by Jane Haddam
bookkeeper/finance director Lautervan Metal Works
Debbie Morelli
alley Saint Joseph’s Loudon
Alexander Mark
bookkeeper/secretary Saint Joseph’s Parish
Arlene Treshka
alley Brentwood block Anderson
Henry Tyder
bookkeeper Green Point Short-term Rental
Gregor looked it over a few times. Here was where it would be useful to know how to use the computer. He wanted an interactive chart that he could add things to and take them out of. For the moment, the ordinary written one would do. He could match it up to what official, stable records there were, the ones that had not been allowed to fall into the hands of Gayle and Leehan. He sat down at the one free space he’d left in the area and began to match the women, the suspects, and the places with the reports of the first officers at the scene, and then with the reports of the Medical Examiner’s Office.
This was, Gregor thought, after he had managed to put together enough of what he needed to call Rob Benedetti, the kind of work that was supposed to have been done on the ground by the detectives assigned to a case before they ever started running around jailing people. At the very least, any homicide detective who wanted to ask for a warrant and serve it should have known what Gregor knew now; but not only was it obvious that Marty and Cord didn’t know it, Gregor was sure nobody else did either. And that included the district attorney, the commissioner of police, and the general public, since one of the problems that seemed to be going on here was the fact that the press—starved for information and not averse to just making it up—had taken the ball and run with it. Instead of insisting on getting the information right, the police, and not just Marty and Cord, had let the press wind the whole thing up and turn it into a Christmas party.
He got Rob Benedetti on the phone and told him to be in John Jackman’s office in an hour. He called upstairs to John Jackman’s office and told him there was going to be a meeting there, and that he should be present at it. Then he went back to matching up his chart with the basic forensics. His eyes were feeling ready to fall out of his head when Betty Gelhorn came to the door and said there were people looking for him.
“A woman and a man,” she said. “A pretty woman.”
Gregor went out into the hall, expecting to see Rob Benedetti and an assistant district attorney. He got Bennis Hannaford instead, and a tall, elegant young man he had met only once or twice before, but whom he recognized instantly.
“Mr. Mark,” he said.
Bennis was looking at the walls and the ceiling and the floor, anywhere but at him. “We couldn’t find you. I called your cell a dozen times, but you didn’t answer.”
“It didn’t ring,” Gregor said.
Bennis leaned forward and pulled the phone out of his inside jacket pocket. “It’s off,” she said, handing it to him.
“It can’t be off. I just made calls on it,” Gregor said.
“And when you finished, you turned it off,” Bennis said. “You have to—”
“Please,” Alexander Mark said. “Could we just—”
“Right,” Bennis said. “Mr. Mark has something he wants to talk to you about that concerns the case, and he thinks it’s important, and he seemed trustworthy to me. And you didn’t answer your phone. So we called around for a while and I talked to John and here we are.”
“I really didn’t mean to interrupt you at something important,” Alexander Mark said. “It’s just that I was thinking. And looking. Looking at things. And then I wondered why nobody seemed to be paying attention to this last one: Arlene Treshka. That last one. Not one of the people from last night—”
“No, that’s all right,” Gregor said. “I understand. Arlene Treshka, the woman next to whose body Henry Tyder was found. Do you know something about her?”
“I know that she was one of our clients,” Alexander said.
“Alexander works as a secretary,” Bennis supplied helpfully, “to a man named Dennis Ledeski. He’s an accountant.”
Gregor looked Alexander Mark up and down. Surely the man hadn’t been a secretary when they’d met before, and no secretary could afford the clothes he wore. Gregor didn’t know all that much about clothes, but he knew a Turnbull & Asser tie when he saw one, and he knew John Lobb shoes. He also knew what they cost.
Alexander Mark flushed. “It’s a long story,” he said. “It’s about . . . I was trying to . . . I don’t know. It’s not about the murders. It’s about something else. But then I started to think. And I realized. Nobody is paying any attention to Arlene Treshka. She died, and it’s as if she’s just one of a list, so nobody cares who she was. That isn’t normal, is it? Don’t the papers and the news programs usually go on and on about the victim and who she was and what she was like? Why hasn’t anybody said anything like that about Arlene Treshka?”
“I don’t think it was a conspiracy,” Gregor said, “I think it was just that Henry Tyder had been arrested and had apparently given some sort of confession—”
“Only apparently?” Alexander said.
“There’s some question about it,” Gregor said. “But I don’t think the lack of information was deliberate. It was just that there was other news that was much more, what’s the word?”
“Spectacular?” Alexander said. Then he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. The thing is, I have some information about Arlene Treshka. And not just about Arlene Treshka either. She was one of our clients.”
“Dennis Ledeski’s clients,” Bennis put in.
Gregor ignored her. “That is interesting,” he said, “but I don’t see that it helps us. I’m sure she had a doctor as well as an accountant. She may have had a lawyer.”
“She isn’t the only one,” Alexander Mark said. “Sarajean Petrazik was one of our clients, too. So was Elizabeth Bray. And Elyse Martineau had my job. She was the one Dennis was questioned about. But you see, you have to see, that there’s more going on here than just the obvious. I don’t know why no-body thought to ask about any of this before, but I found out in less than ten minutes on the computer. Don’t you think that’s odd, that all those women were clients of Dennis’s?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I do think that’s odd. Did you check the other ones? Were they clients, too?”
“No,” Alexander admitted. “I mean, I did check, but none of them were. But they didn’t all have to be clients, did they? He’d have been crazy to run around killing nobody but clients. They could have been connected to him in some other way.”
“Were you able to find another way?”
“No,” Alexander said. “I wasn’t. But I think it’s worth looking into, don’t you?”
Gregor nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do think it’s worth looking into. Does Mr. Ledeski keep back content information on clients? How they came to show up at his door? Who referred them?”
“Sure,” Alexander said, “In fact, I keep it. Or I have, you know, for the last few months.”
“Can you check that information on the victims who used to be clients? Check it and get it back to me?”
“Sure.”
“Where’s Mr. Ledeski now?” Gregor asked. “It must be getting toward evening. Has he gone home? Where does he live?”
“Gregor, for goodness sake,” Bennis said. “It’s after six.”
“Dennis,” Alexander said carefully, “seems to be missing in action. I’m fairly sure he’s taken off.”
“Taken off?”
“Gone out of town,” Alexander said. “Maybe permanently and under an assumed name.”
“Another one,” Gregor said.
“What?” Bennis said.
“Dennis has other problems besides being a serial killer, if he is one,” Alexander said. “He’s a full-bore stop, dyed-in-the-wool pedophile. I knew it the first time I saw him. His picture was in the paper, and I looked at it, and I knew when I’d seen it before. I was coming out of Saint Joseph’s on Loudon Street. I was coming out of a
meeting. And it wasn’t just the once. I saw him half a dozen times, and he wasn’t coming out of a church. He was coming out of a porn shop. And I know the porn shop. Every gay man in Philadelphia knows what goes on in that porn shop.”
“Loudon Street,” Gregor said. He picked up his list and looked at it. There was Saint Joseph’s, and there was Loudon Street. “Debbie Morelli was the woman you were picked up for questioning about,” he said. “That’s right, isn’t it? I helped you out with it.”
“You helped me beyond words,” Alexander said. “And I thank you. But maybe that’s another connection nobody knows about. That Dennis was on Loudon Street right across the alley from where Debbie Morelli was found. I do think that there’s enough to be going on with, don’t you? And now he’s gone. God only knows where. And I’m not standing here worrying that he’s killing women.”
“It’s the pedophile thing that really gets to him,” Bennis said.
Gregor wasn’t really ignoring her. He just couldn’t think of a way of responding to her that wouldn’t feel utterly unnatural. He looked back at his list again. Then he took a pen out of his pocket and made notes beside the names of Sarajean Petrazik, Elizabeth Bray, and Elyse Martineau.
“Yes,” he said. “All I can ask is that you get me the back content information, if you can do it without putting yourself in any kind of danger.”
“Dennis isn’t a danger to grown men,” Alexander said. “They scare the death out of him, no matter how gay they are.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well, do that then. As quickly as possible, if you can. Right now I seem to hear a meeting coming in through the front door.”
3
Rob Benedetti was having a bad day. Gregor had been able to see that earlier in the day, but by now the man was almost entirely white and the young woman with him looked even whiter. Gregor left Alexander Mark and Bennis, Betty, and Martha in the evidence room and its antechamber, and went down the hall to greet him.
“Well,” he said. “You look about as bad as I feel.”
“I think I’m going to look worse. How much of what you know does John know?”
“Not much yet,” Gregor said, “but I’m going to have to tell him. For one thing because the first thing the two of you are going to have to do is to get those idiots off this case. And I mean off. I want them removed and barred from coming anywhere near the files. If you have to lock them up—I don’t know if I mean the files or Marty and Cord, but I don’t really care—this has to be the end of their contact with the material from this case. Which is about to become cases. Because this isn’t a case.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Well,” Gregor said. “If it’s any consolation, I do think you have a serial killer on your hands, just not the one you think you do. And not one who can account for all this material. There’s a young man in there named Alexander Mark—”
“The name’s familiar.”
“It should be. He was picked up for questioning when Debbie Morelli was found dead. I helped him out of it. A friend of his, who is a good acquaintance of mine, came to me, and I stepped in for about a second and a half—”
“I remember,” Rob said, “the gay guy. But that was ridiculous; it was a completely bogus arrest. It was—oh, wait.”
“Yes, wait,” Gregor said. “I’d have to check, but I’m willing to bet you anything that that was Marty Gayle letting his feelings about homosexuality run wild.”
“You don’t have to check,” Rob said, “I know. I even remember the arrest.”
“Mr. Mark,” Gregor said, “is in there, with Bennis Hannaford, who is—”
“Well, I know who Bennis Hannaford is,” Rob said, sounding aggrieved. “She’s famous.”
Gregor let this one go by. It was even true, although not true in the same way that the word was used about Elvis, say, or the president of the United States. “Mr. Mark,” he said again, “came up with a very interesting idea. Well, two, actually. The second one was common sense, and one I’m sorry to say I didn’t think of on my own. We’ve spent precious little time investigating the life of Arlene Treshka, the woman whose body Henry Tyder was found near to that started this entire thing. But the other one was more interesting. Do you realize that three of these women—Arlene Treshka, Elizabeth Bray, and Sara-jean Petrazik—were clients of one of your suspects, Dennis Ledeski, and that a fourth, Elyse Martineau, was his secretary?”
“Ledeski,” Rob said. “Wait, I remember. The accountant. He was a suspect for about a minute and a half. I don’t remember anybody saying he was connected to any of the murders, but the one, I think it was of the secretary—”
“I’m pretty much sure nobody did say it,” Gregor said, “because nobody noticed. I got that information from Alexander Mark not two minutes ago, and I saw nothing like it in any of the files I was able to read. Which doesn’t mean the information isn’t there, but if it is, it wasn’t followed up. And now here’s another one. Dennis Ledeski is missing.”
Rob straightened up. “What?”
“He’s missing,” Gregor said. “According to Alexander, he packed up some stuff and some computer discs and disappeared late yesterday. I don’t know how seriously to take that. I don’t know if Alexander has checked, or if he’s just jumping to conclusions, but—”
“But we’d better go find him,” Rob said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Do you think—”
“That he’s our killer?” Gregor said. “No. Alexander Mark says he’s a pedophile. My guess is that in this case, we can trust what Alexander says because Alexander went to work in Ledeskis office specifically to expose him.”
“I’m going to have a migraine,” Rob said. “And I don’t get migraines.”
“The thing is,” Gregor plowed on, determinedly, “I doubt if, assuming what Alexander said is true, that Ledeski is the man who killed a small string of these women. Not all of them, mind you, because even with a cursory look at the evidence I can see that these women were not all killed by the same person, but the ones who were would not have been killed by a sexual predator. If Ledeski is a pedophile, then if he resorted to murder two things would be true: first, he’d kill his sexual victims, which I would guess would be very young boys, second, there’d be signs of sexual activity, which there is not in any of the women I would count here as the victims of our killer. You should find the man, yes, please, because you don’t want a guy who gets his kicks forcing himself on eight-year-olds to be out wandering the street. But he’s not going to have killed any of these wx>men. The thing is, though, that Alexander Mark was on the right track. What the detectives in this case should have been working on was the connections between the women, where they existed.”
“All right,” Rob said, “that makes sense.”
“I think first thing tomorrow morning you have to assign some regular-duty detectives to this stuff, specifically to look for connections of any kind. Women who worked together, women who lived near each other, women who belonged to the same health club, anything and everything that might connect them. I have some ideas as to what kind of link is going to be important, but we’ll put that aside until your people collect some information.”
“I’ll get John to get homicide to put a couple of guys on it tonight,” Rob said. “I don’t think he’ll balk, not even at removing Marty and Cord. We should have some stuff for you by the morning.”
“There’s one more thing,” Gregor said. “That mess last night. What do you know about it? What does anybody?”
“Oh,” Rob said. “I haven’t seen reports on that yet. I’m the last to get anything; you know that. But from what I’ve heard listening around, it was grisly enough but not as bad as we thought at first. There was just one body, and one part. But the body was, well, off, you know. I don’t think the stray hand is going to have anything to do with this. It’s probably been buried for centuries.”
“What about the more-or-less intact body?”
Rob shrugged. “You’re going to
have to ask homicide. It was a few months old. It had started to decay. It—”
“Did it have a cord around its neck?”
“What? Oh, yes. Yes, it did. At least I think it did. You really should ask homicide, Gregor. They don’t tell me everything they do.”
“Right now, asking homicide means asking Marty Gayle and Cord Leehan, and that’s counterproductive. Please make sure, or get John to make sure, that they aren’t allowed to contaminate this latest case; because if they do, I’m going to sit down and tear my hair out by the roots. We need a name for this victim, and we need to know something about her. We need to run the same kind of background check, with the same concern for finding commonalities, that we’re running with the rest of them.”
“But that’s not usual, is it?” Rob said. “Serial killers don’t usually have background commonalities with their victims, do they? I mean, all the victims might have red hair, or be gay male prostitutes or something, but they don’t usually have anything in common on a deeper level. Or am I behind the times?”
“No,” Gregor said, “you’re quite right, but we’re not dealing with a proto-typical case of serial murder here, or a prototypical serial murderer. If we were, even Gayle and Leehan couldn’t have screwed things up as badly as they have. No, what we have here are a few—four, maybe, with the woman last night, or five—women who are connected in some way we’re not seeing just yet, both with each other and with one of the suspects. Except that the suspect isn’t the murderer. He’s just the accomplice. But he’s what we’ve got.”
“You know, you’re not making much sense,” Rob said. “This kid has disappeared, this Bennie Durban. He lives in the house where those bodies were found. That’s a connection. And it gets worse. He has a wall covered with pictures of serial killers: Bundy, Gacy, Manson.”
“I know,” Gregor said, “his landlady told me last night. The kid’s an idiot, and he’s very disturbing, and he’s gone. But he’s not who you’re looking for. Or at least, he’s not a serial killer.”