Act of Darkness

by Jane Haddam

  “The car’s in the drive,” she told him. “Get into it. We’re going home.”

  “Home,” he said.

  “We’re going, Gregor. I’ve already called Donna. She’ll be waiting up.”

  Bennis had also packed her suitcases and his own and cleared the trip with Henry Berman. Even if he hadn’t been happy with the thought of getting out of that place, he would have to have gone. Fortunately, he was very, very happy. So happy, he didn’t think of the obvious until they were out of the gate, past the still struggling crowd, and on the highway headed for the Triborough Bridge.

  “Bennis,” he said then, “how did you get the car so fast?”

  “I didn’t get the car so fast. I got it when we were in New York.”

  “I know that, Bennis. But—”

  “I got it for the weekend, Gregor. I had it on call.”

  He stared at her in astonishment. “You had a Rolls-Royce on call for the entire Fourth-of-July weekend?”

  “It doesn’t do to be cheap, Gregor. It causes you a lot of trouble in the long run.”

  “With a Ford, you wouldn’t have been being cheap. With a Rolls-Royce—”

  “With a Rolls-Royce, you get better service. I hope you don’t think we’re going to Penn Station to get the train.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back to Cavanaugh Street, of course. In this car. It’ll be much more convenient. I’d have died trying to manage trains and taxis at this time of night.”

  Gregor thought it was a good thing her books sold as well as they did. The way she spent money, she’d go bankrupt trying to survive on any ordinary income.

  A little while later, the car began to cross the Triborough, and Gregor began to fall asleep. By the time they reached the warren of bypasses around Manhattan, he was out. He stayed out until they were well into Philadelphia, bouncing along the potholed side streets and through the rapidly shifting neighborhoods of a city in transition. Then they turned onto Cavanaugh Street itself, and he woke up thoroughly and irrevocably.

  It was a good thing he did. Donna Moradanyan was young and she had been brought up in the suburbs, but neither of those things kept her from being like every other Armenian-American woman in the neighborhood. First, she had called Lida Arkmanian. Then she had called Father Tibor Kasparian. Then she had gone downstairs and woken up poor old George Tekamanian. And those three, of course, had woken up everybody else.

  It wasn’t only Donna Moradanyan who was waiting up.

  It was very nearly the entire population of Cavanaugh Street.

  They were sitting in tiers, on the steps that led to the apartment building where Gregor and Donna and George had the three occupied floor-throughs.

  And they had brought food.

  [2]

  THERE WAS MORE FOOD the next morning, in the kitchen of the little apartment at the back of Holy Trinity Armenian Church, where Tibor lived in the same cramped quarters as every other Armenian priest who had ever been sent to Cavanaugh Street. Because the kitchen, like every other room Tibor had, was piled with books, the food was piled on books. It was also decorated with tiny plastic American flags, a patriotic gesture Gregor was sure had been Tibor’s own. Gregor found a bowl of stuffed grape leaves sitting on a copy of Aristotle’s Poetics (in the original Greek) and a plate of fried pastry dipped in honey on a copy of Mickey Spillane’s The Body Lovers (original paperback cover, half-naked female draped over the edge of an invisible world). There was also a pan of deskewered shish kebab with microwave instructions taped to its side. That was sitting on a hardbound edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. The wonder of it was that the place was so very clean. Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian did a good job when they came in to “look after” Tibor every other day of the week. Gregor took a huge piece of phyllo stuffed with spiced meat from a plate resting on one side on Scruples and on the other on something called The History of Chinese Snuff Bottles, and wandered back into the living room.

  In the living room, Tibor was sitting on one of the only two chairs that had been cleared of books, holding Donna Moradanyan’s baby on his lap and showing it pictures from Janson’s The History of Art. Gregor dropped into the other cleared chair and took a big bite out of his phyllo.

  “Don’t you think you’re pushing it a little? The child isn’t two months old.”

  “That is very silly of you, Krekor. It is never too early to start. And my Tommy here likes the pictures of Vermeer. They make him smile.”

  “It’s going to make me smile to see you change a diaper. Is that what she’s decided to call him, finally? Tommy? I thought the child was going to go to his wedding without a baptismal name.”

  “Thomas Peter.” Tibor sighed. “Thomas is her father’s name, of course. And Peter,” Tibor looked at the baby. “I am going to have a talk with this Peter. He is coming to visit and ‘work things out.’ This is how he put it. Work things out. I am going to work things out on his head, and then Lida is going to finish him off.”

  “And then Tom Moradanyan is going to get his shotgun? I thought you said this Peter had a brain the size of a pea. And I told you, Tibor, it’s not necessarily a good idea—”

  “I know what you told me. Forget telling me. We who are not sophisticated will take care of this here. Tell me instead about your poor Victoria Harte. You said you would.”

  Gregor sighed. He had, of course, said he would. He even wanted to. He always talked things over with Tibor. He had never been comfortable with the fact that he had not consulted the priest about this case before he had decided to take it. He should have, if only from practical considerations. Tibor might not be “sophisticated,” but he knew more about human nature than any human being since Dostoyevsky. With Tibor along, Gregor didn’t think he would have made half the mistakes he had.

  “Well,” he said, “what started me going was two things. I told you about the first one. Carl Bettinger.”

  “Who was not behaving as he should have been behaving,” Tibor said. “The man from the FBI. Yes, Krekor. I know.”

  “Yes, you know. Well, there was only one way it added up, even before Victoria Harte came out with that bit about how Carl had been to visit her asking questions two months before Stephen Fox’s attacks started—although that clinched it. Carl had a red look around his eyes, the one he always got when he was on the computer too much. He was around those people at Great Expectations every chance he could get. When Kevin Debrett died, Carl actually got to the scene before the police did. Then when you told me he’d called asking for me twice, when he knew perfectly well where I was—”

  “I thought it was very strange, Krekor.”

  “It would have been, except that it’s standard procedure when you’re running blind agents in a serial murder investigation. You don’t tell them what they’re really doing, but you make sure they get where they’re going, and you make sure you know how they’ve gone. I think we’ll find he called the hotel in New York, too. And checked out the car rental companies until he found the one Bennis used.”

  Tibor smiled. “That was a remarkable car, Krekor. I don’t think I have ever seen a car just that color blue.”

  “Yes. Well. Leave it to Bennis. Anyway, once I decided he had to be investigating a serial murder, I also had to decide the serial murder suspect was among the people at Great Expectations that weekend. Nothing else could have justified Bettinger’s spending all that time in Oyster Bay. Then I was stuck with something else. As far as I knew, there was no serial murder case anywhere that could have involved any of these people. You may not think I read the papers the way I should, but I do read them. There’s an ongoing investigation in Washington and Oregon, a series of old women murdered in their garages. There’s another ongoing investigation down in Texas, all young boys. Whatever Bettinger was investigating, it had to involve a class of people whose murders could be made to look convincingly like something else. And whoever he was investigating had to be important enough to be a threat in the event
of a lawsuit, somebody Carl would have to track without letting that tracking leak.”

  “Stop,” Tibor said. “Here is what I don’t understand, Krekor. You say this Dr. Debrett was murdering infants—”

  “That’s right, mentally retarded and otherwise damaged infants.”

  “But I’d think that is the best sort of case for the newspapers. The very best. The sensationalism they could exploit—”

  “They could exploit it if they knew it existed. Tibor, look at this. That nurse in Texas, Genene Jones, got caught because she made a drama about the deaths she caused, and because she sometimes went to work on perfectly healthy infants. But what if you didn’t make a drama about it, and what if you only killed those infants whose chances for survival were lower than normal anyway? Three years ago, there was a perfectly respectable pediatrician in Virginia who killed five or six newborn babies, all with Down syndrome, during his rounds in the maternity ward of a hospital. All of them but the last were attributed to either crib death or other natural causes. They would never have gotten on to him at all except that, with the last one, he talked to the parents first, and they got suspicious. They had a niece with Down syndrome, and the doctor, they said, was making it sound like the worst thing in the world, when they knew it wasn’t. When their child died, they insisted on an investigation.”

  “Was it that way with this Carl Bettinger, too?” “Not exactly. One of the young agents assigned to headquarters had a child with Down syndrome, and he and his wife were given a referral to Kevin Debrett’s clinic. Somebody else’s child died while they were there having their own child tested, and the nurse said something about how common it was. She made it sound too common, and the agent got nervous.”

  This nurse was part of the murders, Krekor?”

  “I don’t think so. Actually, you’d have to ask Bettinger, but I’d guess not. Conspirators tend to cause more publicity than they avoid. Anyway, Carl showed up right after Debrett died, and he didn’t show up right after Fox died—Dan Chester had to call him and haul him in—so I knew it was Debrett, and I also knew Debrett had the most consistent access to infants. So—”

  “This Stephanie Fox,” Tibor said, “was she the first?”

  “Probably. I don’t think we’ll ever really know.”

  “I don’t understand this Victoria Harte,” Tibor said. “Why did she not kill them all then? Why wait so long, Krekor, and then do this?”

  Gregor sighed. “In the beginning, I think she was confused. Her focus was always on Janet—what would be best for Janet. She was pathologically identified with Janet. It was the first thing you noticed when you walked into Great Expectations. Victoria had these huge blown-up photographs on the wall, facing each other across the living room, and at first glance you thought they were all Victoria. But they weren’t. On one side there was Victoria. On the other, there were pictures of Janet that looked like Victoria, when Victoria was younger. When the three of them killed Stephanie Harte Fox, Victoria wasn’t sure what effect it would have on Janet. As far as she knew, it might have been for the best. It was only later, when she realized what the death of Stephanie had really done to her daughter, that Victoria began to get seriously angry.”

  “What had the death of Stephanie done, Krekor?”

  “Made Janet one of the walking dead. Just knocked her out completely. If the first thing you noticed about Victoria was her obsession with Janet, the first thing you noticed about Janet was her passivity. She did what she was supposed to do. She kept her mouth shut about her husband’s women and she appeared on his arm when politics demanded it, but she was on autopilot. My guess is that Victoria has spent the last ten years scared out of her mind that Janet was going to commit suicide.”

  Tibor cocked his head. “Was she, Krekor? Was Janet Harte Fox going to commit suicide?”

  “I don’t know. I’d feel better about her mental state if she’d ever worked up the energy to divorce that idiot.”

  “Well,” Tibor said. “You still haven’t answered the important question. Why now?”

  Gregor smiled. “It’s called the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children, and Victoria would have been wildly in favor of it, except for two things. In the first place, it was a fraud. Dan Chester dreamed it up to position Stephen Whistler Fox for a run at the White House, and he was using it to buy campaign contributions from one end of the country to the other. In the second place, it was the vehicle that let Dan turn Stephen into a martyr over the death of Stephanie Harte Fox.”

  “And your Victoria Harte was enraged by the—the hypocrisy.”

  “My Victoria Harte was enraged by the lack of consideration for Janet. And by the possibility that Stephen, Dan, and Kevin could be made to look like saints over what they had done to her daughter and her granddaughter.”

  “I don’t know, Krekor. I think she sounds crazy. I think she will not go to jail.”

  “Well, she ought to go to jail. Try to keep in mind that this was a premeditated set of crimes, a very premeditated set of crimes. She stole that succinylcholine from somebody somewhere, probably from Kevin Debrett’s medical bag at one of the parties they were at together. She set up those attacks on the senator, and she made sure Patchen Rawls was there for each one. Also Clare Markey—at one point Victoria had her invited to one of the senator’s speaking engagements. Clare thought it was Dan Chester’s idea, but it wasn’t. Then Victoria did two things about the Fourth-of-July weekend. First, when Dan had a brochure printed up for the guests, she had a floor plan of the guest wing made and attached to the back of it, so that nobody would be able to say they didn’t know where somebody else’s room was. Then there was the pantyhose. Victoria took them out of Patchen’s room and left them each time where they would be found and where they would be incriminating. Then there were the servants—”

  “Servants?”

  “Victoria Harte usually travels with a personal entourage. Personal trainer, personal shopper, the sort of people who never leave her alone. This weekend, none of those people was in evidence. They all had the full four days off. What was the point of that if not to make sure she wouldn’t be disturbed?”

  “I don’t understand the point of anything, Krekor. When you tell me these things, I am simply fascinated.”

  “I’m glad I amuse you.”

  “It is not amusement, Krekor. It is admiration. That was a brilliant psychological analysis.”

  “Thanks.” Gregor grinned at him. “It’s just too bad it wasn’t what I used to figure it all out.” Tibor stroked the baby’s back gently, looking uncertain and confused. “How else could you figure it all out? You have said nothing about fingerprints, Krekor, or footprints in the mud. And suffocation—”

  Tibor gave an elegant shrug, and Gregor laughed. “All right,” he said. “The first thing I figured out was that Kevin Debrett was under investigation for serial murder, and that the people he was suspected of murdering had to be infants. Do you see?”

  “You have told me all this, Krekor.”

  “Yes, I have. Take it a step further. The infants he’s murdering are probably infants with Down syndrome, because those are the infants he has access to.”

  “I see.”

  “Now, ten years ago, a child was born to Stephen and Janet Harte Fox, and that child had Down syndrome, and that child died. Either I have to believe in a series of extraordinary coincidences, or I have to assume that Kevin Debrett killed Stephanie Harte Fox. And that, you see, leaves me with three people with possible strong motives for the murder of Kevin Debrett.”

  “Three?”

  “Of course. I have to at least consider Stephen Whistler Fox. He could have been faking attacks on himself. He could have been giving himself small doses of succinylcholine. He was hardly mentally stable. Why not?”

  “He was murdered, Krekor.”

  “Yes, of course. He was murdered, and that left me with the two women, Janet and Victoria. How do you choose between them?”

  “The psychology—” Ti
bor faltered. Gregor shook his head.

  “I didn’t work out the psychology until I was on my way back to Philadelphia. Not consciously, at any rate. No, Tibor, it was nothing so cerebral. It was the weapon.”

  “The weapon,” Tibor repeated. He looked thoroughly boggled. The baby looked thoroughly boggled, too, although probably for other reasons.

  Gregor stretched his legs, wriggled his ankles, rearranged his back against the back of the chair and wished he wasn’t so tired. “Succinylcholine,” he told Tibor, “has to be delivered directly into the blood or directly into the muscles. If you swallow it, it doesn’t do much of anything at all. Like curare itself, however, it doesn’t have to be actually injected. Primitive South American tribes have been killing their enemies with curare for centuries, and they’ve never heard of a hypodermic.”

  “They probably have by now, Krekor.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, both Janet and Victoria habitually wore things that could be used to deliver succinylcholine. Janet had these antique Victorian ornamental hairpins she wore stuck in her French twist or whatever. Victoria had a heart-shaped ruby brooch she wore day and night, as a kind of trademark. It was big and it was heavy and it was one of a pair. She had the pair made as a mother-daughter thing for Janet’s twenty-first birthday.”

  “That sounds like psychology to me, Krekor.”

  “Well, it’s not.” Gregor’s grin grew wider. “Janet had a habit of picking at those hairpins, pulling them out and sticking them back in again, completely absentmindedly. Quite often, she stuck herself often enough to draw blood. If she’d been coating one of those things with succinylcholine and carrying it around on her head off and on for over a month, she’d have exhibited a few symptoms of her own to go along with Stephen’s. Victoria Harte, on the other hand, wore her ruby brooch high on her left shoulder. Do you remember I told you it was heavy?”

  “Yes, Krekor.”

  “I saw a videotape of Janet wearing hers when I first got to Great Expectations, and it made the material of the dress around it sag enough to tear. But Victoria’s never made the material of her caftans sag. I noticed it, but I don’t know enough about women’s clothes. Patchen Rawls explained the reason to me, quite by accident.”