by Jane Haddam
“Call me Ken,” Dr. Crockett said. It sounded automatic, as if he’d gotten used to telling Tibor this same thing over and over again. “I’ve seen Lenore a couple of times. I’ve been wondering if she’s ill.”
“She sounded like she was strangling when we met her,” Bennis said.
“I haven’t heard her talk. I was up at the cabin today—we have a rock-climbing club here; the club keeps a log cabin up near Hillman’s Rock—anyway, she was out there, circling around this morning. I’ve never known her to circle as much as she has the last few days.”
“The last two,” Tibor corrected “She was all right the day before yesterday. I had her in my office, eating out of my hand, and she was talking away just as usual.”
“Maybe the circling has something to do with sex,” Bennis said. “Maybe she’s getting ready to mate or looking for a mate or something like that.”
Gregor found it absolutely astounding, how Bennis could manage to bring sex into any conversation. It was a trait he had come to decide was universal in her generation of women, and he didn’t like it. He took a bite out of his doughnut, which was stale. He took a sip of his coffee, which was nearly as bad as the stuff Tibor made at home. Then he pushed the whole mess away from him and said, “In the first place, as I was telling you before, if it talks, it’s a him, not a her. In the second place, ravens don’t mate in the fall and they don’t mate by circling, either. They circle when they’re coming in for a kill.”
“Is that so?” Dr. Kenneth Crockett looked bemused. “In that case, I suppose we’ll have to find Lenore a bird psychologist. What she seems to be circling in to kill these days is Constitution House.”
“I thought you said you saw her circling a cabin in the woods somewhere,” Gregor pointed out.
“She wasn’t actually circling the cabin,” Dr. Crockett corrected. “She was just up over Hillman’s Rock circling. But the last couple of days, what she’s been doing most often is circling over Constitution House. Even Father Tibor’s noticed it.”
“That is true, Krekor. I have noticed it. She goes up into the air and around and around our house.”
“She never comes down?” Gregor asked, realizing at the last minute that he had done it himself, called the raven “her.” “He never swoops or lights on anything anywhere?”
“He never swoops,” Dr. Crockett said.
“Of course she lights on things, Krekor,” Tibor said. “She came into my apartment not half an hour ago. You saw her yourself.”
“He wasn’t lighting to kill. He was just coming in to see what he could find.”
“Well, there it is, then, Krekor. The behavior does not make sense. It doesn’t matter if Lenore is a him or a her. It only matters that she is not well.”
The ebb and flow of contradictory pronouns was beginning to make Gregor dizzy. Accuracy mattered to him. He could never understand why it didn’t matter to everyone else. He looked at Dr. Kenneth Crockett with some curiosity. Here was a man, a Ph.D. and a scholar, a man whom Tibor had pronounced himself in favor of—and yet there was something about him that Gregor didn’t like. It all seemed jerry-rigged somehow—his personality, his conversation, even his clothes. It was as if Crockett had woken up one morning and decided on the man he was going to be, and then gone out and become that man, but only from the outside. The core of him was someplace else, something else. It didn’t fit with the rest of him, and it chafed.
Gregor shifted a little in his chair—why was he forever the victim of uncomfortable chairs?—and said, “You know, there is one possible explanation for the kind of circling you’ve been talking about. He may have been spotting.”
“Spotting?” Dr. Crockett asked.
“Carrion,” Gregor said. “Ravens aren’t vultures, of course. They kill their own meat. But any carnivorous bird will spot carrion, if there’s enough of it.”
Father Tibor blanched, “What do you mean, Krekor, if there’s enough of it?”
“I mean if the kill is big enough, of course. It would have to be a very substantial kill, I’d think, in the case of a bird like Lenore. He’s well fed without having to work too hard for it.”
“I don’t understand why she bothers to work for it at all,” Bennis said. “All she has to do to get fed is show up at Father Tibor’s window. Why should she knock herself out chasing small animals?”
“Instinct,” Gregor said. “Community responsibility. In case you didn’t know it, birds are fairly communal animals, even if they don’t live in herds. If Lenore is spotting carrion, then he’s not just spotting carrion for himself. He’s spotting it for any of his fellow ravens who happen to be able to see him.”
“Krekor, Lenore has no fellow ravens. Lenore is the only raven anyone has ever seen in this part of Pennsylvania.”
“Excuse me,” Dr. Kenneth Crockett said. “That’s Alice. We were supposed to meet and we kept missing each other.”
He was already on his feet, looking away from them, his legs bent slightly at the knees, getting ready to move him quickly. From his initial politeness, Gregor would have expected handshakes, rituals, trivialities—but that initial politeness had been stripped away. Dr. Kenneth Crockett didn’t seem to care about anything but getting across the room to Alice—or maybe, Gregor thought, away from them.
“Excuse me,” Dr. Crockett said again. Then he spun around and hurried off, into the crowd.
Bennis got out her cigarettes and lit up. “Good grief,” she said. “Who’s Alice?”
“Dr. Elkinson,” Father Tibor said. “We met her when we were going into Constitution House. She’s over there, by the cash register.”
Someone else was there, by the cash register, in deep conversation with Dr. Elkinson—an older woman with an iron permanent and a face of steel and ice who reminded Gregor far too much of the most terrifying Sunday school teacher he had ever had. The older woman seemed to have nothing on her tray but a cup of tea, as if she were made of metal inside and didn’t need human food. Dr. Elkinson’s tray was much more reassuring: a hamburger, a little cardboard boat full of french fries, and a garishly colored old-fashioned tin can that said Belleville Lemon and Lime All Natural Soda.
“Who’s she talking to?” Gregor asked. “Is that the infamous Dr. Branch?”
“No, Krekor, that is not Dr. Branch. That is Miss Maryanne Veer. She is the secretary for our office.”
“I think I’ll stay out of your office,” Bennis said.
Gregor dragged his attention away from Dr. Elkinson, Dr. Crockett, and Miss Maryanne Veer, and found himself face-to-face with a very worried Father Tibor. He felt almost instantly guilty. He had meant to rattle Dr. Crockett and see what came of it. He hadn’t meant to put Father Tibor Kasparian off his food.
“Tibor,” he said, “don’t get so upset. I was just presenting a possibility. I don’t have any real—”
“What’s that?” Bennis said.
Bennis was an immobile sitter. She got comfortable where she wanted to be and stayed there. Now she was rising off her seat, leaning forward, her palms flat against the table and her arms straining to stretch just a little longer, just a little farther. The tone of her voice had been so shocked, Gregor found himself rising too, turning toward the cash register again, confused and alarmed.
He had every reason to be alarmed. What he saw, when he finally got himself into position, was a tragedy out of a cheap horror movie. Miss Maryanne Veer had moved away from the cash register, toward the center of the room. She was there now, alone, her head thrown back, the sound coming out of her throat a cross between a gurgle and a scream. Her chin had been stripped of skin and left raw and bloody. Something seemed to be eating into the front of her dress and the skin on her neck. At her feet, where her teacup had fallen and shattered, a puddle of brown and green was having no effect on the floor at all.
Gregor Demarkian felt as if he were being shot from a cannon.
“Dear sweet Jesus Christ,” he said, and he headed across the floor. “Lye.”
>
Five
1
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN simple—in fact, in the beginning, it was simple. There is nothing on earth like a poisoning with lye. Gregor could have recited the indications from memory, just the way he had learned them in his second month of Bureau training at Quantico: the stripping away of the skin that looked worse than it was but not nearly as bad as it would get; the gagging heaves that turned to choked strangling and brought up no vomit; the short-term inviability of all the nonhuman surfaces. Miss Maryanne Veer’s dress must have been made of silk. Silk was one of the few materials lye would eat through on contact, except for human skin. Or animal skin, Gregor thought irrelevantly. The effect would be the same on most animals as it was on human beings. He could remember a case, years ago, from when he was new in the Bureau and assigned to kidnapping detail. A small girl had been snatched from the playground of her expensive private grammar school in Beverly Hills and taken high up into Coldwater Canyon and killed. Her mother, half-insane with grief and self-recrimination, had been unable to stand the sound of the girl’s tiny kitten mewling disconsolately through the house. She had taken the kitten and locked it in the back pantry. Then she had gone on with her life and forgotten all about it—unsurprising, because her life at that point had consisted of a bottle of Stolichnaya before breakfast and whatever she’d had to drink afterward to get herself unconscious for the rest of the day. The kitten had remained locked in the back pantry for three days without food, kept alive only because a small leak in the roof made a puddle of water on the pantry floor. Then the kitten had gotten too hungry to care about anything else and had gone looking for something open and chewable. It had found an open tin of drain cleaner that had been made mostly of lye.
Gregor Demarkian was not a physically active man. When he read the detective novels Bennis sometimes gave him, he preferred the ones about Nero Wolfe and Hercule Poirot, men who solved the problems of the world from the safety of their living rooms, who sat and thought instead of ran and shot. Because he had been determined to join some sort of police force when he was young—he couldn’t remember why now—it was a good thing the Bureau had existed. He couldn’t imagine himself, even at twenty-five, chasing across the landscape with his gun drawn. He couldn’t imagine himself directing human traffic in an emergency, either—but now, he knew, that was what he had to do.
For what seemed like minutes after Miss Maryanne Veer dropped her teacup and began to gag, nobody spoke and nobody moved. Miss Veer was the radial point in a large empty circle, central and spotlit. The only sound in the room was the low-grade hissing Gregor knew came from the puddle at Miss Veer’s feet, lye mixed with water, activated. Then Dr. Alice Elkinson threw back her head and began to scream.
“Dear God,” Bennis Hannaford said, “will somebody please shut her up?”
“Never mind about shutting her up,” Gregor said. What he had been afraid of was beginning to happen. Miss Maryanne Veer had fallen to the floor, and the rest of them were converging on her, throwing themselves at her. There were things that needed to be done and done quickly, and a roadblock of bodies was going up that could become impossible to penetrate at any moment. Gregor grabbed Tibor by the shoulders and spun him around, so that he was facing the cafeteria line and the door out. “Go,” he said. “Call 911. Ask for an ambulance and the police. Tell them we’ve got an attempted murder by lye.”
If Tibor had been thinking clearly, he would have protested. There was no way to know, now, whether what they had was an attempted murder, an attempted suicide, or some kind of gruesome accident. Because Tibor was thinking no more clearly than any of the people now clotting up the center of the room, he took off at a brisk trot without asking questions. Gregor turned to Bennis and said, “Go get some milk. Lots of milk. As much as you can carry. Bring it to me when I get in over there and then go back and get some more.”
“Milk?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions, Bennis. Just go.”
Bennis went. The clot in the center of the room was pulsing, sending up waves of sound that weren’t words and weren’t music but had something in common with both. Dr. Elkinson had stopped screaming and begun crying hysterically instead. She kept altering sobs with wails, sobs with wails, so that she sounded like a defective police siren.
“We’ve got to make her vomit,” someone in the crowd was saying. “We’ve got to force her to bring the poison up out of her system.”
Gregor pushed through two young girls, students, whose skin was tinged with the whitish-green of incipient nausea. As he forced himself through the second layer and into the still empty but smaller circle of the center, he saw one of the girls turn away and bend over. He wedged himself into the open space next to Miss Maryanne Veer’s body and dropped to his knees.
“For God’s sake,” he said, “whatever we do here, what we can’t do is let her vomit.”
“Who’s that?” someone in the crowd said.
Bennis pushed through, her arms full of those small waxed-cardboard cartons of milk that seem to be sold only in school cafeterias. She had at least thirty of them. She dumped them on the floor next to Gregor and stood up again, looking a little wild.
“Is that what you wanted?”
“More,” Gregor said.
“More?”
“Just in case.”
Bennis whipped around and ran off again. Gregor looked up and tried desperately to judge the character behind the faces he saw. Dr. Elkinson was in no shape to help anyone with anything. She had fallen out of the crowd and collapsed into a chair. Gregor could see the top of her head, bent and shuddering, between the shoulders of a student dressed as Leonardo the Ninja Turtle and the shoulders of another student dressed as Snow White. That was part of the problem, the way all the students were dressed. The face Gregor most wanted to see was that of Tibor’s friend, Jack Carroll. He remembered that the boy had been dressed as a bat, complete with hood, but there were two bats in the crowd, both complete with hoods. Gregor hadn’t paid enough attention to the way the rest of the boy had looked to be able to determine if either of these bats was the one he wanted. He didn’t want to call out the boy’s name, either—although at that moment he couldn’t have said why. There was just something about it that felt damned wrong, maybe even dangerous for the boy, and Gregor had to go with that. He didn’t have the time or the inclination to work it all out.
“I know who that is,” someone in the crowd said. “That’s the man who’s giving the lecture about crime.”
Gregor examined the faces before him, the ones he knew and the ones he didn’t know. The ones he knew were few in number and not always attached to names. There was Dr. Elkinson in her chair, yes, but there was also the pretty, blond, athletic girl hanging on to one of the bats. She was dressed as a pumpkin and her face was streaked with tears. Gregor had seen her on the quad when Tibor had been leading them to the dining hall for lunch. She had been part of a whole line of girls dressed as pumpkins, and she hadn’t looked happy even then. Gregor mentally rejected her services out of hand—not only was she too upset, she wasn’t strong enough—and went back to his search. Finally, he came to rest on Dr. Kenneth Crockett, upset, even horrified, and hanging back as far as he dared, but blessedly still in control of himself.
“You,” Gregor said, “Dr. Crockett. Come here please. I need some help.”
“Me?” Kenneth Crockett said.
“I have more of them,” Bennis said, stumbling into the open space and dumping another load of milk next to Gregor’s knees. “More?”
“No. Go find out what’s happened to Tibor. I sent him to the phone.”
“Right,” Bennis said. She took off again.
Gregor motioned Dr. Crockett in toward the writhing body. This time, he came, slowly but steadily, as if he were forcing himself to move.
“What I need you to do,” Gregor told him, “is to get her mouth open and your finger on her tongue, so that she can’t swallow it or block the progress of the milk. She’ll
have third-degree burns in her mouth and we’ll get to them, but we have to get to the esophagus first. Lye is a corrosive. It will eat right through her windpipe if we let it, and if it does she wont be able to breathe, not now and not later, no matter what anybody does for her.”
“Lye,” Ken Crockett hissed. “Oh, my God.”
Gregor took one of the cartons of milk, ripped it open, and poured it on Miss Maryanne Veer’s chin and chest. It wouldn’t be much help, but it would be some. He didn’t want to look at that pulped, untreated skin a moment longer. He motioned to Ken Crockett and the other man leaned forward, got his thumbs around Miss Maryanne Veer’s teeth, and pulled.
“Dear God,” Ken Crockett said. “She’s fighting me.”
Gregor got another carton of milk open, took aim, and poured the contents straight down Miss Maryanne Veer’s throat.
“She’s not fighting you on purpose,” he said. “From the state of her pupils, I’d say she was barely conscious. But she will try to clamp down. It’s sheer instinct. The lye came in that way. The body is trying to keep it out.”
“I don’t blame her,” Ken Crockett said.
Gregor opened another carton, took aim again, poured again. “You were standing near her when it happened. Do you remember what she was carrying on her tray? What besides tea or coffee or whatever was in the cup.”
“I remember the tea. She always had tea.”
“The lye couldn’t have been in the tea. Tea is full of tannic acid. Lye is an alkali. Even if the tea was weak—even if the tannic acid wasn’t strong enough to neutralize the alkali, and it probably wouldn’t have been, it isn’t that strong an acid to begin with when it’s derived from tea leaves—anyway, tannic acid or no tannic acid, most of the available forms of lye foam when they come in contact with water.”
“What do you mean, ‘most of the available forms’?”
Another carton, another aim, another pour. Dr. Crockett was holding Miss Maryanne Veer’s mouth wide open and her head tilted back toward the light. Gregor could see well into her throat. The skin there was raw and unforgiving. He grabbed another carton and opened it.