Quoth the Raven(90)
“Do you really think we should have done all that?” she asked them. “I think that was a really awful thing I did to Dr. Elkinson.”
“I don’t,” Evie said. “I think you were brilliant. I didn’t know you had it in you. That makes two things I didn’t know you had it in you for over the last two days.”
“Oh, that,” Jack said. “I knew she had that in her. What did you think the problem was?”
Evie made a face. “In my opinion, it was a case of pathological nostalgia for the fifties. But what do I know?”
“Got it.” Jack waved the cork triumphantly in the air and reached for one of the glasses Evie had set out along the desk. They weren’t what he thought of as champagne glasses—they were narrow and tall instead of wide and squat—but Evie had assured him that they were what champagne glasses were really supposed to be, and she should know. He poured the glass he was holding full and handed it to Chessey.
“To all the brilliant things only I knew you were going to be,” he said.
Chessey frowned at him. “Still—” she began.
Evie snorted. “Look, what we had to do was get them off campus and out of the way for at least an hour and a half each, right? And we did it, right?”
“You bet,” Jack said.
“Still,” Chessey said.
“Still nothing,” Evie said. “I say we ought to be knighted by the Queen. Except that we don’t have a Queen. Never mind. I’ll think of something.”
Jack poured the second glass full and handed it to her. He saw her point. He even believed in it more than he believed in Chessey’s. He did have to give Chessey one thing.
It was not only an awful thing she had done to Dr. Elkinson, it was a thoroughly shitty thing he had done to Ken Crockett.
Necessary or not.
Six
1
THERE HAD BEEN TIMES in Gregor Demarkian’s life when the case he was working on had blotted out everything else. Seasons and sentimentalities, weather meteorological and emotional, even friendships and family had been drowned as surely as words on a page under a sea of spilled ink. In the early days of the Behavioral Science department, that sort of case had been almost routine. Those were the days before he—or anyone else—realized that the man who murdered thirty young women with an ice pick and a cheese board wasn’t an anomaly, but the representative of a class. Gregor thought he had been on the job with the new department for five years before it hit him that that class was not only vast, but growing. Somehow or other, this society seemed to be breeding a prolific race of the morally dead. It had taken Elizabeth’s dying to pull him out of that one. For a while—even after Elizabeth had been diagnosed; in the calm days before they both knew how bad it was going to be—the phenomenon of the serial killer, cold-sane and self-conscious in the Bundy style, had taken over Gregor’s mind and heart and soul, like a demon possession. He hadn’t even been able to eat without thinking about it. He would sit at the desk in the ridiculously huge office they had given him, perquisite of a man raised to the rank of senior administrator, with a half-eaten sandwich at his side and a thermos of bad coffee threatening to fall off the desk’s edge, trying to write it all down on paper in a way that would make it make sense.
Of course, at Independence College on the thirty-first of October, it was not really possible to ignore Halloween. The campus was too bizarrely caught up in the holiday for that. It was now seven o’clock in the evening and full dark and very cold. In an hour, Gregor was due to give his lecture on criminological methods and the FBI. In five hours, the great pile of wood shored up against King’s Scaffold would be doused with kerosene and lit, sending flames as big as tidal waves against the star-dotted blackness of the sky. The gently glowing globe lights that lit the paths of the quad and the sidewalks that stretched out to the more far-flung technical buildings every other night of the year were all extinguished. What light there was came from the flaming kerosene-soaked torches carried by Jack Carroll’s legions of senior boys. Because there were a lot of those boys there should have been more light rather than less. It didn’t work that way. Flames flickered and danced and were pushed about by the wind. They sowed light one minute and shadows the next. Coming across from Liberty Hall to Constitution House for what Gregor thought might be the last time, he had a hard time holding the features of anyone’s face.
Next to him, Father Tibor Kasparian trudged along with his hands wrapped into the folds of his cassock, looking infinitely tired. Gregor knew Tibor had been brought up among psychopaths—raised by them, really, except in the tight protective womb of his unshakably religious family—but he hadn’t expected Tibor to be taken like this by what had happened here. He thought he might have read. Tibor’s psychology exactly backward, the way he had once tried to read words in a mirror when he was a boy and pretending to fight crimes with magic superpowers, like Spider Man. After all, what they were dealing with here was not a psychopath, but an ordinary human being who had invested too much in superficialities and too little, in inner strength. It hadn’t occurred to Gregor that Tibor might find that worse than the prospect of a man who had decided to play out the fantasies of Stalin and Hitler in private life.