by Jane Haddam
“I suppose your secretaries would have six kinds of fits if we checked with them about it,” Gregor said.
“Probably,” Russ said. “But we could. Everybody’s walking on eggshells anyway. The explosion is likely to be muted. But I don’t think we can wake them up at this hour of the morning to do it.”
“Mikel said you had told him you had good news,” Asha said. “He was very happy about it. And that big sign came down off the front of the house. I was very happy about it.”
“I do have good news,” Russ said. “I actually got the court to grant an injunction. Why they should do it now when they wouldn’t for the last six months is beyond me, but they did it. That means that nobody can go forward with the foreclosure until we’ve been able to bring our entire case into court on the countersuit. And that means that you’re safe in your house for the foreseeable future. Safe from J.P. CitiWells, anyway. If you’ve got a problem with American Amity, that’s something else.”
“There is no problem with our real bank,” Asha said stiffly. “Mikel is always on time with all his payments. Also his payments for electricity and everything else.”
“I think the problem now is to find out what’s happened to him,” Gregor said. “I told Asha here that I’d seen him this afternoon. He was rushing off to an appointment. That could have been his appointment with you. Except I think it was just after lunch, and if his appointment with you was—”
“After three o’clock,” Russ said.
“It seems a little early,” Gregor said. “It seems a lot early. But he was very excited. He didn’t stop to talk. And he looked frantic.”
“He was going to the Hall of Records,” Asha said. “He was going to look there for something to help our case.”
Russ looked puzzled. “The Hall of Records? But why? There wouldn’t be anything there. The only crux of this case is the fact that J.P. CitiWells didn’t use the Hall of Records. They used that online database. If they’d used the Hall of Records, we could have had this whole thing cleared up in a day.”
“There wasn’t anything he could have found there at all?” Gregor said.
“I don’t see what,” Russ said. “The real mortgage is filed there, the one from American Amity Savings. But there’s nothing wrong with that mortgage. And there’s nothing there about J.P. CitiWells.”
“I think maybe there is something he could find,” Asha said. “And then these people, these people from the big bank with the ridiculous name, maybe they wanted to stop him from telling you about it.”
Russ shook his head. “There really isn’t anywhere to go with that. There isn’t anything anybody could have found out that would make J.P. CitiWells want to … uh…”
“Liquidate him,” Asha said firmly.
“Right,” Russ said. “Liquidate him. There really isn’t any reason why somebody from J.P. CitiWells would want to liquidate him. Or anybody else. No matter what they found out.”
“They could go to jail for what they are doing,” Asha said. “They don’t want to go to jail.”
“Nobody at J.P. CitiWells is going to jail for anything they’re doing,” Russ said. “No matter what it is. I can’t even think of a scenario where that would be the case. Hell, they nearly wrecked the entire country and none of them went to jail. And this is, what? Yet another case of a mortgage mess the same as dozens they’ve had before.”
“It’s the dozens part I can’t get over,” Gregor said. “But I agree with Russ here. I don’t think it’s plausible to believe that somebody from J.P. CitiWells sent a hit man after Mikel, even if the timing wasn’t so tight. Even if he found something out, how would the bank had known he’d found it? We’re talking about the space of a few hours here.”
“You said he was running,” Asha said. “He was running for his life.”
“He said he was late for an appointment,” Gregor said. “It sounds to me as if that was too early to be his appointment with Russ here. Did he say anything about another appointment?”
“No,” Asha said. “He said he was going to the Hall of Records, and then he was going to see Mr. Donahue.”
“Maybe he made another appointment while he was out,” Gregor said. “We should try to think of whom he’d make an appointment with. That might help.”
“I hate to say it,” Russ said, “but I think the most plausible explanation is that Mikel ran into trouble somewhere. You know what Philadelphia is like. There are neighborhoods and then there are other neighborhoods and they change in a flash. If he ended up somewhere that wasn’t safe—”
“You are saying my Mikel is dead,” Asha Dekanian said. Her voice was edging up into the frantic range. “You are saying somebody killed him and left his body in the street.”
“I’m not saying anything of the kind,” Russ said firmly. “I’m saying that the first thing we ought to do is to check the hospitals, because if he did run into trouble and got knocked out, he could be in one of those. He wouldn’t necessarily still have his wallet with him. They would take the wallet. Did he have anything else on him that would identify him? You didn’t by any chance sew a tag into his clothes.”
“A tag? What is a tag?” Asha asked.
“It’s a little printed label that you sew into clothes when you’re going to go to camp or to a boarding school,” Gregor said. “It’s usually done for children.”
“Mikel is not a child,” Asha said.
“Of course not,” Russ said. “But sometimes—” He looked at Asha’s face and gave it up. “Let’s get started calling hospitals,” he said. “There aren’t that many of them. If we don’t find him, we’ll think of something else.”
The first thing Gregor thought of was the morgue, and he knew better than to say anything about that.
3
Three quarters of an hour later, they had found no trace of anybody who might be Mikel Dekanian at any of the hospitals, and they had also not found any trace of him at the morgue. Gregor had taken care of the morgue himself, going into a room where Asha couldn’t hear him and getting a deputy coroner out of bed. The deputy coroner got two other people out of bed, and one of those finally found the woman who had access to the records they needed. No body brought into the morgue for the last twenty-four hours fit the description of Mikel Dekanian, even vaguely.
By then it was after five o’clock in the morning and the first traces of sun were coming up on the horizon. Gregor felt jet-lagged, and Russ looked it. Asha Dekanian was shaking in her chair.
“He has disappeared into thin air,” she said. “He is lying dead somewhere and we will never find him.”
“Don’t go on like that,” Gregor said. “There are still a lot of things that might have happened, and all of them are more likely than that he’s lying dead somewhere. I think the next thing we need to do is to notify the authorities and get them to issue a silver alert—”
Russ shook his head. “You’re not going to get them to do that today, no matter what you do,” he said. “It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours. As far as the police are concerned, he isn’t even a missing person yet.”
“I thought the point of the alerts was to start looking for missing people earlier,” Gregor said.
“It is,” Russ said, “but you’ve got to look at it from their point of view. He’s a grown man, in good health, and in his right mind as far as anybody can tell. He’s got an absolute right to go where he wants to go and to inform people of that or not as he wants. If they put out a silver alert for him right away and bring in the resources to go looking for him and it turns out he’s just gone off to visit a friend in Sheboygan—”
“What is this Sheboygan?” Asha demanded.
“If it turns out he’s gone off for some reason of his own,” Russ went on, “they’ve not only wasted a lot of time and resources, but they’re also stuck with the bill.”
“Are you telling me Mikel would have gone away without telling me?” Asha demanded. “For what purpose? To see a woman? You think Mikel has run
away with a woman?”
There was a sudden stream of vigorous and infuriated Armenian. Neither Gregor nor Russ knew what it meant, but they both winced.
“I don’t think that’s the likely explanation either,” Gregor said, although there was a part of him that could see why it might be very likely indeed. “And I don’t see why it would hurt to ask the authorities to put out an alert. If they say no, they say no. If he wanders in on his own, there’s been no harm done even if they’ve said yes—”
“Except to the finances of the City of Philadelphia,” Russ said.
“And let’s face it,” Gregor said, “we’ll all feel a lot better. So let’s get that done, and let’s get Asha here back to her children, and then I’m going to go to the Ararat and have breakfast. I think sleeping is not very likely on this particular morning.”
“All right,” Russ said. “I’ll go call in the alert.”
Asha Dekanian hesitated. “I will return to my house,” she said. “I will send Mrs. Demarkian back home. But Mikel is not somewhere with a woman. Mikel would not ever go away with a woman.”
Gregor didn’t think Mikel Dekanian had gone off with a woman either, but he wasn’t sure why he didn’t. He ushered Russ into the living room to make the call and bundled Asha Dekanian up to send her home and wished he didn’t feel as tired as he did.
He’d just got Asha out into the morning when Russ came out of the living room, looking like hell.
“I take it you can’t go back to sleep any more than I can,” Gregor said.
Russ shrugged. “It’s not like I’m sleeping all that well anyway,” he said. “This is a hell of a mess. It really is.”
“I take it you’re not talking about Mikel Dekanian.”
“I think the odds are that Mikel Dekanian met some friend of his somewhere and they tied one on but good, and he’ll show up in a couple of hours with egg on his face.”
“Is Mikel prone to that kind of thing?”
“No,” Russ said, “but you don’t have to be prone to that kind of thing to do it. And that is the way these things usually turn out. I’ve seen maybe six of them in my career, and that’s the way all of those turned out. No, it’s not Mikel. It’s not even the mortgage thing. I’ve made some progress in the mortgage thing.”
“If it helps any, Tibor isn’t talking to me any more than he’s talking to you,” Gregor said.
“You know who he is talking to?” Russ asked. “Hannah Krekorian. Hannah went over to the jail to see him yesterday, and he saw her. Agreed to talk to her through those telephone hookups.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “That could be a good sign. Did you talk to her? Did she tell you anything Tibor said?”
“I didn’t talk to her, Donna did,” Russ said. “And from what I gather, he said practically nothing, and she spent the entire visiting time crying and accusing him of things. You know Hannah. And what does that mean, that he’d talk to Hannah and not to either of us?”
“It could mean he’s ashamed of himself,” Gregor said.
“Do you believe that?”
“No,” Gregor said. “At least, not in the way it sounds. I don’t think he killed that woman and now he’s afraid to face us. I think maybe he’s afraid to talk to us because he knows that if he did talk to us, he might not be able to keep his silence about what actually happened. I just wish I could think of what that might be.”
“Right,” Russ said. “I wish I could think of anything. I’d better go home, Gregor. Donna’s probably frantic. And Bennis will be home in a minute. I’ve actually got work to do today.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “So do I.”
“It’s just so strange,” Russ said. “I always knew Tibor was the bedrock of this neighborhood, but I think I always thought of that as an abstraction. It’s just so strange for him not to be here. As if the whole place has emptied out.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Gregor said.
And he did.
TWO
1
When Father Tibor Kasparian was honest with himself, he had to admit that he was going a little crazy. He was almost certain that he would be allowed to have books if he asked for them. He’d seen that on television once or twice. Even prisoners on death row were allowed to have books. What he wasn’t so clear on was the way it worked. Was there a prison library somewhere, where he could borrow books? He hadn’t seen a prison library or heard of one, but he spent all but an hour a day in this small cell. Anything could be going on out there, and he wouldn’t know about it.
Maybe the problem was that he was not in prison. He was in jail. He had been vaguely aware, before all this happened, that there was a difference, but he’d never paid much attention to it. Jail was where you waited for your trial. Prison was where you served your sentence. He was pretty sure he had that right. He wondered if prison was like this, with small cells with solid doors and almost no way to look out. He wondered if prisoners were like this, not just cooped up but also so bored, it was hard to remember how to breathe. If they were, then Tibor Kasparian was no longer the least surprised that there were prison riots.
Somewhere along the line, Tibor had passed through a barrier, and he knew it. He was bored and lonely and desperately isolated. Things were going on in the world, and he knew about none of them. Things were going on with the case, yes, but they were also going on in the real world. There were elections coming up in a couple of months. There would be political ads and debates and television opinion shows where everybody was lying. There were episodes of Downton Abbey he hadn’t gotten around to watching on Netflix. He had not been in jail for a full calendar week, so the church was all right for the moment. It wouldn’t be all right in the long run. There would be no service Sunday, unless somebody did something drastic. Tibor didn’t see who would or what that would be. Sometime along the line, they would have to get another priest.
He wanted to think that the jails where they kept juveniles were not like this, but he was sure they were. He imagined Stefan Maldovanian locked up in a small room with nothing to do. He imagined Petrak Maldovanian, too, although Petrak would probably be sent to an adult prison. Closed up and bored. Losing their minds. Never making anything of themselves, because there was less and less of themselves to make every single day.
When they came and told him he had visitors, he didn’t hesitate. He really had crossed a line. He needed to see people. He needed to talk to them. He didn’t think he would agree to talk to Gregor. Talking to Gregor would be far too dangerous. But he would talk to anybody else. He would even talk to Bennis and Donna, if they came.
It was not Bennis and Donna who came. The guard who brought the message garbled the names, but Tibor had no problem at all knowing what they were.
“I haven’t seen them yet myself,” the young woman guard said when she got him out and all trussed up to move. “But I’ll tell you, Chris downstairs couldn’t stop laughing.”
Tibor would have bet his life that Chris downstairs wasn’t laughing where the Very Old Ladies could hear him. Nobody laughed at the Very Old Ladies unless he was suicidal.
Tibor wondered absently what they were doing about the setup downstairs, which allowed only one person to sit down in the cubicle and talk through the phone.
He also wondered what time it was. It was after breakfast and the long rigamarole that was getting teeth brushed and generally cleaned up. After that, there had been A Lot of Time, but that could mean anything.
When he got to the booth where they wanted him to sit, Tibor saw that Mrs. Vespasian was in the seat in front of the glass panel, and her two minions were standing right behind her. All three of the women were exceedingly frail. All three of them had to be well into their nineties. Not one of them was headed for a nursing home anytime soon.
Mrs. Vespasian had her walking stick with her, the ebony one with the ivory handle that one of her great-grandchildren had bought for her on a trip to London. She looked grim, but she always looked grim. The oth
er two only looked worried.
“This is ridiculous,” she said when she picked up the phone. “What do they expect me to do with a walking stick? If it’s not on the ground as my fifth leg, I cannot stand up.”
She could always use it to whack people when she was sitting down, Tibor thought. He didn’t say it.
“And this thing,” Mrs. Vespasian said, gesturing to the cubicle and the glass and the phone. “What is this thing? What do they expect three old women are going to do? What do they expect you are going to do? You never hurt anyone in your life.”
This wasn’t true. Tibor let it go. “I am very glad to see you,” he said. “It becomes very boring in here. And I do not hear news.”
“It wouldn’t be so boring if you got out of here,” Mrs. Vespasian said, “and I am sure you can get out of here if you tell me what is going on.” Suddenly she switched to Armenian. It had been seventy years since she last saw Armenia, but she had not forgotten the language. “This is a ridiculous thing you are doing. Nobody believes in it. Even you do not believe in it. I can see it in your face.”
“But I do believe in it,” Tibor said, also in Armenian. “That is the one thing I am sure of.”
“I am sure that Krekor Demarkian says you are a fool,” Mrs. Vespasian said, “and I think he knows fools. You are a priest. You should act with morality. If you have committed this murder, you should say so. If you have not committed this murder, you should say what really happened. I do not think you have committed this murder. Do you want to know why?”
“Yes,” Tibor said.
“If you think I am going to say that I know you and I know you would not commit a murder, this is false,” Mrs. Vespasian said. “I know what people are. I know what they will do if they are pushed into the wrong place. No, I do not know for certain that you would not commit a murder. But I know that that video film everyone is showing everybody else on their phones is a fake.”
Tibor suddenly felt as if he really couldn’t breathe. He felt as he did when he’d fallen off a slide as a child and had all the wind knocked out of him.