Quoth the Raven(36)

“Who’s she talking to?” Gregor asked. “Is that the infamous Dr. Branch?”

“No, Krekor, that is not Dr. Branch. That is Miss Maryanne Veer. She is the secretary for our office.”

“I think I’ll stay out of your office,” Bennis said.

Gregor dragged his attention away from Dr. Elkinson, Dr. Crockett, and Miss Maryanne Veer, and found himself face-to-face with a very worried Father Tibor. He felt almost instantly guilty. He had meant to rattle Dr. Crockett and see what came of it. He hadn’t meant to put Father Tibor Kasparian off his food.

“Tibor,” he said, “don’t get so upset. I was just presenting a possibility. I don’t have any real—”

“What’s that?” Bennis said.

Bennis was an immobile sitter. She got comfortable where she wanted to be and stayed there. Now she was rising off her seat, leaning forward, her palms flat against the table and her arms straining to stretch just a little longer, just a little farther. The tone of her voice had been so shocked, Gregor found himself rising too, turning toward the cash register again, confused and alarmed.

He had every reason to be alarmed. What he saw, when he finally got himself into position, was a tragedy out of a cheap horror movie. Miss Maryanne Veer had moved away from the cash register, toward the center of the room. She was there now, alone, her head thrown back, the sound coming out of her throat a cross between a gurgle and a scream. Her chin had been stripped of skin and left raw and bloody. Something seemed to be eating into the front of her dress and the skin on her neck. At her feet, where her teacup had fallen and shattered, a puddle of brown and green was having no effect on the floor at all.

Gregor Demarkian felt as if he were being shot from a cannon.

“Dear sweet Jesus Christ,” he said, and he headed across the floor. “Lye.”





Five


1


IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN simple—in fact, in the beginning, it was simple. There is nothing on earth like a poisoning with lye. Gregor could have recited the indications from memory, just the way he had learned them in his second month of Bureau training at Quantico: the stripping away of the skin that looked worse than it was but not nearly as bad as it would get; the gagging heaves that turned to choked strangling and brought up no vomit; the short-term inviability of all the nonhuman surfaces. Miss Maryanne Veer’s dress must have been made of silk. Silk was one of the few materials lye would eat through on contact, except for human skin. Or animal skin, Gregor thought irrelevantly. The effect would be the same on most animals as it was on human beings. He could remember a case, years ago, from when he was new in the Bureau and assigned to kidnapping detail. A small girl had been snatched from the playground of her expensive private grammar school in Beverly Hills and taken high up into Coldwater Canyon and killed. Her mother, half-insane with grief and self-recrimination, had been unable to stand the sound of the girl’s tiny kitten mewling disconsolately through the house. She had taken the kitten and locked it in the back pantry. Then she had gone on with her life and forgotten all about it—unsurprising, because her life at that point had consisted of a bottle of Stolichnaya before breakfast and whatever she’d had to drink afterward to get herself unconscious for the rest of the day. The kitten had remained locked in the back pantry for three days without food, kept alive only because a small leak in the roof made a puddle of water on the pantry floor. Then the kitten had gotten too hungry to care about anything else and had gone looking for something open and chewable. It had found an open tin of drain cleaner that had been made mostly of lye.

Gregor Demarkian was not a physically active man. When he read the detective novels Bennis sometimes gave him, he preferred the ones about Nero Wolfe and Hercule Poirot, men who solved the problems of the world from the safety of their living rooms, who sat and thought instead of ran and shot. Because he had been determined to join some sort of police force when he was young—he couldn’t remember why now—it was a good thing the Bureau had existed. He couldn’t imagine himself, even at twenty-five, chasing across the landscape with his gun drawn. He couldn’t imagine himself directing human traffic in an emergency, either—but now, he knew, that was what he had to do.

For what seemed like minutes after Miss Maryanne Veer dropped her teacup and began to gag, nobody spoke and nobody moved. Miss Veer was the radial point in a large empty circle, central and spotlit. The only sound in the room was the low-grade hissing Gregor knew came from the puddle at Miss Veer’s feet, lye mixed with water, activated. Then Dr. Alice Elkinson threw back her head and began to scream.