Glass Houses(5)
Linda wasn’t about to wait around to hear what they thought. She hurried off, the tray under one arm the way she must once have carried schoolbooks. Gregor watched her go and then looked down at the paper. The front page was entirely taken up by pictures of the man the police had arrested as the Plate Glass Killer, and the largest headline Gregor had seen on the Inquirer in years. He looked down at the subtitle: “Homeless Man Confesses to Plate Glass Killings.” He looked at the pictures of the man again and said, “Huh?”
“What is it, Krekor? You are not happy they have caught this Plate Glass Killer.”
“I’m just surprised at who they’ve caught as the Plate Glass Killer.” Gregor looked through the pictures one more time, then turned to the inside page and looked at some more. The Inquirer had gone all out, as if this were a political assassination. “Tyder Picked Up Once Before,” one of the subheads read. He ran his eyes over those paragraphs quickly: the accused man, Henry Tyder, had been suspected of being the Plate Glass Killer after the murder of Conchita Estevez, who had been a maid living in the house of his sisters. Gregor blinked. The syntax was awful. Somebody had put the article together at the last minute and without sufficient regard to things like grammar, punctuation, and spelling. He looked through the pictures of Henry Tyder again.
“Why didn’t he confess the first time?” he asked Tibor.
Tibor was obviously thinking about something else. He was leaning slightly forward, trying to get as full a look at the street as possible. Gregor tapped him on the arm.
“Why didn’t he confess the first time?” he asked Tibor again.
Tibor pulled his attention back to the table. “I don’t know,” he said. “Is that unusual? Is it the habit of serial killers to confess the first time they are suspected?”
“No,” Gregor said. “Quite the opposite. But then, most of them never confess at all, unless they get away with it for so long it begins to make them crazy not to get credit for it. And even then, it’s rare.”
“So then. Possibly this man was unhappy not to be getting the credit for it.”
“After only, what, eighteen months and eleven murders?”
“Tcha, Krekor. It would take you to think of it as only eleven murders.” “It’s not much for a serial killer,” Gregor said. He went back to looking at the paper. There were mountains and mountains of type. He looked into the face of Henry Tyder. It was the picture of him coming out of court after “causing a distubance,” whatever that meant. Gregor thought the man looked extremely pleased with himself.
“Why did he confess this time?” he asked.
Tibor brushed this away. “You are the expert on serial killers, Krekor, not me. If I had been in this man’s position, I would have confessed out of feelings of guilt, but serial killers are not supposed to have feelings of guilt. I have no idea why they do what they do.”
Actually, Gregor thought, almost nobody had any idea why serial killers did what they did. There were legions of psychologists with theories, and the theories ranged through everything from childhood sexual abuse to early addiction to pornography, but nobody really knew. Gregor Demarkian had spent over fifteen years of his life chasing serial killers, the last ten of them directing the first law-enforcement division ever dedicated to doing that and nothing else. He didn’t know either, and he didn’t think that his successor at the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit knew either. It was ridiculous to call this kind of thing “science.”
“Still,” he said.
He was so wrapped up in trying to make sense of it, he didn’t notice that the Ararat had gone almost completely quiet. If he had, he would have been more convinced than ever that the entire population of Cavanaugh Street was on a crusade to drive poor Phillipa Lydgate crazy. Instead, he kept running the most likely scenarios through his head. Henry Tyder confessed because he’d been caught red-handed. He confessed because he wanted the police to know how clever he was. He confessed because he was tired of the entire process and didn’t think he could stop by himself.
“Crap,” Gregor said.
Across the table, Tibor cleared his throat again. “Krekor, please,” he said. “You are not paying attention.”
Gregor thought he was paying far more attention than he should have been. The Plate Glass Killer case was not his case, in spite of the fact that he’d helped out Edmund George when a friend of his had been unjustly suspected, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted it to be. There had been a time when he found serial killers fascinating, but that time was long gone. If there was anything really interesting at all about the Plate Glass Killer, it was that he did not rape his victims, before or after death. That, and the fact that this man—this particular man—had confessed to being the perpetrator.