From beyond the open window came night noises: the distant hooting of a deep-throated whistle from the bay, the high whine of tires on the pavement below, a sudden burst of laughter from some late revelers passing on Bryant. Inside the room the four men steadily contemplated the laboratory dish, each one with his own thoughts. For inside the closed frosted Pyrex dish lay a human finger, now separated from the wedding ring that had adorned it when the laboratory had first received the bloody specimen for examination.
Gentry crushed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. He took a deep drag, shoved his glasses up farther on his large bony nose, and spewed smoke as he spoke.
“It’s Mike Holland’s finger, all right. Print checks. The ring—”
He reached into his pocket and brought it out, sliding it across the desk. It came to rest a few inches from the small dish; nobody reached out to pick it up.
“—it’s Mike’s. Initials and dates. From a double-ring ceremony, I guess.”
Boynton grunted. He, as well as the others, had never really doubted the fact since the gruesome package had been recovered and delivered to the Hall. He frowned at Gentry.
“Was it cut from a living man or a dead one?”
“We thought of that,” Gentry said, and pushed his glasses up again. “Dr. Lascowski was down in the morgue on night duty, and I showed it to him. We agreed. We don’t know.”
Reardon had been staring at the little dish without really seeing it. Instead he saw a man being held down while someone else, some faceless person, chopped off one of his fingers. He spoke without raising his eyes from the dish.
“Pop’s alive.”
Boynton swung around to stare at him. “What makes you so sure, Lieutenant?”
“They need him alive, if they have to cut off any more fingers,” Reardon said, and raised his eyes from the dish to look at the chief. “Or they think they do.”
Boynton took Reardon’s stare for a moment and then went back to Gentry, changing the subject.
“Did the amputation indicate any degree of medical knowledge? Was it done by a doctor, for example?”
Gentry shrugged. “We discussed that, Lascowski and me. It doesn’t take any surgical skill to cut off a finger. If you put the finger over the edge of a table, or a wood chopping block, with the other fingers down alongside the edge of the table” — he demonstrated with one hand against the edge of the desk — “then all you need do is take a sharp knife or a hatchet—”
“Understood,” Boynton said abruptly, cutting off the detailed description. He looked at each man in turn, and then sighed. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said heavily. “Still, the situation really hasn’t changed. Our reasons for not acceding to this man’s demands remain exactly the same, as far as I can see.” He looked around the room again, and then shrugged. “However, since it’s obvious you don’t all agree with me, or you think we should make the exchange whether you agree with me or not—”
Reardon’s hope’s rose. By God, the chief was going to do it!
“—I’ll take the matter up with the Board of Commissioners this morning as soon as I can get them together. I’ll abide by their decision. But that’s as far as I can go.”
Reardon’s hopes plummeted. The Board of Commissioners weren’t cops; they couldn’t possibly understand the feelings of the men on the force toward a fellow officer in a jam. Still, they were reasonable people, all with families; they ought to be able to put themselves in Pop’s position. And, after all, letting Lazaretti go wouldn’t be putting some hardened criminal on the street. The man hadn’t committed any great crime, and besides, he would have been on an airplane for Rome, extradited, a few hours after he was released, in any event. So, possibly, if Boynton presented the case to the board in the proper perspective... But, the question was, would Boynton?
The chief might have been reading Reardon’s mind.
“The senior department heads will be present and allowed to give their opinions to the board, as well,” he said dryly, and looked around. “Well, anything else before we break up?”
“What about that tape?” Reardon asked.
Gentry spoke up, reaching for a cigarette and his lighter as he did so.
“First, as to that background noise — that bumping sound. We haven’t been able to identify it. Now, as to the voice and identification of the speaker, we did a little better there. We graphed the voice and fed it into the comparator. You gentlemen realize, I’m sure, that these voice machines are far from definitive; they only compare with other data prerecorded and fed the computer. You also realize they aren’t too accurate.”
“We know,” Chief Boynton said in a tone that urged Gentry to get down to facts.
“Yes, sir. Well, among ourselves we break the possibilities into three areas: a presumptive level, which we consider fairly high; a conjecture level, which is a lower probability of accuracy, and” — Gentry smiled, a brief, humorless smile, quite professorial — “a pure guess level, I guess you could call it.”
“Gentry—”
“Yes, sir,” Gentry said, and hurried on, even foregoing lighting his cigarette. “Well, in regard to this particular tape, Ruth Damrosch ran the tests, and as you know she’s the best technician we have. She’s had the most experience—”
“Gentry!”
“Yes, sir,” Gentry said, and finally got down to cases. “The man, according to our presumptions, has lived in the bay area for most of his life, or at least long enough in his formative years to establish his basic speech pattern and tonal definition. There also seems to be a total lack of probability of any Italian in his background, by which I mean any influence from parents, grandparents, or neighborhood environmental forces. In fact, we would judge his background to be British, most probably with a good degree of Scottish in his ancestry.”
He stopped. Boynton frowned.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all, sir.”
“What about the tape itself?”
“The cassette? There were no prints, as you know. The tape was a Memorex 60, available in about every department store, radio shack, tape house, anywhere. These cassettes have no serial number or factory identification of any kind.”
Chief Boynton fell silent. Reardon spoke up.
“You said you hadn’t been able to identify that funny bumping noise. Are you still trying?”
“We’ll try again today, but we don’t have much hope we’ll find anything.” He finally managed to light his cigarette and puffed on it in relief. “You see,” he said, “we don’t have a large library of sounds for comparative purposes, and if we did, I doubt it would be very useful. Most of the standard sound records are made up of sounds we would all recognize without the help of any machine — birds, railroad sounds, automobile racing sounds, animal sounds, car crashes, baby sounds, that sort of thing; libraries primarily built up to be used on soundtracks of films, or TV tapes. Ruth separated that background sound from the voice and fed it into our comparator against the few sounds we have, and” — again there was the brief, classroom-type smile — “all it did was shake its head.”
The silence that fell now was unbroken. Boynton came to his feet.
“What you’re saying,” he said, “is that the man could be almost anyone in this area — with the possible exception of the Italians living here — and the sound in the background could be anything at all. Great.”
Gentry looked down. “I’m sorry...”
“Nobody’s blaming you. It’s just that we’re not getting anywhere on this damned case, and it’s beginning to get under my skin.” He looked at his watch. “Well, gentlemen, I think that’s enough for tonight. I’m going home and try to get a few hours rest. I suggest you all do the same.”