Free Stillness in Bethlehem by Jane Haddam

see.
    They were not holes too small for Camber Hartnell to see. He slammed his Cadillac into gear, revved his engine so abruptly it made the car squeal and took off in a spray of flying gravel.
9
    Fifteen minutes later and six miles farther down the road, in a hollow on the side of the road that had once been the edge of a farm owned by a family that had ceased to exist, old Dinah Ketchum lay in a nest of twigs and snow, listening to her murderer get into a car parked on the shoulder not ten feet away. Her murderer was the murderer of Tisha Verek, too, and Dinah Ketchum knew that. She knew everything there was to know about everything that had happened in the last half hour, and the only thing that really bothered her was knowing she would never get a chance to tell anyone about it.
    Old Dinah Ketchum was eighty-two years old, old enough, and as she closed her eyes, she told herself she should have known better. She should have seen. She should have understood. She should have wondered what the gun was doing there in the back of that car instead of up on Stuart’s rack at home where it belonged. Dinah Ketchum had never liked Stuart’s guns, and she didn’t like them now. The blood that was oozing out of her shoulder into the ground was so hot it was making the snow melt.
    Go to sleep, she told herself. Go to sleep.
    The only thing that matters now is to go to sleep.

Part One
    Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
    The silent stars go by

One
1
    I T WAS CALLED J . Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets , and what Gregor Demarkian told people who asked him what he was doing with it was: Bennis Hannaford gave it to me for an early Christmas present. This, of course, was true. J. Edgar Hoover was a book, and Bennis Hannaford had indeed given it to Gregor Demarkian for an early Christmas present. She had even wrapped it up in shiny silver paper. Back on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia, where they both lived, Gregor thought Bennis had thought there might actually be sense in the idea. Gregor had spent twenty years of his life in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the last ten of them either establishing or heading the Department of Behavioral Sciences. He had chased serial killers from Florida to Oregon to Massachusetts and back around again. He had sat kidnapping stake-outs from Palm Beach to Palm Springs. He had known three presidents and more senators, congressmen and departmental functionaries than he cared to remember. He’d been spoken of as a possible candidate for Director of the Bureau itself, although that sort of talk had mercifully died an early death. To Bennis Hannaford, one thing and one thing only would have been important, and that was that Gregor had known J. Edgar Hoover himself.
    It was now ten o’clock on the morning of Sunday, December fifteenth, and Gregor was standing in the lobby of the Green Mountain Inn in Bethlehem, Vermont, letting Bennis and Father Tibor Kasparian deal with their bags and the sour-looking woman at the polished mahogany check-in desk. It was the sort of job he usually took on himself, because he was better suited for it. For all her authority of manner—for all her damn plain arrogance—Bennis was not only a woman but a small one. She measured just about five-foot-four and weighed in at less than a hundred pounds. Sometimes, no matter how hard she tried, she got overlooked. Bennis called it “the experience of drowning in tall people.” Father Tibor Kasparian had a different set of problems. He was also small—Lida Arkmanian back on Cavanaugh Street said there were two kinds of Armenian men, big and broad and small and wiry; Tibor was the latter—but his difficulties getting service at crowded counters came less from his size than his manner. Tibor was parish priest at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church in Philadelphia, and to many people who didn’t know him, he seemed as ineffectual as a parish priest could get. He was hunched and tentative. He was quiet and