Glass Houses(111)

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.”