Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) by Jane Haddam Page B

it’s a phone video. I suppose she could have ditched the phone somewhere.”
    “And where was everybody else?” Gregor asked. “There should have been other people. There should at least have been secretaries.”
    “That one, we’ve got an answer to,” Dickson Greer said. “The secretaries were at a funeral of a secretary for a judge who retired a while ago. The judge retired, the secretary died of breast cancer. The whole support staff was out at the funeral and the judges who were in at all were in court.”
    “And this doesn’t feel wrong to you?” Gregor asked. “This doesn’t feel out of whack?”
    “Gregor, I hate to tell you this,” John said, “but that’s no help at all.”
    “I know it isn’t,” Gregor said. “But at the moment, that’s the best I can do.”
    John Jackman looked at the ceiling for a moment and then seemed to come to a decision. “All right,” he said. “We’ve got some problems, and I think the three of us have figured out at least some ways around them. You know and we know that this meeting is going to leak, and when it does it’s going to be crap from here to eternity. But we knew that going in, and we all took the risk anyway. So let’s let that go. The big issue, first of all, is that there is no way the City of Philadelphia is going to be able to hire you as a consultant on this case.”
    “Ah,” Gregor said. “I really didn’t expect you to. I hadn’t even considered it.”
    “Good,” John Jackman said, “because it’s not just the political problems that are insurmountable in this case—it’s the legal ones, too. There are so many conflicts of interest running around here at the moment, it makes my head spin.”
    “I’ve got a conflict of interest myself,” Gregor said. “He’s probably my closest friend after Bennis. I’m not an objective investigator.”
    “You may not be an objective investigator, but you are an investigator,” John said, “and I’d think you’d be investigating no matter what the circumstances were. So what we’ve done is figured out a way to get the information to you, and also to lay off any charges of impeding a police investigation or that sort of thing.”
    “Would I be impeding a police investigation?” Gregor asked.
    “It would depend on what you were doing,” John Jackman said. “What I want to say here is that I don’t want to catch you not telling us anything you’ve found out. I know that thing you do where you think you have the answer but you don’t tell anyone because you haven’t worked it out yet. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about information. If you get any information, you pass it along to us. Even if it’s not in the best interests of Tibor Kasparian.”
    “I think the truth will always be in the best interests of Tibor Kasparian,” Gregor said.
    “Don’t bet on it,” Dickson Greer said. “You never know what’s coming out of the woodwork then.”
    “The next thing,” John said, “is a technicality, but the law is full of technicalities. Unless you can get Tibor to talk to you and authorize you to act on his behalf, you can’t go charging around telling people you’re investigating for the defense. The operative word is ‘can’t.’”
    “But I will be investigating for the defense,” Gregor said.
    “Not officially, you won’t,” John said. “Not unless you’ve been authorized by Tibor or Tibor’s attorney. And as we sit now, Tibor won’t even authorize an attorney.”
    “Don’t you think that’s very strange in and of itself?” Gregor asked. “Why won’t he accept an attorney? Why won’t he talk to Russ? Russ is his attorney, as far as he has one.”
    “That’s the kind of thing we were hoping you could tell us,” Dickson Greer said.
    “I think it borders on being insane,” Gregor said.
    “I think it borders on being perverse,” John said. “But here we are. George and Dick will take you to see some people. We’ll give you all the