by Jane Haddam
“You’re not being much help,” Rob said. “I mean, you may be being of help to the case, and you probably are, but you’re not being much help to my nerves. We’d better go up and talk to John before he comes down and finds us because he’s going to be in a bad enough mood as it is. This is not the kind of mess you want happening on your watch while you’re running for mayor of Philadelphia.”
Gregor knew. He more than knew. He knew John Jackman’s temper, which was both controlled and legendary. He turned around to go back to the evidence room and tell Betty and Martha that he would be upstairs for a while, when a tiny young woman in extremely high heels came clattering around the corner and down the corridor.
“Mr. Demarkian? Mr. Demarkian? Is that you?”
“I’m Mr. Demarkian,” Gregor said.
“Oh, thank God,” the woman said. She took a deep breath, but didn’t seem to be able to get any air. “You have to come upstairs right away. To Mr. Jackman’s office. Oh, and you too, Mr. Benedetti, we’ve been trying to find you. It’s urgent. It’s very urgent.”
“What’s urgent?” Rob asked.
“Mr. Jackman told me to tell Mr. Demarkian, if he wanted to wait, he told me to tell him that Henry Tyder has just escaped from jail.”
PART THREE
DISAPPEARING WALL
ONE
1
John Henry Newman Jackman was livid. He was also shouting, which Gregor and Rob could hear as soon as they stepped out of the elevator on his floor. John Henry Newman Jackman had one of those voices. He had once sung bass in his church choir. He could have given James Earl Jones some competition on who got to be the voice of God. When he shouted, the walls shook.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Rob said, under his breath.
Gregor agreed, silently. He’d seen John in these moods before. This time, he was a bit hesitant to describe it as a mood. If Henry Tyder had really found a way out of jail, that was a good enough reason to be angry.
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?”
“No,” Jackman said. “As far as I can make out, from the blithering I’m hearing on the other end—”
“They wouldn’t blither so much if you wouldn’t shout,” the African-American woman said, coming in with a little stack of messages. “You scare them to death, and then you wTonder why they act scared.”
“I could fire you, too,” Jackman said.
“As if,” the African-American woman said, and went out.
“She’s the most extraordinary person,” Jackman said. “I’ve met black people who talk ghetto and black people who sound like they were born heir to the throne of England, but she’s the only one I ever met who sounds like Alicia Silverstone in Clueless. ”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “We were talking about where he escaped from.”
“Oh,” Jackman said. “Well. He had to go to the bathroom. He poked his head out of the door and told the guard on duty, and the guard took him down to the bathroom. And Margaret Beaufort came along.”
“To the men’s room?” Gregor asked.
“For the walk, I think,” Jackman said. “The guard let him into the bath-room, which is a single room, not a big one with stalls. Henry Tyder closed the door. Margaret Beaufort excused herself and went off down the hall toward the front of the building. And that was that. Ten minutes later the guard got suspicious and forced his way into the bathroom and Henry Tyder was gone, and Margaret Beaufort was long gone because she hadn’t come back from when she’d first excused herself.”
“There was a window in the bathroom?” Gregor asked.
“Yes. Of course,” Jackman said. “I
think it’s city code that you have to have windows in bathrooms. I’m not sure.”
“How is the window secured?” Gregor asked.
Jackman sighed. “It isn’t. It’s not a full window. It’s a little sideways thing, like you see for crawl spaces. It would take a midget to get through one of those things, Gregor. I’ve seen them. I was a cop in this city for years.”
“Henry Tyder did get through it though,” Gregor said.
“He must have,” Jackman said. “I don’t know. Maybe the story will be different when they all get down here and I can make them make sense. But that’s what it looks like so far. And I think I’m going to kill somebody.”
“It would be hell on your chances of election,” Rob Benedetti said.
Jackman glared. Gregor ignored both of them. He looked around Jackman’s office for a moment. He’d been in many of Jackman’s offices over the years, and in the cubicles Jackman had worked out of when he’d been an ordinary homicide detective. There was a small Carmelite cross on the desk, unobtrusive enough to be ignored by almost everybody who came in and unusual enough so that most people wouldn’t know it meant that Jackman was one of that very rare breed, an African-American Catholic. There was a picture of his mother and father in a silver frame. They were both dead, and Gregor had always assumed that the picture had been taken for a wedding anniversary. Beyond those two things, everything else in the office was work-related: stacks of papers and folders; the office furniture; the computer; law books, and a hard copy of the criminal code on the shelves against one wall. If Tibor was here, he’d be making noises about how Jackman ought to do something about himself, like settle down and get married.
Gregor turned back to the desk. “So,” he said, “does anything about this strike you as odd?”
“I should hope a jail break strikes me as odd,” Jackman said. “If jail breaks weren’t odd, we’d be in a hell of a mess.”
“No, no. I know jail breaks are unusual,” Gregor said. “I mean does anything about Henry Tyder breaking jail strike you as odd?”
“Well, he’s not Albert Einstein, if that’s what you mean,” Jackman said. “Of course, he could have had help. His sister must have had something to do with this. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have known to take off when she did.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said. “But she’s not exactly Albert Einstein either. It’s the other sister, Elizabeth Woodville, who’s the brains of the operation. No, I was thinking of something else. Henry Tyder in court for the bail hearing. It was unlikely that the court was going to set bail under the circumstances; but what struck me at the time, what struck Russ Donahue at the time, was that Tyder wasn’t exactly cooperating.”
“I don’t think that’s really what was going on,” Rob Benedetti said. “He seemed addled as hell to me. The cardinal archbishop thought he was mentally defective. From all the years of liquor, you know.”
“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.”
“Good,” Gregor said. “What about Aileen Wournos?”
“I remember her,” John said. “Serial killer in Florida. The first female serial killer. Prostitute who killed her Johns, I think. Or guys who tried to pick her up. Whatever does this have to do with what we’re doing?”
“The thing is,” Gregor said, “it was all about sex: Myra Hinckley, Jeffrey Dahmer. It was all about sex.”
“I can’t believe this,” John said. “We’ve got at least three people on the run, if I’m to believe your friend about Dennis Ledeski, every single one of them suspects in a serial murder case, and you’re telling me abo
ut sex?”
“Doesn’t it bother you that there’s been no sex with this thing?” Gregor asked. “Serial killers are mind-numbingly unoriginal. They rape and then kill, or they kill and then rape. The murder is a response to the sex or a cause for the sex. The sex is the point. And here we are, and there is no sex.”
“Personally,” Rob said, “I think he’s trying to kill his mother. It would fit, don’t you think? They’re all about that age. Well, most of them. Conchita Estevez was younger. Oh, and Rondelle Johnson.”
“And besides,” John said, “what can you possibly make out of a motive for anything else in this thing? Did any of these women have any money? I can’t remember that any of them did. Maids. Secretaries. Retail store clerks. Book-keepers. These were not a well-heeled bunch. The only person in this case so far with money, real money, is Henry Tyder, and nobody is killing him. Or, at least, I hope they’re not. Oh, Christ, that’s all we’d need.”
The phone on John’s desk rang again. He picked it up and immediately stopped shouting. Gregor shot Rob a look, and Rob shrugged.
“He’s a little exercised,” Rob said. “You can hardly blame him.”
“I don’t blame him,” Gregor said. “I find this sort of behavior a little dys-functional as a management style, but it seems to work for him.”
“The thing is,” Rob said, “I thought you said that this wasn’t a murder case. That all the murders weren’t connected. Or something like that.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “That’s true. If you go by the assumption that all these murders are the work of the same person or persons, you’re dead in the water, because they’re not. For instance, Dennis Ledeski killed Elyse Martineau, but not any of the others.”
John was just putting down his phone. “What?” he said. “What did you say?”
“Dennis Ledeski killed Elyse Martineau,” Gregor repeated. “I can almost guarantee it. And he didn’t kill any of the others because if Dennis Ledeski ever took to serial murder, it would be serial murder with lots of sex in it, and it would probably be serial murders of young boys. So he’s not a serial murderer; but he killed Elyse Martineau because she was his secretary, and she was on to his hobbies.”
