Glass Houses(75)
“But not big enough to fit all the boxes,” Gregor said. “There are some out in the hall. There are a lot out in the hall.”
“The only room on this floor big enough to hold all the boxes is the conference room, and the mayor will not let us commandeer that for your use. I gave you the biggest office we had. Bigger than this one. There’s a first-rate computer, better than mine, and a box on the desk with computer files.”
“All of them?”
Rob Benedetti cast his eyes toward the ceiling, and Gregor sighed.
“All right,” Gregor said. “What about last night? How soon will it be before we know from the Medical Examiner’s Office just what we’ve got and what we haven’t got?”
“End of the day,” Rob said. “I talked to him, and he promised. He knows this is a big deal just as much as you do. Hell, even without everything else, he’d know it was a big deal. You don’t get a serial killer case every day.”
“How many bodies was it in the end? Seven?”
“Only one, believe it or not, plus part of a hand, skeleton only. That’s part of what the medical examiner is working with today, but we think it’s going to turn out to be an artifact. There used to be a cemetery in that part of the city, back in the Colonial Era. It was moved when construction expanded, but we think the extra hand is just something that didn’t get found at the time. We’ll work it out. Only, Gregor, listen, I know this looks bad. I know this looks awful. But nobody was trying to screw this up. And nobody was being negligent. The department is under a consent decree, we’ve got lawyers coming out of our asses—maybe not the best metaphor under the circumstances—anyway, we did what we had to do when we had to do it and nothing of what we had to do was meant to make it possible for us to run a sensible case. For anybody to.”
“And Marty Gayle and Cord Leehan weren’t even trying to.”
“Yeah, well,” Rob said. “Do you want to go down and see your office? I asked the other clerk, Betty Gelhorn, to do a summary; and there’s one there on the desk, but not the final one, because she, uh, she—”
“She didn’t have much to work with?”
“Or too much. Let’s just say she didn’t have much access to Marty and Cord because they’ve, you know, gone home to sleep.”
The words that came to Gregor’s mind were, “God, give me strength.” He decided against saying them out loud. Instead, he got up when Rob got up and let himself be led out through the outer office, into the corridor, and down the hall. Now that he had a closer look at them, the boxes looked much closer to large than small after all. He wondered what they meant. Everybody was supposed to keep things on a computer these days. It cut down on the need for storage space. You only used hard copies to back up the most important of information. The only reason why so much of the material for this case would be in boxes instead of on discs or CDs was . . . what?
“Just a minute,” Gregor said, stopping in the middle of the hall. “Don’t tell me. They weren’t putting anything on a computer. They didn’t want the other one to be able to see what they had; so instead of putting it on the computer, they made hard copies and squirreled them away somewhere.”
“Well, sort of. Sometimes. There’s a lot on the computer, too.”
“So?”
“It might be a good idea if you didn’t yell right in the middle of the corridor,” Rob said. “I mean, I know you’re not the yelling kind, but—”
“What?”
“Well,” Rob said, “the thing is, there’s a lot on the computer, but so far we haven’t been entirely successful in getting hold of all the necessary passwords so that we can access it.”
3
The assistant they had assigned to him was a young woman named Delia O’Bannion, and she was scared to death of him. Gregor paid less attention to this than he might have otherwise. The situation was worse than he had feared, worse even than he had allowed himself to imagine when he first saw all those boxes in the hall, and it only got even worse the longer he sat at his desk trying to sort things into some kind of order. In the beginning, he had what he thought was a very good plan. He would arrange the information by victim, starting with the earliest (Sarajean Petrazik) and making his way right down to this latest one Henry Tyder was supposed to have killed, or not. He couldn’t remember the latest one’s name, and it didn’t help to go looking through the material he had. If the name was there, he had no idea where it was.
Or, he thought after a while, what it would look like. These were the craziest records he had ever seen in his life. There were one or two standard reports, yes, but most of the rest of the paper seemed to consist of random notes, some of them apparently in code. There were restaurant napkins with scribbles on them, matchbook covers with phone numbers on them, big sheets of lined notebook paper covered with handwriting that would have shamed a fourth grader. If he’d been the kind of man who drank in the middle of the day, he’d have sent Delia O’Bannion out to get him a scotch.