“Seven? In the morning?”
“In the morning.”
“Bobby, there won’t be anybody there at seven in the morning. We’ll stick out like bag ladies at the April-in-Paris Ball.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
“Bobby—”
“Be there,” Bobby said. He shoved his thumb against the power switch and turned the phone off. It wasn’t as satisfying as really hanging up, but it had something. He shoved the antenna down and threw the phone back into the briefcase.
He had money all over the bed, and he had to put it back.
There was a digital clock on his bedside table, the kind that told the seconds as well as the minutes and the hours. It reminded him of a cliché he’d thought of when he first met McAdam, but hadn’t allowed himself to dwell on since. It’s only a matter of time. How true. How true, how true, how true.
And now was the time.
Someone knocked on his door. He stood up and started shoving money back into the safe.
“Who is it?” he said.
“Myra.”
“Just a minute.”
Crap, he thought. Shit shit shit shit crap.
Daddy was dead. Daddy was out of the picture. Once Daddy was out of the picture, everything was supposed to be fine.
And it wasn’t.
Myra knocked on his door again. He took a huge fist full of cash and threw it at the open mouth of the safe. It hit the side and scattered bills everywhere.
Emma was dead, but he didn’t think about it. To Bobby Hannaford, Emma dead seemed like the least important thing in the world.
FIVE
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN DIDN’T WANT to go home. He was riding in Jackman’s unmarked police car, at six o’clock in the evening, through the center of Philadelphia—and he felt good. That was what he was trying not to admit to himself. The Hannaford case was like an adrenalated narcotic. The first few doses had energized him, but left him substantially free. Now he was as addicted to it as the monkeys he had heard about, who had become so enamored of being high that they’d chosen cocaine over food. He couldn’t remember the last time his mind had worked so well. Long before Elizabeth had fallen sick, he had fallen shell-shocked. Too many years of too many crazies too mindlessly obsessed with brutality had numbed his brain. There was nothing numb about it now. It was working away, sorting through bits and pieces of information, snagging on inconsistencies, and it felt good, too. Thinking had become a physical pleasure.
If he had been a different kind of man, he would have worried about his insensitivity. That poor girl was dead. From what he’d seen, she’d been as innocent and undeserving of execution as Donna Moradanyan. Somebody should grieve for her. Gregor knew too much about the world to think that someone ought to be him. It was a damn good thing there were people who could think without becoming sentimental, who could divorce themselves from the emotional to concentrate on the objective truth. Without them, the human race would still be living in caves.
Jackman turned onto a side street, taking some shortcut through the rush hour traffic Gregor didn’t want to understand.
“I don’t understand why you don’t like the financial angle,” he said. “I don’t believe Bobby Hannaford is straight. You don’t either. If he’s fooling around, he’s got a real motive. Now that the old man is dead—”
“Hundred-dollar bills are showing up in wastebaskets,” Gregor said. “And you should have found the briefcase.”
“I did, Gregor. It was right where you said it would be.”
“That briefcase started out in Robert Hannaford’s study. He told me it would be there.”
“There’s too damn much manipulation in this case,” Jackman said. “And it’s weird manipulation, too. It’s like something out of an Agatha Christie novel. It’s not real.”
“What’s real—a couple of idiot nineteen year olds blowing each other away with Uzis over a quarter of a pound of crack?”
“That does tend to be more usual.”
“That also has all the reality of a Kafka nightmare.”
Jackman laughed. Gregor went back to looking out the window. They were in a part of Philadelphia he knew, but he didn’t know why he knew. They weren’t near Cavanaugh Street, and they weren’t near the library, either. He stared at the solid, undistinguished office buildings and wondered what they meant to him.
“You okay?” Jackman asked him.
“I’m fine. Where are we?”
“Out behind the Dick Building.”
Gregor sat up a little straighter. Of course. It had been years, but he should have remembered. He checked the numbers on the buildings they were passing and saw they were going in the right direction. Slowly, but in the right direction.