Glass Houses (28 page)

“And you saw it even though there wasn't any light.”

“There was light come from the regular basement where I was. I had all the lights on.”

“Are those strong lights, the ones in the basement?”

Kathleen Conge turned away again. “I'm not gone talk nonsense to you no more. I'm only gone talk to the police.”

Gregor almost told her that she had the right to remain silent, and not just with him, but there was no point to it. He had the information he had come for, and more of it than he had hoped. He wondered if Marty Gayle had spent any time talking to Kathleen Conge just yet. He also wondered what was in the dirt cellar that Kathleen had gone looking for, and why she had gone looking just today. If the skeletons had been as exposed as she said they had been—and he wasn't sure of that—she might have seen a little something and gone digging for it and then not wanted to say. She couldn't have been coming to the cellar on a regular basis any time recently or she would have seen them before. She might have seen them before and waited until now to say anything about them, but Gregor doubted it. There was little that was genuine about Kathleen Conge, but she was most definitely genuinely upset.

She had turned her back to him, and he could see dirt and stains there, too. Up close, he had no trouble discerning that some of the stains were older than others, and that only some of them could have been made by dirt. Kathleen Conge was not a clean woman. She wasn't going to turn back to him to allow him to say good-bye, so Gregor abandoned politeness and just went. The wind had picked up, and it was beginning to get more than a little cold.

He made his way through the circle of uniformed police and back into the crowd, looking everywhere for Russ. He did not look for Marty Gayle. He could sit down with Marty Gayle and get that straightened out later. Now was not the time.

Russ was on the other side of the street now, sitting on the bottom step of a stoop with his legs thrust out in front of him. Gregor started walking over, looking back at the house just one more time, as if it would make more sense if he contemplated it from a distance.

R
uss had stopped trying
to get too close to the uniformed officers, but he had not stopped watching, and he was tall enough so that he could see clearly even when he was sitting down. As Gregor approached, he got up, an automatic gesture of politeness Gregor had stopped being used to decades ago.

“I called Donna,” Russ said. “I don't know why. Maybe I was bored. I
keep sort of coming to and being terrified she's gone off and had the baby when I wasn't paying attention.”

“Not for a couple of months though,” Gregor said. “At least, that was what Lida told me when I asked.”

“Not for a couple of months,” Russ admitted. “But you know what babies are. They come whenever. Like Bennis, I guess.”

“Bennis isn't a baby.”

“Not physically, maybe. Anyway, never mind. I'm sorry I brought it up. Donna was trying to get me to pump you.”

“About Bennis?”

“About you and Bennis. Bennis isn't talking.”

Gregor thought it was a very curious thing indeed, a time when Bennis wasn't talking to Donna. He let it go. “I just got a very interesting piece of information,” he said. “Did you know that there is a man who lives in this house who was once picked up on suspicion of being the Plate Glass Killer? And that he decorates his walls with pictures of serial killers who are supposed to be his heroes?”

Russ sat down again. “Really? He thinks they're heroes?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “I don't know what he thinks, although I'm going to find out eventually, and sooner rather than later. He isn't here at the moment. I talked to the woman who functions as superintendent for the building.”

“Kathleen Conge,” Russ said. “They wouldn't let me near her.”

“I've got no idea how credible a source she is,” Gregor said, “but most of what she told me would be easy to check. Does the name Bennie Durban mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“You haven't been through the files on the Plate Glass case? They should have sent you a pile of paper for discovery.”

“Not this soon, they shouldn't,” Russ said. “And they'll take their own sweet time about it, too. Anyway, you have to be on your way to trial to get discovery, and then I have to demand it, or a lot of it. But there would be another way to check. If this guy was picked up on suspicion of being the PGK, it would have been in the newspapers.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Absolutely necessarily. The cops have been desperate for months wanting to get something to say they were moving in on this guy. If they were arresting somebody, or even bringing him in for questioning, it would have gotten out.”

“Not necessarily,” Gregor said. “I know of at least one person in that category who got no newspaper publicity at all because I saw to it.”

“Really?” Russ rubbed his hands against his face. He looked cold. “Did you do that with only one person?”

“Only one, yes.”

“Why?”

Gregor shrugged. “He was a friend of Chickie George's. Chickie asked me to look into it, and I put a clamp on the gossip machine until I could figure it out. But he isn't the Plate Glass Killer, Russ. He couldn't be. I checked him out so thoroughly, he could have survived a nomination to the Supreme Court. Marty Gayle just picked him up because he's gay.”

“Okay,” Russ said. “But here's the thing. There's your guy, and this Bennie Turban—”

“Durban.”

“Durban. There were probably more. I wonder how many more. I can't remember what I've seen in the newspapers, but I've got to admit that before Henry Tyder entered my life, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the Plate Glass Killer. I wonder what would happen if I ran a search at
The Inquirer.
I wonder how many people would turn up.”

“One of the people who would turn up would be Henry Tyder,” Gregor pointed out. “You said yourself that the police had picked him up once before.”

“They did. But they must have picked up other people. Your guy, Bennie
Durban.
I can't remember. I wonder if all the pickups were alike. If there was a woman involved in each one. Can you tell me something? You worked on serial killer cases. Is it common for serial killers to kill somebody they know?”

“Sure,” Gregor said, “but that tends to happen at the beginning of a cycle. The first one they kill is someone they know, if they kill someone they know at all.”

“So the most likely victim to have a relationship with the real Plate Glass Killer would be the first one,” Russ said. “Who was the first one?”

“I don't remember. And you've got to consider that we may not actually know yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Gregor said, “what I heard from Kathleen Conge was that the bodies that were found weren't bodies but skeletons, which means they've been around for a while. The first one might be one we don't know about yet. It might be one of those.”

“But it's not likely to have been Conchita Estevez,” Russ said, “because she was well down the line. Number three or four at least. Which is my point here. There's another reason to think Henry had nothing to do with it.”

“Unfortunately, it would also leave most of the other men who've been suspected off the hook, too,” Gregor said. “I know there wasn't a pickup after the first one, or the first one to be discovered, because that was big news for a while, and not a thing. I don't know if anybody has ever been picked up with connections to the first one, Sarajean Petrazik. That was the name.”

“Oh, I remember,” Russ said. “God, that was a long time ago. She was, what, a bookkeeper or something. Not an accountant, nothing that big. Found in an alley behind a Quik Stop somewhere not very far from her own apartment. I'm sorry, I really didn't pay much attention.”

“That's because it wasn't reported as a serial killing,” Gregor said. “You never report the first one as a serial killing, just as a murder. It was after the second one that the papers started calling it a serial killing. I don't remember the name of the second one.”

“I don't either,” Russ said, “we're pitiful.”

“Not really. There was no reason for us to be paying attention at the time. But it is a way in. A way of looking at this that the police haven't thought of yet, and aren't going to in the case of Henry Tyder. You could look into it.”

“So could you.”

“I intend to,” Gregor said. “This whole Plate Glass Killer thing is so odd. It's not that there are never serial killer cases like this, but they aren't usual. In fact, they're very unusual. In fact, no matter how hard I try, I can't think of a case without an element of sexual sadism to it. Young women, younger boys. It's about sex and power. But there isn't any sex in this that I can tell, and the women aren't young.”

“Maybe this is a man who hates his mother.”

“You think you're joking, but I don't see any reason to rule that out.”

“I'm not ruling anything out,” Russ said. “What do you think happened to me anyway? I used to be a cop. Even after I got out of law school, I still thought like a cop—for years. Now I think like a defense attorney.”

“You're the one who wanted to leave the District Attorney's Office.”

“I know. But I wasn't expecting this.”

There was noise on the other side of the street. Russ stood up next to Gregor, and then went up another step or two on the stoop so that he could get a better look. Gregor could see the crowd in front of the door to the murder house, already held back by a line of uniformed officers, being pushed back even farther. Then the medical examiner's van backed in more closely, going right up on the sidewalk. Then the men began to come out, carrying body bags.

“That's another bag,” Russ said. “Holy damn.”

“Don't get too excited,” Gregor said. “You don't know what's in them.”

“I thought what was supposed to be in them was bodies.”

Gregor shoved his hands in the pockets of his coat. At least five bags, assuming there were no more in the basement, waiting to come out.

What was going on here?

I
t took four hours
to get out everything that had to be gotten out, and in all that time the crowd only grew. Sitting on the low stone wall that bordered the stoop across the street, Gregor found himself increasingly fascinated with the psychology of the crowd. This was not a rich neighborhood. It wasn't a particularly safe one. Surely all these people had been in the presence of a murder victim before or of the police investigating what had happened to one. Why would they stay outside like this on a wet night that was steadily getting colder?

Why Russ Donahue was staying was not a mystery. “I used to be a cop,” he said. “I trust cops. I trust Philadelphia cops. I don't think they're corrupt, and I don't think they'd railroad an innocent man if they knew he was innocent; but sometimes they don't know, or they think it's only a matter of time before everybody knows, and then you've got trouble.”

“What about Marty Gayle? Do you trust him?”

Russ shrugged. “I don't know him. I never worked with him, in or out of uniform. He's got a bad reputation about some things. Why? Don't you like him?”

Gregor didn't answer. He was used to working
for
the police. And, really, given the way Jackman had set it all up, he was working for the police now. What he was really used to was police support of his work, and he didn't like the fact that he wasn't getting it.

“That makes seven,” Russ said finally. “How could somebody have seven bodies buried in a cellar without anybody knowing about it?”

“We don't know that it's bodies, yet,” Gregor said. “Seven body bags doesn't necessarily mean seven bodies. They may be taking out pieces, or collections of pieces, rather than whole bodies. Skeletal remains.”

Russ coughed.

Gregor looked at his watch. It was going on three o'clock. The scene was surreal. He was tired and cold. He was too far away from the action.

He got the cell phone Bennis had given him out of his pocket and opened
it up. The police showed no signs of packing up to go, but they would, and sooner rather than later. He punched in Jackman's home number and waited until John picked up.

It's me.

“What the hell
time
is it?”

“About three. I can't believe you haven't been awake during all this. Do you even know about all this?”

“Of course I know about it. Body or body parts or bodies in a cellar; belongs to a house where one of the former suspects lived. For this I have to stay up?”

“I'm not exactly the most popular person at the crime scene at the moment,” Gregor said. “If you really want me to help with this, I have to have access to information, and the best information is on the scene and fresh. Right now I'm standing across the street from the police cordon talking to Russ Donahue about Bennis Hannaford's brain.”

“Who are the detectives at the scene?”

“Marty Gayle.”

“That's it? Just him? His partner isn't around?”

“Not that I could see.”

“His partner has to be around, Gregor. You don't go out to a scene like that on your own. Is there some kind of emergency with Cord Leehan that he couldn't come?”

“I haven't the faintest idea.”

“Damn.” There was the sound of rustling on the other side of the phone, rustling that Gregor was sure was not caused by John alone. He filed that away in the back of his mind. John was running for mayor after all. There was only so far he could ride the story about being “the most eligible bachelor in public office.” “Damn,” he said again. “Is Rob there?”