Precious Blood(67)

So Gregor had read the murder mysteries, and waited to be amused, and not been. He had, however, been distracted. To be perfectly honest about it, the damn things had infuriated him. He didn’t mind the unreality of the stories—which was what most policemen objected to in the classic whodunit—because he thought of them as a restricted art form, like haiku. The form had prescribed parameters and any artist choosing to work in it had to stay within them. That was true of the Elizabethan love poetry, too, and the intellectuals who made such a fuss about the “artificiality” of classic detective fiction never complained of the artificiality of that.

It was the fictional detectives who had made Gregor crazy, because as far as he was concerned their behavior was appalling. It was inexcusable. About halfway through almost every one of the books Bennis had given him, the fictional detective had been described as “knowing” who was rampaging around the countryside, slaughtering civil servants and the odd trembling virgin—but never telling anyone. It was as if Peter Wimsey, Hercule, and company sat back and said, “Well, I know who the murderer is, and since I know, all I have to do is sit back and wait for the next murder, and that will give me the evidence to convict him.”

Wait for the next murder, for God’s sake.

Actually, Hercule Poirot was not as bad as the rest of them. Gregor had grown fond of Hercule Poirot, in spite of the fact that The Philadelphia Inquirer persisted in calling him (Gregor) an Armenian-American one. Even so, Gregor had been unable to conceive of a single situation in which he would “know” the name of a murderer and not tell anyone. He couldn’t imagine a case where he’d “know” the name of a murderer and not make sure the man, or woman, was arrested immediately.

Until now.

He stood on the steps of the Cathedral, shivering slightly in the thin fall of sleet, and sighed. He knew what he knew through a process of logical reasoning. Andy Walsh had been murdered in the most public way possible, with three television cameramen and dozens of reporters looking on, and from that everything else followed. It had to. Unfortunately, logical reasoning only secured a conviction when it was backed up by physical evidence, and he had none of that. The means were readily available to any number of people, assuming the means to have been nicotine. Even if the police could establish that the concentration Andy Walsh had swallowed was too strong to have been distilled from ordinary cigarettes—and tests weren’t usually that good—there would still be all those commercial plant poisons, available to anyone who wanted them off any garden store shelf. Opportunity might be better, assuming the poison had been put in the chalice and nowhere else, and assuming Gregor could figure out how it had been done. At the moment, he hadn’t a clue. Then there was the matter of motive. Motive wasn’t a legal requirement for prosecution, but it was a practical necessity in any jury trial. That was why Behavioral Sciences always let captured serial killers rationalize their heads off. No matter how crazy the “reasons” sounded—and no matter how much danger those “reasons” posed for any verdict other than “not guilty by reason of insanity”—they were, at least, reasons. Juries like reasons.

All he had in the way of motive this morning was the vague conviction that all this had something to do with what had happened twenty years ago in Black Rock Park, and that Cheryl Cass and Andy Walsh must have at least known what had happened there, and that the murderer must have been involved in what happened there. The conviction would have been less vague if he hadn’t also been harboring the suspicion that John Smith was right: What had happened in Black Rock Park had happened much too long ago to be the real motive for any real murder.

In short, what he had this morning was a mess, and he couldn’t see any way out of it. He would be better than the fictional detectives of the thirties. He would go to John Smith and tell the man what he thought and why. He might even be taken seriously. The problem, Gregor knew, was that Smith could take his word as Holy Writ and still not be able to do anything. At this point, Gregor not only had insufficient evidence for conviction, he had insufficient evidence for arrest.

It had been Gospel in the Bureau that once you knew who your criminal was, you could always find the evidence you needed to pick him up. Gregor knew, from experience, that that Gospel was a lie.

He pressed the bell beside the Chancery’s door one more time—it was only eight o’clock in the morning, and Good Friday, and the Chancery didn’t open until nine even on ordinary days—and then turned around to look at the neighborhood. State Street ran right up to the steps of the cathedral, a collection of small stores and diners and gas stations and parking lots. Carver Street ran south toward St. Agnes’s and north to the business district proper. Up there, the buildings got taller and newer and more elaborate, and most of them, with the exception of the hotels, were topped by billboards. The hotels were topped by signs that looked as if they could be lit up at night, and probably should have been lit up this morning, because it was so dark. On a hunch, Gregor checked the signs on the two hotels that looked closest and found the Lombard and the Maverick. The Maverick had a banner across its sign, much like the banners across its billboards near the train station, that said Closed for Renovations, February 17-June 1. Gregor frowned. Here it was, one more piece of evidence that the Colchester Police Department was criminally inept. One of the homicide detectives Gregor had talked to when he’d still been trying to get information over the phone from Philadelphia had told him that Cheryl Cass had “made her way clear across town to the hotel district.” From what the Cardinal had said, Gregor had known this was untrue. He hadn’t known how untrue. Here was the hotel district. The Maverick and the Lombard, between which Cheryl’s body had been found, was right in the Cathedral’s lap.