Conspiracy Theory (12 page)

The tape had come to its natural end. All he could see on the screen was fuzz. The cell phone he had plastered to his ear was humming. Nick Braden-ton was lecturing him, again. He stepped forward and hit
rewind
. He wanted to watch the tape again. He wished he had bought a bigger set. He wished even more than he hadn't lost the remote for this one. The tape finished rewinding and he hit the
play
button again.

“Are you
listening
to me?” Nick said. “I talk and I talk, but I don't think you ever listen to me.”

“I'm listening to you.”

“I'm your editor,” Nick said. “I'm responsible for you. And you're behaving like an ass.”

“I seem to be doing all right,” Ryall said. On the screen, there was a sudden sharp picture of himself, only a few seconds long, being introduced to the viewers. He
did
look like Porky Pig. He half-expected the camera to pan around to his behind and catch a view of a curly little tail poking out from the seat of his trousers. God, it was embarrassing.

“You're making yourself suspect number one in the biggest shooting of the year,” Nick said. “Or maybe of the decade. You're plastered all over everything from the
National Enquirer
to
Crossfire
, and the only thing that ever comes out of your mouth is just how close you were when the bullets hit.”

“I
was
close when the bullets hit,” Ryall said. “I saw his face explode in front of my eyes.”

“Save it for cable. You know and I know that if you really had been that close, you wouldn't have stood there watching Tony Ross's face explode. You'd have dived under the nearest table and done your best to be invisible.”

Ryall sniffed. “Maybe you underestimate me, Nick. Maybe I'm not just some poof society gossip columnist.”

“Have I ever called you a poof?”

Ryall didn't answer.

“Shit,” Nick said.

If Ryall had had the remote, he would have been able to freeze frames to study what he was doing wrong. He was too jumpy. He talked too fast. His face was too animated. You wanted to be larger than life when you went on television, but not too larger than life, because then you looked—cartoonish.

“Try to pay attention,” Nick said. “I don't give a flying fuck about your sex life, your social life, or your sexual orientation. I do care about having my office invaded by a bunch of FBI agents who need a quick fix and think they've got one in my least retiring regular columnist. This is not a game, Ryall. Got that? Tony Ross wasn't just Charlotte Ross's husband. He was the head of one of the world's most influential investment banks. He's had dinner at the White House as a matter of course for the last four administrations. The first lady was on her way to his front door when he got offed, and the offing looks a lot like a professional hit. This might, just
might
, have some connection to international terrorism, if only because of Ross's exposure on the globalization issue. So when you go around telling everybody and his cat that you looked right into Tony Ross's eyes at the moment he was hit—”

“I
did
look into his eyes.”

“—a few people, like those FBI agents, and the Bryn Mawr cops, get to thinking that the reason you knew enough to be staring at Tony in the first place was because you were either in the process of shooting him or because you had prior knowledge that he was going to be shot. And when you put that together with the fact that this mess has been the biggest boost to your career since the day you first learned how to use a computer,
some
people—”

“That's ridiculous,” Ryall said. “Nobody would shoot anybody just in the hopes that it would give his career a boost. Nobody would even think of it.”

“People think of everything.”

“Besides,” Ryall said, “you already said it. It looks like a professional hit. I couldn't carry out a professional hit if I wanted to. I can't even hit skeet.”

“Somehow, I don't think that's going to be the kind of argument that impresses anybody. Look, Ryall, for God's sake. I'm just trying to save your ass. You've already got them so focused on you they can't think about anybody else. Tone it down a little.”

“I don't have any reason to tone it down a little,” Ryall said. He sounded constipated, even to himself. “I'm only telling the truth.”

“You're only saying what you have to say to keep getting asked back to those programs,” Nick said. “This isn't going to work, Ryall. You're not going to be the next Greta Van Susteren.”

“I'm only telling the truth,” Ryall said again. Then he pulled the cell phone away from his ear and switched it off. He could hear Nick's voice coming out of it right to the very end. He didn't care. He could always say they'd been cut off. Nick wouldn't believe it, but he wouldn't press the issue. It happened with cell phones all the time.

On the little screen, a tiny, overanimated version of himself was jumping and squirming on the padded seat of a guest chair. He hadn't understood how the camera would catch and magnify his every mood. He didn't just look like Porky Pig. He looked like Porky Pig on amphetamines, sixty seconds before a serious psychotic break. Nick was wrong. He
would
be the next Greta Van Susteren. He had been plucked out of relative obscurity by the crush of great events and a major news story. By the time it was over, he would be familiar to everyone in America. It astonished him to realize just how much he wanted this. It went deeper than any other emotion he'd ever known. It brought him bolt upright in the middle of the night and made it impossible for him to sleep for more than four hours at a time. It was the miracle he'd been waiting for, and he hadn't even known he'd been waiting.

God
, he thought.
What I wouldn't do to be rid of every last one of them.
It was too bad that this wasn't a case of serial murder, so that he could watch them dying in agony one by one. He would reserve a very special death for Charlotte Deacon Ross, who looked down on the English royal family and thought that Ryall Wyndham existed only to provide an uncontroversial escort for women temporarily unaccompanied by their husbands—that, and just the right amount of just the right kind of publicity, when she decided she wanted publicity.

The tape had run its course again. It had only been a half-hour talking heads show. Ryall pushed
rewind
and waited for the tape to scroll back to its beginning. He pushed
play
again and pulled up one of the chairs as close to the screen as he could manage. It was a question of studying and working and thinking and planning. If he did everything right, he would be released.

These days, the trip out to Bryn Mawr was like taking no trip at all. If you went by car—and Gregor was going by car, because Bennis was driving him— it hardly looked as if you'd left the city. The nicer parts of Brooklyn, that's what it reminded him of. The buildings were lower and set further back on the road than they were in Philadelphia proper. There was grass along the edges of the sidewalks. There were more gas stations and sit-down fast-food restaurants in small ponds of parking lots. It was not the Bryn Mawr he remembered from his childhood, when he used to come out here with friends just to drive through the winding streets and look at the big houses behind their gates. The big houses were still here. He had first met Bennis in the one that had belonged to her father, which also happened to be one of the oldest and biggest in the township and a landmark of railroad robber-baron excess. Tony Ross and his wife had their house here too. From what Gregor had seen on the night of Tony Ross's murder, that one was big enough to be a boarding school. Still, there was something about Bryn Mawr experienced the way he was experiencing it now. It was as if it had somehow, inexplicably, shrunk.

Bennis was bouncing along a widish, two-lane main road with too many cars parked at the curb on both sides. Every once in a while, she swore. Every once in a while, she slowed to a crawl so that she could read the signs on the cross streets. They were no longer in Bryn Mawr, which was fine, because Bryn Mawr didn't actually have a police station. Lower Merion did, in Ard-more, which covered Tony Ross's house. Both Bennis and the Lower Merion detective who had approached him at the Ross house after the murder had explained all this in detail, but it made his head hurt.

“Looking at you,” Gregor said, “nobody would ever guess you grew up here.”

Bennis shot him a sour look. “It's not my part of town. I got you to Tony and Charlotte's the other night without having to pause for anything but stop signs. Besides, I never came back here as an adult if I could help it. Before my mother got sick, I used to have her come into the city and I'd meet her there.”

“You were living in Boston.”

“It was too difficult for her to come to Boston. My father, as you know, was a professional bastard.”

Bennis paused again, at another side street. The car behind her honked. She ignored it. “Here,” she said, turning right. “I think we got a little off the track the directions said we were supposed to be on. You've been here before. How did you get here?”

“John Jackman drove me. He was chief of police here at the time.”

Bennis let the subject of John Jackman's career drop. She went down a block and made another turn. She went down another two blocks and made another turn. Gregor had been here before, but he had never paid much attention to his surroundings, and now he found himself surprised that there was this sort of area to Bryn Mawr at all. It wasn't poor. The small storefronts were well-tended and the sidewalks were free of debris and street toughs propped up against buildings trying to look like they were concealing weapons. It was
modest
, that was the word Gregor wanted. He saw a small store with plate-glass windows making up almost the entirety of its sidewalk-facing wall. When he looked inside its windows, it seemed to go back forever in a narrow line, like those old railroad flats in New York. It sold mystery books. Gregor saw a copy of
Blindsighted
in the window, which he recognized because Bennis and Donna had both been reading it. Farther along, the stores got more ambiguous. One looked like a hardware store, except for the riot of wicker baskets taking up one window. One looked like a pharmacy, except that its main window had a display of what looked like hair dryers. The side streets they crossed now led to small houses set in small square lawns. Like the mystery store and the hardware store and the pharmacy, they all seemed to be made of brick.

“Here we are,” Bennis said, turning into a parking lot that looked as confusing as a puzzle. There was a lot of it, but it did odd things, and seemed to accommodate too many people. There was the police station, and the township building, and a Chinese restaurant that gave an entirely new meaning to “upscale.” Then there was more parking, in the back, marked only for police, which was where Bennis took them, since they'd been told to “consider themselves official” for at least this visit.

“I'll bet you anything they've got a first-class drug problem here,” Gregor said. “I know the signs. They've got population. They're close to the city.”

“I thought you said every place had drug problems these days,” Bennis said. “Even small places that aren't close to cities.”

“There are drug problems and drug problems,” Gregor said.

Bennis was carefully locking up the car. It was a custom-painted, tangerine orange Mercedes two-seater convertible. Gregor had warned her about the color. It was like putting a strobe light on your vehicle and running a tape screaming:
Slash my tires! Crack my windshield! Run your keys through my paint!

A door opened in the side of the building and a man in a brown wool suit looked out. Gregor looked back. The man nodded to himself and came down the small set of side steps and started across the narrow lot to them.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Miss Hannaford.”

“Are we late?” Bennis said. “I was trying to keep track of the time—”

“No, no,” the man said. “I'm Detective Lieutenant Frank Margiotti. I don't know if you remember. We met briefly the other night—”

“I remember,” Gregor said.

“We talked mostly to that other man,” Bennis said.

“Marty Tackner, yes. Marty's inside waiting. We were just, ah … It's been a little stressful here these last few days.”

“I'm sure,” Gregor said.

“And then there's the FBI.” Frank Margiotti paused and looked quickly back at the building. He shook his head slightly. “I mean no disrepect, mind you, but I'm not so happy with the FBI. You were an agent, weren't you?”

“An agent and later an administrator.”

“Well, I really do mean no disrespect. He says you're something of a legend at the FBI. Invented the method they use to catch serial killers.”

“Hardly,” Gregor said.

Frank Margiotti looked back at the building again. He was a short man, no more than five foot eight, and thin the way some Italian-American men are thin, wiry and hard. Gregor did not think he was normally a nervous man, but he was nervous now, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, making and unmaking fists.

“It's always a pain in the ass—excuse me, Miss Hannaford—it's always a pain when we've got a crime with one of these people involved. Even people a lot less important than Tony Ross. We had the United States Secret Service out here the other day, did you know that? He did something or the other with the International Monetary Fund. Tony Ross did. I'm not even sure what the International Monetary Fund is.”

“It loans money to poor countries,” Bennis said. “I think.”

“Christ,” Frank Margiotti said.

Gregor cleared his throat. “Maybe we ought to get inside and talk to whoever we're supposed to be talking to.”

“We should,” Frank said. “We should.” He didn't move. “Did John Jackman tell you that we won't be able to officially use you as a consultant? Technically, you're a suspect in the case. Because you were there, you know.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “It's all right. It's quite proper, really.”

“Yes, well. Nobody really takes you seriously as a suspect. Not just because you're you but because you were in at that buffet table when the shots were fired, so obviously you weren't firing them. And, uh, we did check with the FBI about your marksmanship record.”

“Oh, God,” Gregor said.

“It's freezing out here,” Bennis said.

Frank Margiotti balled his hands into fists and then unballed them. He looked at the sky. He looked at his feet. He did not move in the direction of the building. “The thing is,” he said. “Marty and I were talking. It
does
look like a professional hit. Everything the papers have been saying in that direction is true. And the FBI guy is insisting on it. Go after the professionals. And that makes sense.”

“But?” Gregor said.

“For some reason, to me, it doesn't make sense,” Frank said. “It just feels like bullshit. Sorry, Miss Hannaford.”

“Don't worry about it,” Bennis said. “I can swear like a pimp in Elvish.”

“Do you have a reason for why it feels like bullshit?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Frank Margiotti said.

“You want me to give you one?” Gregor asked.

Frank brightened. “Is there one? Marty feels the same way, but the FBI guy keeps telling us we're both acting like assholes. Excuse me, Miss Hannaford.”

“I give up,” Bennis said.

“Look at it this way,” Gregor said. “Tony Ross was a very important man. An
internationally
important man. You hire a mercenary to kill him, you've got a man out there who knows who you are and who's got about as much compunction about committing another murder as you've got about having a second cup of coffee at breakfast. Which puts you in an extremely sticky situation, long-term.”

“All right,” Frank said. “That's good. But—it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that one of the guests could do, does it?”

“No,” Gregor said. “If I were you, I'd be looking for some kind of organization. Something with a high commitment factor where the members have access to professional training. Islamic fundamentalists. One of the separatist groups, Basques, that kind of thing. Maybe the militias, but only maybe. They like to think of themselves as professionals, but they're mostly good ol' boys with delusions of grandeur.”

“Timothy McVeigh's delusions of grandeur killed a hundred sixty-eight people,” Frank said.

“With a fertilizer bomb,” Gregor said, “not a high-powered rifle with a silencer fired at a distance in the dark at a target standing in a group of people, all of them both moving and standing close enough to him to turn into collateral damage at the least mistake in aim. Has any group tried to take credit for this?”

“Oh, hell, yes. Dozens of them. We're checking them out, but—” Frank shrugged.

“I'm going inside before I freeze to death,” Bennis said. “Or he starts apologizing to me for saying
hell.
”

She walked off. Gregor looked after her. Frank Margiotti looked after her too.

“Beautiful woman,” Frank said. “Something of a handful and a half, I'd think.”

Gregor thought about agreeing with him, but under the circumstances he thought it would be redundant.

The special agent's name was Walker Canfield, and Gregor Demarkian hated him on sight. Bennis had gone off somewhere in the building. Since this was an official meeting, and there was no possible way to designate her as anything but an ordinary suspect, they had to maintain at least a pretense of protecting their information, even if they knew Gregor would tell her at least some of it as soon as he got back into her car. Bennis didn't seem to mind. There was a plate of doughnuts and a coffee machine in a little room on the same corridor with the conference room. Officers and administrative personnel used it when they had a few minutes to relax in the middle of the day. Bennis walked into that, took the only available chair—a metal folding chair with a wooden seat that looked like it had been treated to sneak attacks from a buzz saw—and took out her book and her glasses. Gregor gave her a long wistful look before he allowed himself to be swept up by the official investigators. He had spent more than twenty years of his life in meetings like this one. It wasn't until he retired and moved to Cavanaugh Street that he realized how much they bored him.

Marty Tackner, Frank Margiotti's partner, turned out to be an African-American who looked eerily like Sidney Poitier playing Mr. Tibbs, right down to the three-piece pinstripe suit. He also looked out of sorts and something beyond fed up. Frank introduced them. Marty nodded. Then Marty and Frank both looked at the other man in the room. That was when Gregor realized they were all in for trouble. He had spent twenty years of his life in the Bureau. He knew special agents. This one gave every indication of being the kind Gregor had always found most useless both when he was in the field and when he was working as an administrator. He had complete and utter disdain for local law enforcement. He thought he knew more about policing than the battle-scarred veterans of inner-city gang warfare. He went by the book, and if the book was wrong he'd never know it, because he'd never consider the possibility that he should have done things differently than exactly the way he had been taught at Quantico. He had no instincts. He came close to having no personality. Gregor couldn't help thinking of the line from
Men in Black:We in the FBI have no sense of humor that we know of
.

“This is special agent Walker Canfield of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Frank Margiotti said, sounding as if he'd been coached.

Gregor had to work hard not to wince at the name. Walker Canfield: a kid who'd been born in the Midwest to a mother who had desperately wanted to send him East to college, but hadn't had the money. Walker Canfield was holding out his hand. Gregor took it.

“Mr. Demarkian,” Canfield said. “I asked around about you in Washington. You've got quite a reputation.”

“Do I?”

“Jack Houseman said to say hello.”

“I hope he's well,” Gregor said.

Walker Canfield shrugged. “It's because of him you're here. It's highly unusual, calling in a civilian to consult on a case like this. Apparently the locals do it all the time, but it's not how we operate in the Bureau. But you know that.”