“So what am I supposed to do now?” John said. “We don’t have a female suspect in this case. In any of these cases. We don’t have a credible case for murder for gain with any of these suspects. Some of them were downright poor. And according to you, we don’t even know which ones we can assign to any serial killer at all. I might as well have been on vacation in Miami this entire time. In fact, it would be a good thing if I went now because if I don’t I’m going to gun down those two idiots right in front of Independence Hall at noon.”
Gregor sighed. “Calm down,” he said. “Betty and Martha are printing out some information for me. Once I have that, I’ll be able to tell you who to assign to what. Oh, and if I could have a password so that I could get into the computer files on the case, it would help. But in the meantime, have you looked for Elizabeth Woodville yet?”
“Oh,” John Jackman said, starting. “Crap.”
3
There was no point in staying at police headquarters, and really no point in staying near John Jackman when he was in one of his moods. The problem was, Gregor didn’t want to go home. It was an odd feeling, not wholly new. There had been times, in the weeks just after his wife had died, that Gregor had gone from library to restaurant to bar to movie theater in a vain attempt never to have to walk through his own front door. Since he’d come to Cavanaugh Street though—or come back to it, since he had grown up there, in the days when tenements had occupied the places townhouses did now and “rich” meant having two new pairs of shoes every year—he’d never had a day when he hadn’t preferred to be home than away. It was the idea of confronting Bennis, one more time, that made the difference.
Of course, during most of the time he’d known Bennis, including the months she’d been away, there’d barely been a day when he hadn’t preferred to be with her than away from her. He waited around while Martha and Betty went on printing what they had to print, first in John’s office and then down-stairs in the hall, sitting on yet another of the ubiquitous molded plastic chairs while he stayed well out of the line of fire. If somebody ever made a movie about John Jackman, the part would have to be played by Jamie Fox instead of Denzel Washington, somebody who could really bellow when the going got tough. It didn’t matter. The difficulty wasn’t John’s mood or even Bennis’s neuroses. John’s mood was never good, and Bennis took on the invention of new forms of neurotic behavior the way a pious Catholic schoolgirl might take on the project of becoming a nun. The difficulty was the fact that this was not his usual kind of case. This was not a tangle that local authorities had been unable to unravel or a cold case where a fresh mind and head could bring new perspective to old material. This was a bureaucratic snafu on a level usually reserved for the United States Army. He could solve some of it in the usual way, but he was worried that other parts of it, the parts not directly related to the central case, might not be possible to solve at all. Or, if they were solved, would not be possible to prosecute. There was good reason why the protocol books on how to handle evidence were hundreds of pages long. The whole concept of “reasonable doubt” was by now completely out of hand. What had once been a formula for common sense was now a demand that prosecutors present a case the defense could not alternatively present as the outline of a murder mystery. Everybody watched too much TV. Everybody went to too many movies. Everybody read too many books, and it didn’t help much that the books had titles like Black Water these days instead of Death Stalks a Wilted Celery. The process was the same. The mental habits the process created were the same. The assumptions had become pandemic: the police are either incompetent or corrupt or both; the most obvious suspect is the one least likely to have committed the crime; the real explanation for any criminal occurrence is both obscure and esoteric, requiring at least half an hour of oration to explain.
It wasn’t that Gregor wanted people to stop reading murder mysteries. It wasn’t even that he wanted them to stop watching true-crime television documentaries. He did think American Justice and Cold Case Files had a lot to answer for, and he was never going to get over the tendency of City Confidential to profile “cities” with names like Pig’s Knuckles, Arkansas. Still, people liked what they liked, and comfortable people who lived largely without the threat of day-to-day violence were fascinated by murder. All that was fine. What he wanted was to be able to outline a reasonable case and have it accepted as one, instead of being second-guessed as too easy to be taken seriously.