“We put them up in a hotel for three days,” Olivia said. “It cost an arm and a leg. Sheila was livid. But we just couldn’t go directly to filming with all the trouble. Eventually the police got whatever it was they wanted, and we got a day to film and sort and do the first big eliminations. And then we moved out here.”
“With fourteen girls.”
“That’s right.”
“What happened to the sixteen who didn’t make it?”
“They went back to wherever they’re from,” Olivia said. “That’s how it works. You compete, and if you’re eliminated, you go home. In the meantime, we get a lot of film of you talking, we do on-camera interviews, we have cameras filming everything almost all the time, and we edit that footage and use it on the show to punctuate the challenges and things. Sometimes I think we could skip the entire thing and go directly to eliminations. It’s eliminations that the audience likes to see.”
“When you say you’re filming them all the time, what do you mean?”
“Oh, we’ve got stationary cameras everywhere, running nonstop,” Olivia said. “We’ve got them in the bedrooms, in the kitchen—there are two here in the hall; if you look up you’ll see them. The whole point of a reality show is to have as much raw, unscripted footage as you can, and this is a reality show in spite of the fact that it’s also a kind of game show. Sheila says it’s a game show for women, because women like all the drama.”
Gregor looked around. There really were two cameras in the foyer, fixed up near the ceiling and pointing down. He saw another one near the ceiling on the landing to the stairs.
“Are there cameras in there where the body is?” he asked.
2
David Mortimer did not show up at Engine House by accident, or by epiphany. Gregor called him as soon as he realized what a royal mess of jurisdiction he was about to get himself into. The police arrived first, with sirens blazing and lights whirling, as if this were an inner-city neighborhood instead of one of the quietest and most discreet in the county. Gregor waited by the door to the study until the tech crews had come in.
“I didn’t want people wandering in and out,” he said to the taller of the two plainclothesmen who came in.
He didn’t want himself wandering in or out either. It was bad enough to look into that room. There is always something wrong about a dead body. It never looks as if it were sleeping. Then there was the blood, everywhere, blood that Gregor hadn’t noticed at first. The bullets had gone through her and out the other side. There was blood not only on the carpet and the wall and some of the furniture, but on the ceiling.
When David Mortimer arrived, Gregor had left the professionals to their work and gone to wander around the hall by himself. He was familiar enough with this house to make the walk difficult. It is always hard to observe properly when you know what you expect to see. Even so, he didn’t think there was anything to see. The foyer was, as always, broad and high ceilinged and highly polished. Whatever else was wrong with Bennis’s brother—and he thought a lot was wrong with him—he obviously kept up the house. The people belonging to the show were less easy to read. The two judges, Mark and Johnny, both looked a little sick. Sheila looked as if she wanted to hit somebody. The girls were mostly crying, except for one Asian girl who seemed to be almost as angry as Sheila herself. Only Olivia Dahl was behaving the way Gregor expected the bystander at a murder scene to behave, and he had the feeling that she was doing it from force of will.
Mortimer did not arrive in a police car with the sirens blasting, but he did arrive in a car that was driving very fast, too fast to negotiate the Engine House drive with anything like equanimity. The car screeched to a halt behind half a dozen police cars and Mortimer got out of the back. Gregor found himself wondering if he’d had a lot of trouble convincing his bosses that he needed a car and driver to get out to Bryn Mawr, or if John Jackman’s office had simply assumed it. Whatever it was, Mortimer took the front steps two at a time and then fairly sprinted through the foyer to the murder scene.
He was back in a moment with the tall plainclothesman in tow.
“Gregor Demarkian,” he said, “this is Detective Borstoi. Len Borstoi, Gregor Demarkian.”
Gregor held out his hand. He was thinking that his life was about to be a nightmare of competing police forces. He wondered who had handled the attempted murder in Merion.
“I’ve heard of you,” Borstoi said.
Gregor made a noncommittal noise.
“I thought you only worked for police departments,” Borstoi said.