by Jane Haddam
“There’s somebody, yes,” David said, “and he’s a lot more competent than you think. Tony had a security service. They’re armed. And they’re good.”
“He had this all the time, not just for the party? I thought security was reinforced because the first lady was expected to be here.”
“It was,” David said. “But security around here is always tight, or at least as tight as it can be. What happened the night of the party was that they tried to close off the bridle paths.”
“Bridle paths for horses?”
“Right.” David walked over to the windows and looked out. “All these places, all the properties along this road and the properties behind them, are connected by bridle paths. They have been for over a hundred years. People keep horses. And there’s the Hunt Club, which is on the circuit too. It’s what’s been bothering me for months.”
“Bothering you how?”
“Well,” David said carefully. “Tony had the guard at the gate, armed. And on the night of the party, the secret service closed the bridle paths and patrolled the grounds closest to the house on foot. But Tony didn’t have security people patrolling the grounds every day. Charlotte said it made her feel as if she were in jail, and Tony wasn’t too happy at the idea either. But even if they had had people patrolling the grounds, it wouldn’t have mattered, because the bridle paths would have to have remained open even now.”
“What do you mean, open?”
“The bridle paths are rights of way,” David said patiently. “They go between the properties, and they’re rights of way. People on horseback have the right to use any of them at any time. That’s been a condition of the deeds out here in this section of Bryn Mawr for a century. One of them comes right up close to the house about a hundred yards up the drive. One of them comes around the back near the terrace. You’re sitting back there or standing out here and people you’ve never seen before come lumbering through on horseback. Of course, mostly they are people you know, but you see what I mean. It made a joke of any security Tony installed. Except for the night of the party, anybody could come barging onto this property at any time. It wouldn’t be legal to try to stop him.”
“What do you mean the secret service tried to close them off?”
“I mean it would have been impossible. Most people in these houses don’t even know where they all are.”
3
By the time the mobile crime lab was ready to leave, it was cold in the way it can only be if the wind is high and strong. The night was so black that looking beyond the security lights onto the lawn was like staring at tar. Gregor went out to the front steps and watched as Frank and Marty bent their heads together over a pair of notebooks. There was no point in being inside. Not only did the house still make him uncomfortable—and there was a good question: What made him so uncomfortable about the house?; from what he remembered, Bennis’s father’s house hadn’t bothered him at all—but there was nobody to talk to. David Alden had sunk into a deep interior space. He responded to comments only when prodded. Marianne Ross was off somewhere in the private rooms with her three sisters. They would have been trained from birth not to come out in public during a situation that threatened their privacy. The really remarkable thing was that there was no press here. That was the good of having a gate near the road. Well, Gregor thought, the press would be here soon enough. It wouldn’t take long before one of them found out about the bridal paths. Then they’d be on the doorstep, and there would be very little the family could do about them. In fact, at least one of them probably knew about the bridal paths already—Ryall Wyndham. From what Anne Ross Wyler had said about him, Gregor was surprised he hadn’t shown up already, in the guise of a friend of the family.
Gregor went down the steps to where Frank and Marty were standing. The chalk marks were still clear on the sidewalk, but there seemed to be no barriers up. If this was a crime scene, it was one that was going to be neglected at least in the immediate future. You could throw a family out of their little raised ranch for a week or two while you went over the evidence. You couldn’t do that with a family like the Rosses or a house like this. Gregor made a face.
Frank and Marty looked up as he came over.
“We got more of them,” Frank said, shaking a sheaf of papers loose from behind the paper in his notebook. “Found it in the morning room, the one where they all were when we got here. Look at this.”
Gregor looked. It was The Harridan Report again, yet another edition from the ones he’d seen. He scanned the first page and raised his eyebrows. “Reptiles?”
“I wonder how she got it,” Marty said.
“I’d expect somebody sent it to her,” Frank said.
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t expect any of the people she knew to know about it.” Marty shook his head. “You know the people who are into that kind of stuff. They just got laid off at a mill someplace, or they’ve worked forever at a convenience store.”
“Maybe it was one of the servants,” Gregor suggested. He tried to shake off the feeling that there was something ridiculous about talking about the servants. He felt as if he’d been taken hostage in an English novel. “I wonder how they decide to employ the people they employ. They live on the premises, don’t they?”
Marty checked his notebook. “About half of them do. According to the big one—Marianne?—it’s hard to get people to live in these days, except immigrants, and they have nothing against immigrants, but there aren’t enough of them to staff a house this size. When it’s running optimally, it takes twenty-five people on full-time, fifteen of them in the house itself.”
“How big is it?” Gregor asked.
“One hundred twenty-five rooms, plus servants’ quarters.” Marty shook his head. “It’s not a house, it’s a hotel. For God’s sake. I’ve lived all my life on the Main Line. I know what it’s like. But this is insane. If I hit one of those three-hundred-million-dollar lotteries tomorrow, I wouldn’t want a place like this.”
“They’re used to places like this,” Frank pointed out. “This is the way they’ve always lived. They probably wouldn’t feel comfortable in your place. They’d be too cramped.”
Gregor tried to pull the conversation back on track. “The first thing you need to do is to find out what kind of background checks they do on the people they hire to work here, and especially the ones who live in the house. The ones who don’t still matter, though, because the chances are they’d be able to get through that gate any time they wanted to, because whoever is guarding it would regard them as having legitimate business here. Then you need to talk to the whole lot of them one by one. I’m not in love with the idea that this will turn out to be a case of ‘the butler did it’—”
“That butler didn’t do it,” Frank said. “He’s a waxwork saint.”
“—but we have to at least check it out.” Gregor was imperturbable. “If there does turn out to be some connection between these murders and The Harridan Report, if there does turn out to have been some kind of domestic terrorism involved—”
“Terrorism?” Frank looked blank. “I don’t think this has anything to do with terrorism. There aren’t any bombs involved. Nobody blew up the Liberty Bell.”
Gregor shook his head. “Terrorism isn’t always the World Trade Center or Timothy McVeigh. Terrorists commit targeted murders all the time. It’s part of the equation in the Middle East all the time. And think of the Unabomber.”
“I understand why people like that might want to kill Anthony Ross,” Frank said, “but what would be the point of killing his wife? Let’s be reasonable here.”
“I agree,” Gregor said. “We do have to be reasonable. And the first thing we have to be reasonable about is those flyers, or newsletters, or whatever we’re supposed to call them. They seem to be everywhere, and they’re all about this family. Or all the ones I’ve seen have something to do with the Rosses.”
“We have a few more down at the station that don’t,” Marty said. “We’ve collected maybe
fifty different ones, all told. A lot of them are just general. There’s a big plot afoot to destroy the Constitution and bring the United States into a One World Government ruled by the UN. Bill Clinton was in on this plot. So is George W. Bush. So was Bush Senior. Kennedy was murdered in a plot run by the CIA, the Kremlin, and the Vatican. All the presidents of the United States are related to each other, and they’re really descendants of Martians, or the Devil, or something. I can never wrap my mind around that part. The world’s thirteen richest families have been the same since the something dynasty, but they change their names so people will think change is happening when it isn’t.”
“The Merovingian dynasty, from the early Middle Ages,” Frank said. He shrugged. “I had Jesuits.”
“Fine,” Gregor said. “We need to go over them, one by one. We need to find out how many of them directly mention any member of this family. We need to figure out if there’s anybody else they mention on a regular basis and what’s happened to that person or persons. We might be looking at another murder down the road. We might be looking back at a death that either wasn’t originally thought to be a murder, or that was tagged as a murder but was never solved. Then we need to find this Michael Harridan. Do we have any idea who he is?”
“We know who his organization is,” Frank said. “That’s what those FBI guys were working on. America on Alert. Steve what’s-his-name was going to their meetings. Before you nailed his ass, Walker whoever was giving us chapter and verse. Where they meet. Who goes to meetings regularly. I’ve got it written down.”
“Good,” Gregor said.
“Do you really think it’s going to turn out to be America on Alert?” Marty asked. “I mean, I suppose it could be, but it doesn’t feel right to me. Maybe I’ll feel differently when I meet them, but right now, I just can’t see how somebody who believes all that stuff”—he pointed to The Harridan Report Gregor was now holding—“I don’t see how somebody like that could be mentally integrated enough to pull off a pair of murders like these.”
“Timothy McVeigh—” Frank started.
“Yeah, yeah,” Marty said. “Timothy McVeigh. But this wasn’t Timothy McVeigh. It wasn’t the September eleventh attacks. All those people had to do is be stupid, be obvious, and be bold. This sucker took precision. What do you think, Mr. Demarkian?”
“I don’t know.” This was the truth. Gregor really didn’t know what to think at the moment, and the more he tried to work it out in his head, the more confused he got. This was not the way it was supposed to work. “I would,” he said, “be careful not to close off other options. For instance, we need to get a reading on the will, who benefits. We need to know if Tony Ross or Charlotte Ross had any life insurance policies. That’s doubtful, but not impossible, especially when it comes to Charlotte. Then we need to look into the daughters. Do we know if they were here for the party, or expected to be here?”
“No,” Frank said.
“We need to find out,” Gregor said. “And we can’t fail to remember that those girls could have gotten on this estate at any time they wanted, even on the night of the party, even without an invitation, even with the extra security all over everything. They’d have been cleared. The same is likely true of Anne Ross Wyler.”
“Who?” Frank said.
“Tony Ross’s sister,” Gregor said. “She runs an outreach program for young prostitutes in central Philadelphia—”
“I know her.” Marty straightened up. “Annie Wyler. She’s famous. Especially with cops. She keeps trying to get them to arrest the johns, and you know they’re not going to do that in Philadelphia, not when the john’s in a Lexus or a Mercedes. She takes pictures and sends them to the newspapers. Sometimes they get printed in one of those alternative press things. She’s Tony Ross’s sister?”
“She is,” Gregor said. “It might be a good idea to check into her background too. If she has any money of her own. If she needs any. What her relationship with her brother and sister-in-law was. Ask the same questions about David Alden back there, especially about his relationship with his boss. Was he secure in his job? Had something happened recently that might make it likely that he’d get fired? Has there ever been any hint of embezzlement, or recklessness? Look into both of the Rosses’ close personal friends. Find out if any of them are in the will. Find out if any of them have money problems. Find out if any of them had reason to think that the death of one or both of these people would be an advantage to them. Most of the time, it comes down to money.”
“Yeah.” Frank looked relieved. “I can handle money. I understand money. This other stuff—” His body shook and he looked away. “I don’t like nuts,” he said. “They’re wild cards. They’re too unpredictable. You can’t get inside their heads.”
Gregor grunted, which might have been agreement, or might not have. On one level, he didn’t think the nuts were hard to understand at all. They were like a record with only one song on it. The song played over and over again. There was no room for deviation. The problem was that the song didn’t follow any of the accepted rules of composition, so that if you didn’t know what was coming next, you couldn’t necessarily figure it out. Still, there was this about nuts—they were relentlessly, unswervingly logical. A was followed by B was followed by C. Neither emotion nor self-interest was allowed to interfere. Unfortunately, reason wasn’t allowed to interfere either. A could be that Martians were kidnapping eggplants from farmers’ gardens from one end of the country to the other—and that was the one thing they would not question, and that they would not allow you to question, either.
It was too cold to be standing outside like this. The wind was too harsh. Gregor snapped up the collar of his coat and put his hands in his pockets.
He wanted to make copies of all the Harridan newsletters and read them in as close to chronological order as he could get them. He wanted to do that tonight.
TWO
1
There were police everywhere. Kathi Mittendorf had seen them, or the traces of them, tucked out of sight in the bushes that marked the edge of the little park at the end of the street, slipping into bathrooms in the small branch of the public library where she went to get her romance books. She had been very careful, since the death of Anthony van Wyck Ross, not to look too dedicated to the cause of America on Alert. She knew the way the Illuminati could make the sanest, most ordinary citizen look like a “fanatic.” She was even a little proud of herself. She had always wondered what would happen to her if the Illuminati began to put the pressure on. She hadn’t really imagined that she would ever be important enough for them to bother with. America on Alert was dangerous to the Illuminati and their plans for a One World Government. Michael was dangerous to them. Kathi saw herself as a foot soldier for the movement, one of those absolutely necessary people who filled the ranks behind the leaders who knew what the score was and how to negotiate it. Her newfound importance had come on her very suddenly. It was the result of a combination of factors, no one of them individually significant: that she lived in the house where they stored the weapons; that she was the one who had picked up the phone when Michael needed to talk; that she had been the only one to be really friendly with Steve. Things came together and you used them. You used every advantage you could find. They were few and far between. Kathi didn’t care that she was an accident. Sometimes she found herself stopping in the middle of the day, caught and startled by the way her life had changed, and it was almost like being drunk—almost, because Kathi didn’t get drunk. She’d tried it once back in high school and ended up sick and embarrassed in the back of somebody’s pickup truck. She wondered what would happen to her now that she had become the focal point of an entire operation. She did not expect to live through it, or to become somebody like Michael. She couldn’t see herself as a seasoned leader with a history of operations to her credit. What she hoped for, in the long run, was what Timothy McVeigh had accomplished—not the bombing, but the martyrdom. She’d be smarter about it than McVeigh had b
een, though. She wouldn’t keep her mouth shut. She’d talk to every reporter who asked for an interview. She’d tell them everything she knew about the Illuminati, and the way the world’s secret power elite was manipulating events behind the scenes to destroy the freedoms Americans had won for themselves in the Constitution and to bring the American government and the American people under the control of the United Nations. She’d tell them the truth about Timothy McVeigh and the World Trade Center bombing. She’d expose the CIA and the Bildebergers and the Trilateral Commission and the Rhodes Scholarship program and the way they were all run by the same people and working together to accomplish the same thing. It didn’t matter that not many people would believe her, some would. It didn’t matter that the press would make her sound like a psychiatric case, the way they had with David Koresh and Randy Weaver. There were people out there who didn’t know the truth but expected it. There were other people who only knew that things were terribly wrong and they were terribly unhappy. Those people would hear her in a way the brainwashed people wouldn’t. That was the way it worked. When the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms destroyed Koresh and the Branch Davidians, and the footage was played on television for the world to see, some people began to realize that it was not paranoid to believe that America was run by a secret government that hated the Bill of Rights. It was only sensible. When the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms killed Randy Weaver’s wife and son with high-powered rifles because the Weavers wouldn’t let the evil agents of the illegitimate secret government onto their private land, some people began to wonder if the things they’d heard about the FBI—those un-corruptable agents of law and order—were nothing but propaganda. What kind of a government engaged in propagandizing its own citizens? It was like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Until you’d fit at least some of the pieces together, it made no sense at all. Kathi had seen the puzzle almost complete. That was what Michael Harridan had done for her, and she would never be able to thank him enough.