Stillness in Bethlehem (30 page)

“Why not?” Gregor asked.

“Because
he
knows what he’s doing,” Stuart said. “He was in Nam, too, about two years before I was. Came back with an itch for target practice but not as bad as mine. He’s got the Marlin and about six other rifles including a thirty-ought-six he takes up to Canada hunting. He’d never have left the rifle out there like that. He’d have known better.”

“Where does he keep it?” Gregor asked.

Franklin Morrison answered. “He’s got a rack over his fireplace, just like the ones you see in house magazines. Got a nice house, too, just off Main Street, around the corner from the
News and Mail
. Local stone.”

“Does he lock the guns in the rack?”

“No,” Franklin said. “Nobody does that kind of thing around here. Nobody gets their things stolen around here as a general rule. Or they didn’t used to.”

“Old Linda Holt has one, too,” Stuart said. “She’s our resident grand old countrywoman. Came up from Boston about twenty years ago and got more native than the natives. She’s seventy-nine. She used to use a Remington Model 7 but it got too much for her.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

“I keep trying to match rifles to the people I saw last night,” Stuart said, “and I just can’t do it. I run one of the food stalls. I was standing right outside the bleachers when the play was over last night, and I must have seen a dozen people I knew. Sharon Morrissey. Amanda Ballard. Betty Heath. Amanda’s shot a rifle or two in her life. She’s come out here with Peter for rifle practice. And I know Sharon Morrissey can shoot because she’s always winning things at the county-fair booths in the summer. As for Betty Heath—I think if you showed her a gun, she’d probably scream.”

“Mmm,” Gregor Demarkian said again.

They were all looking at him. Even Bennis, who should have known better, had her head cocked as if she expected him to produce a pearl of wisdom or the perfect solution to the entire mess, wrapped up in ribbons and tied up in bows. Instead, his mind was caught on a couple of snags.

He stirred in his chair, did his best to sound like a Great Detective with the solution already in hand and a secret agenda to his questions and said, “Are the two things contradictory? The rifle is stashed in a way that no one who knew anything about rifles would stash it—which, for your information, is the same way we found the other rifle stashed last night—anyway, there it is, stashed by an amateur, and there the—the bodies are—hit by someone who must have been familiar with firearms.”

Stuart Ketchum looked startled. “Why?” he demanded.

“Why what?” Gregor asked him.

“Why did he have to be familiar with firearms?”

Now it was Gregor’s turn to be confused. Since it was such a familiar feeling in this case, he didn’t mind. “Because he’s so consistently accurate,” he said. “Always, every time, he hits his victims in exactly the same places.”

“How do you know he’s aiming at those places?” Stuart asked.

Gregor countered. “How do you know he’s not?”

Stuart Ketchum threw up his hands. “Well, hell,” he said. “If he’s so good he can aim and hit the shoulder and the throat every last blasted time, why hit the shoulder and the throat at all? Why not hit the heart? Why not hit the head? The way he’s been going about it, he’s been damned lucky one of his victims hasn’t shown up alive.”

“Now, Stuart,” Franklin Morrison said.

But Stuart Ketchum wasn’t listening. His winter jacket hung from a peg hammered into the wall near the wood stove. He grabbed it, stuffed it under his arm and started out a door at the back.

“Where are you going?” Gregor asked him.

“Show you something,” Stuart Ketchum said. Then he turned back to the room, looked at Bennis and said, “You’ll be perfect. Come on out to the yard.”

“Come on out to the yard and do what?” Bennis asked.

Stuart wasn’t waiting for her, either. He was standing in the back doorway, holding the door open and motioning them all through.

They had to go through the gun room to get to the backyard. Gregor looked it over and decided that Stuart Ketchum had been telling the literal truth. If a gun had been missing from this collection, Stuart would have known about it. The guns were not only all in racks, but labeled and sorted according to type and caliber. The military collection took up one wall and each of the guns in it had been secured to the rack with a frame lock. Gregor saw a pair of Mausers that looked old enough, and in good-enough condition, to be worth serious money. He decided that Stuart locked them up less because they were dangerous than because they would be tempting to steal for sale. The other rifles were not locked up, not even now, after one of them had gone missing and been involved in the shooting deaths of two people.

Out in the yard, a string of cans was set up on a disintegrating wooden fence for target practice, but Stuart ignored them. He went into the barn and came out again with what Gregor recognized as a folded-up police practice target, the kind that works on a modified tripod. Stuart unfolded it, reached into its back and came out with a sheet of paper drawn to look like the head and torso of a man. He tacked this securely to the target and stepped back.

“There,” he said. “Now let me show you something.” He hurried back through the door they had all come out of and reappeared a few moments later with a rifle Gregor thought was close to identical to the Browning that had been used in the killings of Tisha Verek and Gemma Bury. He walked to a place about forty feet in front of the target, loaded the rifle and aimed. “Watch me,” he said.

They watched him. He hit the target square in the heart.

“There,” he told them. “I can aim. And this isn’t a bad test, either. I don’t know where my mother was or what she was doing when she was hit, but Gemma Bury was sitting close to stock still on a bleacher and Tisha Verek was standing in her own driveway. These shootings have been a lot like target practice from the beginning. Now I need Ms. Hannaford.”

“For what?” Bennis Hannaford asked suspiciously.

“This is what we brought you out here for,” Gregor said soothingly. “It’s what I meant back at the Inn when I said we needed you for target practice.”

“You knew he was going to pull this?” Bennis didn’t believe it.

“They knew I wanted a small-sized person to fire a gun,” Stuart said. “This is something else. We’ll get back to the other thing later if we have to, which maybe we won’t. Come up here and hold this thing.”

Stuart had the barrel cocked. Bennis took the rifle out of his hands and held it away from her body, at arm’s length, as if it were contagious. Gregor had to bite his lip to keep from laughing.

Stuart walked up behind Bennis, put his arms around her shoulders and gripped the gun. Then he brought it closer to both of them and put the barrel back in place. Bennis definitely didn’t look happy with the situation.

“I’m going to kill somebody,” she warned. “I’ve never had one of these, things in my hands before in my life.”

“You’re not going to kill anyone,” Stuart said. “You’re going to shoot at the target. Let me show you how to aim.”

Stuart showed Bennis how to aim. Then he stood back and nodded encouragingly. Bennis had let the barrel’s nose drop toward the ground. Now she pulled it up again and sighted along the barrel. Gregor thought she looked like she felt ridiculous.

“Now,” Stuart told her, “aim for the heart, and pull on the trigger.”

“I don’t want to aim for the heart,” Bennis said.

“It’s just a piece of paper,” Stuart said patiently. “Just aim for the middle there. I want to show your friends an important point.”

Bennis sighted again, and then closed her eyes. She fired in the direction the gun was pointing in without looking at what she was firing at. Then she opened her eyes again and said, “Nothing happened.”

“Something did happen,” Stuart said drily. “You hit the side of my barn. Couldn’t you feel the recoil?”

“My shoulder still hurts.”

“Exactly my point.”

“I don’t get it,” Franklin Morrison said.

“It would be easier if Ms. Hannaford here would keep her eyes open long enough to hit something,” Stuart Ketchum said, “but in theory it’s very easy. Maybe Ms. Hannaford could try again and keep her eyes open this time.”

“I don’t want to try again,” Bennis said. “I’m a nonviolent person.”

“Aim.”

Bennis looked appealingly at Gregor Demarkian and then at Franklin Morrison, got no help—Gregor wasn’t going to give her any; he wanted to see what this was all about—and raised the rifle again. This time, she didn’t look so afraid of it. She positioned the stock against her shoulder and sighted down the barrel again. She bit her lip and tensed her finger on the trigger. Gregor thought she was deliberately holding her eyes open, the way people will when they’re talking to a very important bore. She pushed her feet a little wider apart, braced herself and fired. Then she pointed the barrel’s nose at the ground once again and looked confused.

“Something happened,” she said.

“You hit the target,” Stuart told her. “A little to the side. You got the appendix instead of the heart. Still, it wasn’t my barn.”

“But it wasn’t that I didn’t aim right,” Bennis said. “The rifle moved.”

“Exactly,” Stuart Ketchum said.

“Why did it do that?”

“Because you aren’t used to firing rifles and because you have the upper-body strength of a gnat.”

“Thanks a lot,” Bennis said.

Franklin Morrison was beginning to get restless. Gregor didn’t blame him.

“Now see here,” Franklin said. “What is it you’re getting at, Stuart? So Ms. Hannaford’s never fired a gun before. So she’s not good at it. So what and who cares?”

“You should,” Stuart Ketchum said. “Look, it only makes sense. I’ve thought it from the beginning. That’s why I’ve never believed all those rumors that Jan-Mark Verek killed Tisha.”

“Do you know Jan-Mark Verek?” Gregor asked. “Do you know he knows how to fire a rifle?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea if Jan-Mark Verek has ever seen a rifle,” Stuart said, “but I do know that if he had some kind of characteristic trouble firing one, this isn’t the kind it would be. The man is built like a bull. You do realize it, don’t you? All this business with throats and shoulders. It’s not what our man is aiming for. It’s what the rifle is making him hit.”

“Stuart—” Franklin was sounding a warning.

Stuart Ketchum turned back to Bennis Hannaford. “Do it again,” he commanded. “Only this time, aim for the head.”

Bennis hesitated only a moment. Then she raised the rifle’s barrel, aimed at the head and pulled the trigger. When she put the gun’s nose down, she was looking confused again.

“It happened just the same way,” she said.

“Yes, it did,” Stuart told her, “and it will go on happening the same way unless you get enough experience to correct for the rifle’s action or you start lifting weights. You got him right in the shoulder.”

“I think I’m beginning to understand,” Gregor said slowly. “Our man, or woman, is really aiming at the head and the heart, say, but because he isn’t used to handling a rifle, he doesn’t know how to correct for the weapon’s kick. Therefore, every time he aims at the head, say, he hits the throat, and every time he aims at the heart—”

“—he hits the shoulder,” Stuart said. “Our guy goes to the right just like Bennis here goes to the left. He also jumps around more than Ms. Hannaford does, but that doesn’t matter. It can’t be Verek because Verek has too much strength in his shoulders and his arms. He wouldn’t need to correct for the rifle’s action the way Ms. Hannaford has to because he’d be strong enough to hold the gun steady under any conditions. Unless, of course, the two of you are right and he actually wants to be hitting people in the shoulder and the neck, which I think is rank impossible.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

“I’m getting a headache,” Franklin said.

Stuart Ketchum stood with his arms folded over his chest, looking triumphant. He had never put his jacket on. He had it tied around his waist where it couldn’t do him any good. He didn’t look cold.

“The other thing this proves,” he said, “is that all three of the shootings had to be done by the same person. I’m not saying there couldn’t be two people in the world with the same reaction to a rifle kick. I’m just saying that as coincidences go, it’s—”

“What’s that?” Gregor asked.

That was a loud echoing noise, like a Brahma bull bellowing into a bullhorn, and it seemed to fill the air like a sudden hard rain. Stuart Ketchum was looking disgusted. Franklin Morrison was looking resigned.

“That,” he said, “is Jan-Mark Verek himself, calling for help. He’s probably dead drunk and can’t find his way to the bathroom.”

The hopes and fears of all the years

Are met in thee tonight

I
N ONE WAY, JAN-MARK
Verek was more of a traditional artist than a contemporary one. He believed in doing the meet and seemly thing, and it was with an eye to doing the meet and seemly thing that he had built his house. Gregor Demarkian saw it right away, as soon as Franklin Morrison’s car pulled into the Vereks’ driveway. There was that great expanse of redwood and glass, staring out across the snowed-over front lawn to the line of tall trees that shielded the property from the road. There was the purity of line, the integrity of form, the perfection of detail that spoke of a project pursued for its beauty at completion. There was the expense, too, that spoke of a project pursued by a man who did not have to wonder how his children would get through college. Gregor found something particularly satisfying about the expense. It wasn’t a large house—not so large as a four-bedroom colonial in a decent Boston suburb—but Gregor was willing to bet that every square foot of it had cost triple what would have been spent on a more conventional place. Redwood had been chosen over clapboard. Glass had been custom designed and special ordered. Cabinets had been individually and locally made. Gregor knew about the cabinets because he could see them. He could see everything there was to see, through those windows, except the bed, which he guessed was up on the second level behind the partial wall on which hung a red-and-grey Navajo blanket. It was an exposed and vulnerable house, except that, hidden behind the trees like this, there was nothing for it to be exposed and vulnerable to. Still, Gregor didn’t like it. He always thought first of security, just in case. There was never any way to tell if your next-door neighbor was a saint or David Berkowitz. Not even if you’d known that neighbor for the past forty years.