Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor picked up the envelope and took the letter from it. It was a very short letter, typed on a computer, a little smeared by a printer that seemed to be malfunctioning.

  Priest of Satan, the letter said. Don’t think we don’t know what you are. Don’t think we don’t know what you’re doing. We’ve seen the bodies of the infants you killed. We know you cremate them in the basement of that hellhole you call a church. We know that you fuck children there night after night, stick your filthy prick up their anuses until they scream. We’ve heard their screams. We won’t let them go unre-venged.

  Gregor stopped reading. “What the hell?” he said.

  Tibor shrugged. “They came for three weeks. At first a few days apart. Then almost every day.”

  “And you didn’t tell anybody?”

  Tibor slammed his palms on the arms of his chair. “I do not want to sound like a fool,” he said. “It’s not the first time. We have had such letters before, Krekor, they come on and off, people don’t understand what we are. They don’t know about the Orthodox churches. They know only about Protestants and Catholics. So they get confused.”

  Gregor looked down at the letter again. Don’t think you’re going to get away with it forever. We’re watching you. We know how to put an end to the evil you’ve brought to this city and this country. We know how to put a stop to you, and we aren’ttoo timid—or too cowed by the law that you’ve got in your own Satanic pocket—to take the measures we need to take to stop you. We are coming.”

  “This,” Gregor said, “is a threat. It’s an immediate threat of imminent physical violence.”

  “Yes, Krekor, I know. I should have done something about it. I should have showed it to you. I didn’t want to.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “Because I didn’t want you to go to the police.” Tibor shook his head. “Krekor, please. It did not occur to me that anybody would actually commit any real violence. You see this sort of thing on the Internet all the time. Mostly, it does not get physical—”

  “Except that this wasn’t on the Internet. This was sent directly to you.”

  “Yes, I know. But still. And then I worried about the obvious. That people would believe what these things said.”

  “Believe that you were sacrificing infants to Satan?”

  “No, Krekor. Believe that there was some truth in the other things. That there was sex going on at Holy Trinity. That is not so far-fetched an accusation, is it? Think of what happened with the archdiocese in Philadelphia, and then in Boston too, hundreds of children, dozens of priests, all involved in—in—”

  “Those were the Catholics,” Gregor said firmly.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Tibor said. “It doesn’t matter that you and I know that nothing like that has ever gone on at Holy Trinity. It doesn’t matter that the whole neighborhood knows. The mud would fly and the mud would stick, out there, in the city, no matter what we did to clean it up. And then I thought that maybe that was the point. That whoever sent this expected me to go right to the police, and then when I did the contents of the letters would be aired in the press, and the reputation of the church would be destroyed. So I threw them away.”

  “Okay,” Gregor said.

  “Now I am thinking that maybe I brought this on us myself,” Tibor said. “That if I had done what I was expected to do and gone to the police, the church would still be standing. That they only blew up the church because the other thing, the thing with the letters, was not working. It was very wrong of me, Krekor. It was a matter of self-regard, and self-protection, and that is not what a priest with a congregation should do.”

  “Okay,” Gregor said again, trying to think. “But you kept that one. Why did you keep that one? Why didn’t you throw it away?”

  “I—it was different. More abusive. And by then they were coming every day, and I thought I should now maybe show them to you. That one frightened me. It used, what do you call it? Not curse words. Anglo-Saxonism, you know. Bad words like that, where the others hadn’t. And there was the direct threat. And I couldn’t make myself throw it away, so I put it in this pocket and I went out to Adelphos House and when I got back to Cavanaugh Street it was still there. And then the church blew up.”

  Gregor got up. His head hurt. Tibor was not entirely wrong about what would happen to the church’s reputation, or his own, when the contents of this letter got out—and they would get out. “You can’t throw that one away,” he said carefully. “Not now. It’s evidence in a crime, or it might be. Maybe I can take it straight to John Jackman and see if he can keep the contents private, at least for the time being—”

  “Oh, Krekor.”

  “The time being may matter a great deal. If it turns out this whole thing was orchestrated by one of the nut groups, the press will concentrate on the nut group. And I should think it’s inevitable that that’s what happened. The next most likely thing is that this was the act of a single deranged individual. All we have to do is to show that he’s made similar threats to other people before. The public isn’t completely cynical, Tibor.”

  “Not cynical, no,” Tibor said, “but jaded. And you can’t blame them. Those things did happen, in the Catholic archdiocese, and in other churches as well. Sometimes I think that is the only religious news I read anymore, the sex molestation cases. Except for the politics, you understand, where some pastor somewhere is burning books. It’s as if the whole world has gone insane, and not just since September eleventh. People no longer have common sense.”

  Gregor thought that people never had had much in the way of common sense. In his experience, common sense was less common than genius, because even geniuses didn’t usually have it. He folded up the letter, put it back in its envelope, and put the envelope into his own jacket pocket.

  “I’ll call John about this right away,” he said, thinking that John Jackman was going to start regretting the fact that he’d given Gregor his private cell phone number. “We’ll do this the very best way we can. But for goodness sake, if you get any more, don’t throw them away.”

  Tibor smiled slightly. Gregor stood up, thinking it made as much sense to call from the phone here as to go upstairs. Bennis wouldn’t be charging Tibor for the phone bill. Gregor got around the edge of the couch and headed for the bedroom. Bennis also had a phone in her kitchen, as he did himself, but for some reason that felt far too public for a call like this. Tibor had gone back to looking out the window, but not looking, the way he’d been staring at everything since Gregor had first seen him in the hospital after the explosion.

  “It’s not just that people no longer have common sense,” Tibor said. “It’s that so many of them want to see evil with a capital E. It’s not enough anymore that there are people in the world who do bad things. It must be some big plot, some ultimate war against the forces of darkness. But I never thought the forces of darkness were like that. I always thought that Armageddon, when it came, would happen in a civil servant’s office, and most people wouldn’t even notice.”

  “Well,” Gregor said, unsure where to go from there.

  The door to Bennis’s apartment slammed open and Grace came running in. “Mr. Demarkian,” she said, breathless. “There’s a man on the phone and he says he has to talk to you right away, because Charlotte Deacon Ross is dead.”

  PART TWO

  Title: SEPTEMBER 11, 1990—PRESIDENT BUSH [Senior] PRESENTS SPEECH TO CONGRESS, “ TOWARD A NEW WORLD ORDER.” SEPTEMBER 11, 2001—MIGHTY BLOW STRUCK TO BRING ABOUT NEW WORLD ORDER— PRECISELY 11 YEARS LATER TO THE DAY. BUSH [JUNIOR] PRESIDENT.

  Subtitle: Since “11” can rightly be thought of as the New World Order Number, this double “11” is most shocking. It seems to confirm the complicity of both Bush presidents and their CFR advisers in this most shocking of terrorist attacks. The number “11” simply surrounds the attacks and for very good additional reason: it is a primary number in Mind Control.

  —FROM THE CUTTING EDGE AT

  HTTP://WWW.CUTTINGEDGE.O
RG/NEWS/N1541.CF

  ONE

  1

  The good thing, if there could be said to be a good thing, was that this time Gregor Demarkian’s status in the investigation was far less ambiguous. Nobody could say that he was a suspect in the death of Charlotte Deacon Ross because, as far as he could figure out, he had spent the time of the shooting talking to two Philadelphia police detectives in Krystof Andrechev’s store. The worst thing of many bad things was what this death would do to the elaborate theoretical construct Frank Margiotti and Marty Tackner had made of the death of Tony Ross—or Anthony van Wyck Ross, as they called him, formally, whenever they launched into their theory about the case. All the way out to Bryn Mawr in the cab, Gregor thought about those two detectives and what they had considered self-evident about the shooting on the night of the charity ball. Gregor could not decide if he, himself, had thought the same things. He had always found it very difficult to get his mind around the existence of people like Tony Ross, even though he’d spent much of his early career working with them. That was what you did on kidnapping detail. You put in your time with the rich. Tony Ross, though, was more than rich. He was the kind of rich that most people never see and wouldn’t understand, because he made it a point to be both obscure and opaque. It was unlikely that any of his children would ever have been kidnapped. Potential kidnappers wouldn’t know that the name “Ross” meant anything—unlike a name like Rockefeller, or Vanderbilt, or Gates—and they probably wouldn’t find the Ross daughters all that rich-looking. Clothes from J. Crew and L.L. Bean and Abercrombie and Fitch, ten-year-old station wagons to get around town in, jewelry limited to sterling-silver hoops in pierced ears—no, these people were nothing at all like “rich” as it was defined in the celebrity press. They simply had more money, and more influence, and had had both for generations back in time.

  Of course, Gregor thought, Charlotte Deacon Ross was something else again, a matron from an earlier brand of matrons, somebody who not only expected to look rich but expected other people to notice. Even so, a potential kidnapper spying her in a store in Philadelphia or New York would probably put her down as one of the second or third rank, a Society woman manqué. Understatement in everything, Gregor told himself, even understatement in in-your-face hauteur. Charlotte would have been completely obvious only to her own kind and the climbers who followed them. That would have been her point.

  The front of the Ross estate was awash in searchlights. There were the regular security lights, but also new ones, brought by the police, meant to help in the combing of the area. Gregor sat back in the cab and tried to think. If they were combing the area near the gates, then they must expect that somebody had come in that way. The murder had not been committed by somebody already in the house. Or had it? It was not so easy to make that sort of determination. Gregor was a little concerned that Frank and Marty were so invested in their theory that they would still assume the truth of it in the face of a death that couldn’t possibly be part of that particular puzzle. Gregor leaned forward and tried to see out the windshield. The drive wound and curved and zigzagged, as if whoever had put it in was really trying to make an obstacle course for go-carts to race down.

  They pulled up in front of the house itself, a long Gothic pile stretched out a good two hundred feet along the drive, 50,000 square feet, 100 family rooms. A uniformed police officer came toward them, waving. At the last moment, he saw Gregor sitting in the backseat and waved the cab on. The cab pulled as far forward as it could, which wasn’t much. There seemed to be dozens of vehicles parked near the front door: police cars, a forensics van, an ambulance, unmarkeds. It looked as if everybody in this corner of the Main Line had decided to come down here and get in on the action.

  The cab pulled to a halt. Gregor glanced at the meter, took his wallet out of his pocket, and threw enough money into the front seat to be sure that the driver would get not only his fare but a tip. He got out into the cold dark air and looked around. Frank Margiotti was standing in the arched front doorway, talking to someone Gregor did not recognize. A moment later, the unrecognized someone took off for the interior of the house, and Frank looked up and saw Gregor.

  “Thank God,” he said, running down the front steps to where Gregor was still stymied by the maze of equipment laid out along the walk. “Sorry to pull you away from whatever it was you were doing, but we need some help here. And we didn’t want to ask the FBI.”

  “Not that particular agent of the FBI, no,” Gregor said. “Is he still here?”

  “We don’t know,” Frank said. “We didn’t call him. We’ve got—ah. This is a mess. They just got the body back. Tony Ross’s body. They were in there getting ready for the wake.”

  “And Mrs. Ross was where when she died?”

  Frank Margiotti waved his hands down the drive. “Out there. It was nearly exact, really. She must have been doing what Tony Ross was doing on the night he was killed, going down the walk for some reason—”

  “Tony Ross was greeting somebody,” Gregor pointed out. “There were people arriving that night, a lot of them. Were there people coming here tonight?”

  “No. Not until tomorrow. Tomorrow is the wake.” Frank Margiotti looked around. “I’ve been on the Main Line most of my life. I’ve lived with these people. I still can never get over them. Who would want to have a wake in their own house?”

  “It’s a big house,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah, yeah. It’s a dead body. A very dead body. I wouldn’t want a dead body anywhere near where I sleep. They’re all in there in the something or the other. Morning room.”

  “Who?”

  “The daughters. Four of them. And this guy named David Alden. Like Miles Standish and John Alden, except I didn’t say that, because I’m not crazy. Come on in. Marty is expecting you. And we’re all completely strung out.”

  Gregor looked back over his shoulder to the walk on the other side of the door and saw that the chalk marks of the body were indeed down, and saw a barrier to make sure that nobody stepped on them or entered the immediate scene while forsenics was working. Then he followed Frank into the entrance hall. It was an entrance hall on a grand scale, built by a Robber Baron to accommodate delusions of grandeur that might have been less delusionary than many people supposed. It must have been remarkable to be newly rich in an age like that, when so many other people were becoming newly rich along with you, and nobody laughed when you brought back entire walls of English castles to install in the Pennsylvania suburbs.

  The entrance hall led to another wide hall that Gregor remembered was called the gallery. There were paintings on the walls, but not important ones. The Rosses had a serious art collection somewhere. Gregor wasn’t sure if it was on the grounds or outside them. Maybe they had endowed a museum. Toward the end of the gallery on the right side, doors were open and people were wandering in and out of them, but not many people, and not very often. Gregor noticed an enormous portrait of a portly man in formal evening dress with a monocle in his left eye. He looked less imposing than uncomfortable.

  Frank went all the way to the end, to a swinging door that had been propped shut with a wastebasket. He turned right into the nearest room and said, “Here he is, Marty. Got here as soon as the cab could get him here.”

  Marty Tackner stopped talking to a tall young woman without makeup and came over. “Mr. Demarkian. We’re glad to see you. Nobody has the faintest idea what happened—”

  “I do,” the young woman without makeup said. She strode over to them, looking angry. What she really looked like was Tony Ross, right down to the thick eyebrows that arched almost to a point at the center. “Somebody killed my mother, that’s what happened.”

  “Marianne Ross,” Marty said, apologetically.

  Marianne Ross ran a single large, spread-fingered hand through her hair. “You’re—who? I’ve seen you before.”

  “My name is Gregor Demarkian.”

  “I remember. You handled the Hannaford case out here a few years ago. Go
d, that was a mess. I thought my mother was going to choke. My mother was the kind of woman who had hysterics about publicity. I suppose she’ll get publicity now. I suppose there won’t be any way to avoid it.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “I don’t think there will be.”

  Marianne Ross looked away. “You’ve got to wonder what’s wrong with these people. Don’t they have anything else to do? It isn’t as if my parents were the Beatles, or whoever it is these days. It’s not as if they were jumping around in front of television cameras every chance they got. They were very private people.”

  “Dominick Dunne says that nothing is as fascinating as rich people in a criminal circumstance.”

  “I can’t stand Dominick Dunne. He’s a throwback. And there’s nothing criminal here. My parents didn’t do anything but walk out their own front door and become the targets of a crank. He’ll turn out to be an escaped mental patient or a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army.”

  “I’m not sure the Symbionese Liberation Army is still in existence,” Gregor said.

  Marianne Ross snorted. “It doesn’t matter what they call themselves. It’s all the same. They’re all obsessed with money and they want to be famous and we’re available. I don’t understand why the police don’t just round them all up and lock them all up instead of waiting for somebody to be killed. It’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”

  It was also in direct contradiction to the U.S. Constitution and to dozens of laws meant to safeguard the rights of people to express their opinions and receive due process in the criminal justice system, but Gregor didn’t tell her that. Marianne Ross wasn’t really listening. The rant was automatic, what she did instead of crying in front of a lot of people she didn’t know.

  “I’ve got to go talk to my sisters,” she said. “They’re upset as hell. We were all here to bury our father.”