True Believers (15 page)
Authors: Jane Haddam
It might have been easier if she had known what she was looking for, but she didn't. She found Scholastica's discipline in its little cotton bag and took it out, a set of knotted cords that a nun used to strike herself on the back while she was praying the Miserere. It was supposed to be done lightly, over clothes, but Harriet had known sisters who used it on their
bare backs until they bled. Her own order had given up the practice when they had given up the habit. She found Scholastica's Little Office and was surprised at how annoyed she felt that it was so obviously used. Nobody had to pray the Little Office anymore. They prayed the Divine Office together. That should have been enough conformity for anybody. The top of the desk was full of things that nuns were once enjoined from having: pictures of friends and family, a small giftwrapped box of chocolates from which only one piece had been taken, Scholastica's old varsity cheerleading letter.
bare backs until they bled. Her own order had given up the practice when they had given up the habit. She found Scholastica's Little Office and was surprised at how annoyed she felt that it was so obviously used. Nobody had to pray the Little Office anymore. They prayed the Divine Office together. That should have been enough conformity for anybody. The top of the desk was full of things that nuns were once enjoined from having: pictures of friends and family, a small giftwrapped box of chocolates from which only one piece had been taken, Scholastica's old varsity cheerleading letter.
Harriet was just tapping into the computer filesâso very easy, because all the Sisters of Divine Grace used either Ave Maria or Benedicamus Domine as their passwordsâwhen somebody came to the door and tried the knob. Harriet stopped still, and everything inside her stopped as well. She was so rigid, she might have been an extension of the steel on the chair. When the door wouldn't open, whoever was there knocked, twice, very loudly.
“Scholastica?” Harriet didn't recognize the voice.
“Is it locked?” someone else saidâThomasetta, Harriet was sure. “How very odd. Sister never locks up.”
“Maybe she did it absentmindedly,” the first person said, and now Harriet did recognize the voice. It was Mary McAllister. “It doesn't matter. I'll come back later. I just wanted to ask her something about that pray-inâ”
“Oh, I wouldn't worry about the pray-in,” Thomasetta said, her voice fading slightly. She and Mary must be walking away. “I've had it on good authority that there isn't going to be a pray-in this year, and like everybody else around here I'm very relieved. I mean, really, with that idiot right down the roadâ”
Harriet sat up straight, and stretched, and forced air into her lungs. It was all right. She had not been caught. She would still be able to get out of here without being found out if she would only hurry.
The problem was, now that she was in the files, she did not want to hurry. She had always been outside the gossip loop in this parish. People didn't tell her the things they automatically told each other. They saw her as an outsider and a threat. So far, the things she had seen were not very important, or very interesting, but she was sure there had to be
something, somewhere, that would allow her toâ
something, somewhere, that would allow her toâ
What?
She grabbed the desk clock and turned it so that it faced away from her, so that it would not panic her.
She didn't think she had felt this free, or this exhilarated, since the day she entered the convent.
For most of the time that Gregor Demarkian was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he thought of murderers at one remove, as if they were objects in a window, on display for purposes of evaluation. It was only near the end, when he was head of the Behavioral Sciences Unit, that his attitude had begun to change, and then the change had been gradual. The truth was, homicidal maniacs were not very interesting. He could never understand why millions of people paid good money to read novel after novel about some detective chasing after a serial killer, when most serial killers made as much sense, and had as much relation to the human spirit, as rice pudding. The exceptions were very rare, and never, in his experience, as fascinating as Thomas Harris's Hannibal. The ordinary run of murderer wasn't much better, though. He got too drunk or too stoned to think straight, and then he let loose at the first thing that annoyed him and killed it. If that happened to be his girlfriend, or his best buddy, or his girlfriend's baby, he landed in jail. If that happened to be the store clerk and two of the customers in a convenience store he was trying to rob, he ended up strapped to a gurney while the prison doctor administered a lethal injection. Maybe that was why his opposition to the death penalty had grown, day by day and year by year. There wasn't enough ceremony to it anymore. It had become a kind of prophylactic, almost a medical procedure. The murderer was a bunion. The doctor was suited up in hospital green to take the bunion off.
Of course, most people, making the analogy, would have said that the murderer was a cancer, but Gregor couldn't see
it. Most murderers were either so hapless and so stupid it was embarrassing to listen to them, or so mentally ill they didn't know what was going on in front of their noses. The idea of Jeffrey Dahmer in jail made Gregor's head ache. The man had talked to furniture. Ted Kaczynski had talked to trees. Literally. Had the country gone completely insane?
it. Most murderers were either so hapless and so stupid it was embarrassing to listen to them, or so mentally ill they didn't know what was going on in front of their noses. The idea of Jeffrey Dahmer in jail made Gregor's head ache. The man had talked to furniture. Ted Kaczynski had talked to trees. Literally. Had the country gone completely insane?
Maybe what it really was was the death of hope. There had been a time when most Americans truly believed that the criminal could be rehabilitated. They wanted punishment. They wanted revenge. They also expected regeneration. Now they only wanted closure. The murderer had ceased to be a human being in any substantive way. He was simply evil, through and through, without so much as a pocket of untainted air, like a solid chocolate Easter bunny. Was he really comparing murderers to chocolate Easter bunnies? It was cold out here. The wind was stiff and constant. He should have taken a cab. Instead, he had decided to walk, to give himself time to think, and now he was thinking things like this.
The problem, really, was that Bennis's sister Anne Marie was one of the rare exceptions. She was not an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic hearing voices and cutting throats in the back alleys of a small American city. She was not a terminally stupid drifter with even less education than brains and no discernible self-control. She was a deliberate killer, the kind who thought and planned, the kind who knew what she was doing and thought she had been right in doing it. It had been eight years since Gregor laid eyes on her, but he was sure she hadn't changed her mind about that. He could still see her sitting at the defense table during the first appeal, her hands folded in front of her, her face set in stone and as much like a gargoyle's as anything on the facade of the Rheims cathedral. She believed she had been right to do what she did. She believed she had only been caught because of accidents and coincidences. She believed, most of all, in herself, and she would go on believing in herself, right down to the moment when she was strapped onto the gurney with an IV feed in her arm. If Gregor had believed that personality was genetic, he would have been afraid for himself, and for Bennisâbut then, maybe Bennis had received a different set of genes, from her mother instead of from her father, and that was all that was needed to take care of that difficulty.
It was worse than cold out here. It was freezing. There were thin, slick films of ice on the rounded edges of the sidewalks. Gregor checked his watch and saw that it was almost eleven. He was sure that had to be enough time for Henry to have done what he'd asked him to do. If it wasn't, maybe he could wait in Henry's living room while the details were ironed out. He was only a couple of blocks away. He had been circling this neighborhood for half an hour, trying to give Henry enough time. Under the circumstances, he didn't want to seem as if he were pushing. Still. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, then took them out again to raise the collar of his coat higher on his neck. He was always telling Tibor and old George Tekemanian to wear their hats, and he had no idea what had happened to his. He turned right at the next corner and then right again. He started left along Baldwin Place with his hands back in his pockets. All the houses on this street were made of dead brown stone and jammed right up next to each other. They looked like hundreds of other houses across the city of Philadelphia, and they were probably equally expensive. After decades of losing out to the expensive suburbs of the Philadelphia Main Line, the city was becoming fashionable againâat least with singles and couples without children. The living-room windows had heavy curtains hanging at the sides of them. All the curtains were drawn back, their owners preferring to sacrifice privacy for a chance at sunlight. Gregor suddenly realized why it was the neighborhood depressed him. Nobody had decorated anything here. The houses were blank and unadorned, almost regimented, so that they looked as if they had put on uniforms. He made a mental note not to complain so much about the way Donna Moradanyan Donahue decked out the fronts of the houses on Cavanaugh Street. At least it gave the street a bit of color.
He got to Henry Lord's house and looked up at the black front door. The door was shiny as well as black, meaning it must have been painted recently. Gregor had no idea why this should matter. He seemed to be nervous about seeing Henry, although he had known the man for so long now that he might have known him forever. Thirty years, Gregor thought, as he pressed the doorbell and got a detailed mental picture of Henry at the University of Pennsylvania in his sophomore year. Gregor had been a senior. They hadn't liked each other much.
The door opened, and Henry, much balder and paunchier and redder-faced than he had been, came out. Gregor reminded himself that he had liked Henry very much once Henry had gotten out of school and joined the Bureau. That was a good thing, because he needed Henry now if he was ever going to be able to help Bennis out. It was interesting to remember, though, how much those things had mattered when both he and Henry had been young: being from the Main Line or not; attending the Assemblies or not; belonging to the country clubs or not. Henry stepped back, and Gregor wiped his shoes on the mat and stepped inside.
“You gave me a very interesting morning,” Henry said. “And I thought I was going to lie around the living room being bored on my day off from work. How are you?”
“I'm fine.”
“How's Bennis?”
“Fairly crazy, about this. I suppose that's to be expected.” Henry closed the front door and motioned for Gregor to follow him down the long hall that seemed to run the entire length of the house. It ended at a small third flight of steps that led to the kitchen, which was large and overequipped and very newly decorated. Copper pans hung from the high ceiling on a grid held by four coiled metal wires. The grid had been lowered so far, and Gregor was so tall, he worried about hitting his head on a swinging paella pan. The kitchen table was round and large enough for a family of eight Henry and Julia's three sons were grown and off in law schools in Cambridge and Palo Alto. The table had been set, too, with a blue-and-white-checked tablecloth and matching cloth napkins. Henry waved Gregor in the direction of the empty chairs.
“Interesting setup,” Gregor said.
“Julie's been decorating again,” Henry told him. “She misses the boys. I think she wishes one of them would settle down and give her grandchildren, but I'd just as soon they waited until they were out of law school and had a hope in hell of making partner somewhere. You should see what she did to the master bedroom. You want coffee?”
“Please.”
Henry got two cups and two saucers and laid them out in the middle of the table. Gregor reached for one and realized that the decorative borders were the same color and pattern as
the tablecloth and the napkins. He shook his head slightly and reached for the coffeepot Henry was handing to him. Then he thought about Donna Moradanyan Donahue decorating on Cavanaugh Street and wondered if this was something about women he did not yet understand. Would Bennis start decorating his apartment as soon as she hit the right kind of crisis? Would he be required to know something about how to buy paint?
the tablecloth and the napkins. He shook his head slightly and reached for the coffeepot Henry was handing to him. Then he thought about Donna Moradanyan Donahue decorating on Cavanaugh Street and wondered if this was something about women he did not yet understand. Would Bennis start decorating his apartment as soon as she hit the right kind of crisis? Would he be required to know something about how to buy paint?
“I seem to be a little distracted,” he said. “Believe it or not, it's already been a long morning. Were you able to find out what I needed to know?”
“Absolutely. It helps to be a judge, whether you believe it or not. You would have made a great judge.”
“It helps to have a family from the Main Line. What did you find out?”
Henry poured his cup nearly half-full of cream and put the coffee in on top of it. “You do know, don't you, that there's no chance of stopping the execution this time? The governor is not going to commute this sentence. At all. No arguments.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I know that. I think even Bennis knows that.”
“She did make an appeal for clemency,” Henry pointed out.
Gregor shrugged. “I think that's only natural. She would have had to.”
“I suppose. Anyway, with that understood, I'm happy to report that the governor and the prison administration both want to bend over backwards to make sure that Miss Hannaford receives every humanitarian consideration before the execution. To untangle the language, they don't want to show up on the evening news in a story about how they refused to let a condemned woman see her own family. Tom Ridge has gotten very touchy about the death penalty. You know that group, Seamless Garment?”
“I've seen them on the news.”
“Well, between them and the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia, the governor is not happy. So Anne Marie will get all the visits she wants right up until the last second, and then they've issued invitationsâ”
“I know,” Gregor said. “Bennis got one. So did Dickie van Damm.”
“Isn't it interesting, the way everybody always calls him
Dickie?” Henry reached for the sugar and used it, liberally. Gregor thought that he must have been making something on the order of a coffee milk shake, only hot. “Anyway, anyway, to get back to the point, the kicker in this is the qualifier. Anne Marie can have all the visits
she wants
. She has to want them.”
Dickie?” Henry reached for the sugar and used it, liberally. Gregor thought that he must have been making something on the order of a coffee milk shake, only hot. “Anyway, anyway, to get back to the point, the kicker in this is the qualifier. Anne Marie can have all the visits
she wants
. She has to want them.”
“And she doesn't?”
“It's not quite that simple.” Henry took a sip from his cup, made a face, and began to shovel in more sugar. “Have you talked to her at all since she's been in jail?” he asked. “I don't mean seen her in court or that kind of thing, but talked to her, face-to-face.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I never did talk to her much, even before she went to jail. Maybe a dozen times over the space of six weeks during the investigation. I did see her at the appeal.”
“That's what I thought. What about Bennis, has she seen her in the last ten years?”
“No.”
Henry finally had his coffee as sweet as he wanted it to be. He drank a third of the cup in a single gulp, and then placed the cup carefully, and exactly, in the saucer. “I talked to her this morning, briefly. And I talked to her lawyer. Her present lawyer. She goes through lawyers the way other people go through toilet paper. Do you mind, Gregor, if I go on record here as saying that this is a very bad idea?”
“What is?”
“Bennis having an interview, ever, never mind in the next couple of weeks. She'sâwhat she is, Gregor. She is not a pleasant woman. And she no longer has anything to lose.”
“Does that mean she's willing to see Bennis?”
Henry sighed. “Nobody listens to a word I say. It's pitiful, really. That's why I stay on the bench. At least the lawyers have to pay attention while they're in the courtroom.”
“
Does
that mean she's willing to see Bennis?” Gregor repeated.
Does
that mean she's willing to see Bennis?” Gregor repeated.
Henry sighed again. “Not exactly. Or maybe I should say, possibly, but not right off. Like I said, it isn't that simple. Right at the moment, she doesn't want to see Bennis. She wants to see you.”
“What?”
Henry reached under his sweater into the breast pocket of
his shirt and brought out a business card, one of his own, its white back scribbled over with the kind of thick black ink that could only have come from a fountain pen.
his shirt and brought out a business card, one of his own, its white back scribbled over with the kind of thick black ink that could only have come from a fountain pen.
“She wants to see you,” he repeated, “at eleven-thirty in the morning at the prison on Thursday. Her lawyer will pick you up and drive you there. You'd better be ready early. It's a long drive. Oh, and you'll like the lawyer. Right up your alley. Temple B.A. Temple Law. Fastest rising associate at Richland, Cooper, Shelby and March.”
“He must walk on water.”
“If I were you, I'd hope he could walk through fire,” Henry said. “I don't know what it is you think you're doing, Gregor, but this woman is bad news. I could tell that much in less than five minutes on the telephone. If she gets her nails into Bennis, she'll do a lot of damage that will last a long time.”
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