He had just had a funny idea, one of the funniest ideas of his life—and yet it was so perfect, he couldn’t see how it could fail to be true. Of course, he couldn’t see how he was going to go about proving it, either, and that was a problem, but proving it was always a problem. It was what all real police work came down to. Gregor had to trust in the possibility that if he didn’t worry about that part of it, if he just followed his funny idea to its conclusion and made sure it worked out as well in practice as it did in theory, the proving would take care of itself.
David Markham’s head appeared over the top of the table again. The lines looked too deeply edged on his face. The worry looked too deeply buried in his eyes.
“We’ve got to get moving,” he muttered as he threw more papers in the general direction of Gregor’s tray.
“Stop,” Gregor told him. “Before we get moving, there are some things I want to tell you. About what I saw and did last night.”
From the look of exasperation on David Markham’s face, Gregor was certain the man was going to take the gun out of his holster and shoot him.
Two
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NOT had an effortless, smoothly crescendoing career. He had faced his share of disbelief on the part of superiors and resistance on the part of local law enforcement officials. He knew that with the way he worked, that sort of thing was sometimes inevitable. It was all well and good for magazines and true crime books and novels to praise what they called “intuition,” and what Gregor knew to be merely a rigorously adhered to commitment to inductive reasoning. It was something else again for people to swallow that reasoning, no matter how meticulously it was explained to them. Even so, he had never been laughed at before, and it rankled. It did more than rankle. It made him feel ready to explode.
Sitting on the other side of the table, David Markham looked ready to explode himself, possibly from an excess of disbelief. Gregor had never thought of disbelief as gaseous before, but apparently it was. Markham looked filled full of it, puffed out at the cheeks and chest and belly. Every once in a while, giggles would escape through his mouth like little bubbles. Sometimes the sheriff held hard to the table, as if he were preventing himself from taking off, like a punctured balloon.
“Look,” Markham said, after Gregor had explained the whole thing for about the fifteenth time. It was nine thirty by now, and the cafeteria was filling up. Most of the faculty seemed to have decided there were more interesting places to eat in Belleville, but most of the students obviously had nowhere else to go. Gregor watched them walking past with trays underfilled by tightly sealed packages of cereal and even more tightly sealed cartons of milk and orange juice, poking at everything as if they could tell by touch if it were poisoned. “Look,” Markham said yet again. “What you’re telling me here is that this boogeyman, the Great Doctor Donegal Steele, is dead.”
“That’s right. Or close enough as to make no difference. After almost three days, there’d be no way to save him if he fell across this table right now.”
“But why?” Markham demanded. “Just because he’s missing? For God’s sake, Demarkian, the man is a nut.”
“I don’t care what kind of a nut he may have been,” Gregor said. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense. Or even could make any sense, unless Miss Veer was poisoned by a random psychopath, and we’ve—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Markham said, “we’ve decided that wasn’t it. Nothing from her tray found anywhere on the floor except the tea and it couldn’t have been the tea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But—”
“But nothing. Markham, think, will you please? Yesterday Miss Maryanne Veer had a perfectly ordinary day except for one thing, and that was that she decided she had to call the police and report Donegal Steele missing. The only reason anyone could possibly have wanted to hurt her was to stop her from doing that.”
“You know, we’ve been through all of this a little while ago. Never mind the simple fact that it would be insane to try to murder somebody with lye just to keep them from making a phone call—”
“Remember me?” Gregor said. “I was the one who told you yesterday that I didn’t think the point was to murder Maryanne Veer.”
“Well, for God’s sake, if whoever it was didn’t want to murder her, all he had to do was cosh her, right? Why go through this complicated and very nasty rigmarole with lye?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said, “but I do have a theory—”
“Oh. Another theory.”