“Maybe.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Well, look at this from my point of view,” Cord said. “Some woman calls up in the middle of the night, the uniforms come out, find what looks like the remains of one or two women. So they call in. And just in case, they call—not me, but Marty. Always Marty. Because Marty’s not a fag. Marty’s not a queer. Marty’s—”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “but that doesn’t have anything to do with whether these bodies are the work of the Plate Glass Killer, does it?”
“Marty Gayle would just love it if there were earlier cases than the ones I found. He’d just love it. It would turn the whole case around. It would make him look like a genius.”
“And that means—what?” Gregor asked. “That he’d say these were vic-tims of the Plate Glass Killer even when they weren’t?”
“Hell, he’d do more than that. He’d come along with a length of nylon cord and do the necktie on them himself. He’d do anything he had to do to screw me over.”
“I really don’t see how finding an earlier victim would screw you over.”
“It would make him look like a genius. It would make me look like the runner up. It’s the way he thinks. I’m telling you.”
Gregor had come to the opinion that it was the way both of them thought, and that the whole thing was a worse disaster than he’d imagined. The ambulance had been closed up and was now starting to run its engine. A uniformed patrolman coming out of the door to the house closed it behind him. Gregor could hear the crowd sighing around him.
“You got lucky,” he said. “That’s a big crowd out there. They could have gotten ugly.”
“They would have gotten ugly if they’d known they had a fag where they could get their hands on him.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. He only meant to punctuate the silence. Cord Leehan decided to take offense.
“Oh, don’t tell me you’re one of those,” he said. “Don’t tell me you go around thinking you know what it’s like to be gay. You don’t know what it’s like to be gay.”
Gregor didn’t know what it was like to be gay, and he didn’t know what it was like to be a jerk, but Cord Leehan was both; and it was the jerk part that was getting to him. He coughed again—if he kept this up, he was going to sound like Sarah Bernhardt in Camille —and begin to move slowly and cautiously toward the center of the action. Marty Gayle was over there, but not near Rob Benedetti, which was all Gregor asked.
The police cordon pulled back. The ambulance was trying to get through. The crowd swayed forward, but it was only a sway. The world had gone so cold Gregor wished he’d brought his heavier coat. It might only be that he was very tired. He got cold when he got tired.
He thought about Bennis, who had told him that he felt cold when he got tired. He’d never noticed it himself. He thought of Alison, who didn’t talk about his bodily states if she could help it. He put it all out of his mind and tapped Rob on the shoulder.
“There you are,” Rob said.
“I was talking to Cord Leehan.”
“Oh, God,” Rob said.
Gregor stepped back to let two uniforms go by carrying armloads of evidence bags. “Do you realize what a complete mess you’ve got here? The both of them ought to be locked up. And I do mean the both of them. You’ve got at least eleven women dead, possibly more if this turns out to be related. You’ve got a man in jail that even you and John aren’t sure ought to be there. And you’ve got what going on here with this investigation? In the hands of these two?”
“Yeah,” Rob said. “I know. Everybody knows.”
“And that’s it? You know? Has it occurred to you, or to John, for that matter—who usually possesses a modicum of common sense—that your real danger isn’t that you’ll jail the wrong guy but that you won’t be able to jail anybody at all? Who’s taking care of business while the two of them are busy spraying testosterone all over each other? Who’s keeping track of the evidence? Who’s double-checking witnesses? Has anybody even bothered to put in a report to the FBI’s Vicom unit?”
“That we’ve done,” Rob said. “That, I can guarantee you.”
“How?”
“I did it myself. Well, my office did.”
“Case closed,” Gregor said. “You can’t let this go on like this. You really can’t. You need to pull both of them off this case and put it in the hands of a pair of officers who can at least think straight.”