Glass Houses(126)

“I’m a middle-aged woman,” Elizabeth said. “I should think the saner response on my part would have been to worry that so many middle-aged women were killed.”

“Oh, not all of them were killed,” Gregor said. “That’s what’s so awful about a case where the investigating detectives have gone round the bend. Everything got shoved into a folder and nobody paid much attention to any of the details. They will, now. The police department has three or four people sifting through the mess of this investigation to find out who did what to whom. And I wouldn’t presume to know all of it. But I know this. You murdered Sarajean Petrazik and Faith Anne Fugate and Beatrice Morgander and Arlene Treshka. Just those four. I got sidetracked, for a while, by the fact that a number of the other women on the police PGK list were also residents of Green Point buildings, but that isn’t surprising, is it? Green Point is the largest landholder in the city. A good quarter of Philadelphia lives in Green Point buildings. But what mattered wasn’t Green Point buildings. What mattered was the kind of trouble they caused.”

“If people cause trouble in buildings,” Elizabeth said, “they get evicted. Even with the rent laws the way they are, they get evicted. And what makes you think I would know who was causing trouble anyway? We have an entire corporation full of people who do the day-to-day.”

“You do,” Gregor said, “but you still do some of it yourself. I know that because you went to see Tyrell Moss. In case you don’t know who that is, he’s an ex-con who owns a small convenience store in that same neighborhood where the fresh body was found with the skeletons. You went to see him your-self soon after the body of Faith Anne Fugate was discovered and Moss was picked up on suspicion and then released. His description of you was exact.”

“Don’t be silly,” Elizabeth said. “Why would I go see one tenant of one building?”

“To scope out the area and make sure Henry hadn’t made a mistake,” Gregor said. “Because that was Henry’s role in all this. He had to get the bodies out of the apartments and into alleys, and he had to tart them up so that they looked like they were the victims of serial killers. But none of you watches enough true crime. Serial killers are almost always driven by sex. They rape their victims or their victims’ corpses. If they can’t perform sexually, they use instruments, broom handles, whatever they can find. There was no sex here, anywhere. There wasn’t even the suggestion of sex.”

“So what do you propose?” Elizabeth said. “That I went around murdering harmless middle-aged women I didn’t know for—what? I didn’t need their money. And I have tenants who cause trouble every day. Maybe you think Margaret and I did it together, like a modern-day version of Arsenic and Old Lace. But then we would have had to use poison, and you haven’t said anything about poison being used.”

“No,” Gregor said. “Poison wasn’t used. But you and Margaret were in it together. You had to be. Neither one of you could have committed any of these murders by yourself. Neither of you is strong enough. And you had to be strong, to strangle four healthy women, even if they were knocked out at the time.”

“Knocked out?” Elizabeth looked amused.

“Well, we’re going to have to double check,” Gregor said. “But my guess is, yes, knocked out. With something like ketamine hydrochloride, I’d expect. I can’t see either of you, or Henry, running around buying illegal drugs off the street. That one’s legal, and vets have it. Routinely have it.”

“You still haven’t explained to me why I—why we, that is, are running around killing middle-aged women,” Elizabeth said.

Gregor smiled. “Mrs. Woodville, for God’s sake. They were all book-keepers.”