Baptism in Blood (39 page)

Minna Dorfman drummed her fingers against the near­est desktop.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” she said. “The first murder was the murder of the child, am I right?”

“That’s right.”

“And,” Minna went on, gesturing at the note, “that murder is confessed to in here. In a way. It’s not entirely clear how the child was killed. Is he confessing to that killing or not?”

“My guess is that he doesn’t know if he committed it or not,” Gregor answered. “He says in the note that the situation was confused, and I think that’s probably just what it was. There was a hurricane. There was the goddess worship with a live baby. I think it was a little like being drunk.”

“So I think that’s what the murder of the baby was,” Minna said slowly, “a matter of fooling around with something that got out of hand. Goddess worship.”

“I don’t think I would have believed it before I came down here,” Gregor said, “but it seems perfectly plausible to me now. Millennial fever, somebody called it. This place seems to be almost infested with religion.”

“I believe it,” Minna Dorfman said. “I grew up less than five miles from this room. But you know, Mr. Demarkian—it is Mr. Demarkian, isn’t it?”

Gregor nodded.

“You know,” Minna went on, “no matter how hyster­ical people from up North get, Holy Rolling is really not the last refuge of nut cases and homicidal maniacs. When there’s a murder or some child abuse on television, it seems like it’s always the Holy Roller that did it, but it isn’t like that in real life. When we pick a man up for murder and mayhem, he’s more likely
not
to belong to a church than to belong to one. This Stephen Harrow,” she continued, “didn’t you tell me he was a member of the clergy?”

“It’s the Methodist Church,” Clayton Hall put in, “and Mr. Harrow isn’t from around here. He’s from up North. He’s got a lot of fancy degrees in theology from fancy universities up there.”

“He’s not exactly a fundamentalist,” Gregor con­ceded. “But I don’t think that was the point of all this, either.”

“So what was?” Minna asked.

Gregor picked up the manila envelope where Clayton was keeping the things they had found at the scene of Zhondra Meyer’s death. He looked through the papers until he found the photograph and then handed it to Minna. She stared at it for a full minute, unblinking, and then handed it back.

“The man is Stephen Harrow?”

“That’s right.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“We don’t know yet,” Gregor said. “We are meant to infer, of course, that the woman is Carol Littleton.”

“You mean Mr. Harrow knows somebody has this picture? Who? Where did you get it?”

“In Zhondra Meyer’s bedroom.”

“You mean she was blackmailing him?”

”No,” Gregor said, wishing that Minna had stuck to her original plan. “I have no idea if Stephen Harrow has ever seen this photograph. In the note, though, which he was trying to make look like a suicide note from Zhondra, he uses Carol Littleton as the other woman. And there
was
a woman. I think the report of what went on on the terrace is completely accurate. They did take the baby out there to worship the goddess. Stephen Harrow, at least, had no in­tention of doing anything—untoward. Something untoward happened, nevertheless. And Stephen Harrow, at least, panicked.”

“You keep saying ‘Stephen Harrow, at least.’ Do you think the woman kept her head? Do you think her motives were different?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I don’t know who she is. I’m not sure, at this point, that she’s important.”

“She’s important if she was part of the murdering of that baby,” Minna pointed out.

“But there was nothing to say that the baby was mur­dered. Ginny Marsh came out of the rain claiming to have seen her child sacrificed by worshippers of the goddess—which she might have done, depending on where she was when she witnessed what she said she witnessed—and we’ve all been running with that interpretation ever since. But the child might not have been deliberately killed.”

“The child had her throat cut from ear to ear,” Minna Dorfman said. “She was an infant.”

“I know. I know, I know, I know. But they were out there on that terrace and there was a lot of confusion and I’m not sure they really knew what they were doing. I’m not telling you that this is the way you would have to argue it in court, if you brought a case against Stephen Harrow. I’m trying to set this out so that it makes sense.”

“I’d like to bring a case against that woman, too,” Minna Dorfman said. “Are you sure you don’t know who she is?”

Clayton Hall shrugged. “She’s some woman from up at the camp, that’s all. Or some woman who spends a lot of time there. They all worship the goddess in that place.”

“It was Stephen who killed the other two,” Gregor said firmly. “Carol Littleton and Zhondra Meyer. They might not have been infants, but they should count, too.”

“And they do count, Mr. Demarkian,” Minna said. “I never said they didn’t. Are you sure it was Stephen Harrow and not his—friend—who killed Carol Littleton and Zhon­dra Meyer?”

“I think so, yes,” Gregor told her. “Assuming the woman he is involved with
is
somebody from town or from the camp, it’s difficult to see how she could possibly have killed either of them. We’ve been watching all those peo­ple. And as soon as anything happened, we took statements from each of them to determine where they had been and when. I don’t think we found any gaps anywhere.”

“If we had found gaps,” Clayton Hall said, “I would have called you people a long time before now.”

“Unless you’re going to believe that there are two people wandering around here murdering people,” Gregor went on, “which I, in this case, don’t, then you’re stuck with the fact that nobody else but Stephen Harrow seems to have had the opportunity to commit all three of these crimes. The one I’m most interested in, of course, is the first, because we’ve got better than usual testimony on that one. Believe it or not, the hurricane helped. It put every­body together in one room.”

“It put all the people in town together in one room,” Clayton corrected. “Most of the women from the camp were in the living room next door.”

“The women from the camp vouched for each other,” Gregor said firmly. “The only people missing who should have been in the living room were Stelle Cary, Carol Lit­tleton, and Dinah What’s-her-name. The three who went out to the circle of stones and had a ceremony to the god­dess. They got caught in the storm.”

“But if that was the case,” Minna Dorfman asked, “why couldn’t they be the ones who killed the baby, just the way Ginny Marsh swears they did?”

“For all the same reasons that the police didn’t arrest them in the first place,” Gregor said. “Because they didn’t have any blood on them anywhere. Not even a trace. Be­cause they weren’t in the right places at the right times. Because they were always together.”

“And Harrow?”

“Harrow,” Gregor said, “keeps disappearing from places. As far as I can tell, nobody remembers him being in the study at all before the hurricane, but he was surely there afterward, and his wife was there the whole time. If we talk to her, I’ll bet anything she’ll say they came up to the camp together.”

“Unless she lies for him,” Minna Dorfman said.

“No chance,” Clayton Hall told her.

“The most important thing here,” Gregor insisted, “is that Harrow was present when the baby died—however she died—and everything he has done since then has been to hide his involvement in that death. Everything. Including the deaths of Carol Littleton and Zhondra Meyer.”

“Why did he kill Carol Littleton? I thought you said she was off with these other women during the storm. She couldn’t have seen him with the baby if that were the case.”

“I don’t think she did see him with the baby,” Gregor said. “I think she might have seen him with his girl, or, even more likely, with some of the paraphernalia of god­dess worship. One of the other women who went up to the circle of stones during the hurricane, Stelle Cary, told me that Carol showed up for the ceremony very late and that she came running out of the house all upset just before they left for the clearing.”

“And think that’s when she saw Stephen and his girl­friend?”

“I think that’s when she saw Stephen and some­thing.”

“I think that’s a little vague to be going on with,” Minna insisted. “You need more details than you’ve got before you can do what you want to do here, Mr. Demarkian. And what about Zhondra Meyer? Did she see him with his girlfriend, too?”

“Zhondra Meyer knew all about Stephen’s girl­friend,” Gregor said. “That’s obvious from the picture. And I think she may have known all about his flirtation with goddess worship. If you want details, Ms. Dorfman, what we ought to do is go over there, to the rectory, and ask him.”

“Without a lawyer,” Minna said. “Without giving him a warning.”

“There’s no need for warnings yet,” Clayton Hall said. “We don’t want to arrest him. We only want to talk to him.”

“He doesn’t have to talk to us without a lawyer pres­ent.” Minna shook her head. “He doesn’t have to give us the time of day.”

Gregor got up from the desk he’d been sitting on. “But he will,” he said. “He will. He’s desperate to talk. That’s why he wrote that note.”

Minna got up, too, and walked across the room to the window. She clasped her hands behind her back and said, “All right, let’s say we go over there. We knock on the door or we ring the bell. Then what?”

“Then I can do the talking,” Gregor said.

Minna Dorfman nodded. She still had her back to them. The flat brown thinness of her hair was plastered against her skull like wet rubber. Her hands were mottled with liver spots before their time.

“Yes,” she said finally. “Mr. Demarkian, I expect you could do the talking. Have you been formally depu­tized?”

“No,” Clayton Hall said.

“Then formally deputize him,” Minna Dorfman said. “I don’t want to hear after all this is over that we had some kind of unauthorized personnel on the scene, and that taints all the evidence we got. God help us, if we’re going to go over there and do this, we’re going to do this right.”

I
F THERE WAS ONE
thing Gregor Demarkian would al­ways remember about North Carolina, it was the night. Night here was beautiful when he was sitting on David Sandler’s deck, looking out at the big moon and the black ocean. It was beautiful here, in town, with trees and small gracious buildings all around him, with the heavy scent of night flowers and the solemn chill of coming winter blow­ing in his face. The Town Hall and the library were dark. Betsey’s diner and many of the Greek revival houses on the side streets were lit up. Sometime while Gregor wasn’t pay­ing attention, twilight had ended.

The rectory of the Methodist Church was lit up like Times Square. There were lights on in all the downstairs rooms that Gregor could see, and some of the upstairs ones. There was a light on on the porch as well. Next door, the church itself was dark, its windows shuttered over to pro­tect it from vandalism and teenagers. Gregor thought the doors were probably locked. He preferred the old tradition in the Catholic Church, maintained so seldom now, because the world had changed so much, of keeping the doors of the church open at all times. So many souls wanted to be saved in the middle of the night. That, Gregor thought, would be an attractive way to believe in God—if he could have be­lieved in God, which he didn’t. He was even attracted, sometimes, to Henry Holborn’s version of Christianity, with its passions and its enthusiasms. He didn’t know what went on in the locked and shuttered Methodist Church from week to week, but he didn’t think anybody’s soul got saved at Sunday services.

The bulb in the porch light spilled light down the steps and onto the walk. Gregor could see through the tall front windows into the living room, which was empty. There was a fire in the fireplace and a portrait of Einstein over the mantel. Gregor, Clayton Hall, and Minna Dorfman had dis­cussed it among themselves back at the police depart­ment—talking to Jackson and the men Minna had brought with her, too—and decided that descending on Stephen Harrow like an army wasn’t going to do anybody any good. The idea was not to frighten him. The idea was to give him a chance to be listened to.

Gregor climbed the porch steps and knocked on the front door. Nothing happened. He looked around for a doorbell and couldn’t find one. He knocked again. This time he heard noise from inside the house, as if someone were stumbling against the furniture, walking too fast. A moment later, he looked through the front windows and saw a dark-haired woman hurrying down the strip of hard­wood floor next to the broad green carpet that the living sofa sat on. An instant later, she was opening the door and peering out to see his face.

“Yes?” she said, hesitant.

Clayton Hall stepped forward. “It’s me, Lisa. This is Gregor Demarkian, you’ve read about him. And this lady here is Minna Dorfman from the county prosecutor’s of­fice.”

“The county prosecutor’s office?”

“We’re investigating a murder,” Clayton Hall said firmly. “We’ve got a few things we’d like to talk to Ste­phen about. Could we come in?”

Gregor thought Lisa Harrow was going to turn them down, or tell them her husband was not here. He could see her closing the door in their faces right now. Then there was more sound from the back of the house, and over her shoulder Gregor saw Stephen Harrow come in.

“Lisa?” he said. “What’s going on here?”

“It’s Clayton,” Lisa said. “He’s got some people with him.” Gregor didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone so nervous in all his life.

Unlike his wife, Stephen Harrow didn’t seem nervous. If there was an opposite of nervousness, he was it. He drew Lisa gently away from the door and motioned them all to come inside.

“Come in, come in,” he said cheerfully. “Clayton. It’s been a long time since we’ve sat down for a talk. And Mr. Demarkian. I’ve read about you, of course, millions of times, and we talked up at the camp a couple of days ago. But I’m afraid I don’t know—”

“Minna Dorfman,” Minna Dorfman said. “I’m from the county prosecutor’s office.”

“I don’t understand why we need someone from the county prosecutor’s office,” Lisa said.