"You didn't let them inside?"
"You kidding? Of course not. Besides, none of them wanted to look at a stiff so early in the morning. Spoil their breakfast. They just wanted to get their pictures taken at the scene of the crime and make a statement that might get on the evening news."
"Did you tell Slavin I was coming over?"
"No, sir, but I mentioned it to Thorsen. He said, 'Good.' So if Slavin comes back and gives us any flak, I'll tell him to take it up with Thorsen. We'll pull rank on him."
"Fine," Delaney said, smiling.
He looked around the corridor. There were two ambulance men with a folding, wheeled stretcher and body bag, waiting to take the corpse away. There were two newspaper photographers, laden with equipment. The four men were sitting on the hallway floor, playing cards.
The Chief looked inside the opened door. The usual hotel room. There were two men in there. One was vacuuming the rug. The other was dusting the bedside radio for prints.
"The Crime Scene Unit," Boone explained. "They'll be finished soon. The guy with the vacuum cleaner is Lou Gorki. The tall guy with glasses is Tommy Callahan. The same team that worked the Puller and Wolheim kills. They're sore."
"Sore?"
"Their professional pride is hurt because they haven't come up with anything solid. They want this guy so bad they can taste it. This time they rigged up that little canister vacuum cleaner with clear plastic bags. They vacuumed the bathroom, took the bag out and labeled it. Did the same thing to the bed. Then the furniture. Now Lou's doing the rug."
"Good idea," Delaney said. "What have you got on the victim?"
Sergeant Abner Boone took out his notebook, began to flip pages…
"Like Puller and Wolheim," he said. "With some differences. The clunk is Jerome Ashley, male Caucasian, thirty-nine, and-"
"Wait a minute," Delaney said. "He's thirty-nine? You're sure?"
Boone nodded. "Got it off his driver's license. Why?"
"I was hoping there might be a pattern-overweight men in their late fifties."
"Not this guy. He's thirty-nine, skinny as a rail, and tops six-one, at least. He's from Little Rock, Arkansas, and works for a fast-food chain. He came to town for a national sales meeting."
"Held where?"
"Right here at the Coolidge. He had an early breakfast date with a couple of pals. When he didn't show up and they got no answer on the phone, they came looking. They had a porter open the door and found him."
"No sign of forced entry?" "None. Look for yourself."
"Sergeant, if you say there's no sign, then there's no sign. A struggle?"
"Doesn't look like it. But some things are different from Puller and Wolheim. He wasn't naked in bed. He had taken off his suit jacket, but that's all. He's on the floor, alongside the bed. His glasses fell off. His drink spilled. The way I figure it, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, relaxed, having a drink. The killer comes up behind him, maybe pulls his head back, slices his throat. He falls forward onto the floor. That's what it looks like. There's blood on the wall near the bed."
"Stab wounds in the genitals?"
"Plenty of those. Right through his pants. The guy's a mess."
The Crime Scene Unit men moved toward the door carrying their kit bags, cameras, the vacuum cleaner.
"He's all yours," Callahan said to Boone. "Lots of luck."
"Lou Gorki, Tommy Callahan," the sergeant said, introducing them. "This is Edward X. Delaney."
"Chief!" Gorki said, thrusting out his hand. "This is great! I was with you on Operation Lombard, with Lieutenant Jeri Fernandez."
Delaney looked at him closely, shaking his hand.
"Sure you were," he said. "You were in that Con Ed van, digging the street hole."
"Oh, that fucking hole!" Gorki said, laughing, happy that Delaney remembered him. "I thought we'd be down to China before that perp broke."
"See anything of Fernandez lately?" Delaney asked.
"He fell into something sweet," Gorki said. "He's up in Spanish Harlem, doing community relations."
"Who did he pay?" Delaney said, and they all laughed. The Chief turned to Callahan. "What have we got here?" he asked.
The two CSU men knew better than to question why he was present. He was Boone's responsibility.
"Bupkes is what we've got," Callahan said. "Nothing really hot. The usual collections of latents and smears. We even dusted the stiff for prints. It's a new, very iffy technique. Might work on a strangulation. We came up with nit."
"Any black nylon hairs?" Boone said. "Or any other color?"
"Didn't see any," Callahan said. "But they may turn up in the vacuum bags."
"One interesting thing," Gorki said. "Not earth-shaking, but interesting. Want to take a look?"
The two technicians led the way to the corpse alongside the bed. It was uncovered, lying on its side. But the upper torso was twisted, face turned upward. The throat slash gaped like a giant mouth, toothed with dangling veins, arteries, ganglia, muscle, stuff. Unbroken spectacles and water tumbler lay nearby.
To the Chief, the tableau had the frozen, murky look of a 19th century still life in an ornate frame. One of those dark, heavily varnished paintings that showed dead ducks and hares, bloody and limp, fruit on the table, and a bottle and half-filled glass of wine. A brass title plate affixed to the frame: after the hunt.
He surveyed the scene. It appeared to him that the murder had happened the way Boone had described it: the killer had come up behind the victim and slashed. A dead man had then fallen from the edge of the bed.
He bent to examine darkened stains in the rug.
"You don't have to be careful," Callahan said. "We got samples of blood from the stiff, the rug, the wall."
"Chances are it's all his," Gorki said disgustedly.
"What's this stain?" Delaney asked. He got down on his hands and knees, sniffed at a brownish crust on the shag rug.
"Whiskey," he said. "Smells like bourbon."
"Right," Gorki said admiringly. "That's what we thought. Where his drink spilled…"
Delaney looked up at Boone.
"I've got thirty men going through the hotel right now," the sergeant said. "It's brutal. People are checking in and out. Mostly out. Nobody knows a thing. The bartenders and waitresses in the cocktail lounges don't come on till five tonight. Then we'll ask them about bourbon drinkers."
"Here's what we wanted to show you," Gorki said. "You'll have to get down close to see it. This lousy shag rug fucked us up, but we got shots of everything that shows."
The other three men got down on their hands and knees. The four of them clustered around a spot on the rug where Gorki was pointing.
"See that?" he said. "A footprint. Not distinct, but good enough. The shag breaks it up. Tommy and I figure the perp stood over the stiff to shove the knife in his balls. He stepped in the guy's blood and didn't realize it. Then he went toward the bathroom. The footprints get fainter as he moved, more blood coming off his feet onto the rug."
On their hands and knees, the four of them moved awkwardly toward the bathroom, bending far over, faces close to the rug. They followed the spoor.
"See how the prints are getting fainter?" Callahan said. "But still, enough to get a rough measurement. The foot is about eight-and-a-half to nine inches long."
"Shit," Delaney said. "That could be a man or a woman."
They looked at him in surprise.
"Well… yeah," Gorki said. "But we're looking for a guy- right?"
Delaney didn't answer. He bent low again over the stained rug. He could just barely make out the imprint of a heel, the outside of the foot, a cluster of toes. A bare foot.
"The size of the footprint isn't so important," Callahan said. "It's the distance between prints. The stride. Get it? We measured the distance between footprints. That gives us the length of the killer's step. The Lab Services guys have a chart that shows average height based on length of stride. So we'll be able to double-check that professor up at the museum to see if the perp really is five-five to five-seven."