True Believers(149)

“Maybe,” Lou said, half-sullenly. “But maybe it wasn’t from the firm. Maybe he had it at home.”

“No,” Gregor said. “Listen. If he had rat poison at home, or arsenic in any other form, then he bought it openly without intending to murder anybody. In that case, if he used it to murder somebody, he would leave himself open to being identified as having bought it. Never mind the fact that there would be traces of the stuff around the house. Why would he do something like that?”

“Panic,” Garry Mansfield said.

Gregor sighed. “Be reasonable. Four times? That’s how many people are dead. Four. Do you really think he panicked four times in a row?”

“Maybe he used the stuff that was in the church,” Lou said.

“We don’t know where Bernadette Kelly was killed, not yet. He could have given her something at the church and then moved her body—”

Gregor sat up a little straighter in his chair. “Wait,” he said. “Look at the great detective,” Lou said. “I thought of something. I thought of something he didn’t.”

“He couldn’t have moved the body,” Gregor said.

“There goes that,” Garry said.

Gregor rubbed his forehead and stood up. This was what he hated most about not sleeping well. Other people could operate at full power on no rest, but he was always left logy and disoriented and slow.

“He couldn’t have moved the body,” he said again, “but he wouldn’t have had to. Nobody would have had to. Nobody has to move a body before it’s a body yet. I want to go talk to the Reverend Phipps.”

“What?” Lou Emiliani looked startled.

It felt better to be up and moving. His coat was laid over an old-fashioned metal filing cabinet in a corner of the room. He couldn’t believe either Lou or Garry ever used it, or anybody else either, with computers all over the department. Gregor put on his coat and felt around in the pockets for his gloves. They weren’t there. He must have left them at home on the bed.

Garry and Lou were standing side by side, staring at him.

“It would be helpful if one of you came along,” Gregor said. “He’s not a stupid man, the Reverend Phipps. He isn’t going to talk to me if I don’t have a police officer with me. He may not talk to me even then.”

“We were talking,” Garry said carefully, “about Ian Holden. And how he probably committed four murders.”

“He didn’t,” Gregor said.

“Why not?” Lou asked.

“Because the timing is off, for one thing,” Gregor said. “I should have realized all along that the timing mattered more than anything, but I was so tangled up in—you know, it’s a dangerous thing. Nobody who deals with real crime ought ever to read Agatha Christie novels.”

“What are you talking about?” Garry asked.

Gregor wound his scarf around his neck. “Agatha Christie novels. In an Agatha Christie novel, the poisoner would have tucked the arsenic into something innocuous, and then he could have been miles away when the death actually happened. The poison would have been, in, say, the chocolates on Sister Scholastica’s desk—”

“We had those checked,” Lou said quickly.

“I’m sure you did,” Gregor said. “And I’m sure they were fine, too. As a murder method, that one always bothered me because you couldn’t be sure of getting the person you wanted. Anybody could eat the chocolates. Death and destruction could rain down like confetti at a New Year’s party, and then what? Trust me. Check out his schedule. Ian Holden couldn’t have committed these murders, not all four of them, anyway, because he couldn’t have been in the right place at the right time. I’ve been forgetting the timing. I’ve been thinking like Agatha Christie.”

“Right,” Garry Mansfield said.

“Come with me, one of you,” Gregor said. “It’s only a couple of blocks away. It won’t take more than half an hour. There’s something I’ve got to find out.”

“Nobody would be angry at you if you could prove the Reverend Phipps did it,” Lou Emiliani said. “The precinct would probably get together and throw you a party.”

“Come,” Gregor said.

Garry Mansfield got his coat off the back of his chair and started to put it on. Gregor stood, shifting from one foot to the other and feeling dense. There are only two reasons for individual murder, love and money. He knew that. He had always known that. And there was something else he had known, too. In real life, murderers did not construct elaborate plots for no other reason than to make themselves look clever.