Glass Houses(112)

“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.

“Listen,” Gregor said. “The most important thing we know, the most important point in this whole mess, is that Henry Tyder was locked up in rehab when Beatrice Morgander was killed. Not when any one of the women on this list were killed, but when Beatrice Morgander in particular was killed.”

“Why?” Rob demanded.

“Because,” Gregor said, pointing Kevin O’Shea in the direction of Debbie Morelli, “Beatrice Morgander was not found in an alley.”





FOUR


1


Tyrell Moss did not think of himself as an important person. In fact, it was one of the most important principles of the program he had been through, the program that was not really a program all those years ago, that he understand that he was Just Like Everybody Else.

“It’s living in the clouds that kills you,” the Reverend Emmett Walters had told him, when he’d first started going to church. “There’s no air up there. First you go crazy, and then you die.”

Charles Jellenmore lived in the clouds. Tyrell saw that every day. And every day he tried to do something to bring the boy down because if the boy didn’t come down of his own free will, he’d end up crashing into the pavement. Even so, Tyrell understood the impulse. It was one thing to say that you should give up a fantasy world where you were the most important human being on the planet, and everybody owed you deference. It was another to make yourself live in the ordinary day-to-day, when the world held you to be less important than some people’s dogs. It was damned nearly impossible to do if you could see no end to the day-to-day, if the future stretched out before you just as in the past—endless and without change.