He pulled off his socks. He got his second-best robe off the back of the chair near the little window and threw it over his shoulder. He could find the clean clothes he needed when he got back from the shower. It was easier to proceed in a murder case where the murderer was intent on doing odd or outlandish things. It was the ordinary cases, the ones where somebody just shot a gun into somebody else in the middle of a room, that were the hard ones. In another way, though, oddnesses were a headache, because they meant providing the prosecutor with a plausible explanation. Juries were remarkably consistent in finding the odd and outlandish cause for “reasonable doubt” in any case against a white, middle-class defendant. A lot of juries also found it hard to find any doubt at all against a poor black defendant even when he had provably been in another state at the time of the crime. Gregor was eternally grateful that he did not have to worry about that kind of thing on a daily basis anymore. Twenty years in the FBI was enough professional law enforcement for anybody.
Gregor thought about looking out his window and decided against it. He opened the door to his room and went into the little hall. He was halfway to the bathroom—not very far, only a few steps—when he realized there was something going on.
“I heard the door open,” he heard Mark say. “I’m not going to wake him up. He already is up.”
“Mark?” Gregor said.
Mark appeared in the hall, looking huge, and worried, and even more adult than usual. “Hi. Good morning. I’ve got to nail your window shut.”
“What?”
“He’s got to nail your window shut.” Liz Toliver appeared in the hall. “It would be even better if we could nail a plank over it, but we don’t have any planks in the house, and we can’t go out in the driveway. I apologize, Mr. Demarkian. When you said that thing about securing the house, I thought you were crazy.”
“I kept telling her,” Mark said.
“One of them tried to climb through the bathroom window at the other side of the house. Scared my mother on the toilet. She’s had to be sedated.”
“I’ll be done before you finish with your shower,” Mark said, looking at the robe over Gregor’s shoulder.
Gregor walked down to the end of the hall instead. Jimmy Card was standing alone in the living room, looking at the flat darkness where the draperies covered the picture window that looked out onto the front lawn and the road. His cell phone lay open on the coffee table in front of the long leather couch. His T-shirt looked as if he had been balling it up in his hands, over and over again, for hours.
“Oh, good,” he said when Gregor came in. “I’m glad you’re up. We’re hoping you can help us out of this.”
“Help you out of what? I take it there’s press outside?”
Jimmy Card smiled thinly. “The last time I saw press like this, Julie and I were getting a divorce and Julie had just made the tabloids with pictures of herself sunbathing nude in the south of France. And she wasn’t alone. Take a look, if you want. Just be careful how you do it.”
Gregor went over to the window and pressed himself against one wall to the side of it. He flicked back the draperies just a little and looked out at what was on the front lawn—and not only on the front lawn, but on the porch of the house itself, everywhere, in the road. There were hundreds of people, all of them with cameras, and beyond them cars, half-abandoned in the road gutters and on other people’s lawns. Gregor let the draperies drop.
“My God,” he said.
“It’s because Jimmy’s famous,” a little voice piped up. Gregor looked around to find Liz’s younger son, Geoff, settled in an enormous armchair with a Game Boy.
“I should have expected it,” Jimmy said. “It’s not like I don’t know the routine. Instead, I didn’t even notice until about half an hour ago, and by then it was too late. Everything was nuts.”
“Have you called the police?”
“The phone lines are dead,” Mark said, coming back from nailing Gregor’s window shut. “We think they must have cut the phone lines. And the cell phones don’t work.”
“The idea is to force us to come out,” Jimmy said. “If we can’t call out, we’re going to have to come out eventually. And they know it.”
“We’re going to have to come out sooner rather than later,” Liz said, “because my mother needs to be taken care of. She’s not well in the best of circumstances, and that thing with the window really tore it. She was completely hysterical. She needs to be hospitalized at the least, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Chris was found dead in my own backyard, I think I’d pack her up and take her back to Connecticut. I suppose it wouldn’t look very good if I tried to duck out of a murder investigation and go back home.”