Living Witness (19 page)

“And it also means that nothing's getting done, again,” Tina said. “In case you were wondering, Mr. Demarkian, the town didn't elect the new school board to do something about evolution. They elected it because nothing was getting done. And I do mean nothing. I talked to Catherine Marbledale just this morning and she was tearing her hair out because some guy from the teachers' union was coming in today. The school board is supposed to deal with the teachers' union, but it isn't. It's doing this, so still nothing is getting done, and the union is threatening to take the teachers' out on strike if there isn't some kind of movement on contract terms this week.”

“That was what Franklin was supposed to fix,” Gary Albright said. “Then it turned out that he is as much a lunatic about Creationism as Henry Wackford is about the holistic curriculum—”

“What?” Gregor said.

“The holistic curriculum,” Gary Albright said. “Don't ask me to explain it. I can't. It had something to do with integrating something or the other into something or the other, and bringing in speakers from the outside to ‘broaden' people's minds. Student minds. That and sex ed, which is supposed to be abstinence-only here, but Henry didn't like it. It was a mess.”

“Did Miss Hadley have positions on any of these issues?” Gregor asked.

“Not really,” Gary said.

“Well,” Tina said, “she did say once that teaching abstinence-only was like leaving a loaded gun in the middle of a room full of toddlers and telling them not to touch it.”

“It wasn't a major issue,” Gary said. “But at least she got down to work on the practical stuff, and now it seems as if nobody is going to do that until the trial is over. It's good of Miss Marbledale to meet with the union rep, but she can't actually do anything. It's the board that has to approve contract terms. We're just going to sit and burn money while a bunch of people fly in from New York and call us all a bunch of hick-town idiots.”

“Unless somebody shoots the judge,” Tina said. “There's rumors everywhere that there's been a death threat on the judge, and the judge called in the FBI to protect him. Wouldn't that be something? All we'd have to do is kill a judge over this thing, and this town will go down in history as no better than—well, no better than anything.”

“Maybe I'll sit down and read through the file for a while,” Gregor said. “When I've done that, I may know where I need to start.”

“Go right ahead,” Gary said. “Tina will get you anything you need. There's a diner up the street if you want something to eat. You can take stuff out and eat it here if you don't want to hassle the place at lunchtime.”

It was a long time before lunch, Gregor was pretty sure. He just shook his head and took himself around the desk to the chair. It really was a very small room.

But it wouldn't do him any good not to get started.

 

The first thing Gregor did was open the file the department had put together for him, and as soon as he did so he could see it was going to take some weeding out. There were all kinds of things in it. Some of those things were part of standard operating procedure. There were reports from the hospital and from two local doctors. There was a forensics summary that seemed to include not only the scene itself but most of Miss Hadley's house. There were background notes on a good two dozen people. Gregor hadn't heard of most of them, and he wasn't sure what he was supposed to make of them. The longest set of notes concerned the pastor of the big church at the end of Main Street, Nicodemus Frapp. Nicodemus, Gregor thought. That must have been some way to go through high school.

In the end, he put the file away on the other side of the desk and tried to think his way through what he'd heard. He did have a telephone. Somebody had plugged one in to a jack somewhere out in the big room. Gregor could see the thin clear cord snaking away from his phone and through his door. He got out his cell phone anyway, because ever since he'd had it he'd developed complete amnesia about phone numbers. There had been a time when he'd been able to remember a dozen or more. Now, he didn't even know Bennis's number, and he probably called Bennis two or three times a day.

He wasn't going to call Bennis now. He really was not up for another round of wedding preparations. He thought that if the wedding preparations went on much longer, they'd rival the plans for celebrating the year 2000. Hell, they'd rival the conspiracy theories about a worldwide computer meltdown.

He punched around on his keypad for a while—it bothered him how quickly he'd gotten used to that; he'd never used his thumb for so much before Bennis had given him this phone, and now he could practically touch-type phone functions. He got to the address book and scrolled through it a little, trying to make up his mind whether it made more sense to stay local or go straight to Washington. He
decided that he'd hated it when people had gone over his head to Washington when he'd been a field agent. Besides, how could the citizens of the United States of America expect the Bureau to operate efficiently with its own field offices if they treated the field offices like—

Gregor didn't know like what. Lackeys? Nobody used the word “lackeys” any more. He found his number and pressed the little green circle. You didn't have to dial anything anymore. The phone dialed for you.

This was not the time to indulge in morbid nostalgia for a technology-free universe. The phone had been picked up on the other end, and a woman's voice was saying, “Federal Bureau of Investigation, Harrisburg Office. Office of the Director.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Hello. My name is Gregor Demarkian. I was wondering if I could talk to Kevin O'Connor for a moment.”

“I'll see if Mr. O'Connor is available,” the woman said. “Could I ask what you're calling in regards to?”

Well, there was something that hadn't changed since Gregor's retirement. He'd sometimes thought that the Bureau had to hire these women and then train them to be as ungrammatical as they got on the phone.

“I was Mr. O'Connor's field training officer back in—well, it was a long time ago.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “If you could spell your name,” the woman said.

Gregor didn't blame her for being wary. He spelled his name and waited. The FBI probably got more crank calls than any other agency in the United States government, or in the state governments, either. When Gregor was with the Behavioral Sciences Unit, they got four or five people a month who called in to confess to serial murders they couldn't have been anywhere near, and they were sane next to the people who called to say they thought the Bureau had implanted microchips in their brains.

There was a click on the other end of the line. Kevin's voice came
bouncing down the wire, sounding happy. “Gregor! What are you doing? I read about you in the papers all the time! It gives me hope, you know what I mean? It's possible to do this job for twenty years without becoming a basket case.”

Gregor liked Kevin O'Connor. He just wished the man wasn't so enthusiastic about everything.

“You got a promotion,” he said. “I thought you said you'd never take a desk job.”

“Yeah, well. Five years sitting on my ass in freezing weather staking out kidnap suspects and I got tired of it. But what about you? Are you just in town or do you have something I need? It's really incredible to hear from you.”

Gregor was sure Kevin found it incredible to hear from him. Kevin found it incredible to hear from anybody.

“At the moment,” Gregor said, “I'm sitting in the police department of a place called Snow Hill, Pennsylvania.”

“Oh, the monkey trial place,” Kevin said. “Yeah. We've got a couple of people out there, just as a precaution, you know. What are you doing out there? Has somebody been killed?”

“Not yet,” Gregor said. “Somebody's been attacked. A woman named Ann-Victoria Hadley.”

“Annie-Vic! Yeah, I did hear about that. Wasn't that some kind of mugging. It's a damned shame, really, she's an incredible old bat. Did you know she was on Nixon's enemies list?”

“Was she? For what?”

“Oh, I don't remember. She ran some organization for a while, I think, some anti–Vietnam War organization. Like I said, she's an incredible old bat. Isn't it kind of overkill bringing you in on a mugging?”

“The chief of police here seems to think it may be more than a mugging. He's of the opinion that somebody tried to kill her because she was the only member of the school board that wouldn't sign on to the new policy of Intelligent Design.”

There was a long pause. “That's not too likely, is it?” Kevin said. “I mean, there are certainly lots of nut cases out there. You can't deny that. But I don't remember there ever being any violence over teaching evolution. Just a lot of, you know, hot air and screaming.”

“That's what I thought,” Gregor said. “The chief of police seems to think otherwise, though, and he's the friend of a friend. So here I am. I take it that you've got nothing on the order of militia activity or that kind of thing going on around this.”

“The militias are pretty much over,” Kevin said. “Not that they ever amounted to much, anyway. What's that line from the
Blues Brothers
movie? A bunch of sad, sorry sons of bitches who're just jerking off, or something like that.”

“And no chatter saying that there's somebody out there looking to pick off the opposition, piece by piece?”

“Gregor, please. Do you know what these things are like? They're a bunch of middle-class, middle-aged people striking attitudes. On both sides, if you ask me. They're not looking for bloodshed. They're looking for time on the evening news. I think the only people who care about the science is the scientists they bring in. Everybody else is starring in their own movie.”

“I've just been told that there's been a death threat against the judge who's supposed to sit on this case.”

“A death threat on Hamilton Folger?” Kevin said. “No. If there had been, I'd have heard about it.”

“Everybody here has heard about it.”

“No, Gregor. Everybody there has heard somebody say they heard about it. If there had been a real death threat, if somebody had actually threatened Folger—I mean, for God's sake, Gregor, you remember Hamilton Folger. He's got a stick so far up his ass it comes up out of his head and he uses it for a flagpole. He was appointed by W. He takes himself more seriously than God.”

Gregor thought about it. He did remember Hamilton Folger. “Prosecutor in Chicago?” he said finally. “That weird case of the woman
who'd—I don't remember—something about she got caught with cocaine—”

“She got caught with a lot of cocaine,” Kevin said, “but she'd just lost both her daughters in some kind of freak accident. So she went down to the nearest slum neighborhood she could find and bought enough of the stuff to kill herself with and everybody knew that was what she was trying to do, but he went after her for dealing, anyway. I mean, seriously, Gregor, the man makes conservatives look like bleeding hearts. If he'd had a death threat, I'd know about it, the national office would know about it, CBS News would know about it, and so would you.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “But the rumors are here, and rumors like that are dangerous. You say you have some agents in place?”

“Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker, yeah. They're both about twelve years old. I'll give them a call and ask them to accommodate you if you want. They're competent enough.”

“That would be excellent,” Gregor said. “I'm just trying to be cautious here. You're sure you've never heard of one of these trials where there's been any violence?”

“Absolutely sure,” Kevin said. “The violence tends to be limited to what the school kids do to each other, and they're nasty. Nasty, but not Columbine. They call each other names. They bully each other. Some kid goes home in tears because somebody told her on the playground that she's going to burn in Hell. That sort of thing. I've got the numbers. You have a pen to write these down?”

Gregor had a pen. He took the numbers down as Kevin reeled them off—both were cell phone numbers. He put his pen down on the desk and stretched a little.

“I wish I understood these things,” he said. “Everybody seems to get angry for no reason. Or no reason that makes sense to me.”

“That's the trouble with the world, Gregor. Everybody
is
angry with no reason, or at least they're not angry for the reasons they say they are. Never mind. You're getting married in a few weeks, aren't you? Congratulations!”

 

In the world Gregor came from, protocol mattered almost more than anything. Who did what when, who had jurisdiction over which or whom was the first question any sane man asked about any action he was about to take. In the universe of Snow Hill law enforcement, there seemed to be no protocol, and not many personnel, either. He left his closet office for the larger room and looked around. Only the woman named Tina was there. There was no sign of any other person. Even Gary Albright had disappeared.

“I'm going to take a walk,” Gregor said.

Tina looked up at him and blinked. “All right,” she said. “Diner's down the block to your right, if you're looking for coffee.”

Gregor made a noncommittal noise, then went out through the front door to Main Street. There were more people there now. The mobile news vans had visible staff. People were walking along the street. Gregor stopped and listened for a while, but that odd high-pitched wail he'd heard for a few moments earlier had ceased. He wondered what it was. He'd thought a car was about to explode.

He looked to his right, in the direction of the diner. People were going in and out of it, quite a few of them carrying Styrofoam cups of what he presumed to be coffee. He looked to his left. There at the end of the street was that big, white modern church and the little cluster of buildings behind it. Now that he had a chance to study it, he didn't think the building was modern by nature. It had been remodeled, somehow. The skeleton of it was venerable, but all the ornamentation was new.