Quoth the Raven(94)

“I hope you’ve dug up more than information,” Gregor said. Up to that point, he had remained standing, Markham’s invitation to the chair notwithstanding. Now he sat down and stretched out his legs. “Let’s start with first things first. Did you find any evidence that Steele was kept at Constitution House?”

“That we did. On the roof, if you can believe it. We’d just about given up. There’s this little protected shedlike thing up there, I think it used to cover roofing equipment and that kind of thing. You know how that works? In the days before power ladders and things, you’d get your heavy maintenance equipment up when the building was built and leave it there for when you needed it because you needed it a lot. Bad winters. Anyway, it’s empty now. The floor of the damned thing was streaked white with the effects of lye. And clawmarks. Oh, Jesus. You were right about that, too. He was alive up there.”

“He would have had to be,” Gregor said. “Even with popping beers, he wouldn’t have swallowed enough of it to kill him outright. They never do. I like the idea of the roof, by the way. I kept thinking it had to be the cellar because that was the only place I could think of where he wouldn’t be heard if he thrashed around. And he must have thrashed around.”

“Too many people go into the cellar,” Markham said. “There’s an incinerator down there. What I want to know is how our friend managed to get him up to the roof. The man’s enormous.”

“He was also probably conscious, in the beginning. Don’t forget that. Conscious and in pain and not thinking clearly.”

“He wasn’t conscious when our friend brought him down.”

“Ropes,” Gregor said.

Markham nodded. “Yes, Mr. Demarkian, ropes. We did what you suggested. We got ourselves a search warrant before we even started out, back-timed, by the way, just in case—it’s amazing what you can do when you were on the high-school football team with the local judge. Anyway, we got the warrant and we searched and we found the ropes, we found the harness thing he was hooked into—there was what looked like lye on that, too—and we found a very interesting article you hadn’t managed to anticipate. I’m glad there was something. We found a heavy-duty luggage carrier.”

“Very good,” Gregor said. “Wheels.”

“Right. Get him down to the ground at about two or three o’clock in the morning when nobody else is around, tie him to the wheels, and just pull him up and out of here. Even you or I could have done it with a little work.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Then, once you have him up there, gravity will help. Did you find the body?”

Markham snorted. “Oh, we found it, all right. It was getting it out of there that was the problem. As you can imagine, we had a lot of help.”

“How bad was it?”

“You don’t want to know. Christ, it was incredible, the kind of mess lye can make, three days down somebody’s throat without anything to slow it up. And that isn’t all. Our friend didn’t just feed the Great Doctor Donegal Steele a lot of lye. Our friend added a little extra no-frills attraction. More lye, all over Steele’s face. It ate his skin.”

“Dear God.”

“It might have been done after death,” Markham said. “By the time we got to him, it had eaten through his eyelids and started on his eyes. Dear sweet Lord in heaven. And our friend has been walking around here for the past two or three days, looking perfectly normal as far as anybody can tell.” He stood up, stretched, and looked around the room. It was filled with books, as all of Tibor’s rooms were always filled with books. Markham paced around among them as if they were so many pieces of furniture.

“You know,” he said after a while, “we actually got a piece of luck, with the body. I was going to save it for later and spring it on you, just to have something to look brilliant with.”

“What is it?” Gregor asked.

Markham reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a little solder cylinder, so much like the one Tibor had found on the floor of the dining room, it could have been a clone. He handed it over and said, “It was caught in the collar of Steele’s shirt. Just stuck there. I suppose we should have bagged it for evidence. Procedure, like the Staties would say. The prosecutor wouldn’t have been allowed to present it anyway.”

“Too easy to plant,” Gregor agreed. “But we don’t have to tell anyone that, David. Not tonight.”

“Oh, Hell. Now it’s David. Why not? Are you all ready to go on?”

“Of course I am.”