, on a case so gruesome it had given everyone involved in it nightmares for months. From what Gregor remembered, Jackman had been a smart rookie, what the Bureau would have called an automatic rise-through-the-ranks. Now he seemed to have done just that, although Gregor couldn’t be sure how he’d landed in Bryn Mawr. Built a reputation in the city and been hired away as a prize, most likely—and that made it all the more important that Gregor not say anything about the patrolman who wasn’t at the door and the medical examiner who seemed to have disappeared. God only knew what was going on here.

Instead, he said only, “I was invited to dinner. When I got here there were all the cars parked outside and nobody around, so I came in.”

“And straight to the crime scene?”

“It didn’t look like a crime scene, John. There were just these two patrolmen. I was looking for anybody at all.”

Jackman gave him a long look, angry and exasperated. “Crap,” he said. “You’re all I need. I mean that, Demarkian. You’re all I need.”

If you can’t fight, feint. That’s what they’d taught him in self-defense classes. Gregor remembered it, even though he’d flunked out of every one. He said, “Do you know yet why he was dragged so far across the room? Why somebody didn’t just use his wheelchair?”

Jackman stiffened. “What do you mean, dragged across the room?”

“You can see it on the carpet,” Gregor said. He went back to the door and pointed inside. “The nap is all flattened. It goes in an arch from the wheelchair—I assume this was Robert Hannaford?”

“Of course it was Robert Hannaford. I thought you knew him. I thought you said you’d been invited to dinner.”