Stillness in Bethlehem (24 page)

She hadn’t told Gregor Demarkian about the affair Gemma was having with Jan-Mark Verek, but maybe she ought to tell him now. And while she was at it, maybe she ought to give him this manuscript.

At least it would get it out of the house.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN WAS FIFTY-SIX
years old, the product of a generation that believed in reason, frugality and hard work, not magic and intuition. He had had a good career and a celebrated one, entirely—he believed—because of the time and effort he had put in. If he had had brilliant moments of insight, they had arisen from his years of patient, plodding study. If he had appeared to be possessed of mythic wisdom in his field, it was because he had applied himself so thoroughly to understanding his field. That was why this business with the rifle made him so nervous. Gregor Demarkian didn’t know anything about rifles. He had never bothered to learn. He didn’t like guns, although he could shoot as well as anybody else who had been a field agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation a dozen years ago. All Bureau agents had to learn how to shoot, of course, and administrators were supposed to go out to the range and keep up their skills, but Gregor had learned quickly that that was a rule easily avoided and happily unenforced. He hated firing ranges at least as much as he hated guns. Heat and noise, anger and hostility: At the Bureau, there had always been somebody around who did like guns, and who studied them, and who could tell Gregor what Gregor needed to know. Gregor didn’t understand the first thing about impacts and trajectories.

He had figured out where the rifle would be because of something Demp had said about impacts and trajectories, and also because it was the only solution that made sense. A rifle isn’t a handgun. A handgun can be stored in a pocket and walked around in public with impunity. Since no one can see and no one can know, no one will suspect. Gregor couldn’t imagine anyone tromping around the park last night with a Browning .22-caliber semiautomatic Grade I rifle. Dozens of people would have seen him and commented on him, even if there had never been a shooting. Someone would have called a cop. The only explanation that made sense was that the rifle was never out in the open at all, and that meant looking for places it could be hidden. Gregor’s first impulse had been to look in the bleachers, under the benches, in the stands. Then he had realized that that explanation was almost as bad as the first one. What was the killer going to do, whip this big heavy rifle out from under his seat, stand up in full view of everybody and aim? Gregor thought he hated guns with good reason, one having nothing to do with the noise they made and the harm they caused. They were so damn complicated. When a killer used poison, it was easy. Drop the poison in a glass in full sight of thirty people in the lobby of an opera hall during intermission, and nobody noticed a thing.

“I kept going around and around the park in my mind,” Gregor told Bennis the next morning, going around and around her room while she sat on the antique wedding quilt that covered her bed, pinning her hair to the top of her head, “and the more I did the more I realized the whole thing would have been impossible if the rifle wasn’t already on the premises before the Nativity play ever started. For a while I thought it would have had to have been there before any of the performances started, back a couple of weeks ago, but it was definitely a bullet from Stuart Ketchum’s gun they found—”

“How could you know already it was a bullet from Stuart Ketchum’s gun?” Bennis asked, stuffing her mouth with rippled hairpins. Gregor had never been able to understand how she could speak so clearly with her mouth full of pins like that. “Don’t you have to run tests before you know what gun that bullet belonged to?”

“To be absolutely sure, of course we do,” Gregor nodded, “but I’m relying on local expertise, as the old Behavioral Sciences field book used to put it. Stuart Ketchum marks his ammunition. The spent shells had his mark.”

“Why does he do that?”

“It’s got something to do with target competitions. Don’t ask me. At any rate, there that was, so I was left with the strong possibility that the rifle had to have been put there later than I wanted it to have been, since Tisha Verek was killed with Stuart Ketchum’s rifle and that was the morning of the first day of the first week of performances of the play—”

“Well, that was before the play started,” Bennis said.

“It wasn’t enough before,” Gregor told her. “By that Monday, the park had to have had at least periodic intrusions of people, wandering around getting one thing or another done. That was certainly true yesterday afternoon, when I’ve decided the rifle must actually have been put there, assuming, as I still insist on assuming, that our killer was looking to shoot Gemma Bury in particular, and not just any stray townsperson attending the Nativity play.”

Bennis’s hair was now securely on top of her head and her mouth was still full of pins. She took the pins out and began putting them back in a small metal box that had once contained Sucrets.

“That’s a really terrible thought,” she said. “I mean that somebody could be wandering around just offing people for the hell of it. Do you think that could be true?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He’s going to too much trouble,” Gregor explained. “I don’t mean with things like hiding the rifle in those bushes. That’s premeditation, that’s all right. You get it with serial killers and you get it with the more normal kind. I mean with Tisha Verek. All the way out there on the Delaford Road. What for? If his only concern is to kill somebody in town, why not pick an old lady off on Main Street?”

“Less chance of getting caught?” Bennis supplied helpfully.

“More. Harder to get away. If you shoot at somebody on Main Street, you can ditch the rifle and hop into the nearest store, and if you’ve picked your spot and your time, nobody’s seen you and nobody’s going to suspect.”

“Because he stole Stuart Ketchum’s rifle,” Bennis said. “That was out there and then he killed the first person he came across after he got hold of it.”

“Why?”

“I thought we weren’t asking why, Gregor. I thought this was an argument in favor of a crazy.”

“I wish you’d disabuse yourself of the notion that crazies are people who leap and whirl in supermarket aisles and can’t remember their names from one minute to the next. There are people like that, Bennis, but they don’t become serial murderers. They get institutionalized.”

“That’s wonderful to know.”

“Serial murderers—and we would have to be talking about a serial murderer here, even if Dinah Ketchum’s death wasn’t connected to the other two, as long as the motive for the other two was some kind of psychological kick—serial murderers are very organized people. The psychopaths are by definition, of course, but even the other ones, the ones who think the moon is delivering messages from aliens on Saturn or whatever, even those are extraordinarily coherent. That’s why they don’t get caught.”

“But they do get caught, don’t they?”

“Some of them do and some of them don’t. Most of them take a damned long time.” Gregor got up out of the chair he had been sitting in and paced moodily to Bennis’s window, looking out on the snow-covered tips of buildings occasionally decked with plastic Santas and reindeer. Bennis was winding ribbons into her hair, green and red, traditional Christmas colors.

“Anyway,” Gregor said, “it had to be somewhere there already before the performance started, because he couldn’t have gotten it there during, so where could it have been? And that’s when this boy Demp said something about the trajectory—about how there had practically been no trajectory, the bullet almost seemed to have gone straight through. And then he laughed and said he realized that couldn’t have been possible. For that to have happened the killer would have had to crouch, because sitting on our level of the bleacher, Gemma was actually lower than most standing people would be—”

“Not so much lower than me,” Bennis pointed out. “I’m only five-foot-four.”

“All right. Somebody five-foot-four could have been standing up. Anybody taller would have to be crouching over. Whatever. I looked around and there were the bushes, one of only two sets of bushes in the whole park. They don’t let the bushes grow over there because they don’t want vegetation getting in the way of the viewing, but they let these two sets because they help with the play. They’re kind of living props. And that’s when it hit me. All somebody had to do was leave the rifle in the bushes beforehand—maybe even set it up for aim beforehand—and then wait until the moment was right.”

“Whoever it was would have had to know where Gemma was going to be sitting beforehand,” Bennis cautioned.

“Exactly,” Gregor said. “That gives us, who? Peter Callisher. Peter’s girlfriend, Amanda Ballard. That semi-retarded man who works for them, Timmy Hall. Kelley Grey. Anybody who might have been in the newspaper office when Peter Callisher gave Gemma Bury the tickets. Anybody any such person might have told—”

“Oh,” Bennis said.

“Exactly. You see where we are. Leave the rifle in the bushes. Wait until Gemma is alone, the stands are mostly clear and you aren’t being watched—which wouldn’t be that hard. Those bushes are right near where the animals come through into the park. There’s a board hold-back near there that would effectively screen most of you from the people behind you, and what would they see if they saw you anyway? Someone standing pressed against a bush? Would they even notice?”

“It was still quite a chance.”

“It was definitely quite a chance, but it wasn’t the miracle Franklin Morrison and the state police want to make it out to be. Did I tell you Franklin called in the state police last night after everybody else had gone?”

“I was part of the everybody else who had gone.”

“Of course. Well. They were called. They came. They made utter nuisances of themselves. Give me local cops over state police all the time.”

“I know how you feel about the state police,” Bennis said. She wound herself off the bed and went searching under it with her feet. A couple of seconds later, Gregor watched her come up with a pair of leather-topped clogs. She slipped her feet into them and went rooting around in the mess on her night table. Her cigarettes were there. So was her copy of something called
The Hilton Head Metabolism Diet
. The copy was dog-eared and destroyed. It even looked like it had been written in. Gregor frowned.

“I’m going down to breakfast,” he said. “You could come with me.”

“No thanks.” Bennis found her lighter, stuck a cigarette in her mouth and lit up. “Tibor was pushing chocolate cake and knishes on me all night. I’m not going to be able to eat for a week. You wouldn’t believe what he had when we got back here. Pizza.”

“Where did he get pizza?”

“I don’t know, but it was hot. Trust Tibor.”

“Maybe you ought to sit down this afternoon and let him see you eating a great big lunch. Maybe that will stop him from worrying about you.”

“Maybe it would,” Bennis said, “but it’s not going to happen this afternoon. I’m on my own. Tibor made the acquaintance of the local Catholic priest, and they’re going off together to look at facsimile Latin manuscripts or something the man brought back from Rome. I think they’re both slightly obsessional on St. Augustine.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said, and then made up his mind. No matter how much he disliked letting Bennis into the thick of real cases, he had a responsibility. It wasn’t that he thought Tibor was entirely right. Tibor had panics. He was having one now. On the other hand, it was also true that he never saw Bennis eating anymore, and that was disturbing. Bennis usually ate like a horse.

“Why don’t you come with me?” he asked her. “I’m only going to grab a sandwich on the run, but after that Franklin Morrison and I are going out to Stuart Ketchum’s farm. You might come in handy.”

“On a case?”

“For target practice.”

There was a knock on Bennis’s door—hardly necessary, since the door was open; the single and the suite at this end of the corridor constituted a little section of their own that could be closed off by a door in the hall, and Bennis had started to behave as if they were in fact living in a self-contained private suite—and Father Tibor Kasparian stuck his small neat head through. Gregor was intrigued to notice that he was in a much better mood than he had been in the night before, in spite of the fact that he couldn’t have gotten much sleep. He had a spring in his step and a large brown paper grocery bag in his arms. Bennis regarded the grocery bag warily, giving off an aura that looked to Gregor very much like despair.

“What have you got?” she demanded, through the smoke curling up from her cigarette and making a cloud above her hair.

“Cookies!” Tibor said triumphantly.

Gregor Demarkian decided it was time he got out of there.

When Gregor Demarkian had made up his mind that there wasn’t a single place to get decent food in Bethlehem, Vermont, he had reckoned without breakfast. Breakfast, after all, was the high point of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant cooking, the one thing even the English made better than anybody else. In France you got a sticky bun and overcaffeinated coffee. In Greece and Italy you got rolls so stale you could have used them for roofing tiles and a little weak tea. Only with the English and the descendants of the English could you be sure of being fed and satisfied at nine o’clock in the morning. Gregor had entered the Green Mountain Inn’s breakfast room with trepidation the morning before. He liked the suite he shared with Tibor well enough, but the Inn made him a little antsy. It was too studied, too discreet. The Christmas decorations erred on the side of chic. After The Magick Endive, he didn’t want to guess what the food would be like. Then he had entered the breakfast room itself and looked around and been instantly, pleasantly surprised. The tables were sturdy and functional without being self-consciously rustic. The tablecloths were good needlepoint covers with sprightly secular Christmas scenes across them. The chairs were solid looking. Gregor Demarkian was a big man, and not just because of the extra twenty or twenty-five pounds he carried. He was inches over six feet tall and thick-boned. He had broad, muscular shoulders and the powerful thighs that ought to have belonged to a former athlete. Gregor had never competed in athletics if he could help it, except in stickball and prisoner’s base when he was a boy. The unusual development of his shoulders and legs was entirely inherited. Gregor had had a much older brother once, who had died in France at the very end of the Second World War, and although Gregor remembered him only dimly, one thing that had stuck with him was his brother’s size and shape. God only knew what Gregor’s father had been like. He’d died when Gregor was so young, Gregor didn’t remember him at all.