Glass Houses (41 page)

Gregor could think of several sensible answers to that question—because you got scared and lost your head; because you were convinced that the police were trying to frame you; because there was something you had to do in a limited period of time and you refused to be deterred from doing it—but none of them seemed to fit Henry Tyder as he had understood the man up to now. For one thing Henry Tyder's mental weaknesses might be at least partially put on, and Gregor was even willing to concede that they were that, but they couldn't be entirely fake. It wasn't just rumor or pretense that the man had spent most of the last ten years pickled in alcohol. That had to take a toll. And late-stage alcoholism could lead to paranoia and acting out.

But the Henry Tyder he'd seen hadn't been paranoid. His resistance to the idea of staying with his sisters had been childish, but it had also been perfectly rational. Gregor even understood the reasons for it and sympathized. He was also convinced that the acting out in court had been staged or almost staged. He was sure Tyder could have controlled himself if he'd wanted to. He rubbed the palms of his hands against his forehead. It was the kind of muddle that he liked the least. He preferred physical evidence to wading through the psychology of
a man who wouldn't have made sense to him even under the best of circumstances. In a way that was why he had been so good at coordinating investigations of serial killers. Novelists and television writers like to delve into the psychology of the serial killer, but in reality there was little to delve into. Tolstoy was wrong. It wasn't happy families who were all alike, and unhappy ones who were each unhappy in its own way. It was the sane and happy people who had individuality. Serial killers did no more than display a. syndrome that was not particularly interesting after a while—or at least, male serial killers did. He'd been emphasizing that point to somebody just the other day. It may have been this morning. He was very tired.

He waited for John Jackman to hang up the phone again—John had been yelling; he was spending nearly all his time yelling—and said, “John, do you remember Myra Hinckley?”

“Who?”

“Or Karla Hrmolka. Or Rosemary West.”

“I know who he means,” Rob Benedetti said. “Myra Hinckley and Ian Brady were the Moors murderers. Karla Hrmolka was a similar case in Canada, but I can't remember the man's name. Rosemary and Frederick West were another similar case back around 1994 in the UK. He died, I think. Hanged himself in prison. I don't remember what happened to her.”

“Good,” Gregor said. “What about Aileen Wournos?”

“I remember her,” John said. “Serial killer in Florida. The first female serial killer. Prostitute who killed her Johns, I think. Or guys who tried to pick her up. Whatever does this have to do with what we're doing?”

“The thing is,” Gregor said, “it was all about sex: Myra Hinckley, Jeffrey Dahmer. It was all about sex.”

“I can't believe this,” John said. “We've got at least three people on the run, if I'm to believe your friend about Dennis Ledeski, every single one of them suspects in a serial murder case, and you're telling me about sex?”

“Doesn't it bother you that there's been no sex with this thing?” Gregor asked. “Serial killers are mind-numbingly unoriginal. They rape and then kill, or they kill and then rape. The murder is a response to the sex or a cause for the sex. The sex is the point. And here we are, and there is no sex.”

“Personally,” Rob said, “I think he's trying to kill his mother. It would fit, don't you think? They're all about that age. Well, most of them. Conchita Estevez was younger. Oh, and Rondelle Johnson.”

“And besides,” John said, “what can you possibly make out of a motive for anything else in this thing? Did any of these women have any money? I can't remember that any of them did. Maids. Secretaries. Retail store clerks. Book-keepers. These were not a well-heeled bunch. The only person in this case so
far with money, real money, is Henry Tyder, and nobody is killing him. Or, at least, I hope they're not. Oh, Christ, that's all we'd need.”

The phone on John's desk rang again. He picked it up and immediately stopped shouting. Gregor shot Rob a look, and Rob shrugged.

“He's a little exercised,” Rob said. “You can hardly blame him.”

“I don't blame him,” Gregor said. “I find this sort of behavior a little dys-functional as a management style, but it seems to work for him.”

“The thing is,” Rob said, “I thought you said that this wasn't a murder case. That all the murders weren't connected. Or something like that.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “That's true. If you go by the assumption that all these murders are the work of the same person or persons, you're dead in the water, because they're not. For instance, Dennis Ledeski killed Elyse Martineau, but not any of the others.”

John was just putting down his phone. “What?” he said. “What did you say?”

“Dennis Ledeski killed Elyse Martineau,” Gregor repeated. “I can almost guarantee it. And he didn't kill any of the others because if Dennis Ledeski ever took to serial murder, it would be serial murder with lots of sex in it, and it would probably be serial murders of young boys. So he's not a serial murderer; but he killed Elyse Martineau because she was his secretary, and she was on to his hobbies.”

“Oh, the pedophiliac,” Rob said.

“You haven't even met Dennis Ledeski,” John said. “I can't believe you're saying this.”

“Well, I could be wrong,” Gregor said, “but you can check that out. And I'm not. Wrong, I mean. It must have been Marty and Cord who investigated Ledeski, though, because if Ledeski had child porn on his computers somewhere, any competent first-year detective should have been able to find it, and they didn't. My guess is that Ledeski was flabbergasted that he got away with it, and he figured he wasn't going to get away with it much longer. So he bolted, and now he's out there, too, doing God only knows what. I do think that if you impound all those computers, though, you'll find what you're looking for. Whether you'll convict him of the murder of Martineau depends on just how stupid he is, and right now I have no way of judging that.”

“It's all right,” John said, taking a deep breath. “We do have bulletins out for him. And for Bennie Durban. And for Henry Tyder. Maybe I could just declare martial law and get it over with.”

“It matters that there is no sex in this, John. It matters very much. Serial killers are not cartoon monsters. They're not even Hannibal Lecter. They're sexual obsessives. Or at least the men are. With the exception of Wournos, as
far as I know, women are only sexually obsessed serial killers when they kill in partnership with a man. Hinckley and Brady abducted young girls, raped and tortured them while videotaping the process, then used the videotapes as porn when they had sex with each other. Hrmolka and West did the same, although I don't remember if there were tapes. The sex matters, John. It really does.”

“So what am I supposed to do now?” John said. “We don't have a female suspect in this case. In any of these cases. We don't have a credible case for murder for gain with any of these suspects. Some of them were downright poor. And according to you, we don't even know which ones we can assign to any serial killer at all. I might as well have been on vacation in Miami this entire time. In fact, it would be a good thing if I went now because if I don't I'm going to gun down those two idiots right in front of Independence Hall at noon.”

Gregor sighed. “Calm down,” he said. “Betty and Martha are printing out some information for me. Once I have that, I'll be able to tell you who to assign to what. Oh, and if I could have a password so that I could get into the computer files on the case, it would help. But in the meantime, have you looked for Elizabeth Woodville yet?”

“Oh,” John Jackman said, starting. “Crap.”

T
here was no point
in staying at police headquarters, and really no point in staying near John Jackman when he was in one of his moods. The problem was, Gregor didn't want to go home. It was an odd feeling, not wholly new. There had been times, in the weeks just after his wife had died, that Gregor had gone from library to restaurant to bar to movie theater in a vain attempt never to have to walk through his own front door. Since he'd come to Cavanaugh Street though—or come back to it, since he had grown up there, in the days when tenements had occupied the places townhouses did now and “rich” meant having two new pairs of shoes every year—he'd never had a day when he hadn't preferred to be home than away. It was the idea of confronting Bennis, one more time, that made the difference.

Of course, during most of the time he'd known Bennis, including the months she'd been away, there'd barely been a day when he hadn't preferred to be with her than away from her. He waited around while Martha and Betty went on printing what they had to print, first in John's office and then down-stairs in the hall, sitting on yet another of the ubiquitous molded plastic chairs while he stayed well out of the line of fire. If somebody ever made a movie about John Jackman, the part would have to be played by Jamie Fox instead of Denzel Washington, somebody who could really bellow when the going got tough. It didn't matter. The difficulty wasn't John's mood or even Bennis's
neuroses. John's mood was never good, and Bennis took on the invention of new forms of neurotic behavior the way a pious Catholic schoolgirl might take on the project of becoming a nun. The difficulty was the fact that this was not his usual kind of case. This was not a tangle that local authorities had been unable to unravel or a cold case where a fresh mind and head could bring new perspective to old material. This was a bureaucratic snafu on a level usually reserved for the United States Army. He could solve some of it in the usual way, but he was worried that other parts of it, the parts not directly related to the central case, might not be possible to solve at all. Or, if they were solved, would not be possible to prosecute. There was good reason why the protocol books on how to handle evidence were hundreds of pages long. The whole concept of “reasonable doubt” was by now completely out of hand. What had once been a formula for common sense was now a demand that prosecutors present a case the defense could not alternatively present as the outline of a murder mystery. Everybody watched too much TV. Everybody went to too many movies. Everybody read too many books, and it didn't help much that the books had titles like Black Water these days instead of Death Stalks a Wilted Celery. The process was the same. The mental habits the process created were the same. The assumptions had become pandemic: the police are either incompetent or corrupt or both; the most obvious suspect is the one least likely to have committed the crime; the real explanation for any criminal occurrence is both obscure and esoteric, requiring at least half an hour of oration to explain.

It wasn't that Gregor wanted people to stop reading murder mysteries. It wasn't even that he wanted them to stop watching true-crime television documentaries. He did think
American Justice
and
Cold Case Files
had a lot to answer for, and he was never going to get over the tendency of
City Confidential
to profile “cities” with names like Pig's Knuckles, Arkansas. Still, people liked what they liked, and comfortable people who lived largely without the threat of day-to-day violence were fascinated by murder. All that was fine. What he wanted was to be able to outline a reasonable case and have it accepted as one, instead of being second-guessed as too easy to be taken seriously.

It was after five when Betty and Martha were finished putting together his computer printouts. Gregor thanked them and got up to go. He hadn't seen Rob Benedetti come downstairs. He hadn't heard Jackman's voice anywhere either. He supposed they were both still up in John's office trying to micro-manage by phone something that really needed a competent detective on the ground. He got up and tucked the computer printout under his arm. It was the size of one of those first Gutenberg Bibles, or maybe bigger. He had no idea if the information in it would be organized in a way that would allow him to understand it when he had the chance to sit down and read it.

When he went out onto the street, it was raining again, and with the rain had come cold, not bitter cold, but that hard underlying chill that characterized so many of the evenings in March. He buttoned his coat and put his collar up, feeling a little silly as he did it. He had a weird conviction that anybody who saw him on the street would think he was pretending to be Humphrey Bogart. Maybe that was what was really getting him down. It was hard to build an identity for yourself once you started to think you had an identity to build. Sensible people didn't question who they were because they knew that once they did they would never understand themselves again. He had been pretty good at not asking himself metaphysical questions even in college, where he had avoided the Philosophy Department like the plague and taken lots of courses in history and economics instead. He thought people who went off to “find themselves” were idiots. If they were over the age of eighteen, he thought they were terminal idiots. But it wasn't that simple. The man who had been happily married to Elizabeth Boukarian Demarkian wasn't the same man who could be involved with Bennis Day Hannaford. The man who had been happily encased in the rationalized cocoon of the Federal Bureau of Investigation wasn't the same man who could be described by
The Philadelphia Inquirer
as “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” Cases mattered to him. He did not want murderers walking the streets. He did not want them walking the streets even if he could be sure they would never commit another murder again. Bennis mattered to him, too; and no matter how angry he was, he couldn't even begin to doubt the fact that he did not want her to disappear from his life. If he could just hold on to those two things, he might be able to think his way out of this funk and do something about John Jackman's problem at the same time.