Festival of Deaths (19 page)

“In here,” he told Bennis Hannaford, who had come to a stop behind him. “You stay out.”

“Like hell I will.”

“You can’t go barging into a men’s room.”

Of course, Bennis could most certainly go barging into a men’s room. She’d done it before and she would undoubtedly do it again. Gregor didn’t have the time to argue with her.

He pushed the door open and stepped into a room that seemed to be tiled on the walls, floor, and ceiling. He went around a gray metal privacy barrier and looked into the main room. The first thing he saw was a row of ornately painted urinals taking up one entire wall. The second thing he saw was the body of the boy called Max, spread out under a window at the far end, its face smashed into pulp.

The third thing he saw was a grossly pathetic smalltime serial killer named Herbert Shasta.

Herbert Shasta was screaming like a stuck pig.

B
ENNIS HANNAFORD SOMETIMES GAVE
Gregor Demarkian detective novels to read, leaving little piles of paperback books on his kitchen table when he wasn’t looking, wrapping up half a dozen hardcovers in red foil and a bow and putting them under his Christmas tree. Since Bennis was a puzzle addict and not a devotee of the real, Gregor had been introduced to every master detective from Sherlock Holmes to—he couldn’t remember to who, because he hadn’t read them in order. What he did remember was that all these fictional detectives shared the same attitude toward the police, and it was negative. Even his favorite, Nero Wolfe, considered the professional law enforcement community a pack of mental defectives who had somehow gone into competition with him in the solving of unusual murders. Gregor couldn’t understand it. In his experience, the professional law enforcement community was made up of wonderful people—and not only because he’d once been part of it. There had been exceptions, but Gregor thought most of the policemen he had met were smart. They knew what they were doing. They were rarely squeamish about doing it. They had access to a lot of very helpful high-tech equipment. Best of all, they had the authority. That was why Gregor was always happy to see the police in situations like this one. They had the most important kind of authority of all, the right to make people get out of the way and keep them there. By the time the police showed up at Studio C of station WKMB that morning, Gregor would have sold his soul for the ability to tell DeAnna Kroll to go to her room and stay there—and make it stick.

Meeting DeAnna Kroll was the second thing Gregor did after finding Max’s body. The first thing he did was to grab Herbert Shasta by the coat collar and drag him out into the hall, shaking him as he went.

“Who does this man belong to?” he bellowed. “Who does he belong to?”

He didn’t mean
belong to,
of course. Slavery was illegal and he knew it. He had no doubt, however, that the person he was looking for would know exactly what he did mean. And he was right.

It took no time at all for a short, compactly built middle-aged woman in a prison guard’s uniform to come tentatively out of one of the doors farther up the corridor. She saw a large, angry man manhandling her prisoner and hurried toward them.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait. You can’t—”

“There’s a dead man in there,” Gregor Demarkian said, pointing at the men’s room door.

The middle-aged woman blanched. The people leaning out their doors, watching the show, got very quiet.

The middle-aged woman’s name was Karen Schell. It was on the thick black plastic name tag pinned to her uniform jacket above the breast pocket.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, God. Did he—”

“I don’t think so,” Gregor said.

“No?” Karen Schell looked confused.

Herbert Shasta was blubbering. “His face was smashed in. It was terrible. His
face
was smashed in.”

“I was in the bathroom,” Karen Schell said, blushing.

Gregor dumped Herbert Shasta on the floor where Karen Schell could get him. He tried to remember how Herbert had murdered his victims, and couldn’t. In the jargon of the trade, Herbert had not been “one of his.” Thank God. He looked up to see Bennis and Tibor at the back of the crowd, looking on. Bennis was trying to move forward. Tibor was holding onto the back of her shirt so that she couldn’t. Gregor motioned to them both.

“Go call the police,” Gregor said. “Don’t call nine one one. Call the chief of police. Tell Tom Reilly you’re calling for me and ask him to send me John Jackman—”

“John doesn’t work out of Philadelphia,” Bennis said quickly. “He works out of Bryn Mawr.”

“He came back. I’m sorry, Bennis. I forgot you knew him. But he’s the best the Philadelphia police force has and I know him. And with a case like this, the politics are such—”

“That you can get anybody assigned you want,” Bennis finished. “That probably isn’t exactly true, Gregor.”

“Call Tom Reilly.”

“Do you think they’ll ever actually carry out a death sentence in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania?”

Bennis spun around and walked away. Gregor sighed. Once, a long time ago, one of Bennis’s crazier siblings had murdered their father, been arrested by John Jackman, been convicted by the state of Pennsylvania, and sentenced to die. This sibling was still not dead, because in spite of the fact that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had a death penalty, it never seemed to be enforced. For Bennis’s sake, Gregor hoped that in this case it would not be. He didn’t have time to think about it now.

“We’ve got to guard the door,” Gregor told Tibor. “We have to make sure nobody goes in or out.”

“I’m going to go in and I’m going to come out,” a voice said, from way up the corridor, in the direction Bennis had gone.

The crowd that had begun to clog the passageway parted, and Gregor saw a tall black woman striding in their direction, looking as if a Sherman tank would have been insufficient to block her path. Gregor had to suppress a smile. The woman was magnificent. Really. She was a vision in corn rows and flapping yellow silk, a carnival of necklaces and bracelets and dangling earrings, a symphony in silver and gold. She came to a stop two inches from where Gregor was standing and looked him up and down.

“Are you Gregor Demarkian?”

“That’s right,” Gregor said.

“I’m DeAnna Kroll. Get out of my way. I’m going to take a look at what’s in there.”

“Nobody’s going to take a look at what’s in there. Not until the police arrive.”

“Even the police aren’t going to take a look at what’s in there unless I tell them to. Mr. Demarkian, I am the executive producer of this show. Nobody farts on these premises without asking my permission. Get out of my way.”

“No.”

“All right.”

Gregor Demarkian was a very large man. He had been trained at Quantico by some of the finest experts in physical intervention in the world. He had also been sitting behind a desk for ten years before he went on leave to care for Elizabeth and had been retired for over three years since Elizabeth died. What DeAnna Kroll did was a moldy old trick taught to volunteer suicide counselors at walk-in street clinics, but Gregor didn’t see it coming. One moment, DeAnna Kroll’s hands were on his arms just below the shoulders. The next, Gregor was standing at the side of the door while DeAnna strode through it. He couldn’t help himself. He admired the woman. He caught the men’s room door before it shut completely and followed her inside.

When he got there, he found that she had stopped just where he had at first, at that spot where you come around the privacy barrier and get a full view of the rest of the room. The boy called Max was right where Gregor had left him, under the windows against the far wall. He was just as dead.

“Oh, God,” DeAnna Kroll was saying. “Oh, God. Max. What a god-awful thing to happen to Max.”

“Don’t get sick here,” Gregor told her. “Don’t do anything here. The less there is to confuse the issue for the police—”

“Did that son-of-a-bitch do it? Shasta?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because like most serial killers, Mr. Shasta has a fairly fixed modus operandi. He wasn’t my case, so I’m not sure of all the particulars, but I do remember he likes fat women, not thin boys. And he kills with an ice pick to the back of the neck. Not a blunt instrument to the side of the head.”

DeAnna blanched. “Don’t they just go crazy sometimes, these guys? Don’t they just go on rampages?”

“Some of them do. But it’s usually the psychotic ones that get that way—”

“Killing fat women with ice picks isn’t psychotic?”

“I meant delusional,” Gregor said patiently. “Some of these people hear voices and see visions. Most of them don’t. And none of them goes on a rampage, as you put it, unless his cycle is played out.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that most of them get faster as they go along. At first they kill once every few months. Then it’s once every month. Then it’s once a week. Then—”

“Wonderful,” DeAnna Kroll said. “Just wonderful. Everybody’s going to think it was Shasta who did it, aren’t they?”

“Let’s just say that unless the Philadelphia police find some very good hard evidence, any first-year law associate worth the paper his degree is printed on could use Mr. Shasta to get anybody but Mr. Shasta off.”

“The police aren’t going to be worth shit,” DeAnna Kroll said. “You. That’s who I want. You’re going to find the hard evidence.”

“Ms. Kroll—”

“This way,” DeAnna Kroll said.

She gave Max’s body one last look and then went back out to the corridor, slapping the door open with the palm of one hand and dragging Gregor after her with the other. The strength in her hands was phenomenal. Gregor knew men who had worked for years with hand grips and hadn’t got as strong as this. When they were both out in the corridor, DeAnna stopped and looked out over the crowd. It was now so thick, it had to include people who hadn’t been in the studio when the fuss had started. The grapevine must be all wound up and chugging along. DeAnna stuck her free hand on her hip and shouted. She did not have a gentle voice.

“Now listen to me,” she boomed. “I want every last one of you out of this hallway. Out. Back in your offices. Back to work. No exceptions. Do you hear me?”

“Not Tibor,” Gregor said.

DeAnna looked down at Father Tibor Kasparian, hovering anxiously at Gregor’s free elbow. “You can stay,” she said. “But the rest of you have got to go. Now. Right away. We’ll call you when the police get here.”

“Nobody should use the men’s room,” Gregor reminded her.

“Oh, shit,” she said under her breath. “Okay, people,” she shouted. “The men’s room is off limits. Absolutely off. Use the women’s if you have to and post a lookout. Or something.” She lowered her voice again. “Christ. This feels like camp.”

“I can’t guard this room,” Tibor said. “I am too small.”

“When Bennis comes back she can help you,” Gregor told him.

Tibor gave him a reproachful look. “The person I am most in need of guarding this room against is Bennis, Krekor. You know that.”

DeAnna dropped Gregor’s arm and rubbed her face with her hands. “Come on,” she said. “Now we have to go do the hard part. Now we have to go talk to Lotte. And
explain
things.”

That was the first time Gregor realized that he had not seen Lotte Goldman, not even once, since he set foot in Studio C of WKMB.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN KNEW NOTHING
about television, cable or broadcast, national or local, network or syndication. He had no idea whatsoever how television people did things. Maybe it was customary for the star of a show to hide from her guests until it was time for the taping to begin. Maybe it was customary for the executive producer of a show to treat her subordinates as if they were new recruits to the United States Marine Corps and she was a drill sergeant. Maybe anything. Gregor let himself be dragged along, into new corridors and unknown territory. DeAnna Kroll was a force of nature. Like typhoons and tidal waves, nothing that got in her way was left standing.

“Here we are,” she said, stopping in front of a plain door. Gregor was a little disappointed. He’d expected to see a star pasted on it. DeAnna knocked loudly and called out, “Lotte?”

“Come right in,” a soft, thickly accented voice said. “I have been waiting.”

DeAnna Kroll opened the door and pushed Gregor through it. “I came as fast as I could. That friend of his went off to call the police.”

Lotte Goldman’s office—or dressing room, or whatever it was—was far less alien territory than the rest of the studio had been. For one thing, it reminded Gregor a little of Cavanaugh Street when Donna Moradanyan had been at work on it. Lotte Goldman might only be occupying this space for a couple of weeks. She might have taken possession of it only a few hours ago. She had already taken pains to decorate it. A carved wooden menorah sat on the desk with nine unlit candles standing in the holders. The candles were white and sleek and slim, like abstract impressionist swans. At one side of her desk, Lotte had a book stand of the kind usually sold to hold large dictionaries. Open on top of it was an ornately illustrated book—illuminated, in the medieval sense—that promised to tell “The Story of the Victory of the Maccabees.” Gregor’s Jewish history was sketchy, but he knew that Hanukkah was the holiday that commemorated the miracle of a single jar of oil that had been only enough to last for one day but that had lasted for eight. After that, he got a little confused. He made a mental note to ask David Goldman to explain it all to him before the season was over.

On the window that looked out on the gray Philadelphia morning, Lotte Goldman had a bouquet of evergreen branches tied with a bright green ribbon. Since it was not a wreath, Gregor supposed it was suitably removed from the celebration of Christmas not to be offensive. Lotte had been standing next to this bouquet when Gregor and DeAnna walked in. She crossed the room to her desk, put her cigarette down in a glass ashtray, and held out her hand.

“Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “I am Dr. Lotte Goldman.”

“How do you do,” Gregor said.