Gregor had been made head of the new Behavioral Sciences Unit because the new director was at sea, because the Bureau had just moved to a new building, and because he’d had so much publicity that appointing him looked like a good piece of PR. It had been a grace to all concerned that he had also been competent. That’s why not being able to engage in office politics was not a virtue. If competent people didn’t engage in office politics, incompetent ones would, or worse, competent ones with ulterior motives, with agendas both personal and ideological, with their eye on the prize. Gregor only wished that most people who lusted after power did so because they wanted fame, money, and luxury. People who wanted fame and money could be bought off. Even people who wanted power for power’s sake could be bought off, at least up to a point. The real killers were the ones who wanted to change the world. Gregor Demarkian was not a conservative and couldn’t be. He was a child of an immigrant tenement neighborhood, and his own mother had kept a picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in an icon frame right next to her icon of the Black Madonna. He did share one idea with the conservatives though, and he thought it was a sensible one. He did not think it was ever possible to make human beings perfect, to rid them forever of greed andlust and avarice and pride. He distrusted the hell out of people who thought they could.
He was able to do the Machiavellian thing in this case because he was truly convinced that somebody had tried to murder Mark DeAvecca and because he had cleared the whole thing with Brian Sheehy beforehand. There was nothing like getting the cooperation of the person you wanted to manipulate to make manipulation feel like high morality. He had no idea if Brian took him seriously or was merely indulging him, but the result was the same in either case, and the result was all that Gregor cared about. Brian, in the meantime, cared mostly about embarrassing the school. Gregor would be happy to oblige him.
The call from the hospital came less than half an hour after he’d left Dee Feyre at the inn’s front door. She had a room there, too—there wasn’t anywhere else to get a room in Windsor unless you went out to the Interstate, to Concord or Lexington—but she wanted to get “some things done,” as she put it, and Gregor hadn’t wanted to ask her what. He’d gone back up to his room to think, and to think about calling Bennis, when the phone rang and he was put through to a pleasant female voice speaking against a background of conversation and random noise. He wondered where she was calling from. It wasn’t an office. Was it that distractingly loud at a nurses’ station?
“Mr. Demarkian?” she said. “This is Carol Alberani at Windsor Hospital. I’m the head nurse on Two West. Dr. Copeland asked me to call you.”
“Thank you,” Gregor said, wondering if he’d been completely off the wall. Her voice did sound pleasant and unconcerned. Would it be unconcerned if what he’d suspected was true?
“Dr. Copeland said to tell you that what you suggested turned out to be true and to thank you for suggesting it. He wouldn’t have thought of it on his own. He’d like to talk to you in person, along with Mark’s parents, later on this afternoon. Say about two o’clock? He said he knows this is short notice, but under the circumstances—”
“No, no,” Gregor said. “It’s fine. I’m grateful he can see me that quickly.”
“From what I know of Dr. Copeland’s schedule, that’s the end of his rounds for the day. He’d like you to meet him on the floor at the nurses’ station at two, if you could.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I’ll tell him. Thank you very much, Mr. Demarkian.”
“Don’t mention it.”
She hung up in his ear. Gregor stared at the receiver for a moment and then put it down. It was already well after noon, and it wasn’t all that easy to get out to the hospital. He’d have to arrange for a cab ahead of time. He put in a call to the front desk and asked them to do that for him. He hung up and stared at his hands. He needed Bennis, that was the truth. He always needed Bennis, but he needed her especially in cases like this one, when something about the case itself, or the place it happened in, or the people involved in it, started tripping all his wires. He couldn’t seem to make his mind stop drifting into his own past, his childhood, his career, his memories. Maybe “drift” was the wrong word. Drifting implied randomness. There was nothing random about the way his mind was working. He knew, by now, just what it was about Windsor that drove him so completely up the wall—that hermetically sealed, pristinely smug self-righteous bubble that adopted “liberalism,” not because of liberal convictions, but because of the sense that only stupid, vulgar, ignorant people were anything else. It was not the liberalism his mother had embraced when she became an American, and it was not the liberalism of somebody like Bennis, whose support for government health insurance and rejection of the death penalty had nothing to do with morality and everything to do with what she thought of as practical necessity. Hell, he thought, it wasn’t even the liberalism of initiatives and programs. He suddenly realized what it was all these people reminded him of. They were the liberals of conservative caricature, born into the flesh and made real on a stage of their own choosing. This was a place where care would be taken to choose only those foods that could beimported from workers’ collectives in the third world by the same people who had only contempt for the everyday, middle-class kids who made up the population at the local public high school.