Quoth the Raven(42)

“All right. Who are you?”

“Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor Demarkian said.

The man with the gun started to write the name in his notebook and stopped. “Gregor Demarkian? That Gregor Demarkian?”

“I suppose so,” Gregor said. He hated it when people put it like that. It made him feel like—like God only knew what.

The man with the gun whacked his notebook against the side of his hip and looked pensive. “Gregor Demarkian,” he repeated. “That’s very interesting, under the circumstances. What are you doing here?”

“I’m visiting him.” Gregor tapped Tibor on the shoulder.

“Who’s him?”

“Father Tibor Kasparian,” Tibor said. He put out his hand, got a look on his face that said he had no idea at all why he’d thought he ought to do that, and put the hand back in his pocket.

If the man with the gun had noticed Tibor’s embarrassment, or anything about him at all, he gave no sign. He was still whacking his notebook against his hip and staring into the middle distance, as if he were concentrating furiously on the Halloween carnival in the quad, easily seen through any of the windows.

“You know,” he said, “here I am, with half the service personnel of this county, or what seems like it, and what I think I’m here for is either a terrorist bombing or a woman’s hysteria, and I get here, and not only is everything stranger than shit, but I’ve got you. Now, what I want to know is, why do I have you?”

“You’ve lost your twang,” Gregor told him.

“I don’t have a twang, except when I’m up here at the college. They like to think of us locals as unspoiled primitives in a state of grace. I’m David Markham. Swarthmore ’47. Stanford Law School ’51.”

“Krekor is here to give a speech,” Tibor cut in. “On the methods of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in apprehending serial murderers.” He turned anxiously to Gregor. “Apprehending is the right word, isn’t it, Krekor? In this case?”

“Yes,” Gregor said.

“I’d heard you were with the FBI,” David Markham said. “You’re not still with the FBI, are you?”

“No.”

“Well, thank God for small favors.”

The medics had done what they had come to do. They had treated the most obvious of Miss Maryanne Veer’s burns, and, with what must have been the advice of a doctor—every once in a while Gregor had been able to hear them talking through two-way radios, the sharp static cutting into the fuzzy confusion of the room like bolt lightning cutting through a cloud-clogged sky—put a tube down her throat and started administering a more chemically calculated antidote than milk. Now they were pushing back the crowd and making way for the stretcher men. They had the body wrapped in a blanket, as if they were protecting it against shock—although, Gregor thought, it wasn’t right to call it a body. The woman was still living. If she hadn’t been, they would have covered her face and not gone to all the trouble of tubes and medicines.

Like Gregor and Tibor, David Markham had turned to watch them take the stretcher out. He kept rubbing his thumb against the side of his nose in a way that was both nervous and inquiring, but his face was merely reflective.

“You know,” he said, “I heard one of my boys say that was Maryanne Veer.”

“That’s right,” Gregor said. “That’s what everyone’s been calling her. Miss Maryanne Veer.”

“You don’t know her?”

“I’d never met her before we started with the milk,” Gregor said. “I just got here this morning.”

“Mmm, yes,” David Markham said. “Did I also hear right about the lye? That she swallowed lye?”

“Technically, we ought to wait for a medical report before we say we’re sure, but it had all the indications. Lye, or something based on lye. Toilet bowl cleaner. One of those drain uncloggers. Something like that.”

“You’re supposed to know about poisons,” David Markham said. “Let me tell you what I know about. Maryanne Veer. She’s local, in case nobody told you. Born and brought up in Belleville. She’s about ten years older than I am and from the other side of town, so I never met her family—Belleville is the kind of place where it matters, which side of town your family lives on—but I’ve heard about them. Her father was a right righteous bastard. They had a house out on Deegan Road, right at the edge before the hills get going for real, and you know what that house had? An outhouse.”

“An outhouse?” Tibor was confused.