Glass Houses (46 page)

“Alleged perpetrator,” the other one said.

Gregor rubbed his forehead. “She told me about Bennie Durban that night when I wasn't wasting my time fighting with Marty Gayle. But about Beatrice Morgander.”

“Yes,” Rob said. “Well, here it is. There was the nephew, but Beatrice her-self was something of a pain in the ass. She picked fights with other tenants. She left her garbage in the halls. She paid rent when she felt like it. Kathleen Conge did what she could to get her to fly right; but when it didn't work, she called the office and complained.”

“Why didn't she just evict her?”

“The city has laws on who you can evict and why,” Rob said. “They're not as bad as New York's, and they don't mean landlords have to keep impossible tenants, but the bigger landlords want to be careful because once they get hit they could find their entire operation under the microscope. And, quite
frankly, most of them couldn't survive it. Anyway, before she evicted anybody, Kathleen Conge had to inform the front office and explain her reasons and get an okay.”

“And did she?” Gregor asked.

“Yes,” Rob said. “She did. I called the office and asked. I—”

“Who did you ask?” Gregor asked.

“Oh,” Rob said. “I don't remember. Somebody called the legal compliance officer? He's got a title like that. Anyway, Kathleen Conge called, laid out her case, asked for the okay to evict, and got it. But she didn't evict because Beat-rice Morgander was gone. By the time Kathleen Conge got to her door to tell her to go, there was no sign of her. She'd left her clothes and most of her other stuff in the apartment and just disappeared.”

“And we have to presume she was dead,” Gregor said.

“Oh, definitely,” Rob said. “The times fit with what the medical examiner is telling us. Just about a year ago in late February. But here's the thing. That lets Henry Tyder out completely, at least on this one.”

“Does it,” Gregor said.

“Yes, it does,” Rob said. “And I've double-checked this. During the week Beatrice Morgander disappeared, and the medical examiner thinks she probably died, Henry Tyder was in a sanatorium in Bedford Hills drying out for the three thousandth time. His sisters put him there after we released him, after we'd picked him up for the murder of Conchita Estevez.”

“Excellent,” Gregor said.

“I don't think this is excellent,” the tall one said. “This is a mess. All these women murdered, and the prime suspect turns out to have a perfect alibi.”

“Maybe he snuck out,” the other one said. “A sanatorium isn't maximum security.”

Gregor was tired of standing up. He gestured to the chair behind Rob's desk, got the nod, and sat down. Then he pulled the piece of paper with the chart on it out of his pocket and put it down on his desk.

“Here it is,” he said. “Here's what you actually have: Sarajean Petrazik, Conchita Estevez, Beatrice Morgander, Rondelle Johnson, Faith Anne Fugate, Elizabeth Bray, and Arlene Treshka.”

“About half the women,” Rob said. “A little more.”

“The women actually murdered by your serial killer,” Gregor said. “Elyse Martineau was murdered by Dennis Ledeski. Debbie Morelli is a possible for the serial killer list, but I doubt it. The timing isn't right.”

“What's timing got to do with it?” the tall one asked.

“Serial killers tend to strike in patterns,” Gregor said. “The almost universal pattern is for the murders to be widely spaced in the beginning, then to
come at closer and closer intervals over time. That's not always true, but I've never known a case where a serial killer sped up and then slowed down again unless there was an external reason for the slowdown—he ended up in prison for something else, for instance, or he had to go to the hospital—and there's nothing like that here. So we'll keep her off.”

“If Dennis Ledeski really did kill Elyse Martineau,” Rob said, “then did what's his name, the guy we pulled in for Debbie Morelli—”

“Kill her?” Gregor said. “That would be Alexander Mark, the one who was working as Dennis Ledeski's assistant in order to nail him. No. I think I can say confidently that Alexander might have murdered Ledeski if push came to shove, but he wouldn't have murdered a middle-aged woman he barely knew. Part of your problem is the records. Marty and Cord were called in every time there was a suspicion that a case belonged to the Plate Glass Killer, and they don't seem ever to have said no. The bigger the case, the more glory they stood to get from it, assuming they could ever get their partner to resign or die. You're going to have to have somebody go through all these cases, one by one, and figure out just why each one was assigned to the Plate Glass Killer. Some of them are going to be so cold by now, I don't know if you'll ever straighten them out.”

“Okay,” Rob said. “I see that. But you don't get it yet. Henry Tyder could not have killed Beatrice Morgander. We're not talking about psychology either. He couldn't have done it; he was locked up at the time. Henry Tyder isn't the Plate Glass Killer.”

“You never thought he was,” Gregor said.

“No, I didn't,” Rob said. “But that was before all this, and he bolted; and his sister seems to be missing in action with him. And if that isn't indicative of guilt, I don't know—”

The office door opened and the young woman from the anteroom stuck her head in.

“Mr. Benedetti?” she said. “There's a call for Detectives O'Shea and Fabereaux. It's something about a break-in.”

I
t was not that
Gregor Demarkian was lost in Philadelphia. He had grown up in Philadelphia, and he'd been living here, since his formal retirement from the FBI, for nearly a decade. It was just that he had a terrible sense of direction, and that he tended not to remember places he was not going to on a regular basis. He would visit a part of the city that was new to him, it would become part of a case, and he would visit it over and over again. He would become familiar with it. Then the case would be over; he wouldn't have to go
back there again for months; he would forget all about it. When the time came to find it again, he would be lost.

In this case he was dealing with parts of the city he had never seen at all, not even in the days before he had been an adult and on his way out of here. He wasn't even sure if all these sections had existed when he was growing up. There was the problem caused by the fifties, when the city almost seemed to collapse and so many people moved out to the suburbs. It seemed as if “city planners” had spent a decade putting up concrete overpasses and burying neighborhoods under them. Then there was the problem of the nineties, when immigration had stopped meaning Italians and Greeks and started meaning an entire collection of refugees from places he'd never heard about in school: Vietnamese, Thais, Cambodians, Albanians. If Gregor Demarkian had tried to put all these people into order, he'd have ended up with a hash.

“I don't get it,” Rob said, as they waited for his assistant to bring in a city map. “I thought you said that that call was important. If it's important, why aren't Kevin and Ed here going out to talk to this guy?”

“They will go out and talk to this guy,” Gregor said. “I'll go with them. But I want to see the map first. The map is important.”

“Gregor, for God's sake,” Rob said. “I told you. Henry Tyder cannot be guilty of these murders. At least, he can't be guilty of the ones on that list because he can't have killed Beatrice Morgander. What do you think you're trying to do?”

“Settle something in my mind,” Gregor said.

There was a knock on the door, and Rob's assistant came in carrying a map. “This is the biggest one I could find,” she said. “I had to go down to the corner to get it. If you want to go over to Police Headquarters, they've got a wall map there that's bigger, but for something you can put out on the desk, this is it.”

“Thank you,” Gregor said, taking the map. “This will do fine.”

He spread the map out on the desk and looked at it. “The trick,” he said, “is to be able to see the pattern whole. Did you bring those pins?”

“The colored ones,” the assistant said. She reached into the pocket of her skirt and came out with a small, clear plastic container. “Here you go.”

“Hold this,” Gregor handed the plastic container to the tall one. He was pretty sure by now that the tall one was Kevin O'Shea, but not so sure that he'd risk calling him by name. “I want green ones for the women in this case who are both on my list and who were found in alleys near Green Point buildings. I want blue ones for women who are not on my list and who were found in alleys near Green Point buildings. I want red ones for any women who don't fit into either category.”

“What about women who are on your list but weren't found in alleys
near Green Point buildings?” Rob asked. “Shouldn't you have a color for them?”

“There's no need,” Gregor said. “There isn't anybody who fits into that category. Now, this break-in we're supposed to go investigate—that's a repeat area, am I correct? One of the women was found in the alley right behind it.”

“Yeah,” the tall one said. “That's Faith Anne Fugate. I read the file this morning.”

“Not the whole file,” the other one said. “You can't read the whole file; it's huge. And it's not in order.”

“But there was a summary at the top,” the tall one said. “That's a guy named Tyrell Moss, picked up on suspicion when the body of Faith Anne Fu-gate was found in an alley behind his store.”

“And his store is a Green Point building,” Gregor said. “We can confirm that.”

“On the computer,” the tall one said.

“If you could,” Gregor said.

The tall one opened the map across Rob Benedetti's desk, looked around for a moment, and put the pin in. Its little green plastic top gleamed green in the glare from the overhead light.

“All right,” Gregor said. “What else do we have? The house on Curzon Street, where the skeletons and the older bodies were found.”

The tall one put in another pin.

“Now,” Gregor said, “from what I've been able to figure out, there was a guy there, living at that house—”

“Bennie Durban,” Rob said.

“Right, who was picked up on suspicion of one of the others,” Gregor said.

“Rondelle Johnson,” the tall one said. “But she wasn't found near the house on Curzon Street. She was found in an alley next to the restaurant where this guy works. I've got it in my notes, just a minute.” He got a notepad out of the inside pocket of his jacket and rifled through it. “Here it is.”

“Pin, if you would,” Gregor said.

The tall one put in a pin. The first two pins had been close together. The third was a hand's stretch across the map. The tall one flipped through his notes some more.

“I've got a lot of material on this guy,” he said. “He's missing, did you know that? We went looking for him after the bodies were found, and he'd taken off. He had a roomful of pictures of serial killers up on his wall, the way teenaged girls put up pictures of rock stars. At least that was in the notes. Ed and I haven't actually gotten a chance yet to see for ourselves.”

Ah, Gregor thought. The tall one had to be Kevin, since he'd just called
the other one Ed. “I know about Bennie Durban,” he said. “Granted, he'd be a good man to get a hold of right now. But at the moment—who else do we have? Sarajean Petrazik, she was the first.”

“Behind Independence Hall,” Rob said immediately. “Boy, do I remember that. You should, too, Gregor, if you were here when it happened. You wouldn't have believed the stink. Articles. Stories on the television news. Doom has come. Americans can't even visit the place where their country was born without getting themselves killed.”

“Was she a visitor?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Rob said. “She was a court clerk on her day off.”

“And I take it Green Point doesn't own Independence Hall. Or at least not yet.”

Kevin O'Shea looked through his notes again, then put them down. “I don't know what Green Point owns and what it doesn't,” he said, “but they do own apartment buildings and they own some right over there, also some town houses, maybe a block or two away.”

“One of them should border on the alley where the body was found,” Gregor said. “It's not enough that she just lived in one.”

“Lived in one what?” Rob asked.

“In a Green Point building,” Gregor said. “Alexander Mark went to work this morning and checked on the women who were part of this case and who had been Dennis Ledeski's clients. Every one of them lived in a Green Point building. But that's not enough. The bodies should have been found near Green Point buildings. Can you put the pin in over there and then find out what else is around that area besides Independence Hall?”

“Sure,” Kevin O'Shea said. He put another pin in.

“Now, Conchita Estevez,” Gregor said. “That's a Green Point building, I take it. Unless the Tyders own it separately.”

Kevin O'Shea put another pin in, this one well away from all the other three. Rob Benedetti shook his head.

“I can't believe this,” he said. “I told you that Henry Tyder can't possibly be the person who committed these murders, not if you think that all the ones on your list were killed by the same person—”

“They were,” Gregor said.

“Then he's out of it, Gregor. He really is. I don't know what you're getting at. And you're wasting valuable time. That break-in may actually mean something.”

“Oh, it means something all right,” Gregor said, pointing Kevin O'Shea to the name of Elizabeth Bray.

Kevin O'Shea leaned over and put a pin in the map just a slight way away from the one for Sarajean Petrazik.