“One of the people who would turn up would be Henry Tyder,” Gregor pointed out. “You said yourself that the police had picked him up once before.”
“They did. But they must have picked up other people. Your guy, Bennie Durban. I can’t remember. I wonder if all the pickups were alike. If there was a woman involved in each one. Can you tell me something? You worked on serial killer cases. Is it common for serial killers to kill somebody they know?”
“Sure,” Gregor said, “but that tends to happen at the beginning of a cycle. The first one they kill is someone they know, if they kill someone they know at all.”
“So the most likely victim to have a relationship with the real Plate Glass Killer would be the first one,” Russ said. “Who was the first one?”
“I don’t remember. And you’ve got to consider that we may not actually know yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Gregor said, “what I heard from Kathleen Conge was that the bodies that were found weren’t bodies but skeletons, which means they’ve been around for a while. The first one might be one we don’t know about yet. It might be one of those.”
“But it’s not likely to have been Conchita Estevez,” Russ said, “because she was well down the line. Number three or four at least. Which is my point here. There’s another reason to think Henry had nothing to do with it.”
“Unfortunately, it would also leave most of the other men who’ve been suspected off the hook, too,” Gregor said. “I know there wasn’t a pickup after the first one, or the first one to be discovered, because that was big news for a while, and not a thing. I don’t know if anybody has ever been picked up with connections to the first one, Sarajean Petrazik. That was the name.”
“Oh, I remember,” Russ said. “God, that was a long time ago. She was, what, a bookkeeper or something. Not an accountant, nothing that big. Found in an alley behind a Quik Stop somewhere not very far from her own apartment. I’m sorry, I really didn’t pay much attention.”
“That’s because it wasn’t reported as a serial killing,” Gregor said. “You never report the first one as a serial killing, just as a murder. It was after the second one that the papers started calling it a serial killing. I don’t remember the name of the second one.”
“I don’t either,” Russ said, “we’re pitiful.”
“Not really. There was no reason for us to be paying attention at the time. But it is a way in. A way of looking at this that the police haven’t thought of yet, and aren’t going to in the case of Henry Tyder. You could look into it.”
“So could you.”
“I intend to,” Gregor said. “This whole Plate Glass Killer thing is so odd. It’s not that there are never serial killer cases like this, but they aren’t usual. In fact, they’re very unusual. In fact, no matter how hard I try, I can’t think of a case without an element of sexual sadism to it. Young women, younger boys. It’s about sex and power. But there isn’t any sex in this that I can tell, and the women aren’t young.”
“Maybe this is a man who hates his mother.”
“You think you’re joking, but I don’t see any reason to rule that out.”
“I’m not ruling anything out,” Russ said. “What do you think happened to me anyway? I used to be a cop. Even after I got out of law school, I still thought like a cop—for years. Now I think like a defense attorney.”
“You’re the one who wanted to leave the District Attorney’s Office.”
“I know. But I wasn’t expecting this.”
There was noise on the other side of the street. Russ stood up next to Gregor, and then went up another step or two on the stoop so that he could get a better look. Gregor could see the crowd in front of the door to the murder house, already held back by a line of uniformed officers, being pushed back even farther. Then the medical examiner’s van backed in more closely, going right up on the sidewalk. Then the men began to come out, carrying body bags.
“That’s another bag,” Russ said. “Holy damn.”
“Don’t get too excited,” Gregor said. “You don’t know what’s in them.”
“I thought what was supposed to be in them was bodies.”
Gregor shoved his hands in the pockets of his coat. At least five bags, assuming there were no more in the basement, waiting to come out.
What was going on here?
PART TWO
OVER EXPOSURES
ONE
1
It took four hours to get out everything that had to be gotten out, and in all that time the crowd only grew. Sitting on the low stone wall that bordered the stoop across the street, Gregor found himself increasingly fascinated with the psychology of the crowd. This was not a rich neighborhood. It wasn’t a particularly safe one. Surely all these people had been in the presence of a murder victim before or of the police investigating what had happened to one. Why would they stay outside like this on a wet night that was steadily getting colder?