“We can pull Marty, but we can’t pull Cord.”
“Why not? He’s not competent on this case, Rob. I don’t care if he’s gay, straight, or a kumquat, he’s not competent to be here.”
“They may both be nuts,” Rob said, “but it was Marty who put Cord in the hospital.”
“What?”
“Not for long. They just kept him overnight for observation. But still. If we pulled them both, it would look like we were blaming the victim.”
“He was a victim? Marty hit him from behind?”
“Hell, no. And he hit Marty with the end of a length of metal tubing, but it only sort of bounced off Marty’s head, so Marty didn’t have to be hospitalized. So you see—”
“I see that the department has got the most important case it’s had to handle in the last decade in the hands of two detectives who not only hate each other but who can’t be in the same airspace with each other without trying to kill each other. I see that you have just pulled parts to I don’t know how many bodies out of somebody’s cellar, which may or may not have anything to do with the eleven women who are supposed to have been killed by the Plate Glass Killer, and you’re putting that investigation in the hands of those two on top of it. As far as I can tell, they’re not doing their jobs; they’re not even making it through the routine. You had to file an FBI report yourself. Are you crazy? Is John?”
“Gregor, listen,” Rob said. “Please. There are lawyers everywhere on this one. There really are. We can’t just pull them off. Well, maybe Marty. But we can’t—”
“Listen,” Gregor said. “It’s probably four o’clock on the morning by now. I want to come down to your office tomorrow around two o’clock in the after-noon. I want you to have every single thing on this case for me to look at. You don’t have to have the actual evidence, but you do have to make sure you can find it, not that it’s just listed on somebody’s piece of paper. I want it all in a pile where I can look at it, and I want an empty office for myself so that I can work on it, and I don’t want you to tell those two idiots where I am. I don’t know if it’s occurred to you yet, but there may not even be a serial killer case here. And that’s just the happiest of the worst case scenarios I can think of.”
“I know,” Rob said. He took a deep breath. “I know. It’s okay. We’ll do it. Don’t worry. And thanks, Gregor, for taking this on.”
“Why do I get the feeling that you and John knew what I was taking on and didn’t bother to tell me?” Gregor said. “Never mind. I know why I get the feeling. I’m going to make a point of waking John Jackman at two o’clock every single morning from now until this case is solved. Or cases. Good night.”
TWO
1
There were people who though Bennie Durban was stupid, but that was not entirely true. It was true that Bennie had never been much use in school. Any quick look at his transcripts would have produced a sea of Cs and Ds from an institution not known to give them out freely. If Bennie had known what grade inflation was, he would have known that Willard Dawson High School was the ground zero of a grade-inflation epidemic. Still, grades never told the whole story about anyone. Bennie himself could remember a boy everybody had been convinced was some kind of mental retard, trailing through classes “mainstreamed” because his mother would have nothing to do with Special Education. Then came fall of senior year and the kid had taken the SATs and aced them, straight across the board. It turned out he wasn’t mentally retarded but some kind of genius and bored out of his skull.
Bennie had been bored out of his skull in school, too, but not because he understood too much. The thing was, it wasn’t because he understood too little either. The things they wanted him to learn seemed straightforward enough, just useless. Did it matter where and when and by whom Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo? Did it matter what the white whale was supposed to signify in Moby-Dick? His days were full of questions like that, and the farther along he got the more of them he had. Going day after day had made him feel tied up and in jail. School was like jail because they told you when to sit and when to stand and when to move from one place to another. They even made you get permission to go to the bathroom. He would sit for hours in small chairs with note-books open on the swing desks, scribbling in notebooks because he knew that if he did not scribble, the teacher would come down the row and demand to know what he was doing. Usually, he wasn’t doing anything except daydreaming or wondering what it would be like to get the teacher in a back alley somewhere and slit her throat. When Bennie dreamed about murder, he always dreamed about knives. Knives were cleaner than guns, and they made less noise.