Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “Do you have the murder weapon?” one of the reporters in the crowd called up.

  “No,” Dale Vardan said. “We do not have the murder weapon as of yet, but we’re confident that we’re going to find it. I have men searching the Hadley residence, the McGuffie residence, and the diner. We think the most likely place for it to be is in the Hadley residence, since none of our witnesses saw her carrying it.”

  “Hasn’t the Hadley residence already been searched?” another reporter asked.

  Dale Vardan looked smug. “A cursory search of the premises was done on the day of the murder under the direction of the local police,” he said. “But the search was inadequate, and no useful evidence was found. I am now personally heading up the investigation into these crimes, and we are making rapid progress.”

  “What about Gregor Demarkian?” yet another reporter said.

  “I have no information on what, if anything, Mr. Demarkian is doing. He is not assisting me or my men and was not a part of this morning’s arrest.”

  Up until then, Gregor hadn’t been sure that Dale Vardan had spotted him. Now Dale looked directly at him and smiled, and Gregor sighed. The only thing he wanted, absolutely, was to get into that hospital without being swarmed by reporters, and he knew it wasn’t going to be possible. Dale Vardan was going to make sure it wasn’t possible.

  “There’s Mr. Demarkian now,” Dale Vardan announced, pointing in the direction of the Snow Hill police car and its three occupants. “If you’ve got something to ask him, ask him. I’m sure he’ll be more than happy to take your questions.”

  3

  Gregor was not happy to take their questions, and he wasn’t happy about anything else that happened to him for the next half hour or so, but he lived with it, because he had to live with it. He’d been in messes like this one before.

  “The great detective,” Dale Vardan said to him at one point, when they were both away from the microphones. “It’s all a bunch of bullshit, that’s what it is. There’s not a damn thing a great detective can do that solid police work can’t, and that’s what I’ve got to offer, Demarkian. Solid police work. And once I started using it, it didn’t take me any time at all to figure out who did it and get those people safely locked up in jail.”

  “That’s where you’ve got Mrs. McGuffie?” Gregor asked. “She’s in jail?”

  “As we speak,” Vardan said. “And her husband with her. They’re domestic terrorists, that’s what they are. They’re no better than Timothy McVeigh. And we’re going to get the death penalty for both of them.”

  The morning might have gone better if there had been better news about Annie-Vic, but there wasn’t. The news wasn’t exactly bad, of course. Dr. Willard had been quite right. Annie-Vic was awake and alert, which was a vast improvement over what she’d been like when Gregor first arrived in town. She followed them with her eyes. She looked directly at them when they talked to her. Unfortunately, she was still unable to move any of her limbs, and she was still unable to talk. Unless a miracle happened, and she was able to communicate by using her eyelids to deliver Morse code, they weren’t going to be able to get anything like testimony from her yet.

  “Maybe we should try that Morse code thing,” Gary suggested. “I mean, she’s the kind of person who would know Morse code, don’t you think? She was probably in the Girl Scouts when she was a kid. Everybody in Snow Hill does scouts. She probably had every merit badge in the book, too.”

  “I couldn’t possibly agree to an experiment of that kind,” Dr. Willard said. “Even if she could do it, it would leave her exhausted.”

  Gregor couldn’t believe that anybody had taken him seriously. Still, Annie-Vic’s condition had improved even in the few hours since Dr. Willard had talked to Gregor on the phone, and that meant there was reason to hope it would improve even more, to the point of making it possible for her to name her attacker. Once they had that, all the rest of the evidence would be just back up. That was the kind of assurance Gregor liked when he was winding up a case, and he almost never got it.

  They drove back to town at a slower pace than they had driven out to the hospital, and on the way Gregor contemplated, once more, the emptiness of rural areas. If somebody attacked you out here, you could scream for hours without anybody hearing you. It was like that scene in that movie Fargo, where the bad guys kill a policeman and a couple of high school kids on a lonely stretch of road, their guns going off full blast, and it didn’t matter. There was nobody to come to the rescue. Gregor hated the thought of there being nobody to come to the rescue. He had no idea why he was always thinking of the need for rescue, but he did.

  When they arrived back in town, the place was insane. The reporters and their mobile news vans had come back from Dale Vardan’s press conference—and why had he held it in front of the hospital, anyway? Even if he wanted to highlight the fact that Annie-Vic was awake, he didn’t have to go all the way out there to do it. The vans were now parked close to the Snow Hill Diner, which had a big closed sign hanging in its window. Gregor could see faces behind the glass nevertheless. They were probably employees, caught short by the news that the McGuffies had been arrested.

  Eddie Block parked the car behind the station and Tom Fordman came out, looking harassed.

  “It’s like some kind of riot,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”

  “We saw Mr. Vardan’s press conference,” Gregor said.

  “I saw it too,” Tom Vardan said. “They carried it live on CNN. Alice and Lyman killed those two women at the development? Is that supposed to make sense to me?”

  “When did they arrest them?” Gregor asked.

  “It couldn’t have been half an hour ago,” Tom said, “and you should have seen it. They practically sent a SWAT team. Bunch of state police cars pulled up in front of the diner and about twelve guys got out and went in with their guns drawn. It was like a military operation. The next thing you know, they’re hauling Alice and Lyman out in handcuffs and Alice is completely hysterical. She’s screaming and pulling. She’s got her hands cuffed behind her back, so she can’t punch anybody, but she bit an officer—”

  “Bit him?” Gregor asked. “How the Hell—”

  “It was a her,” Tom Fordman said. “The officer, I mean. And I don’t know how. She wasn’t careful enough and Alice bit her, and then all Hell broke loose. It was like a television show or a movie, maybe. I’m not making much sense myself.”

  They all went into the back door of the station together, and as soon as they did Gregor could hear the noise. There were people in the big outer office, lots of them, and most of them sounded angry. Gregor, Gary, Eddie, and Tom came around the corner in the corridor that led to the front of the station and Gregor saw them: some reporters, lots of ordinary people. One of the ordinary people was a pastor of some kind. He was wearing a clerical collar.

  “This is outrageous,” the man in the clerical collar was saying. “This is completely unacceptable. Alice and Lyman McGuffie are two of the finest, most God-fearing citizens of this town, and the idea that either one of them ever killed anybody is completely absurd.”

  There was a young woman behind the counter, looking embattled, but it wasn’t Tina from a couple of days before. She saw Gregor and Gary and the others come in and rushed over to them, looking frazzled.

  “There’s something else that’s just come in,” she said, grabbing Gary’s arm and trying to whisper, but whispering was hard. There was so much noise that real whispering wasn’t going to work, but raising her voice meant risking the possibility that the people on the other side of the counter would hear her, and Gregor thought it was obvious she didn’t want that.

  “We’ve got another problem,” she said, leaning as close to Gary’s ear as she could. “I’ve just had a call from Miss Marbledale. There’s trouble up at the school.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Gary asked.

  “Some kind of sit-in,” she said. She looked confused. “What’s a sitin, exactly? It sound
s like a kind of riot, but that doesn’t make any sense. Miss Marbledale says that Tim Radnor and a lot of other students are in the office and they won’t let her or anybody else in and they’re using the intercom. It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, Tim Radnor?”

  “I’ll go up there,” Eddie said.

  “You’d better take Tom with you,” Gary said. Then he put his head in his hands. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “I really can’t believe this.”

  The young woman shook her head. “I really can’t believe it, either,” she said. “But there’s more. There are two people in Mr. Demarkian’s office who say they’re from the FBI and they’ve got an appointment, except it was supposed to be in the diner and now they can’t go there. I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing, but I just couldn’t think of anything else to do with them.”

  “It’s all right,” Gregor said. “I’ll let you people work on the sit-in and go talk to them.”

  “This is outrageous,” the pastor said again. “This is religious persecution, that’s what this is, and you’re not going to get away with it. We’re going to sue. We’re going to take it all the way to the Supreme Court.”

  Gregor let Gary take care of the rant and retreated to his closet of an office.

  4

  The entire town of Snow Hill might be panicking, but Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker were not. They were sitting on the only two chairs in Gregor’s “office,” drinking coffee, and playing games on their cell phones. Gregor wondered if these were their personal cell phones or phones the Bureau gave them. Then he realized that he’d been out of the Bureau for so long, he didn’t know what kind of cell phone policy it had.

  Molly looked up when Gregor walked in, but Evan stayed staring at his phone intently and saying “Damn!” Molly coughed. Evan looked up and blushed.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” Gregor said. “You were bored. I don’t blame you. Were you here when the McGuffie’s were arrested?”

  “We were sitting in the diner when the cops came in,” Evan said. Then he shrugged. “It was a light and sound show. They were being as conspicuous as possible. And they were getting a lot of help. That woman can really scream her head off when she wants to. Was all this your doing, Mr. Demarkian? You didn’t tell us anything about it.”

  “It didn’t have anything to do with me,” Gregor said. “I didn’t even see it coming. It was the work of a state police detective with an ego. Did you bring me the information I need?”

  “Absolutely,” Molly said.

  She stored her cell phone in her pocket and sat forward. Gregor wasn’t sitting at all. Two chairs was as many as the “office” could hold, and nobody was jumping up to offer him a seat. Molly reached into the pocket of her jacket and came up with a sheaf of papers.

  “You’ll be glad to know,” she said, “that you turned out to be right. We checked the operating budget, the pension fund, and the construction. The operating budget and the pension fund are both clean, at least on this end. If somebody is embezzling from the pension fund, they have to be doing it at the union national end, and I’m willing to bet they’re not. The AFT has good controls for that sort of thing.”

  “And the operating budget?” Gregor asked.

  “Well,” Molly said, “a lot of money goes through there on a regular basis. Wages and salaries, though, are the biggest item, and we doublechecked the bank accounts. Everything adds up. We did consider the possibility that there might be a phantom employee, but we doublechecked that, too, and apparently not. The rest of what goes through that budget is large in the aggregate, but small in each individual withdrawal. And we mean small. There’s stuff under five dollars on that list, and nothing over about a thousand at a time except for the sports stuff. And we checked out the sports stuff, and at least from a firsttime overview, it looks clean, too.”

  “So,” Gregor said, “that leaves the construction.”

  “Yes it does,” Molly said. “And the construction is very interesting indeed.”

  She stood up, leaned across to Gregor’s desk, picked up another sheaf of papers and handed it across to him.

  “Look at those,” she said. “Dellbach Constuction.”

  “Those” were page after page of disclosure documents, all in very tiny print. Gregor looked up at Molly.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll tell you. First, those are the documents Dellbach Construction had to file when it went after the job for the schools complex. If you look carefully, you’ll see some interesting stuff. For one thing, according to the sworn statement, Dellbach Construction only came into existence a month before it bid on this project.”

  “Only a month?” Gregor asked.

  “Exactly,” Molly said. “And it gets weirder than that if you look beyond the disclosure documents, because not only did Dellbach Construction not exist until a month before it got the project, it doesn’t really exist now. It’s a holding company. It subcontracts the work out in bits and pieces, never the same subcontractor for two phases in a row, never a phase that lasts more than six months, several phases that last only six weeks or so.”

  “And the money is completely screwy,” Evan said. “We both spent a lot of the night trying to figure it out, and we know somebody is embezzling something—”

  “Somebody is embezzling a lot,” Molly said. “At least five million dollars over the last five years.”

  “Yeah,” Evan said. “But we don’t know how. And that’s worrying.”

  “But the real kicker is at the bottom of the first page,” Molly said. “Take a look at line fourteen. That’s the line that says ‘ownership.’ That’s who owns Dellbach Construction.”

  “And who owns it?” Gregor said, scanning down the page.

  Then he saw it. Right there, next to the word ownership, was not one name, but two.

  Catherine and Margaret Marbledale.

  SIX

  1

  Somewhere along the way, somebody had put a needle in her arm. That was the last thing Alice McGuffie remembered at all clearly, and it was pickled in emotion. Everything was emotion. Somewhere underneath this haze they had put her in was what she felt, and what she felt was hot and red and angry, where it wasn’t scared to death. She hated that man, that Dale Vardan. She had always hated him, and everybody in town hated him, too. She had been waiting for years for the secular humanists to come for her. All across the nation, the secular humanists were making martyrs out of good Christian people, and they were doing it right here in America, which had been founded as a Christian nation and meant to be a City on a Hill. Alice could not, for the life of her, remember what the phrase “City on a Hill” actually meant. She’d heard it a million times in church over the years, but the truth about church was that she just didn’t pay that much attention to the sermons. It was hard to keep your mind on anything that went on and on like that. The pastor liked to quote from people, too. They were always people Alice knew she was supposed to recognize, but almost never did—Plato, Aristotle. It made no sense to her to bring up people like that in church. They had “never had the chance to hear the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” The pastor said that. The two guest pastors they had had over the past year said the same thing. What good were they, then? For the Christian, Christ was all in all. The pastor said that too. Alice didn’t see why they needed to know about these people who had lived a long time ago and who hadn’t believed in Christ and who had said things that sounded crazy and stupid. Maybe there were secular humanists back there, too. Maybe they roamed the countryside like a lion waiting to devour you. The words were all getting mixed up in her head. She couldn’t make herself concentrate. She had never been able to make herself concentrate. Maybe that was the problem.

  She was lying in a cell in the county jail; that much she knew. She did not know what had happened to Barbie. Barbie was back at school when all this had happened. Did Barbie even know this had happened? She must, by now. She must be home alone, or maybe soci
al workers had come and taken her away. Social workers were what Alice McGuffie feared most after secular humanists, but she thought that a lot of social workers were secular humanists as well. It was unbelievable, the way the secular humanists had managed to get themselves into all the nooks and crannies of government. They had managed to get the law on their side. They had managed to get the courts. Maybe the social workers would take Barbie and claim she was being “emotionally abused.” That’s what they called it when a child was being raised in a Christian home. Christianity itself was “abuse,” and if you could claim “abuse” you could kidnap the child and take her way somewhere, where all that Christianity could be trained out of her. Maybe the social workers would claim that Alice could no longer “provide a safe space” for Barbie, because she couldn’t provide a safe space for anybody, because she was in jail. “Provide a safe space” was like “emotional abuse.” It was a phrase that could mean anything or nothing. It existed only as an excuse, to make it possible for the social workers to take the child away. Social workers were dedicated to taking children away from Christian parents because they hated Christianity and they hated parents. They wanted all children to be raised up as secular humanists.

  Everything was spinning, and her head hurt. One entire wall of the room she was in was bars. A woman in a police uniform was sitting on a chair just on the other side of that, reading her way through a magazine. Alice wondered what the woman was like. She didn’t understand it: The police in Snow Hill weren’t secular humanists. There was Gary Albright, who went to her very own church, and Eddie Block, who went to the Methodists. Even Tom Fordman went to church, to the Lutheran one, and he was like lot of men, uncomfortable at services and not happy about being asked to show his love for Jesus in public. But they all loved Jesus. Alice was sure of that. Most of the teachers in Snow Hill loved Jesus, too, except for the science ones, and Miss Marbledale. Where did all these people come from, people like this woman on the other side of the bars? Where did they find them?