Skeleton Key(39)

For a while there, he had thought Kayla Anson was going to stop it for him. He had thought she was going to be his resting place. He honestly couldn’t imagine how much higher he could go, than being married to her and having for himself what being married to her would mean. Even if it didn’t last forever. Even if she couldn’t love him always. None of those women could ever love for always. They weren’t built for it.

Right now, he could hear Deirdre in his shower. She had slept through the night and the morning. She didn’t give a damn about the news or even about the way Kayla Anson had died. She seemed to think it had nothing to do with her.

Peter wondered if he would feel differently if he and Kayla had been closer than they were, if what they had had together hadn’t already begun to wind down, if she hadn’t been on her way out his door. On her way, but not completely gone yet. On her way, but waiting for the right time to make a scene. All women felt they had to make scenes, to justify the end of a relationship. Even Deirdre was going to feel the need to make a scene, and she was going to be good at it.

Once, when he and Kayla were first going out together, she had taken him to a hunt breakfast up in Salisbury. They hadn’t actually gone on the hunt—Kayla didn’t approve of hunting, but she didn’t disapprove of the people who approve of it—and they had walked together along the wide halls of one of those mock-Tudor houses everybody had been building in the twenties. In that one moment, Peter Greer had been perfectly and unquestionably at peace. He had suddenly been able to see himself in just the place where he belonged. It was so far in the past, he could never reach it, but it was there. It wasn’t just a figment of his imagination.

Now he would never reach even an approximation of that place. He was sure of it. She would not be coming back to him.

And although it was true enough that she would not have come back to him even if she had lived—that she was more than on her way out the door the last time he talked to her, she was all the way out and just running back to clear up a few loose ends—it somehow made an enormous difference that she was dead.

That did not, however, mean that he was sorry she was dead.

The news reports all said strangled, and he could see her strangled. He could see the hands around her throat and the arms pressing her neck down, down, so far down that it would break. He could see her eyes bulging in their sockets and the skin of her face going red.

His anger was so broad and so deep, it welled out of him like lava.





Four



1


The newspapers were lying in a stack at the foot of the bed when Gregor Demarkian woke up—lying there in the way, so that every time he turned he brushed them with his feet. He felt fuzzy, the way he often did when he was off-schedule. He liked to keep regular hours. He couldn’t remember when he had last slept in this off-and-on way. Maybe it was when he had still been on kidnapping detail, sitting with a partner in an unmarked car at the side of some road somewhere, drinking bad coffee and waiting for hours for something to happen. Mostly, nothing ever did. In those days, all new agents with the Bureau started either on kidnapping detail or on tax patrol. It was either boredom in a car or boredom in a back office somewhere, trying to decide if one mobster or another might be illegally deducting hit men fees from his income taxes. Although why such a deduction would be illegal, Gregor thought now, wasn’t that easy to explain. He could make a decent case in tax court that hit men were a legitimate business expense, at least if the businessman in question was a member of the Gambino family.

In those days, too, there was the ethnic thing. There were no black agents, and Gregor was one of the very few who could not claim to be at least partly Anglo-Saxon. Hoover had been strange that way, as he had been in many ways. It wasn’t quite that he had been an unrelieved bigot. He didn’t hate all people who were not “true Americans,” as he put it. He just picked and chose. The Bureau had a good sprinkling of Greeks, but no Italians. It had Armenians, but no Portuguese. People of color, as they would be called now, were simply out of the question—but if Hoover had been required to hire one, he would have taken an African American over a Chinese or Japanese. He was, however, passionately committed to Irish Catholics. He always said he thought they made the best Americans. It made no sense, because Hoover himself made no sense. Even in Gregor’s earliest days at the Bureau, the consensus had been that the old man was not really mentally well—and that was when the agents were being polite. A dangerous paranoid jerk, was what Gregor had thought, the third or fourth time he met the man. By now he knew perfectly well that he’d been right.