Later, what she remembered was sitting in her apartment and wondering if the incident had happened at all. It had been so bizarre, she hadn’t been able to keep hold of it. It had not, however, been as bizarre as this.
After she’d locked all the doors and closed all the windows, she had sat down in the best chair in her living room and made herself be still. Now she stood up and made herself walk back the way she had come, back to the kitchen and the back porch door. She had left the back porch door unlocked and slightly open—which said something. Maybe it said she hadn’t been able to delude herself into thinking she didn’t believe it.
She took a deep breath, opened the porch door wide, and stepped out onto the balcony. There was nothing back here but trees, no other part of the campus to look out on. What sounds she heard were coming from all the way on the other side of the building, where the students were holding another of their pre-Halloween parties on the quad. If the entire faculty of Independence College had been ax-murdered in their beds this afternoon, the students would still be holding a pre-Halloween party on the quad.
The problem with the porch was with those buckets of lye Dr. Steele had left with her.
They were missing.
Three
1
BY THE TIME THE bells in Declaration Tower rang six o’clock, Gregor Demarkian needed a rest—not a nap, not a mental and physical vacation, but the real rest of being outside the pressurized circle of social restraint. He was not tired. It had been years since he had been part of a real emergency, instead of being called in afterward to lend support and clean up. Even in the three murder investigations he had involved himself in since leaving the Bureau, he had served as a kind of consultant. It amazed him that his body still responded so well to the need to overcompensate for its preferred and natural lethargy. He was adrenalated. His mind was working too fast. Every muscle in his body was twitching and jiggling, as if they had been carbonated. He knew all the rules of official murder investigations, especially the iron one about how, after forty-eight hours, the odds against catching the killer grew more and more remote by the second. In his experience, it was a rule that did more harm than good. It made people rush and occupy themselves with busywork. It was the catalyst for dozens of unnecessary interviews and hundreds of extravagantly examined blind alleys. He did much better when he gave himself the time and distance to calm down, untangle his emotions, and face the problem like a rational man.
The problem, at the moment, was finding the time and distance. They were in Tibor’s apartment—he and Bennis and Tibor himself—and the topic on the agenda was dinner. Under the circumstances, it was not a topic Bennis and Tibor were approaching with a great deal of common sense. Bennis was agitated and distraught. She had seen at least one of her sisters die by violence. She didn’t take well to outbreaks of murderousness in her fellow man. Of course, Gregor admitted, nobody did, not even veteran agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. With Bennis, though, the reaction was particularly acute, a kind of psychological nuclear implosion. It made Gregor wonder why Bennis was always so eager to become part of his problems—and so obsessed with filling up her spare time in the reading of murder mysteries.
For Tibor, the problem was different, more general, pervasive instead of specific. Most of the violence he had seen in his life—and there had been a lot of it—had been both officially sanctioned and rigorously theologized. He had told Gregor once that the most frightening hour of his life had come one afternoon when he was ten and sitting in his fifth-form Political class. His teacher, a pock-faced woman brought in from the outside the way priests were brought in from the outside to teach religion in some American Catholic schools, had delivered a lecture on “the fundamental lie of Christianity,” and that lie had been this: that Christianity demonized violence, illegitimated revolution, and celebrated the weakness of the weak. Change is a garden, she had told them, and that garden could only be properly watered by blood.
Now Tibor sat in his armchair, white and small, and watched Bennis pace back and forth across the living room. Gregor felt sorry for him. He looked so old and defeated, even though he was actually younger than Gregor himself. It had only taken one undeniable intrusion of the reality of the outside world to knock him back into a frame of mind he probably thought he had forgotten.
Bennis had come to rest in the middle of the room, with her foot on one of the picnic baskets the boys—Freddie and Max?—had delivered while they were out. She reached into the pocket of her shirt, took out her cigarettes, and lit up.