but that was almost as if he’d called the Mona Lisa “ cute.” Gregor had been at crazy crime scenes before. He’d been there in the dark when the Philadelphia Police Department had pulled an endless stream of bones out of a cellar, all thought to be the work of the Plate Glass Killer. He’d been in the middle of a hurricane in North Carolina when a young woman brought her smashed and bleeding baby out of the rain and blamed the death of it on witches. He’d even been on the scene at an attempted assassination of a president of the United States. He’d never seen a crime scene completely wrecked before. It was so completely wrecked that nothing and nobody could put it straight, and nothing the police managed to find would ever be credible evidence in a court of law. These were not crime reporters they were dealing with. The words “reasonable doubt” meant nothing to them, except as the hinge of suspense in a courtroom drama, which, like all dramas, they found inherently unreal.
