Glass Houses(120)

When he got to the top floor, he looked around to make sure he was still alone, but he didn’t see how he wouldn’t be. He got the key in the lock and the door open. He went inside and locked up. There were two bolts in here that he’d put in himself, on one of those days when he was not as drunk as Everybody thought he was. There were a lot of those days. It was a complicated story.

He walked through to the living room and then to the bedroom. He looked around and sighed.

It was all still here. It would have to be. Nobody knew what was in this apartment. It was his one real secret place. It was his one secure place, and that was what mattered.

He sat down on the bed and picked up Sarajean Petrazik’s scarf. It was the first thing he’d taken. He kept it, always, lying across the pillows on a pristinely made-up bed.





FIVE


1


It was not the way Gregor Demarkian liked to bring a case to an end. After all, he’d been trained by an organization that took cohesion and structure so seriously, it often let those things get in the way of common sense. Now it was not common sense that was getting short shrift but just about everything. He hadn’t realized what a mess a pair like Marty Gayle and Cord Leehan could create. He didn’t really know if this case would ever recover from it.

That was not the sort of thing he wanted to tell Rob Benedetti right now, so he concentrated on trying to understand the city as they passed through it in Rob’s car. Detectives O’Shea and Fabereaux were in another car, which was good, because they talked nonstop, and Gregor wanted to think. Here was the problem. For most of the names on his list, the list of real victims of the Plate Glass Killer, there were no witnesses, and no suspects. Only Tyrell Moss, Alexander Mark, and Henry Tyder had been picked up near victims’ bodies, or sort of near them. In all the other cases, the record was a complete blank. At this late date, there was virtually no chance to go back and find people who might have been at or around the scene at the time. Even if you find them, the chances that they would accurately remember anything were close to nil. It wasn’t as if anybody had witnessed the actual murder or found the body and reported it—Gregor stopped.

“Rob,” he said.

“What is it? Do you know this part of town?”

Gregor didn’t know any part of town. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Who found the bodies.”

“What do you mean, who found them?”

“Just that,” Gregor said. “They didn’t come floating in off the street and plant themselves at their local precinct station. Who found the bodies? How did the police department come to know that there were any bodies at all? Think of Arlene Treshka. She was in an alley. Henry Tyder found her. Other people saw Henry covered in blood and went looking, and they found her, too. That was how she came to the attention of the police. What about the other bodies? Who found them?”

“Ah,” Rob said. He shook his head. “Do you know something? I have no idea. Isn’t that in the reports?”

“It might be in there somewhere,” Gregor said, “but at the moment, looking through the reports is like picking up ten pounds of rice one grain at a time. But somebody must have found the bodies. Even if it was just some guy going out into a back alley and seeing the body lying there and calling the police; somebody must have found them.”

“Well, Tyrell Moss found Carol Ann Fugate,” Rob said. “And the other one, the one who’s missing—”

“Dennis Ledeski?”

“No, the kid,” Rob said. “Bennie Durban. He found Rondelle Johnson, but not on his own. There was a whole crowd of people. I remember that because I asked Marty if he was absolutely sure he was looking at a Plate Glass Killing. I mean, it’s not a neighborhood where murder, or even random murder, is unknown. But Marty was adamant.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said.

He could have given a very long talk about what Marty Gayle had the right to be adamant about and what he didn’t, but that didn’t even begin to cover the things he wanted to say. They were coming up to Dennis Ledeski’s offices, something Gregor knew by the fact that the car was slowing. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood: old townhouses that had been converted into professional offices; a few expensive coffee shops; a big newsstand on one corner, covered with copies of today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.

The car pulled to a stop, double parked, in front of a small building with a bright red door. The driver looked over the seat to where Rob and Gregor were in the back.

“I’m going to have to go find a space. You’re looking for that one right there.”