Free Not a Creature Was Stirring by Jane Haddam Page A

turn taught other people, was how to keep someone on the phone when they wanted to get off. He knew two dozen tricks for that purpose, and he had tried them all out on Robert Hannaford. None of them had worked. Like a politician or a surgeon, Hannaford knew how to cut off communication when he wanted it cut off. He knew even better how to say nothing when he wanted to say nothing. Gregor had been left, that first night, with the feeling that he had been snookered—and snookered by a man with a psychopath’s voice. He’d ended up so angry he hadn’t been able to sleep. He could still see himself, pacing from the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom and back again, feeling more and more certain that what he really wanted to do was break Robert Hannaford’s neck.
    It was his unaccustomed will to violence, and his feeling that he’d never sleep again if he didn’t get some answers, that had made him decide to make the first of the follow-up calls the next morning. Hannaford’s voice had had an unexpected effect on him. He was willing to grant Tibor all his nasty suspicions of the man’s character. If there was one thing Gregor understood, it was the psychopathic personality—not the brain-diseased delusionalism of the popular novel’s “homicidal maniac,” but the core of the men who had no emotions that were not in some way about themselves. And the women, too, Gregor thought. He’d never met a woman like that, but he’d read the files. What mattered here was that there had never been a normal man on earth with a voice like Hannaford’s, and there never would be.
    He’d called Engine House at eight o’clock, even though he knew it would have been better to wait until nine. He’d been too edgy to wait. He’d been too tired to be alert, too. The phone’s ringing had had a different quality than it had the night before, but he hadn’t realized it until the call was over. When the phone was picked up, he still expected it to be answered by Robert Hannaford.
    Instead, he’d got a woman’s voice. It was flat and nasal, with a tinge of resentment in it—the kind of voice he associated with the embittered and divorced. Because he knew none of Hannaford’s children had ever been divorced—it was amazing what you could find out just by going through the newspapers and Philadelphia magazine, especially when you borrowed the back copies from Lida, who never threw anything away—he’d assumed he was talking to Hannaford’s secretary. He gave his name and explained his business and waited to be put through.
    There was a sound of papers shuffling on the other end of the line. The nasal voice said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I don’t have the authorization to connect you.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t have the authorization to connect you,” she repeated, sounding firmer. “I am allowed to put through calls only from the people named on this list. You are not named on this list.”
    “But—”
    “It’s very early, Mr. Demarkian. I’m sure you’ll understand why I have to now get off the line.”
    There was a click in his ear and then the dial tone. And that was that.
    Now he looked down at the mess on his bed—the phone and the newspapers and the magazines and the notes on yellow legal paper—and wondered what he was supposed to do about it all. This last call had been just like the first, and it had left him with the same feeling of residual anger and of residual apprehension. If it hadn’t also left him feeling that Elizabeth was closer to him now than she had been at any time since her death, he might have called the whole thing off. He had a precise understanding of just how dangerous it was to get involved with men like Robert Hannaford. Even when they weren’t engaged in physical homicide, they were heavily involved in murder.
    He’d left a cup of coffee on his night table. He picked it up, took a drink out of it, and winced at the cold flatness of the liquid. Then he put it back. He