They went into the anteroom where John’s secretaries held sway. The older African-American woman was imperturbable, but the younger white one was in tears. Gregor took out his handkerchief and handed it to her.
“I keep telling her she can’t take it personally,” the African-American woman said. “You take it personally, you’ll have a nervous breakdown in a week.”
Gregor let himself consider the possibility that John was like this on a regular basis—and what that would mean in a mayor of Philadelphia—and let himself be ushered into the inner office with Rob in tow. John was on his feet and pacing, with his desk phone at one ear and his cell at the other.
“I don’t care what it takes,” he was saying. “You’re going to have the officers responsible in this office in an hour. And the only reason you’re getting that much time is that I’m allowing for traffic. I should make you crawl over car roofs. I should make you squeal. Get them here. Get yourself here. Be ready to have some explanation for this besides gross incompetence or I will have a way to make sure you get fired, and don’t believe I can’t.”
He slammed the desk phone into its receiver and did that odd tilting motion with his head that people did when they were talking on a cell. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Yes. I understand. Don’t assume he’s still going to be in uniform. She’s gone, too. For all we know, she brought him clothes. I don’t know. I don’t know. How the hell do you assume I’m going to know anything about that? I’m not there, I’m here, and—All right. You can do that. Yes, you can. I’ll talk to you later. Sooner rather than later. Don’t you dare screw this up.”
John Jackman flipped the cell phone closed and sat down in the chair behind his desk. He was sweating, which he almost never did. He looked like he had a headache. Gregor waited to be asked to sit down. So did Rob Benedetti.
“Well,” John said, after a while, “that’s the final straw It really is. I expect screwups from Marty and Cord. It’s what they do. But this was—This was—. I don’t know what this was.”
“Maybe we could sit down,” Gregor suggested.
John Jackman looked surprised. “Sure. Go right ahead. Sorry. I didn’t realize you were standing on ceremony. Sometimes I wonder about brain cells, do you know that? Especially the brain cells in this department. The whole department. Me. This is absolutely incredible. We haven’t had somebody break out of jail here in a decade.”
“Have you made it that difficult?” Gregor asked.
Jackman shrugged. “We’ve professionalized the process. Everybody has. Sometimes it bothers me. It used to be we’d take prisoners from jail to court handcuffed to the front and think that was pushing it most of the time. With the women we sometimes didn’t bother even with cuffs. Now we cuff them behind. We shackle them. We treat guys being arraigned for kiting checks as if they were ravening wolves who were going to grab a weapon and shoot up the joint at any moment. Most of the time I think it’s just crazy and wrong somehow. And then something like this happens.”
“He was being taken to court when he escaped?” Gregor asked.
Jackman and Benedetti both shook their heads at once. “He couldn’t have been,” Rob Benedetti said. “He’d have been shackled, like John said.”
“Right,” Jackman said. “No, he was in a conference room, one of those places where we let them talk to their lawyers. One of his sisters had come to visit him.”
“Which one?” Gregor asked.
Jackman pawed through the mess of papers on his desk. “Margaret Beaufort,” he said. “I think she’s the heavier one with the twee attitude. Anyway, she came and asked to talk to him. We think he might have called her. He made a call from the pay phone about forty-five minutes before she showed up. She came and asked to talk to him, and they brought him to the conference room.”
“And left them alone inside to talk?” Gregor asked.
“Yes, of course,” Jackman said. “They say they had an officer stationed right outside the door, and maybe they did. But you know, there are certain limitations to what we can do when we’re just holding them awaiting trial. They haven’t been convicted yet. We go as far as we can, but they do have the right to see their attorneys, and anybody else involved in their case, face-to-face. And we can’t keep an officer in the room because of—”
“Confidentiality issues,” Gregor said. “Yes, I know. So that’s what he did? He escaped from the conference room?”