“No,” Alexander admitted. “I mean, I did check, but none of them were. But they didn’t all have to be clients, did they? He’d have been crazy to run around killing nobody but clients. They could have been connected to him in some other way.”
“Were you able to find another way?”
“No,” Alexander said. “I wasn’t. But I think it’s worth looking into, don’t you?”
Gregor nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do think it’s worth looking into. Does Mr. Ledeski keep back content information on clients? How they came to show up at his door? Who referred them?”
“Sure,” Alexander said, “In fact, I keep it. Or I have, you know, for the last few months.”
“Can you check that information on the victims who used to be clients? Check it and get it back to me?”
“Sure.”
“Where’s Mr. Ledeski now?” Gregor asked. “It must be getting toward evening. Has he gone home? Where does he live?”
“Gregor, for goodness sake,” Bennis said. “It’s after six.”
“Dennis,” Alexander said carefully, “seems to be missing in action. I’m fairly sure he’s taken off.”
“Taken off?”
“Gone out of town,” Alexander said. “Maybe permanently and under an assumed name.”
“Another one,” Gregor said.
“What?” Bennis said.
“Dennis has other problems besides being a serial killer, if he is one,” Alexander said. “He’s a full-bore stop, dyed-in-the-wool pedophile. I knew it the first time I saw him. His picture was in the paper, and I looked at it, and I knew when I’d seen it before. I was coming out of Saint Joseph’s on Loudon Street. I was coming out of a meeting. And it wasn’t just the once. I saw him half a dozen times, and he wasn’t coming out of a church. He was coming out of a porn shop. And I know the porn shop. Every gay man in Philadelphia knows what goes on in that porn shop.”
“Loudon Street,” Gregor said. He picked up his list and looked at it. There was Saint Joseph’s, and there was Loudon Street. “Debbie Morelli was the woman you were picked up for questioning about,” he said. “That’s right, isn’t it? I helped you out with it.”
“You helped me beyond words,” Alexander said. “And I thank you. But maybe that’s another connection nobody knows about. That Dennis was on Loudon Street right across the alley from where Debbie Morelli was found. I do think that there’s enough to be going on with, don’t you? And now he’s gone. God only knows where. And I’m not standing here worrying that he’s killing women.”
“It’s the pedophile thing that really gets to him,” Bennis said.
Gregor wasn’t really ignoring her. He just couldn’t think of a way of responding to her that wouldn’t feel utterly unnatural. He looked back at his list again. Then he took a pen out of his pocket and made notes beside the names of Sarajean Petrazik, Elizabeth Bray, and Elyse Martineau.
“Yes,” he said. “All I can ask is that you get me the back content information, if you can do it without putting yourself in any kind of danger.”
“Dennis isn’t a danger to grown men,” Alexander said. “They scare the death out of him, no matter how gay they are.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well, do that then. As quickly as possible, if you can. Right now I seem to hear a meeting coming in through the front door.”
3
Rob Benedetti was having a bad day. Gregor had been able to see that earlier in the day, but by now the man was almost entirely white and the young woman with him looked even whiter. Gregor left Alexander Mark and Bennis, Betty, and Martha in the evidence room and its antechamber, and went down the hall to greet him.
“Well,” he said. “You look about as bad as I feel.”
“I think I’m going to look worse. How much of what you know does John know?”
“Not much yet,” Gregor said, “but I’m going to have to tell him. For one thing because the first thing the two of you are going to have to do is to get those idiots off this case. And I mean off. I want them removed and barred from coming anywhere near the files. If you have to lock them up—I don’t know if I mean the files or Marty and Cord, but I don’t really care—this has to be the end of their contact with the material from this case. Which is about to become cases. Because this isn’t a case.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Well,” Gregor said. “If it’s any consolation, I do think you have a serial killer on your hands, just not the one you think you do. And not one who can account for all this material. There’s a young man in there named Alexander Mark—”