“Yes, I do know,” Gregor said. “And that might be true. But the fact is that Henry Tyder didn’t want to be out on bail if it meant being in the custody of his sisters. He told Russ Donahue that, and Russ told me. So what changed?”
“What do you mean, what changed?” Jackman said.
“What changed?” Gregor repeated. “A couple of days ago, Henry Tyder considered it practically a fate worse than death to be out of jail if it meant being in the company of his sisters. Today, he not only breaks jail, but he does it in a way that seems to indicate he asked one of those sisters to help. What changed? What’s happened between a couple of nights ago and now that makes Henry Tyder happy to put up with his sisters as long as he isn’t in jail?”
“Maybe it wasn’t like that,” Rob said. “Maybe he just used the sister to get out and now he’s somewhere on his own.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said. “And I assume he is on his own now that he’s out. It would be far too dangerous for him to stay in the company of Margaret Beaufort while you’re looking for him. But the fact remains, Henry Tyder didn’t want to be released to his sisters. He staged a nutty in the courtroom that absolutely ensured you’d lock him up. And now everything is different. I think it would be a good idea to start by asking why.”
2
It was not, Gregor thought, as he sat calmly watching everybody else have hysterics in one form or another, as silly a question as it sounded when you said it out loud. Yes, it was true, most inmates were interested in getting out in whatever way they could. That was why the police took so many precautions when they had to move inmates from one place to another. But it was also true that some inmates were more likely to bolt than others. On the surface Henry Tyder didn’t seem to be one of the inmates more likely to bolt. For one thing he hadn’t been convicted and sentenced, which meant that bolting would make it more likely that he would be both. Judges, juries, and the public tended to equate running off with evidence of guilt. After all, if you weren’t guilty, why would you run?
Gregor could think of several sensible answers to that question—because you got scared and lost your head; because you were convinced that the police were trying to frame you; because there was something you had to do in a limited period of time and you refused to be deterred from doing it—but none of them seemed to fit Henry Tyder as he had understood the man up to now. For one thing Henry Tyder’s mental weaknesses might be at least partially put on, and Gregor was even willing to concede that they were that, but they couldn’t be entirely fake. It wasn’t just rumor or pretense that the man had spent most of the last ten years pickled in alcohol. That had to take a toll. And late-stage alcoholism could lead to paranoia and acting out.
But the Henry Tyder he’d seen hadn’t been paranoid. His resistance to the idea of staying with his sisters had been childish, but it had also been perfectly rational. Gregor even understood the reasons for it and sympathized. He was also convinced that the acting out in court had been staged or almost staged. He was sure Tyder could have controlled himself if he’d wanted to. He rubbed the palms of his hands against his forehead. It was the kind of muddle that he liked the least. He preferred physical evidence to wading through the psychology of a man who wouldn’t have made sense to him even under the best of circumstances. In a way that was why he had been so good at coordinating investigations of serial killers. Novelists and television writers like to delve into the psychology of the serial killer, but in reality there was little to delve into. Tolstoy was wrong. It wasn’t happy families who were all alike, and unhappy ones who were each unhappy in its own way. It was the sane and happy people who had individuality. Serial killers did no more than display a. syndrome that was not particularly interesting after a while—or at least, male serial killers did. He’d been emphasizing that point to somebody just the other day. It may have been this morning. He was very tired.
He waited for John Jackman to hang up the phone again—John had been yelling; he was spending nearly all his time yelling—and said, “John, do you remember Myra Hinckley?”
“Who?”
“Or Karla Hrmolka. Or Rosemary West.”
“I know who he means,” Rob Benedetti said. “Myra Hinckley and Ian Brady were the Moors murderers. Karla Hrmolka was a similar case in Canada, but I can’t remember the man’s name. Rosemary and Frederick West were another similar case back around 1994 in the UK. He died, I think. Hanged himself in prison. I don’t remember what happened to her.”