Glass Houses(29)

“Yeah, I know. I know better than you think. I’m fine with all this, Gregor, and I’d really like to have you on board because, trust me, the last thing I want, and the last thing Jackman wants, is for us to go after a Philadelphia Tyder on a charge of serial murder and then not be able to make it stick. Especially with the IPO coming. One of the sisters is a bubblehead, but the other one isn’t, and she’d have us in court in a second if her half brother got acquitted but the arrest screwed up the public offering. Why don’t you come down here tomorrow morning around nine, and we’ll have the materials for you to go over for background. I could do it sooner, I suppose, but we’re a little backed up and taking longer means we’ll at least be thorough.”

“Tomorrow will be fine,” Gregor said. “Tonight, I’m meeting with a psychologist I’m thinking of recommending to Russ.”

“Russ is still on the case?” Rob said. “Great, I’m glad. I’d never have expected those women to put up with him.”

“Henry Tyder hasn’t been declared incompetent yet. He’s the one who wants to put up with Russ.”

“Ah,” Rob said. “All right. This gets more interesting by the minute. See you tomorrow morning. I’ll assign one of the desk jockeys to it and have it all organized. Good luck with your psychologist.”

“Thanks,” Gregor said. Rob had already hung up. Rob was like that.

Gregor put the phone back in the cradle and then his head in his hands. The building was quiet. Even old George Tekemanian didn’t seem to be watching television. Usually, that television was on full blast. You could hear Oprah clucking for blocks. He didn’t want to get up and go to the window again. He didn’t want to read. He didn’t want to go back to Tibor’s. He didn’t want to watch television. That last one wasn’t all that surprising because he didn’t ever want to watch television. He only turned it on for the news, and the last time he’d turned the news on for any length of time was on and right after 9/11. He had no idea what he was supposed to do now. He had no idea what to think.

Finally he got up and got his jacket from the back of the chair he’d tossed it on when he’d first come in from Tibor’s. Bennis’s luggage was still everywhere. In his bedroom, three of her sweaters were now lying across his bed. He had pictures of her. He had her underwear in his chest of drawers. He had her special brand of tea in his kitchen cabinets. All of these things had been comforting during the long weeks while she was away, but now they were—he didn’t know what. Wrong. Frightening. A terrible testament to the fact that you could be married to someone without ever standing up in front of a priest and making it official.

If he stayed here any longer, he was going to go insane. His only choice was not to stay here.

He made sure he had his keys and headed out the door.





3


In the end Gregor met Alison Standish and her psychologist for dinner. He really had no reason not to. It might have been different if he and Alison had actually been having an affair. He kept telling himself that Bennis should assume he had been having an affair with someone, given her disappearance and her lack of explanations and all the other nutsy behavior she was prone to. Gregor was sure that any other man would have been having an affair, if not several, and one or two of the ones he had known while he was still with the Bureau would have been married to one of his affairs by now. The problem was that Gregor could not quite figure out why he and Bennis weren’t married yet. In fact, in every way that really mattered, they were—or had been, up until recently—and then he couldn’t explain what was going on. He knew couples who had been legally married for thirty years who were less settled in with each other than he and Bennis had been until she took off without giving him any idea of where or why she was going.

He spent the afternoon researching single-state serial killer cases and then doing VIPER searches for out-of-Pennsylvania cases that matched the MO of the Plate Glass Killer. He had the codes he needed to access the system. Being a consultant for police departments had enabled him to keep those current. Of course, he had them all on his computer at home. It would have been easier for him to go home and get it all done there. Instead, he’d gone to a local branch of the Philadelphia Public Library and searched through his wallet for the place where he’d written down the passwords he needed. He had a lot of passwords tucked away on the backs of business cards. It took him awhile to find the right one.

In the end he might as well not have bothered. There wasn’t a thing like what he was looking for anywhere in the system. He came across only two open cases where the killer did not sexually assault his victims before or after the murders. One was in Oregon with reports in Washington and Northern California, one was in Texas with reports in Oklahoma and New Mexico, and in neither case did the killer slash his victims’ faces with glass. As for the single-state cases, they were even less helpful. There were no other cases in Pennsylvania at all. Gregor would never have imagined that Pennsylvania was a particularly low-crime state, but there it was. At least as far as serial murder was concerned, Pennsylvania was practically the epicenter of Eden.