27 Blood in the Water (12 page)

“If her father is out of a job, maybe he doesn’t have enough money to get her something to drive,” Heather said. “Maybe she’d have to get a job to have something to drive.”

“Well,” LizaAnne said, “if she got a job, that would be very good. And if she got the right kind of job, she could even get back into the B group. But I think she belongs in the C group and I’m going to talk to Norma and Sally about it. If things keep going the way they’re going, she’s going to drop all the way down to D, and then nobody will talk to her. Don’t be retarded. Tell me what I’m supposed to do about Lisa Breen. She’s started dating Peter Halliday, and usually that would mean a step up, but you know Lisa. I can’t stand brainy girls, can you? I mean, who do they think they are?”

Heather went over to the window and looked out. LizaAnne stared at her back for a moment and then turned away. Heather was always a problem. She was only in the A group because she was LizaAnne’s ugly friend, and she knew it, and LizaAnne knew it, and everybody else knew it. LizaAnne had considered the possibility that it might one day be necessary to ditch her for a substitute, but she didn’t like the idea. Substitutes were actually very hard to find. You wouldn’t think so, but they were. A lot of ugly girls seemed to think it was better to be outcasts in the F group than to be some pretty girl’s ugly friend.

LizaAnne picked up Lisa Breen’s picture and frowned. Lisa wasn’t bad looking, and she had wonderful clothes, but there was the brains thing. Lisa was in all the honors classes, and in AP everything, and people said she was applying to Harvard. Nobody with any sense applied to someplace like Harvard.

Heather came back from the window and sat on the bed. “It’s true,” she said. “I just saw him.”

“Saw who?”

“I just saw Mr. Heydreich. He’s back. He just came out onto his deck. He was wearing a suit. You know, a regular suit. Not an orange suit for jail.”

LizaAnne put down the picture of Lisa Breen. “Well,” she said. “I guess that’s interesting. Although I don’t like it, and my dad doesn’t, either. It’s not nice to live in a place with a murderer.”

“But maybe he isn’t a murderer,” Heather said. “They let him go.”

“They arrested him in the first place, didn’t they? They must have had a reason. The police don’t just go running around arresting people for no reason. He must have done something.”

“Do you think so?”

“Of course I think so,” LizaAnne said. “Everybody thinks so. Besides, somebody has to have killed Michael. Everybody goes on and on about Martha Heydreich, but it was Michael’s body they found in the pool all bloody. Who do you think did that?”

“I don’t know,” Heather said.

“I do,” LizaAnne said. “There were two murders, not one. People don’t just go around murdering people like that. Especially not people in a place like Waldorf Pines. There can’t be two murderers running around. Whoever killed the one had to kill the other.”

“Maybe.”

“Absolutely. And you know what?” LizaAnne said. “I’ll bet that if I had to, I could prove it. Forget about it, won’t you? He probably has some fancy lawyer that found a technicality to get him out of jail. It happens all the time. That’s what my dad says. Just wait. He’ll be back in jail in no time. What do you think I should do about Lisa Breen?”

“What?” Heather said.

LizaAnne rolled her eyes. Heather was so retarded. Really. LizaAnne took the picture of Lisa Breen and dropped it into the C group.

“I don’t care who she’s going out with,” LizaAnne said, “she’s just retarded.”

FOUR

1

When Gregor Demarkian had first started to do the work he did now, he had not given much thought to the people he would do it for. Even the word “client” had been foreign to him. He had worked for twenty years as a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not have clients, and did not think well of most of the people who did. Lawyers had clients, and lawyers were always trying to get the perpetrators off, or to pretend that the perpetrators were crazy, or just filing motions because otherwise they’d get bored. Even federal prosecutors were lawyers. Their job seemed to be to tell everybody else that the case was hopeless, and that there would need to be at least another hundred man hours of scut work before they could even think of getting anything done.

Of course, when Gregor had joined the Bureau, all special agents had been required to be either lawyers or accountants, so many of the agents Gregor had known had been lawyers, too, but that somehow hadn’t seemed to count. Gregor himself had been trained as an accountant and had become a CPA before first arriving at Quantico. Once he was in training and part of the organization, nobody had ever mentioned that again.

Part of the reason Gregor had never thought about clients was the timing. He had come back to Cavanaugh Street after Elizabeth died, just after. He’d bought his apartment in a kind of daze, not really knowing where or who he wanted to be. As long as Elizabeth had still been alive and there had still been something to do he had been “all right” in the sense of “pretty nearly functional.” It wasn’t until it had been all over for months that he’d realized that “pretty nearly functional” had been a euphemism for “just like a zombie.” Still, as long as he had doctors to talk to and a hospital to visit and medical bills to negotiate, he’d been able to get along day by day, doing the things people did, lying down in a bed he could never remember sleeping in, putting away food he could never remember eating.

At the end, he hadn’t even been living in the apartment he had shared with Elizabeth all those years. He’d put that up for sale and moved into something efficient and modern closer to the hospital, and he’d gone on leave so that he didn’t show up at the office every morning just to spend all day listening for the phone. It had been a long, bad stretch that last year. When it was over, he had not really had any idea of what he wanted to do next. He hadn’t even had any idea that there was a “next,” and coming home to Cavanaugh Street—
coming home
—had just seemed like something natural that might one day make sense.

Working as a consultant to police departments with difficult-to-solve murder cases had not seemed like something natural or something that might make sense, but that was because he had not thought of it at all. His very first case had been an accident and not one he’d gotten paid for. His next had been set up by friends who thought he needed something to do with his time. Then the cases had come on down the line and people had started sending him money, and it was only when old George Tekemanian’s grandson Martin had gone out on his own as an accountant that Gregor had been forced to think about making the whole situation regular. Now he had a “billing department” of sorts, and a standard hourly fee that seemed to have been concocted out of thin air. He had somebody to send people to when they asked him what he charged. He still had no handle at all on clients, or where they came from, or what they really wanted out of him. It was easy to say that what they wanted was their cases solved, but it was never that simple. If all you wanted was your case solved, you could hire somebody a lot cheaper who wouldn’t suck up all the publicity as soon as he arrived in town.

“What they want is cover,” Bennis told him, over and over again. “They want you to suck up all the publicity. It’s usually bad publicity. They want to be able to sit back and say, look, we went out and got the hottest guy out there, it’s not our fault this is the way it turned out.”

“I don’t usually leave a case until it’s been solved,” Gregor pointed out. “I don’t usually leave them with an open murder file.”

“It’s not just a matter of solving the case,” Bennis said. “It’s also how it gets solved and who it gets solved in the face of. That didn’t make any sense, I know. But I think a lot of these times, a lot of these cases, what they’re worried about is not necessarily solving it, but solving it by arresting the wrong person.”

“They bring me in as a kind of Innocence Project?”

“No,” Bennis said, “not that kind of wrong person. I mean they don’t want to think that the person who is really guilty is the richest guy in town, maybe, or the mayor, or somebody else they would rather not arrest. I don’t think they’re going to call you in if they think the perpetrator is the local high school drug dealer. They bring you in when the murderer is going to be somebody—normal.”

“I don’t think murderers are normal,” Gregor said. “I never did buy that thing about how any one of us could be a murderer under the right circumstances. Most of us could be killers, yes, but that isn’t the same thing.”

“You’re not really going to give me one of those lectures about the fundamentally altered mind of the murderer,” Bennis said. “I mean, the first time I heard you give one of those was the week after we met, and that was—”

Gregor sat in Larry Farmer’s car and thought that his theory was fine as far as it went, but that he’d never developed it to the point of determining how you could recognize such a person when you first met him.

Larry Farmer had pulled up right outside the Pineville Station Police Department’s front door. It wasn’t much of a police department as far as Gregor could see, but the departments that hired him almost never were. Larry Farmer looked around a bit and then sighed with relief.

“That’s all right, then,” he said. “I was sure we’d already be inundated. It’s just the kind of thing, you know. There’ll be trucks down here before the day is out. It’s been enormous news locally for weeks. This is going to make it worse.”

Gregor sat where he was, without moving. Larry Farmer didn’t seem to be moving, either.

“We’re going to want to call a press conference,” Larry Farmer said. “I hope you don’t mind, but it’s absolutely vital. We can’t be seen as just sitting on our rear ends or not doing something to repair the situation. Especially now that we seem to have made such a mess of it. There’s going to be a lot of local publicity and there’s going to be a lot of, well, people.”

“People?”

Larry Farmer shrugged.

Gregor leaned back a little. “My wife says that people hire me when they know who committed the murder, but it’s somebody they don’t want to take the responsibility of arresting. That they call me in to take the heat when the murderer turns out to be the mayor.”

“Oh, the murderer isn’t the mayor,” Larry Farmer said.

“I wasn’t suggesting he was,” Gregor said. “I was trying to find out if that was why you had hired me. To take the heat of the publicity which you know is going to be bad.”

Larry Farmer squirmed. “Is that unacceptable? Would you be unwilling to work for us if that was what we wanted? Because, I have to admit, Mr. Demarkian, the publicity is an issue. The publicity and the pressure. There’s going to be a lot of pressure, because it’s Waldorf Pines. And we haven’t talked money yet, but I’ve heard about what you charge. You’re not cheap. I don’t think I could justify your fee if it wasn’t for the problem with the publicity. And, you know, the pressure.”

“I’ve got nothing against taking the heat with the publicity,” Gregor said, “but I do think that if you’ve got a good idea who did this and why, or even just who, that it might save us both a lot of time if you just told me now. Making me stumble around until I stumble on the obvious just wastes time. And even if you’re wrong, knowing who you suspect and why is useful information.”

Larry Farmer fluttered his hands in the air. Everything about the man fluttered.

“But that’s the thing,” he said. “That’s the thing. You know who I suspect? Arthur Heydreich. Or at least, I would have suspected him if that body in the pool house had been his wife. What would you think? Here’s a man found right at the scene with two dead bodies. One is definitely the body of the kid who was screwing his wife, or at least who everybody said was screwing his wife. The second was unrecognizable but, you know, arguably—”

“It made sense to expect it belonged to the wife,” Gregor said. “We’ve been over this before.”

“Now I don’t know what happened, or why,” Larry Farmer said, “The kid who’s dead? The body we can identify? Well, he belongs to a Waldorf Pines family. He was a first-class screwup. His parents bought him out of some legal trouble on and off, and he got expelled from college for something drug related. But dead in the pool with his head bashed in from behind? Who would do that? He wasn’t a major dealer. He didn’t know anybody who was, that we can tell. His parents moved to Waldorf Pines after he left for college. And I refuse to believe all that nonsense about the Marsh girl. It’s ridiculous.”

“Who’s the Marsh girl, and what’s the nonsense about her?”

Larry Farmer sighed again. “LizaAnne Marsh lives in Waldorf Pines. She goes to high school. She’s a senior, I think. She’s one of those people. She’s a sociopath in training, if she isn’t full blown there yet. She had one of those parties, those sweet sixteen parties, that they show on television.”

“What?”

“It’s a reality television show,” Larry Farmer said. “
My Super Sweet 16.
Girls have sweet sixteen parties and they film them, the preparations, the party itself, everything. I don’t know how to explain them to you if you haven’t seen them. The families spend a ton of money on them, hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“Seriously?” Gregor said. “Then this Waldorf Pines place is, what, an enclave for multimillionaires?”

“No,” Larry Farmer said, “not at all. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the course of my life, Mr. Demarkian, it’s that people with real money would never let some television show come and film some big party they gave for their daughter, and they really wouldn’t let some television show make a big fuss about what everything costs. The people who live at Waldorf Pines are well off, more or less, but it’s nothing like that. LizaAnne Marsh’s father owns a bunch of car dealerships. High-end cars, multiple dealerships, he’s definitely making money. It’s just not that kind of money.”

“And yet he gave his daughter a party that costs a hundred thousand dollars?”

“Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars by the time they added up the final tab,” Larry Farmer said. “But you know what people like that are like, Mr. Demarkian. They like to throw it around. Old Herb Marsh likes to throw it around, and as much of it in public as he can. He’s probably in debt up to his eyeballs.”