They had given her seventy-five milligrams of Demerol to deaden the pain and sent her into outer space instead.
Lemons, hand, straw.
She’d never gotten around to telling the people who mattered that Donegal Steele was missing.
Six
AT THREE O’CLOCK IN the morning, Gregor Demarkian, unable to sleep, got off the couch he had been lying on in the suite he was not supposed to be sharing with Bennis but was and went to look out the window. Bennis was behind the closed door of the bedroom, dead to the world. Even the acid smell of her cigarette smoke had faded hours ago. Gregor’s back felt as if it had been worked over by a curling iron for days. This was the guest suite in Constitution House, the best apartment in the building according to Tibor. It was on the fourth floor and looked out over Minuteman Field to King’s Scaffold.
At this hour of the morning, the campus was dead. There were no students wandering back from late study in the bowels of the library, no stray drunks reeling in from roadhouses out of town. Gregor had never seen a college campus so peaceful in the dark. He kept thinking that one good look at the Halloween decorations ought to change the atmosphere for him, but he couldn’t see any Halloween decorations. There were only the ominous lumps of logs rising up against the Scaffold and the straw man pumpkin head at the top.
He didn’t know how long he had been standing there at the window before he realized what he was looking at. Five minutes, ten minutes, a minute and a half: he found it hard to keep track of things when he was this tired. His gaze swept back and forth across the top of the Scaffold, back and forth, and finally it stopped.
There was somebody up there, prancing back and forth, doing God only knew what in the harsh light of a moon that looked like it ought to belong to another planet.
A bat.
Part Three
Thursday, October 31
Deep into that darkness peering,
long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal
ever dared to dream before.
—E. A. Poe
One
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER given any thought to the differences between large city police departments and small-town cop shops in the sealing and securing of crime scenes. If he had given it any thought, he would have said there wasn’t any. Crime scenes weren’t something he had been either trained or conditioned to consider. In his early years at the Bureau, he had mostly dealt with crimes without scenes. Kidnappers tended to snatch their victims off sidewalks or in department stores or out of playgrounds, and to do it where they couldn’t be observed. In his later years at the Bureau, Gregor was called in mostly as an afterthought. First there would be a series of killings in one state, then a similar series in a second state, then another similar series in a third. At that point, the local police from all three states would start talking to each other, and somebody would say: Doesn’t the FBI have a department that deals with this kind of crap? By the time Gregor or his agents got into it, there would be no scenes left, just bodies in drawers and evidence in bags. If something new came up while they were trying to get the “crap” coordinated and ultimately straightened out, it was the local police who handled the details of sealing, securing, and gathering evidence.
Still, walking up to the dining hall from Constitution House at five minutes to seven on Halloween morning, Gregor had fully expected to find the cafeteria closed. He thought he’d be meeting David Markham surrounded by empty tables and a nonfunctioning kitchen. It only made sense. Instead, he came into the dining hall foyer to find the wide double doors to the cafeteria line open and stuffed with bleary-eyed students balancing more in the way of books than of food on their trays. The kitchen was, indeed, nonfunctioning—there was a neat little hand-lettered sign near the stacks of trays and pockets of tableware that said, “SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, BUT THE CAFETERIA WILL BE UNABLE TO OFFER HOT FOOD UNTIL 4 NOVEMBER”—but otherwise business was proceeding as usual. The Halloween decorations had not only been left up, but increased. A jack-o’-lantern cut out of a pumpkin so large it looked like it had grown in a dump for nuclear waste was sitting on the top of the plastic display cover where the hot food should have been, glowing evilly with the interior light of a dozen votive candles.
Gregor passed by the little individual boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Count Chocula cereal—he hoped the Count Chocula was a special just for Halloween—and by the little sealed containers of milk and orange juice until he came to the coffee. Then he took three coffee cups, filled them, and pushed the tray along to the cash register. From there, he could see David Markham, sitting alone at one of those tables by the window, surrounded by papers. It was remarkable about those tables near the windows. No matter how crammed the dining room got, there was always at least one of them left open. It was as if the students had mentally consigned a certain number of the best places to eat to the faculty, and neither common sense nor self-esteem could talk them into violating them.