“And?”
Doug Frelinghuysen blushed. “And I had to leave early. That’s what you told us to do. If we were in danger of getting into any trouble.”
“You were in danger of getting into trouble?”
“You know.” Doug Frelinghuysen blushed again, this time so red he looked as if he had painted his face with oils and then let them dry against his skin until they cracked. “There was this guy, you know,” he said. “And he was, you know. Getting friendly. He was asking me to go out to a bar with him. There was stuff like that going on all over the room. People hitting on each other. And, uh, people kissing.”
Some of the men in the room visibly blanched. Roy kept his temper.
“So,” he said. “While you were there, did you hear anything of interest to us? Any talk of a demonstration, or some news about a public action. Anything of that kind?”
“They weren’t doing that stuff,” Doug Frelinghuysen said. “They were just, you know. Eating. And kissing. And. Stuff.”
“Yes,” Roy said. It was harder to keep his temper than ever, but it was important not to lose it too often. He needed his anger for strategic moments, when it would matter. He turned his attention to the rest of the men. “Well?” he said. “Any of you?”
“I bought the Advocate,” Carl Schmidt said. “I don’t know if it did any good. It was full of personals.”
It was also full of articles about fundamentalists, including one about this very church. Roy had seen this week’s issue of the Advocate. He counted to ten in his head, the way he had to do so often, and looked over the rest of the small crowd. They were staring at the floor, every one of them. He had sent them on a mission, and they had failed even to start it. If he pressed them, they would take on that pouty resentment they got so often at work. They were in their thirties and forties, but they were still children in the ways that mattered most. They were still people whose decisions were made by authority figures who did not believe they were mature enough to run their own lives.
Roy went over to the television set and turned it on. He had preset it to the right channel, and the first thing they all saw was the bland, blond prettiness of the KPAL anchorwoman, trying to look serious under a hairdo that would have embarrassed a toy poodle.
“It’s always women on the news shows now,” Carl Schmidt said. “You ever notice that? It used to be only men, and now it’s always women.”
The other men murmured in what might have been agreement, and might have been noise. Roy turned the volume up and took a seat in the empty front row. The picture wavered, and the next thing on the screen was a bank of microphones on a table with no one behind it. The anchorwoman’s voice in the background was hushed, as if she were calling a tennis match.
“Listen to me,” Roy said. “If we’re going to carry this off, you’re going to have to do your part. Go out to those meetings. Read the newspapers and magazines, but go out to those meetings. Go down the street and sit through the service at St. Stephen’s. Keep your ears open. Listen. You don’t have to be stealth bombs. You don’t have to tell anybody who you are. Just go. Those meetings are open. Anybody can go to them. Go and come back and tell us what was said.”
There was a low murmuring throughout the room, but Roy knew there was no way to tell what it meant. He turned his attention to the set, where a heavyset man carrying a large sheaf of papers had appeared behind the microphone, looking grave. That would be the medical examiner. Roy had never seen him before. He wished he’d brought a cup of coffee with him when he’d come upstairs. By now, this man had to know what had really happened to Marty and Bernadette Kelly. He might even know more than that. Roy wasn’t worried.
The trick was always to stay one step ahead, and he was out in front by light-years.
SIX
1
Gregor Demarkian had made it a point, through all the years of his retirement and “consulting,” always to work with police departments. The reason for that was twofold. First, it was simply easier. Father Tibor sometimes gave him mystery novels to read, but they always ended up making him feel impatient. In the real world, spunky housewives and nosy librarians did not solve crimes, no matter how bright they were. They didn’t have access to the necessary resources. Long before the Bureau had established the Behavioral Sciences Unit, law enforcement had become mostly a matter of technology. Fingerprints, footprints, tire tracks, fiber analysis, the chemical analysis of poisons—all these things were vital for any case that was going to get anywhere in a court, and they had been joined, in recent years, with even more esoteric tools like DNA analysis and voiceprints. No housewife, no matter how spunky, was going to be able to do a DNA scan in her kitchen, and no nosy librarian was going to be able to know Who Done It if she didn’t also know that the voice on the answering machine belonged to the Sweet Sister-in-Law rather than the Vituperative Ex-Wife, who was trying to mask her own voice while incriminating her rival. Of course, in real police cases, the characters in the drama almost never stacked up like that, and the murder was almost never the kind that required this sort of investigation. Instead, some idiot with more alcohol in his system than brains in his head went haywire one late Friday night and shot up his girlfriend, or some other idiot hyped high on cocaine got into a fight outside a bar about the color of his running shoes and stabbed the first person who came to hand, or some yet bigger idiot decided to hold up a convenience store and panicked when the clerk didn’t bow down and worship him at the first opportunity, which resulted in five people dead and three more wounded before a single dime ever came up out of the till. Hill Street Blues was the only thing Gregor had ever seen or heard of that tried to portray crime as it really was, and it only got away with it because it spent most of the time concentrating on the private lives of the cops in the station than it did on the crime. Even Ed McBain, whose realism was close to meticulous, dressed up his books in unusual crimes and unusual circumstances, and the other “realistic” writers Tibor had given him were about as realistic as an Oliver Stone screenplay. Gregor almost preferred the books about little old ladies and their cats. At least they didn’t pretend to be anything but what they were. If “crime novels” had really been about real crime as it really existed, nobody would buy them.