Quoth the Raven

by Jane Haddam

  “You know,” he said, “here I am, with half the service personnel of this county, or what seems like it, and what I think I’m here for is either a terrorist bombing or a woman’s hysteria, and I get here, and not only is everything stranger than shit, but I’ve got you. Now, what I want to know is, why do I have you?”

  “You’ve lost your twang,” Gregor told him.

  “I don’t have a twang, except when I’m up here at the college. They like to think of us locals as unspoiled primitives in a state of grace. I’m David Markham. Swarthmore ’47. Stanford Law School ’51.”

  “Krekor is here to give a speech,” Tibor cut in. “On the methods of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in apprehending serial murderers.” He turned anxiously to Gregor. “Apprehending is the right word, isn’t it, Krekor? In this case?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  “I’d heard you were with the FBI,” David Markham said. “You’re not still with the FBI, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, thank God for small favors.”

  The medics had done what they had come to do. They had treated the most obvious of Miss Maryanne Veer’s burns, and, with what must have been the advice of a doctor—every once in a while Gregor had been able to hear them talking through two-way radios, the sharp static cutting into the fuzzy confusion of the room like bolt lightning cutting through a cloud-clogged sky—put a tube down her throat and started administering a more chemically calculated antidote than milk. Now they were pushing back the crowd and making way for the stretcher men. They had the body wrapped in a blanket, as if they were protecting it against shock—although, Gregor thought, it wasn’t right to call it a body. The woman was still living. If she hadn’t been, they would have covered her face and not gone to all the trouble of tubes and medicines.

  Like Gregor and Tibor, David Markham had turned to watch them take the stretcher out. He kept rubbing his thumb against the side of his nose in a way that was both nervous and inquiring, but his face was merely reflective.

  “You know,” he said, “I heard one of my boys say that was Maryanne Veer.”

  “That’s right,” Gregor said. “That’s what everyone’s been calling her. Miss Maryanne Veer.”

  “You don’t know her?”

  “I’d never met her before we started with the milk,” Gregor said. “I just got here this morning.”

  “Mmm, yes,” David Markham said. “Did I also hear right about the lye? That she swallowed lye?”

  “Technically, we ought to wait for a medical report before we say we’re sure, but it had all the indications. Lye, or something based on lye. Toilet bowl cleaner. One of those drain uncloggers. Something like that.”

  “You’re supposed to know about poisons,” David Markham said. “Let me tell you what I know about. Maryanne Veer. She’s local, in case nobody told you. Born and brought up in Belleville. She’s about ten years older than I am and from the other side of town, so I never met her family—Belleville is the kind of place where it matters, which side of town your family lives on—but I’ve heard about them. Her father was a right righteous bastard. They had a house out on Deegan Road, right at the edge before the hills get going for real, and you know what that house had? An outhouse.”

  “An outhouse?” Tibor was confused.

  “An outhouse,” David Markham repeated firmly. “It’s against sixteen different building codes, and that doesn’t matter a damn, not in Belleville and not in anyplace south of here. Hillbillies. That’s what Maryanne’s family was. A pack of hillbillies who’d come down into town and bought shoes. Most of the people south of here are pretty decent. Ignorant and uneducated but decent. But Maryanne’s father. Well, Maryanne’s father was what the academic snobs around here really mean when they use the word hillbilly. Do you know what I’m trying to get at?”

  “Of course,” Gregor said. “Whatever else went on here today, Miss Maryanne Veer did not try to commit suicide.”

  “Exactly,” David Markham said.

  “I don’t understand,” Tibor said. “Why does it mean she would not have tried to commit suicide? From this description, Krekor, I would think she would have had great cause for depression.”

  “True,” Gregor told him, “but she would never have used lye. Don’t you remember what that girl was saying when we were pouring milk? Maybe you weren’t there. There was a girl, Chessey something—”

  “Chessey Flint.”

  “Whatever. She was talking about some cabin some club has up in the woods somewhere—”

  “The Climbing Club. On Hillman’s Rock.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Tibor. The point is, the cabin has outhouses behind it, and next to the outhouses she says there’s a tub of lye. Marked as lye, at any rate. The point is, what you clean outhouses with is lye.”

  “Maryanne Veer grew up with outhouses,” David Markham said. “She knew too much about lye to think of using it on herself. That leaves two alternatives. Accident and attempted murder.”

  “Maybe not,” Gregor said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s dispense with accident, in the first place,” Gregor said. He explained about the broken teacup, about the foaming action of lye in water—which would have been superfluous, because David Markham obviously knew all about lye, except that Gregor had no idea where Tibor had been during his original explanation—and about the absence of any sign of any other food anywhere near the body. Of course, I could be wrong, he said. I had to do my looking around while I was administering an antidote to a woman with third-degree burns in her throat. Those are hardly the best of conditions for making an eyeball search. But before we started administering the antidote, there was a period, maybe a full minute and maybe less, when everyone was frozen. And I didn’t see anything else on the floor then, either. She ingested lye. It had to have been something she ate immediately before she began to gag, because lye works that quickly. It couldn’t have been in her tea. It had to have been in something else. The something else is now missing.”

  “Whoosh,” David Markham said.

  “There’s also the obvious,” Gregor told him. “I could write you a scenario to show you how lye could get into the tea water, accidentally. I couldn’t write you one to show you how lye got into, say, a sandwich, accidentally.”

  “Then it does have to have been murder,” David Markham said, “or attempted murder. Please God, attempted murder. With any luck, they’ll get her up to County Receiving and straighten her out in time.”

  Gregor nodded. “We got to her early. It shouldn’t be impossible. But as for murder or attempted murder—look, have you ever heard of anyone who was actually murdered with lye?”

  “I’ve heard of plenty of people who have died from it,” David Markham said. “Kids, especially. Every year you get one or two who get into the Drano and there they go.”

  “Accidents.” Gregor waved that away. “I’ve read about those things myself. But you’re right, Mr. Markham, it’s almost always children, who are smaller and have less resistance, and the accidents are almost always bizarre. I remember a case a few years ago where a zookeeper fell off a ledge into a vat of the stuff that had been mixed with water to clean a bears’ cage. The results were predictably nasty. But murder—no. I’ve never heard of a single person who was murdered with lye. I’m not entirely sure it could be done.”

  “But Krekor,” Tibor said, “why not? The substance is lethal.”

  “Yes, the substance is lethal, but look at the facts in the present situation. Miss Maryanne Veer is not dead. There’s a good chance she will not be dead, not from this, although she may be severely damaged. Lye is an extremely corrosive alkali. As soon as it touches the skin, it burns and it burns badly. Anyone ingesting it with food would do just what Miss Maryanne Veer did. One sip—or one bite. Instant pain. Excruciating pain. Then she’d drop whatever she was holding and try to spit out whatever was in her mouth. She might swallow a little because swallowing is a reflex, a
nd she wouldn’t have to swallow much to do herself severe damage, but it’s highly unlikely she’d swallow enough to die unless she was prevented from reaching medical help. And even then it would take two or three days.”

  “Maybe,” David Markham said, “but you’re making an assumption. You’re assuming that whoever fed her that stuff knew what there was to know about lye.”

  “You think the people at this college wouldn’t?”

  “I think some of them would and some of them wouldn’t.” Markham nodded across the room. The body was gone, but the small space where it had lain was still empty. It was as if the people who had witnessed Miss Maryanne Veer’s pain were afraid to step into the circle, afraid of a hex. Even Bennis was sitting on one of the tables near the window, smoking a cigarette and looking anywhere but at the place where she had so recently been. Jack Carroll and Chessey Flint were farther away, back all the way to the wall, in deep conversation. Gregor thought Chessey was crying.

  “Ken Crockett,” Markham said, “is local, too, from the richest family in the county. I used to be impressed by the Crocketts before I went out to California and saw what rich was really like. Never mind. Rich or not, Ken would know all about lye. He’d have picked it up somewhere. But the rest of these people?” Markham shrugged. “The rest of these people are like Ken’s lady friend, nice little intellectuals from nice little upper-middle-class suburbs, people who have spent all their lives in hermetically sealed, overzoned, planned communities among their own kind.”

  “The cafeteria workers wouldn’t be like that, would they?” Gregor asked. “And they’re the most likely suspects, in a case like this.”

  “No,” Markham agreed, “they wouldn’t be like that. But I don’t agree they’re the most likely suspects. They’d have had the best opportunity, but I know most of them. None of them is nuts, as far as I can tell. And none of them had any reason to hurt Maryanne Veer.”

  “What about Tibor’s friend, that boy, Jack Carroll? I don’t know anything about his history, but the impression I got is that he’s from anything but an upper-middle-class family.”

  “That’s true. He’s on scholarship. He works down at the Sunoco to make his pocket money.”

  “So?” Gregor said.

  Markham sighed. “So I think I’m going to go over there and look for a sandwich or a cheese Danish or something, and if I don’t find it I’m going to treat this as an attempted murder. You going to be around for a couple of days?”

  “I’m supposed to give my speech tomorrow, late. I’ll be around until the morning of the first.”

  “Good. Why don’t you meet me tomorrow morning, around seven, right here? I think I’m going to want to pick your brain.”

  “I’d be glad to.”

  “Glad isn’t the word I’d use in connection with any of this,” Markham said.

  He had stuffed his notebook into the back pocket of his pants while he had been talking to them. Now he took it out, squinted at it, and sighed again. Then he headed across the room toward the open space where the body had been, parting the crowd in front of him as easily as God had parted the Red Sea.

  Gregor waited until he had gotten all the way to the other side of the room and gone down on his knees to look under the table Bennis was sitting on. Then he grabbed Tibor by the arm and said,

  “Come on. There’s something I want to see.”

  2

  WHAT GREGOR WANTED TO see was the floor under the tray-rest just inside the line from the cash register. Talking to Markham, it had hit him all of a sudden that that was where something was likely to be. He couldn’t have said what. It wasn’t that clear. Like a lot of successful detectives—in police departments across the country, in the FBI, maybe in the CIA (although he doubted it; he’d never had much respect for the professionalism of the CIA)—most of what he knew was buried in his deep memory. It consisted of a collection of rank trivialities that added up to more than the trivial, but if he’d tried to keep either the collection or its sum in the forefront of his consciousness, he wouldn’t have had any attention to spare for anything else. Like most men, he wanted to have attention to spare for everything else: for Tibor and Bennis and Donna, for good dinners and enjoyably bad movies; for his memories of his wife. He certainly didn’t want to turn into the kind of neurotic law enforcement officer, retired or otherwise, who used the vagaries of his profession as the background music to his life.

  The cafeteria line was entirely clear of people. The medical personnel had left campus with Miss Maryanne Veer on her stretcher. David Markham’s police deputies were spread out through the students and faculty and food workers who had been at lunch when the poisoning happened. The girl who had been at the cash register and the students who had been tending to the Swedish meatballs and the lime Jell-O had withdrawn into a group of their own in a far corner. They were being comforted by an older woman who was probably the college dietician and their boss. Dr. Katherine Branch and her friends were doing their best to fade into the woodwork, near the place where they had laid themselves out on the floor. Their clothes were spattered with pieces of pumpkin pulp and smudges of face paint.

  “It occurred to me,” Gregor told Tibor, “that I had no right to assume that when Miss Veer’s tray fell, all its contents scattered in the same general direction. The cup was right next to her left foot. I didn’t see her tray—”

  “I did, Krekor. It went toward the table closest to her, toward the windows. When it fell, Chessey Flint picked it up.”

  “What did she do with it?”

  “Put it on the table in front of her. It was automatic, I think, Krekor. She is a girl who has been brought up to that kind of politeness.”

  “Maybe. We’ll get back to that later. The tray went toward the windows. Fine. There’s nothing to say that whatever else was on it also went toward the windows. Miss Veer was standing very close to the cash register. It makes as much sense to think that something might have fallen in that direction.”

  “Do you mean you think you were wrong, Krekor? No one has taken the sandwich or whatever it was? It has simply fallen where we have not seen it?”

  “If it did, it didn’t fall toward the cash register. I could see all the way under the cash register stand, the tray-rest and the food service tables, all the way back to that wall with the canisters on it, from where I was standing when I was talking to David Markham.”

  “Oh.”

  They had reached the steel-tube tray-rest and the cash register, the clear plastic-fronted dessert display and the large bucket of crushed ice stuffed with cans of Coke and Dr Pepper and carbonated lemonade. Gregor noticed a few things he hadn’t before: little straw baskets full of Halloween spaced out along the top of the plastic shield of the food display; a wart-faced, grey-skinned witch’s mask hung on the hot-water canister; a mummy rising up out of the ice next to a can of Vernors ginger ale.

  “It’s got to be something small,” he told Tibor. “It might even be a piece of food, but I’m not expecting to get that lucky. Pick up anything you find.”

  “I am likely to find a lot of things, Krekor. Lost earrings. Money.”

  “Leave the money on the edge of the cash register. That’s not what we’re looking for.”

  “Krekor.” Tibor hesitated, so-long and in such an uneasy way that Gregor began to become alarmed. Then he brushed at the front of his cassock and straightened up. “Krekor, do you believe what you said to David Markham, that the people who work in the cafeteria are the most likely suspects?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “What does that mean, Krekor, yes and no?”

  “Yes, because they have the best access to the food. You have to take that into consideration, Tibor, whether you like it or not. There’s always the chance that what we’re dealing with here is a lunatic, like the man who put the cyanide in the Tylenol capsules.”

  “Did they catch that person and know he was a man, Krekor?”

  “I don’t remember. It happened when Eliza
beth was sick.”

  “Why the no?”

  “A lot of reasons,” Gregor said. “In the first place, a lunatic wouldn’t have bothered to get rid of the evidence, especially not at the risk of exposing himself. Why should he bother? The frightening thing about incidents of that kind is that they so seldom leave anything that actually points to anybody in particular. In this situation, it would have been easy to set it up in a way that left him completely in the clear. The victim would be random. Our lunatic wouldn’t be singled out as a man with a motive. It would be easy to throw suspicion on somebody else. He only had to put the lye in the food in a section of the line where he wasn’t working. Why leave the line to pick up what remained of the food, in full view of a hundred or so people, a fair proportion of whom could identify him? If he was par for the course at this sort of thing, he’d be happy to have the rest of us know just what he’d done and how he’d done it. The only thing he’d be trying to protect is the who.”

  “What else?” Tibor asked.

  “What else should be obvious, Tibor. The Tylenol incident and things like it make the papers and cause a lot of fuss, but the reason for that is that they’re out of the ordinary. Stranger-to-stranger crime is rising, of course, because of the drug problem, but in ninety-nine percent of the cases, in murder and in attack, the victim and the victimizer not only know each other but know each other well. If the food hadn’t disappeared, I would have had to assume a lunatic, on practical grounds. With the food gone, I have to assume something else.”

  “You are sure the lye was not put into the tea, Krekor?”

  “Positive. There was lye mixed with the tea by the time the tea hit the floor. It was hissing away like a snake at her feet just before she keeled over. She would never have drunk it if she heard it doing that.”

  “Even is she was distracted?”

  “It was loud, Tibor. She would have had to be virtually comatose.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Tibor said. “Do you realize, Krekor, that if it was someone who knew her who tried to kill her, it was somebody who is in the Program?”