by Jane Haddam
“Oh, the pedophiliac,” Rob said.
“You haven’t even met Dennis Ledeski,” John said. “I can’t believe you’re saying this.”
“Well, I could be wrong,” Gregor said, “but you can check that out. And I’m not. Wrong, I mean. It must have been Marty and Cord who investigated Ledeski, though, because if Ledeski had child porn on his computers somewhere, any competent first-year detective should have been able to find it, and they didn’t. My guess is that Ledeski was flabbergasted that he got away with it, and he figured he wasn’t going to get away with it much longer. So he bolted, and now he’s out there, too, doing God only knows what. I do think that if you impound all those computers, though, you’ll find what you’re looking for. Whether you’ll convict him of the murder of Martineau depends on just how stupid he is, and right now I have no way of judging that.”
“It’s all right,” John said, taking a deep breath. “We do have bulletins out for him. And for Bennie Durban. And for Henry Tyder. Maybe I could just declare martial law and get it over with.”
“It matters that there is no sex in this, John. It matters very much. Serial killers are not cartoon monsters. They’re not even Hannibal Lecter. They’re sexual obsessives. Or at least the men are. With the exception of Wournos, as far as I know, women are only sexually obsessed serial killers when they kill in partnership with a man. Hinckley and Brady abducted young girls, raped and tortured them while videotaping the process, then used the videotapes as porn when they had sex with each other. Hrmolka and West did the same, although I don’t remember if there were tapes. The sex matters, John. It really does.”
“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.
It was after five when Betty and Martha were finished putting together his computer printouts. Gregor thanked them and got up to go. He hadn’t seen Rob Benedetti come downstairs. He hadn’t heard Jackman’s voice anywhere either. He supposed they were both still up in John’s office trying to micro-manage by phone something that really needed a competent detective on the ground. He got up and tucked the computer printout under his arm. It was the size of one of those first Gutenberg Bibles, or maybe bigger. He had no idea if the information in it would be organized in a way that would allow him to understand it when he had the chance to sit down and read it.
When he went out onto the street, it was raining again, and with the rain had come cold, not bitter cold, but that hard underlying chill that characterized so many of the evenings in March. He buttoned his coat and put his collar up, feeling a little silly as he did it. He had a weird conviction that anybody who saw him on the street would think he was pretending to be Humphrey Bogart. Maybe that was what was really getting him down. It was hard to build an identity for yourself once you started to think you had an identity to build. Sensible people didn’t question who they were because they knew that once they did they would never understand themselves again. He had been pretty good at not asking himself metaphysical questions even in college, where he had avoided the Philosophy Department like the plague and taken lots of courses in history and economics instead. He thought people who went off to “find themselves” were idiots. If they were over the age of eighteen, he thought they were terminal idiots. But it wasn’t that simple. The man who had been happily married to Elizabeth Boukarian Demarkian wasn’t the same man who could be involved with Bennis Day Hannaford. The man who had been happily encased in the rationalized cocoon of the Federal Bureau of Investigation wasn’t the same man who could be described by The Philadelphia Inquirer as “the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.” Cases mattered to him. He did not want murdere
rs walking the streets. He did not want them walking the streets even if he could be sure they would never commit another murder again. Bennis mattered to him, too; and no matter how angry he was, he couldn’t even begin to doubt the fact that he did not want her to disappear from his life. If he could just hold on to those two things, he might be able to think his way out of this funk and do something about John Jackman’s problem at the same time.
He saw a cab coming down the street and stepped off the curb to hail it. Just as he did so, a woman stepped off the curb just a few feet behind him. He looked at her briefly and nodded, determined to do the right thing and let her have the cab ahead of him. Then he realized he knew her, or at least knew who she was. He saw in her face that she recognized him, too.
“It’s,” he said, coming up to her as the cab pulled over, “it’s Miss Lydgate, isn’t it? I’m sorry. I’m not good with names. I’m—”
“You’re Gregor Demarkian,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “If you’re going back to Cavanaugh Street, we can go together. I was just headed home.”
“That would be fine.”
Gregor held the door while Phillipa Lydgate climbed into the back of the cab, then got in himself. She had already given the driver their destination, so he sat back and unbuttoned his coat.
“Have you been touring the city?” he asked. “That’s what you’re doing in America, isn’t that right? You’re writing articles about Philadelphia.”
“I’m writing about American identity,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “I’m trying to get some insight into the way Americans think. Real Americans. Red State Americans.”
“Pennsylvania is a Blue State,” Gregor said, thinking that he remembered having this conversation with her before. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d had a conversation about a conversation like this with somebody.
Phillipa Lydgate was rearranging things in her handbag. “I was going to go to Ohio, but I couldn’t find a contact there. Americans are so woefully igno-rant of other countries, it’s nearly impossible to explain to them that the rest of the world just doesn’t see them the way they see themselves. They don’t see the value in work like mine. I don’t think even Bennis Hannaford does, and she’s a very well-traveled woman.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “she is that.”
“It’s the myopia that comes from being the world’s only remaining super-power,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “It’s another form of arrogance. We all have to pay attention to what other people think about us. It’s part of the process of being human. Americans think they’re immune.”
“Do they?” Gregor said.
“I went to a store today,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “In the very poorest part of town. It was run by a black man—not a South Asian, an African, a really black man. And here he was, in the middle of a neighborhood of his own people, and what was he doing? Selling cigarettes. Selling the worst kinds of junk. Potato crisps. Twinkies. I bought a packet of Twinkies. It made me sick.”
“Did you eat two of them?”
Phillipa Lydgate ignored him. “I went to that place because it was owned by a man who was suspected in those murders you have. I’ve never seen such a country for violence. Of course, he was only suspected because of his race. Americans can’t seem to get over their racism. They can’t even seem to confront it. Do you know what this man told me? His store, the physical store, the property itself, is owned by an absentee landlord of a Mayflower family, and as far as I can tell, they treat him no better than those Mayflower families have ever treated their slaves.”
“I don’t think any slaves came over on the Mayflower, ” Gregor said.
“It was all about slavery, the founding of this country,” Phillipa said dismissively. “And this landlord this man had got, this woman apparently—although you’d think women would have more sensitivity to social inequality—this woman came down to the store and screamed at him the one time he was even a week late on the rent. A week. Can you imagine that?”
“It does sound a bit excessive,” Gregor said.
“I pressed him, but he refused to see the incident for what it was, completely unacceptable and a gross violation of his human rights. He’s grateful to her, if you can believe it, because she agreed to rent him the property even though he’d been in prison. Think about it. What’s a man supposed to do when he gets out of prison if people can refuse to rent to him because of it? The people of this country think nothing of rehabilitation. They’re only interested in vengeance. That’s why you still have the death penalty. Every civilized country has abolished it.”
Gregor was opposed to the death penalty, but he couldn’t help himself. “Japan isn’t civilized?” he asked.
Phillipa Lydgate acted as if she hadn’t heard him. “And then there are the guns,” she said. “The guns are everywhere. There are shops selling them right in the middle of the city. I don’t know how any intelligent person can live in this country. I don’t know if any intelligent person does. Lord only knows, if I was an American, I’d have emigrated to someplace civilized long ago.”
“THIS IS Cavanaugh Street,” Gregor said, and it was, which was a good thing because the cab driver’s neck kept getting redder by the minute.
The car pulled up at the curb, and Phillipa hopped out without bothering to look back. Gregor pulled out his wallet and paid up.
TWO
1
Dennis Ledeski was not behaving like a sane man. He knew that. He knew that he should never have disappeared from his office to begin with, and if he had he shouldn’t have taken so much with him. He didn’t trust Alexander Mark, that was the thing. Alexander Mark was “gay,” and gay was the absolute opposite of what he was. Gay was a grown man who wouldn’t step up to the plate and shoulder his responsibilities. It wasn’t true that the Greeks had honored homosexuality. They tolerated a few flings between warriors in wartime, but that was only sensible. You took a bunch of men and put them out on the march away from home for months at a time, and it wasn’t surprising that they took to screwing anything that moved, including trees, which didn’t move. The Greeks despised homosexuality, that was the truth. What they favored were mentor relationships between older men and younger boys. The idea was that sex would bring the two together, and the bond that would be created would make it possible for the boy to learn, not only from his mentor’s teaching, but his mentor’s soul.
Of course, the younger boys in those relationships had been fifteen, not six, but Dennis couldn’t see where that made the difference. The principle was the same. Once, spending the afternoon in an Internet cafe in a little town outside Orlando, Dennis had looked up NAMBLA’s Web site, and he had seen at an instant that they understood what he himself did. It was the relationship that was important. Sex was the trivial thing. It was the relationship that he craved so much that he sometimes came awake at night in pain, the images streaming through his head as if somebody had held an image hose to one ear and turned the water on full. That made no sense. He never made any sense when he thought about this.
He looked around now, trying to gauge just how far he had walked and just how deep into the district he was, but he couldn’t. New York was not his city. For most of his life, he hadn’t even liked coming here. The place was too big, and every bit of it was rude. Getting out of Philadelphia, though, he hadn’t been able to think of any place to go. There were all those crime shows on now: Unsolved Mysteries, and Americas Most Wanted. They put your picture up and everybody saw it. Waiters and cab drivers were looking out for you. Fat house-wives with part-time jobs in the local 7-eleven prided themselves on being able to spot the best disguised fugitive. He had to be someplace where nobody paid attention, and the only place he knew like that was New York.
He was pretty sure that if anybody was paying attention to him now, they wouldn’t be in this place, where people did not pay attention even to themselves. He looked from store front to store front, and his stomach clenched. It wasn’t his fault that the world was the way it was, that the prisses and
the fags and feminists had taken over everything. They were the ones who were to blame. They had taken a beautiful thing, the love of a man for a boy, the love that meant not just sex and emotion but the promise of a brighter future for the boy and a legacy for the man, they had taken that thing and made it foul. No, Dennis thought, that wasn’t quite it. The thing itself, the man-boy relationship, that was shining and pure and good and noble. Nobody and nothing could destroy its nobility. What the fags had done was to align themselves with it, to take it on as cover, and as a result people spit on it these days. They hated it. They did everything they could to paint it as foul and perverse and abnormal. It wasn’t abnormal. He’d been on the Internet, and he knew. There were millions of men out there who felt just as he did. Dateline could run as many sting operations as it wanted it, it wouldn’t change the fact that “pedophilia” was as normal as apple pie.
Pedophilia. The love of a child. The love of a boy. They had made that into a disease. They had made it into something worse. That was why Dennis Ledeski hated fags. He really did.
Just at the moment, he was surrounded by fags, and he knew he had to be careful. He’d been approached three or four times by prostitutes. The first two had been women, the kind of women who made you know that every movie depiction of a hooker was so airbrushed as to make it a fantasy. They were very young, but they were already filthy all the way through. You could see the tracks on their arms and the dirt in the folds of their skin. The next three had been men, but transvestite men. It was a kind of continuum, as if the professionals on the street knew that it was a bad idea to approach a man first off with the real deal. The transvestites had been in better shape than the girls. They were clean, and if they were junkies they weren’t injecting it any place visible from the street. Dennis had to be careful. The unmasked gay male prostitutes would come next, and they would be much more aggressive than the others had been. He knew. He had been followed through train stations by them, followed down streets by them. They came at you like vengeance, and once they started they never let go. They all had AIDS.
