Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  “Looking at you,” Gregor said, “nobody would ever guess you grew up here.”

  Bennis shot him a sour look. “It’s not my part of town. I got you to Tony and Charlotte’s the other night without having to pause for anything but stop signs. Besides, I never came back here as an adult if I could help it. Before my mother got sick, I used to have her come into the city and I’d meet her there.”

  “You were living in Boston.”

  “It was too difficult for her to come to Boston. My father, as you know, was a professional bastard.”

  Bennis paused again, at another side street. The car behind her honked. She ignored it. “Here,” she said, turning right. “I think we got a little off the track the directions said we were supposed to be on. You’ve been here before. How did you get here?”

  “John Jackman drove me. He was chief of police here at the time.”

  Bennis let the subject of John Jackman’s career drop. She went down a block and made another turn. She went down another two blocks and made another turn. Gregor had been here before, but he had never paid much attention to his surroundings, and now he found himself surprised that there was this sort of area to Bryn Mawr at all. It wasn’t poor. The small storefronts were well-tended and the sidewalks were free of debris and street toughs propped up against buildings trying to look like they were concealing weapons. It was modest, that was the word Gregor wanted. He saw a small store with plate-glass windows making up almost the entirety of its sidewalk-facing wall. When he looked inside its windows, it seemed to go back forever in a narrow line, like those old railroad flats in New York. It sold mystery books. Gregor saw a copy of Blindsighted in the window, which he recognized because Bennis and Donna had both been reading it. Farther along, the stores got more ambiguous. One looked like a hardware store, except for the riot of wicker baskets taking up one window. One looked like a pharmacy, except that its main window had a display of what looked like hair dryers. The side streets they crossed now led to small houses set in small square lawns. Like the mystery store and the hardware store and the pharmacy, they all seemed to be made of brick.

  “Here we are,” Bennis said, turning into a parking lot that looked as confusing as a puzzle. There was a lot of it, but it did odd things, and seemed to accommodate too many people. There was the police station, and the township building, and a Chinese restaurant that gave an entirely new meaning to “upscale.” Then there was more parking, in the back, marked only for police, which was where Bennis took them, since they’d been told to “consider themselves official” for at least this visit.

  “I’ll bet you anything they’ve got a first-class drug problem here,” Gregor said. “I know the signs. They’ve got population. They’re close to the city.”

  “I thought you said every place had drug problems these days,” Bennis said. “Even small places that aren’t close to cities.”

  “There are drug problems and drug problems,” Gregor said.

  Bennis was carefully locking up the car. It was a custom-painted, tangerine orange Mercedes two-seater convertible. Gregor had warned her about the color. It was like putting a strobe light on your vehicle and running a tape screaming: Slash my tires! Crack my windshield! Run your keys through my paint!

  A door opened in the side of the building and a man in a brown wool suit looked out. Gregor looked back. The man nodded to himself and came down the small set of side steps and started across the narrow lot to them.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Miss Hannaford.”

  “Are we late?” Bennis said. “I was trying to keep track of the time—”

  “No, no,” the man said. “I’m Detective Lieutenant Frank Margiotti. I don’t know if you remember. We met briefly the other night—”

  “I remember,” Gregor said.

  “We talked mostly to that other man,” Bennis said.

  “Marty Tackner, yes. Marty’s inside waiting. We were just, ah … It’s been a little stressful here these last few days.”

  “I’m sure,” Gregor said.

  “And then there’s the FBI.” Frank Margiotti paused and looked quickly back at the building. He shook his head slightly. “I mean no disrepect, mind you, but I’m not so happy with the FBI. You were an agent, weren’t you?”

  “An agent and later an administrator.”

  “Well, I really do mean no disrespect. He says you’re something of a legend at the FBI. Invented the method they use to catch serial killers.”

  “Hardly,” Gregor said.

  Frank Margiotti looked back at the building again. He was a short man, no more than five foot eight, and thin the way some Italian-American men are thin, wiry and hard. Gregor did not think he was normally a nervous man, but he was nervous now, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, making and unmaking fists.

  “It’s always a pain in the ass—excuse me, Miss Hannaford—it’s always a pain when we’ve got a crime with one of these people involved. Even people a lot less important than Tony Ross. We had the United States Secret Service out here the other day, did you know that? He did something or the other with the International Monetary Fund. Tony Ross did. I’m not even sure what the International Monetary Fund is.”

  “It loans money to poor countries,” Bennis said. “I think.”

  “Christ,” Frank Margiotti said.

  Gregor cleared his throat. “Maybe we ought to get inside and talk to whoever we’re supposed to be talking to.”

  “We should,” Frank said. “We should.” He didn’t move. “Did John Jackman tell you that we won’t be able to officially use you as a consultant? Technically, you’re a suspect in the case. Because you were there, you know.”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “It’s all right. It’s quite proper, really.”

  “Yes, well. Nobody really takes you seriously as a suspect. Not just because you’re you but because you were in at that buffet table when the shots were fired, so obviously you weren’t firing them. And, uh, we did check with the FBI about your marksmanship record.”

  “Oh, God,” Gregor said.

  “It’s freezing out here,” Bennis said.

  Frank Margiotti balled his hands into fists and then unballed them. He looked at the sky. He looked at his feet. He did not move in the direction of the building. “The thing is,” he said. “Marty and I were talking. It does look like a professional hit. Everything the papers have been saying in that direction is true. And the FBI guy is insisting on it. Go after the professionals. And that makes sense.”

  “But?” Gregor said.

  “For some reason, to me, it doesn’t make sense,” Frank said. “It just feels like bullshit. Sorry, Miss Hannaford.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Bennis said. “I can swear like a pimp in Elvish.”

  “Do you have a reason for why it feels like bullshit?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” Frank Margiotti said.

  “You want me to give you one?” Gregor asked.

  Frank brightened. “Is there one? Marty feels the same way, but the FBI guy keeps telling us we’re both acting like assholes. Excuse me, Miss Hannaford.”

  “I give up,” Bennis said.

  “Look at it this way,” Gregor said. “Tony Ross was a very important man. An internationally important man. You hire a mercenary to kill him, you’ve got a man out there who knows who you are and who’s got about as much compunction about committing another murder as you’ve got about having a second cup of coffee at breakfast. Which puts you in an extremely sticky situation, long-term.”

  “All right,” Frank said. “That’s good. But—it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that one of the guests could do, does it?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “If I were you, I’d be looking for some kind of organization. Something with a high commitment factor where the members have access to professional training. Islamic fundamentalists. One of the separatist groups, Basques, that kind of thing. Maybe the militias, but only maybe. They like to think of themselves as
professionals, but they’re mostly good ol’ boys with delusions of grandeur.”

  “Timothy McVeigh’s delusions of grandeur killed a hundred sixty-eight people,” Frank said.

  “With a fertilizer bomb,” Gregor said, “not a high-powered rifle with a silencer fired at a distance in the dark at a target standing in a group of people, all of them both moving and standing close enough to him to turn into collateral damage at the least mistake in aim. Has any group tried to take credit for this?”

  “Oh, hell, yes. Dozens of them. We’re checking them out, but—” Frank shrugged.

  “I’m going inside before I freeze to death,” Bennis said. “Or he starts apologizing to me for saying hell.”

  She walked off. Gregor looked after her. Frank Margiotti looked after her too.

  “Beautiful woman,” Frank said. “Something of a handful and a half, I’d think.”

  Gregor thought about agreeing with him, but under the circumstances he thought it would be redundant.

  2

  The special agent’s name was Walker Canfield, and Gregor Demarkian hated him on sight. Bennis had gone off somewhere in the building. Since this was an official meeting, and there was no possible way to designate her as anything but an ordinary suspect, they had to maintain at least a pretense of protecting their information, even if they knew Gregor would tell her at least some of it as soon as he got back into her car. Bennis didn’t seem to mind. There was a plate of doughnuts and a coffee machine in a little room on the same corridor with the conference room. Officers and administrative personnel used it when they had a few minutes to relax in the middle of the day. Bennis walked into that, took the only available chair—a metal folding chair with a wooden seat that looked like it had been treated to sneak attacks from a buzz saw—and took out her book and her glasses. Gregor gave her a long wistful look before he allowed himself to be swept up by the official investigators. He had spent more than twenty years of his life in meetings like this one. It wasn’t until he retired and moved to Cavanaugh Street that he realized how much they bored him.

  Marty Tackner, Frank Margiotti’s partner, turned out to be an African-American who looked eerily like Sidney Poitier playing Mr. Tibbs, right down to the three-piece pinstripe suit. He also looked out of sorts and something beyond fed up. Frank introduced them. Marty nodded. Then Marty and Frank both looked at the other man in the room. That was when Gregor realized they were all in for trouble. He had spent twenty years of his life in the Bureau. He knew special agents. This one gave every indication of being the kind Gregor had always found most useless both when he was in the field and when he was working as an administrator. He had complete and utter disdain for local law enforcement. He thought he knew more about policing than the battle-scarred veterans of inner-city gang warfare. He went by the book, and if the book was wrong he’d never know it, because he’d never consider the possibility that he should have done things differently than exactly the way he had been taught at Quantico. He had no instincts. He came close to having no personality. Gregor couldn’t help thinking of the line from Men in Black:We in the FBI have no sense of humor that we know of.

  “This is special agent Walker Canfield of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Frank Margiotti said, sounding as if he’d been coached.

  Gregor had to work hard not to wince at the name. Walker Canfield: a kid who’d been born in the Midwest to a mother who had desperately wanted to send him East to college, but hadn’t had the money. Walker Canfield was holding out his hand. Gregor took it.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” Canfield said. “I asked around about you in Washington. You’ve got quite a reputation.”

  “Do I?”

  “Jack Houseman said to say hello.”

  “I hope he’s well,” Gregor said.

  Walker Canfield shrugged. “It’s because of him you’re here. It’s highly unusual, calling in a civilian to consult on a case like this. Apparently the locals do it all the time, but it’s not how we operate in the Bureau. But you know that.”

  “I also know that the Bureau doesn’t investigate much in the way of murder,” Gregor said. “National parks, Indian reservations, maybe the assassination of a federal official—but none of that covers in this case. So what are you doing here?”

  Canfield blinked. “Lending a hand to local law enforcement.”

  “Uh, huh. Lending them a hand in what?”

  “In the investigation.” Canfield rubbed the flat of his hand against the side of his face. Good, Gregor thought. I’ve got him nervous.

  “In the investigation of what?” Gregor asked him.

  Canfield was now visibly squirming. “In the investigation of the murder. The Bureau helps local law enforcement with murders. You know that. You headed up a whole department that does that. You invented it.”

  “The Behavioral Sciences Department provides a clearinghouse for information in serial-killer cases with known or possible interstate implications. Do you expect that the person who killed Tony Ross is a serial killer?”

  “It’s the interstate implications. That’s what it is,” Canfield said. “Anthony van Wyck Ross was an important man. We think the killer, uh, left the scene and then left the state.”

  “And that’s enough for the Bureau to assign a special agent full-time to the investigation? And only one?”

  Canfield started rubbing his hands together. “This is a big case. Local law enforcement needs all the help it can get. The director felt—”

  “Bullshit,” Gregor said pleasantly. “I had lunch with the director not two months ago. He’s sane.” Gregor turned around and looked at Frank Margiotti and Marty Tackner. They were standing so still they were barely breathing. Gregor knew they were both fascinated and a little smug. He could just imagine how Walker Canfield had been behaving since he got here. “Would you mind?” Gregor asked Frank and Marty. “I’d like to talk to Mr. Canfield here in private.”

  “Anything you want,” Marty said, pushing himself away from the wall he’d been standing against and heading for the door.

  “We’ll go get some coffee,” Frank said.

  Gregor waited for them to leave and shut the door behind them. Walker Canfield waited too. He had gone beyond nervous. His eyes were darting around in his skull. The palms of his hands were sweating enough to leave visible marks on the knees of his pants when he rubbed them. Oh, fine, Gregor thought. No instincts, and no nerves, either.

  When the door shut, the click sounded as loud as a cap gun going off in a playground. Gregor sat down on the edge of the conference table.

  “Now,” he said, “let’s make some sense. What is it exactly you’re supposed to be doing here? And don’t hand me that crap about helping law enforcement one more time.”

  “I do have a brief for confidential agency business.”

  “More crap. Try again.”

  “You aren’t an agent of the Bureau any longer, Mr. Demarkian. You know as well as I do that it is entirely against the rules for me to divulge confidential agency business without first getting a green light from—”

  “You want a green light? Fine. Let’s get a green light. There’s got to be a phone around here somewhere. I’ll call the director himself and we’ll—”

  “No,” Canfield said.

  “No? Why not? If this is confidential agency business you’re on, the director will know about it. He has to know.”

  “He does know,” Canfield said. “I mean, he knows in general.”

  “Then why not ask him?”

  “It’s not that simple.” Canfield had calmed down, but it wasn’t a good kind of calm. His palms were still sweating, and now so was his forehead. His face looked like it was covered with water. It was not a good face under the best of circumstances.

  Gregor got a chair and sat down on it, straddling it, resting his chin on its back. “So,” he said. “If it’s not that simple, what is it?”

  Canfield sighed. “I had a partner. On this investigation.”

 
; “The investigation of Tony Ross?”

  “No, no. We were here a long time before that happened. Months, to tell you the truth. He went undercover and I did backup.”

  “Undercover as what?”

  Canfield gave Gregor an odd look. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled a wad of papers from his inside jacket pocket. “Here,” he said, flattening them on the conference table. “Take a look at these.”

  Gregor looked. THE HARRIDAN REPORT, the page at the top said, in bold italics. That page was stapled to three others. Then there was another set of stapled pages, the first one with the same logo. Then there was a third set. Gregor picked up the first set and scanned the text. He picked up the second and did the same. He stopped midway through the second page.

  “Do you know who this is?” he asked, pointing to the name.

  “Bennis Hannaford,” Canfield said. “We checked her out. Comes from one of those old money Main Line families, railroad money and then steel, I think. Went to Vassar. Tends to be a little pink, to use an old-fashion word. Writes science fiction. I don’t remember everything else. I’d have to check my notes. She—”

  “She’s sitting down the hall eating doughnuts. She drove me in from Philadelphia today.”

  “What?”

  “I hate sloppy work,” Gregor said. “She and I have been plastered all over People magazine more than once. It’s not like it would have been hard to find out.”

  “We weren’t interested in her,” Canfield said defensively. “She wasn’t our target.”

  “Who was? This Michael Harridan?”

  “Yeah,” Canfield said. “Sort of. It’s this whole organization he runs. America on Alert. You heard of them?”

  “No.”

  “We got word about six months ago that they were buying weapons. A lot of weapons, and explosives too. So they sent us down to check it out.”

  “And?”

  “And,” Canfield said, “it was true. They weren’t even being cagey about it. These two women, Kathi Mittendorf and Susan Hester, they went to gun shows. They bought on the street. They bought on the Internet. They used false ID, of course, but not good false ID. And they just kept stockpiling the stuff. They put it in Kathi Mittendorf’s living room, as far as I can tell.”