“Well, at least the rain’s stopped,” Monoghan said.
“You know what they do in England when it rains, don’t you?” the ME asked.
“No, what?”
“They let it rain,” the ME said, and both men burst out laughing.
“Rain brings out the bedbugs,” Monoghan said. “Had to be a bedbug did something like this.”
“A lunatic,” the ME said.
“A crazy person,” Monoghan said, and smiled. He had found a substitute for Monroe. Even on this damp Saturday night, criminal detection could proceed in an orderly Tweedledum and Tweedledee fashion. His mood perceptibly brightened. “Did a nice job on her,” he said conversationally.
“Yep. Cut the trachea, the carotid, and the jugular,” the ME said.
“Notice her hands?” Monoghan said.
“Getting to them,” the ME said.
To Carella, apparently feeling amplification was necessary, Monoghan said, “In some of these incised wound homicides, you get these defense cuts. Person puts up his arm to block the knife, he’ll get cut on the fingers someplace.”
“Or the wrist,” the ME said.
“Or the forearm.”
“Or the palm.”
“I hate knife wounds, don’t you?” Monoghan said. “You get a bullet wound, it’s neat. Knife wounds are messy.”
“I’ve seen messy bullet wounds, too,” the ME said.
“But not as messy as knife wounds. I hate knife wounds.”
“I hate blunt-force wounds,” the ME said. “But your bullet wounds can get pretty messy, too.”
“I’m not talking about your shotgun wounds now,” Monoghan said.
“No, I’m talking about your average exit wound from a .45-caliber slug, for example. Drive a subway train through that exit wound. That’s a messy wound.”
“Still, I hate knife wounds worse than anything else.”
“Well, to each his own,” the ME said, and shrugged, and snapped his bag shut. “She’s all yours,” he said, and rose from where he’d been crouching over the girl.
“Was she raped?” Monoghan asked.
“Can’t tell you that till we get her downtown,” the ME said.
In the girl’s handbag, they found a comb, a package of menthol cigarettes, a book of matches, $3 .40 in cash, and a Social Security card that told them her name was Muriel Stark.
At twenty minutes past midnight a woman named Lillian Lowery called the precinct and asked to talk to a detective. When Sergeant Murchison asked what it was in reference to, she told him she was worried about her daughter and her niece, who had gone to a party at 8:00 and who were not yet home. Murchison asked her to hold, and then put her through to Detective Meyer Meyer upstairs in the squadroom.
The woman immediately told Meyer that the girls were only fifteen and seventeen years old respectively, and that they had promised to be home by 11:00 at the very latest. When they had not arrived by 11:30, she had called the house where the party was still going on, and a boy who answered the phone told her they’d left at least an hour before that. It should have taken them no more than twenty minutes to get home. It was now almost 12:30 — which meant that nearly two hours had elapsed since they’d left the party. Meyer, who had a daughter himself, gently suggested to Mrs. Lowery that perhaps her daughter and niece had decided to take a walk with some of the boys who’d been at the party, but Mrs. Lowery insisted her daughter was very good about keeping her word; if, for example, she knew she was going to be late, she always called home to say so. Which is why Mrs. Lowery was worried. Meyer took down a description of the girls, and then asked for their full names. Mrs. Lowery said her daughter’s name was Patricia Lowery, and her niece’s name was Muriel Stark.
Meyer asked her to call him again if the girls showed up; if he did not hear from her by morning, he would pass the information on to the Missing Persons Bureau. In the meantime, he phoned down to the desk sergeant and asked him to put out a 10–69 to all the precinct’s radio motor patrol cars, specifying a non-crime alert for two dark-haired, brown-eyed, teenage girls, one wearing a blue, the other a pink dress, last seen in the vicinity of 1214 Harding, and presumably heading south toward their home at 648 St. John’s Road. Meyer gave the desk sergeant the girls’ names, of course, but neither of those names meant anything to him. He had come on duty shortly before midnight, and did not know that both Kling and Carella were actively investigating two separate cases involving two teenage girls. His ignorance wasn’t particularly uncommon; no one expected every detective on the squad to know what every other detective on the squad was doing at any given hour of the day. Kling, for example, did not know that Carella was at this moment in the hospital mortuary waiting for a necropsy report that would tell him whether or not Muriel Stark had been raped. And Carella did not know that Kling was on the eighth floor of that same hospital talking to an intern who said it would now be all right for him to interrogate the girl who had burst into the muster room two hours earlier. Kling hadn’t even known her name until the intern gave it to him.
At 12:33 A.M. Patricia Lowery put some of the pieces together for them.
The first thing she told Kling was that her cousin Muriel had been killed. She told Kling where the slaying had taken place, and Kling went immediately to the telephone at the nurse’s station in the corridor outside and called the precinct — only to learn that Carella had responded to the homicide an hour ago. The desk sergeant checked the log, in fact, and told Kling that Carella was at that moment in the hospital mortuary. Kling thanked him, and before going back into Patricia’s room, called down to the mortuary to tell Carella where he was and to advise him that he was about to interrogate an eyewitness to the crime. Carella told him to hold off for a minute, he’d be right upstairs.
They had washed her and dressed her wounds and given her a clean hospital gown. Her hair was neatly combed and her eyes were dry. A police stenographer sat by the bed, his pencil poised over his pad, ready to record every word. Carella and Kling asked their questions softly. Patricia answered in a clear, steady voice, recalling emotionlessly and without horror the events that had taken place after she and her cousin left the party.
CARELLA: That was at what time?
PATRICIA: We left at about ten-thirty.
KLING: Were you heading home?
PATRICIA: Yes.
KLING: Can you tell us what happened?
PATRICIA: It began raining again. It was raining on and off all night. It slowed down when we left, and then it began again. So we were running down the street, ducking in doorways and under awnings, like that. We weren’t wearing raincoats because when we went to the party it wasn’t raining. We were maybe two blocks from Paul’s house when it started raining.
CARELLA: Paul?
PATRICIA: Paul Gaddis. He’s the boy who had the party. It was his birthday. His eighteenth birthday.
CARELLA: How old are you, Patricia?
PATRICIA: Fifteen. I’ll be sixteen in December. December twelfth.
CARELLA: And your cousin was how old?
PATRICIA: Seventeen.
CARELLA: All right, go ahead. You were walking from Paul’s house—
PATRICIA: Yes.
KLING: On Harding was this?
PATRICIA: Yes. Where all the stores are. Near Harding and Sixteenth. It was raining very hard when we got to Sixteenth, so we stopped under an awning for a while, until it let up. Then we started walking down Harding again, toward Fourteenth. There’s construction going on around there, these buildings are being knocked down, they’re putting up a housing project. So when we got to Fourteenth, it began raining again, and Muriel and I ran into the hallway of this abandoned building. Just to get out of the rain. Till it let up a little. We were only three or four blocks from where we lived, we figured we’d wait a few minutes and then go home.