28 Hearts of Sand (21 page)

“I’m ready for persecution,” Ray Guy said. “I’ve been ready for persecution for years.”

“Where did you hide Chapin Waring?”

“I didn’t hide Chapin Waring,” Ray Guy said, “and don’t tell me I should have turned her in. I’m a private citizen. I’ve got no legal obligation to do any such thing. And I wouldn’t. I’m not going to make their work any easier for them.”

“Where did you hide Chapin Waring?”

“I didn’t hide her,” Ray Guy said again. “She didn’t even have to hide herself. She just moved into a neighborhood half a dozen blocks from here, dressed herself up in a
hijab
, and went about her business. A
hijab
, for Christ’s sake. Thirty years ago. There couldn’t have been more than five or ten thousand Muslims in all New York, and still all she needed to make herself invisible was a head scarf.”

Gregor considered this. “It wouldn’t have made her invisible after 9/11,” he said.

“Sure it would have,” Ray Guy said. “Everybody was running around so frantic that anything they did would look like some kind of anti-Muslim bigotry, she was safer after 9/11 than she was before it. Besides, your Bureau can’t find clover in a country meadow. She lived a perfectly normal life. She even went back to that silly town half a dozen times. People reported seeing her. Oh, I’ve been watching all of it. I really have. And the authorities have been useless.”

“Which explains why they’re running the world and controlling the minds of the masses with such precision, nobody even notices,” Gregor said. “Where’s the money?”

“I don’t have the money,” Ray Guy said. “And if you want to know, she didn’t have it, either. My best guess is that there never was any money. There never were any bank robberies. Those were frames, setups to prevent the public from believing anything she said. After all, she was one of their own. She was a child of the very people who are running this world conspiracy, and she was ready to testify to all of it—to the infant sacrifices, to the devil worship, to the systematic rape of children to make them pliable agents of the powers that be—”

“For God’s sake,” Gregor said.

“I knew as soon as she showed up here that she was the greatest victory for right and truth and reason since I started this publishing company,” Ray Guy said. “I knew it and I knew that all the people at the top would know it, too. They got to her too early, though. If I’d been able to advise her, I could have kept her out of that kind of trouble. But even if she couldn’t testify directly, she could give me the information and I could get it on the record. And I have. And I will.”

“Information about child sacrifice and Satan worship.”

“Information about the powers that be.”

“Why did she go back to Alwych?” Gregor asked.

Ray Guy shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure. I didn’t live with her. I didn’t even see her all that often. It wasn’t safe. I think there was somebody there who was having trouble, somebody who wanted to come out and tell the truth, but who was too afraid.”

“And who was that?”

Ray Guy looked away, and in that instant, Gregor knew he was about to lie. “I never knew who it was,” he said. “But she needed a lot of encouragement, and Chapin went back every once in a while to encourage her. But it didn’t work. Chapin died without bringing her over.”

Gregor filed this away in the back of his mind. It was not what he was here for, but there might be better ways of discovering what was going on with this than pounding at Ray Guy Pearce. Besides, it was impossible not to notice that Ray Guy was exhausted. He was much more exhausted than he should have been.

Suddenly, the big man turned away, walked to the couch, and sat down on top of papers and books as if there were nothing there but a seat cushion.

“You can’t be here,” he said, his voice coming out in a whine. “You have no right to enter my house without a warrant. Nothing you find here is going to be of any use to you. You can’t use anything I’ve said. I don’t know why you people keep trying this stuff when you know it will never work. I don’t know why you people haven’t figured out that you have to lose in the end. Evil always loses in the end.”

It was an odd performance, distant and fluctuating. Gregor thought through his options, and then headed for the door.

“You’ll probably have a few visitors in the next few days,” he said. “You have to know that.”

“I’m ready for persecution,” Ray Guy Pearce said, his voice climbing almost to a scream. “I’m ready for persecution. I always have been.”

3

Back in the car, having given Juan Valdez the information that he’d like to be taken back to Alwych, Gregor got out his cell phone and started making calls.

His first was the New York Bureau office, where he was threaded through a dozen offices before he found one that had some direct responsibility for the Waring case. He explained Ray Guy Pearce’s declarations about where Chapin Waring had been for the last thirty years and why she hadn’t been found, and he tried to do it in a way that didn’t make any of the agents over the years sound like rank idiots.

“Hidden in plain sight is always the best way,” he said, desperately trying to sound nonjudgmental. “He said a dozen blocks. That might have been an estimate. You guys should probably do concentric circles until you find where she was. I didn’t get the name she was using, but there will be somebody who disappeared, and that will probably be the one. I don’t think you’ll get lucky enough to have an actual missing persons report. I doubt if she got close to anybody where she was living. It wouldn’t have been safe. And she wasn’t the kind of person who got close to people anyway.”

“Yes, Mr. Demarkian,” the agent on the line said. She sounded very young and very frightened. “Of course. We can probably get people out there today. You said she was living as a Muslim?”

“I said that Ray Guy Pearce reported that she was wearing a
hijab
when she went out. That doesn’t mean that she was living as a Muslim. And I don’t think it makes sense that she would have been doing that. There weren’t many Muslims in New York thirty years ago. What Muslims there were almost certainly comprised a small community and that community was likely to have been enforcing at least some cultural standards. They would have recognized a stranger as a stranger.”

“Oh,” the agent said. “Yes, of course.”

“He says he doesn’t have the money, and he doesn’t think she had it, either,” Gregor said. “But you need to find where she was living and look. God only knows if it would still be there if she did have it, with whatever place she was living in being empty for weeks. You still have to look. But if she really didn’t have it, and he really didn’t have it, then that presents an interesting problem. Give me about a day, and I can get you probable cause for a warrant to search his house,” Gregor said. “But you might want to put details up there to watch him. Whether that’s going to be any good or not if he’s got the money in the house, I don’t know.”

“Details,” the agent said. “I’ll get right on this. Does Mr. Fitzgerald have a number where he can call you?”

“He’s got my cell number, yes,” Gregor said. “Have him call me. It would help.”

The agent fluttered and apologized and thanked until Gregor’s eardrums felt as if they had been coated in goo. He hung up and called the Alwych Police Department.

Jason Battlesea was in his office, and apparently busy.

“What I need you to do,” Gregor said, “is to make sure your people get all the fingerprints, every single one, in the Waring house. Send somebody back out there and go over the place with tweezers and microscopes. Get fibers. Get prints. Get anything and everything, even if it looks utterly irrelevant. Then I need you to find any DNA you can get off those, and any fingerprints, through every database in existence.”

“We got everything,” Jason Battlesea said.

“I don’t mean at the crime scene, and I don’t mean around the door where somebody got in,” Gregor said. “I mean the whole house, upstairs and down. The attic. The basement. Every single inch of flooring and carpet and furniture. Everything.”

“My God,” Jason Battlesea said. “That will take months. And what for? We looked through the house both times. Nothing had been disturbed—”

“Nothing had been noticeably disturbed,” Gregor said. “And it shouldn’t take more than twenty-four to forty-eight hours if you put everybody you’ve got on it and start now.”

“But it’s the weekend of the Fourth! We’ve got ordinary policing to do—”

“Not with forensics people, you don’t. Call the state police in to help if you have to. Oh, and one more thing. Look through drawers. We need to find photograph albums, or loose photographs, or wherever it is the Warings put their snapshots of things like family outings. My guess is that there will be formal photograph albums all done up with those little corner holders. We need to find those, and we need to start going through them. And be
very
careful. If we’re going to find fingerprints or DNA, those are going to be the most likely places.”

“In the photograph albums,” Jason Battlesea said.

“In the photograph albums,” Gregor said. “Just get it done, and I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“Where are you?” Jason Battlesea asked.

“I’m in New York,” Gregor said. “And don’t ask why now. I think I’m running out of cell phone battery.”

SIX

1

It was the third of July and in spite of the legendary work ethic of Wall Street lawyers, men and women were clearing out of the office as fast as they could go. Kyle Westervan was sitting at his desk, wondering if there was something wrong with him. His briefcase was on the desk in front of him, locked. He had been staring at it for fifteen minutes. He had not been able to move.

“Cheesecake,” he had said into the phone just fifteen minutes ago, after he listened to the usual opening.

“Cohen’s Kosher Deli,” was the way the phone had been answered when he called.

“It all sounds ridiculous,” they’d told him when they started this.

At the time, he hadn’t agreed. Cloak-and-dagger was cloak-and-dagger. You went with it or you didn’t. It had taken all this time to feel that the entire situation was just stupid. At this point, looking out his open office door at the empty corridor, it didn’t even seem real.

“No, I’ll come down and pick it up,” he’d told them.

That was standard, too. They asked if he wanted his food delivered. He told them he’d come down and pick it up.

He forced himself to his feet. He took the briefcase off the desk. It felt unbelievably heavy.

He went out into the corridor. There was nobody there. He looked into the few offices with their doors open. They were all shut down for the night. He went through what the assistants called CubicleLand, where the paralegals worked. The cubicles were all empty, too. Even the receptionist at the front desk was gone, her little clutch of photographs in silver frames all put away in a locked desk drawer for the night.

He went through the lobby and into the foyer. He went down in the elevator to the first floor. Kyle said good evening to the night guard and went out into the street. The street instantly made him feel better. It was not so empty, and it was very much the real world. Maybe he had begun to feel he no longer lived in the real world.

Maybe he had felt that way from the moment he started working on Wall Street.

Cohen’s Kosher Deli was half deserted, which was good. Kyle went in through the front door and asked the woman at the register about his cheesecake. She found it in a little pile of bags behind the counter and handed it to him. He paid for it and looked around. The man he had never known as anything but “Andy” was sitting in the last booth but one against the back, the ones without the windows.

“Well?” Andy said as Kyle sat down across from him.

Kyle shrugged. “I don’t think you want me to take ten stacks of five-hundred-dollar bills out right here in the restaurant.”

“Of course I don’t,” Andy said. “I wasn’t happy that night when you had to take them home.”

“They’re all counted, Andy. I’m not going to rip you off.”

“I didn’t say you were. But things happen. Traffic accidents. Traffic stops. You could have been pulled over by a policeman. Then what would you have done?”

“I’d have had a very hard time explaining why all that money was in the glove compartment without blowing your cover.”

“Your problem is that you always want to be funny,” Andy said. “This kind of thing isn’t funny. And it isn’t safe. Our marks don’t routinely kill off our informants, but they have been known to do it once or twice. You might at least try to consider that.”

“I have considered it,” Kyle said. Then he looked around him and felt instantly depressed. “Everything is in the briefcase. And I do mean everything. Including the tape of the two of us talking. And he didn’t send an aide.”

“Really?” Andy looked impressed.

Kyle shrugged. “It’s not the Nixon administration,” he said. “Aides don’t fall on their swords and go to jail for their bosses these days. They write tell-all books. So he came himself. The great Senator Durham of South Carolina.”

“You hear about this kind of thing, but you don’t ever really believe it,” Andy said. “There’s still something in my head that says these guys are too smart, too successful, too clued in to the way the world works to get involved in this kind of thing. How much did the senator give you?”

“Ten stacks of five-hundred-dollar bills. Twenty bills to the stack. You do the math.”

“A hundred thousand dollars? In cash? In your briefcase?”

“Exactly. And the tape. And it was an easy tape to get. I hate it when I have to wear that buttonhole thing.”

“And the tape says?”

“It’s explicit enough, Andy, trust me. There’s no doubt about what he’s trying to do. And I’m going to need a receipt for this money, so you’d better find a way to check it discreetly.”

Andy looked around the deli. There were a few people sitting along the counter, but they were all up near the cash register. Kyle felt the briefcase slide past his leg under the table. A moment later, Andy had it up and open and his head down over it.