“Until eight tomorrow.”
“Then do this. I want the City and County air monitored for male Caucasian DBs. Stay at your switchboard, keep the City and County boxes on low and listen for homicide squeals with male Caucasian victims. Call me here the same way you just did if you get any. Have you got that?”
“Yes, Danny.”
“And sweetie, nobody can know. Not Dietrich, not anyone on the squad, _not anyone_.”
A long sigh, Karen’s version of Katharine Hepburn exhausted. “Yes, Deputy Upshaw,” then a soft click.
Danny hung up and forensiced the pad.
He scraped dirt and dust samples off the floor in all three rooms, placing them in individually marked glassine envelopes; he got out his Rolleiflex evidence camera and shot wide angles and close-ups of the blood patterns. He scraped, tagged and tubed bathtub blood, couch and chair blood, wall blood, rug blood and floor blood; he took fiber samples from the three sets of clothes and wrote down the brand names on the labels.
Dusk came on. Danny kept the lights off, working with a pen flash held in his teeth. He dusted for latent prints, exhausting rolls of touch, grab and press surfaces, getting a rubber glove set–most likely the killer–and a full right- and partial left-hand unknown–which did not match the Marty Goines print abstract. Knowing Goines latents _should_ appear, he kept going and was rewarded–a left spread off the kitchen sink ledge. Reconstructing the killer showering himself free of blood, he rolled every touch surface in the bathroom–bringing up one-, two-, three-finger and full hand spans, surgical rubber tips, the hands of a large man, widely spaced where he braced himself into the shower/tub wall.
Midnight.
Danny took the severed finger out of the icebox, rolled it in ink, then on paper. A matchup to the middle right digit on the unknown set. The cut point was jagged, just above the knuckle, cauterized by scorching–charred black flesh scabbing it up. Danny checked the hot plate in the living room. Paydirt: fried skin stuck to the coils; the killer wanted to preserve the finger, a shock to whoever discovered the carnage.
Or was he planning to return with another victim?
And was he keeping the pad under surveillance to know when that option was blown?
12:45.
Danny gave the place a last toss. The one closet was empty; there was nothing secreted under the rugs; a penlight wall scan gave him another notch on his reconstruction: approximately two thirds of the blood caking was texturally uniform–victims two and three were almost certainly killed at the same time.
Checking out the floor on his knees got him a last piece of evidence: a glob of hardened white paste residue, neutral in smell. He tagged and bagged it, tagged and bagged Marty Goines’ eyeballs, sat down on the nonblooded edge of the sofa, gun out and resting on his knee–and waited.
Exhaustion crept in. Danny closed his eyes and saw blood patterns superimposed on the lids, white on red, the colors reversed like photographic negatives. His hands were numb from hours of working in rubber gloves; he imagined the metallic smell of the room as the smell of good whiskey, started tasting it, shut down the thought and ran theories in his head so the taste would stay away.
2307 Tamarind was a thirty-minute drive to the Strip tops–the killer had his maximum time of two hours to play with Marty Goines’ corpse and decorate the pad. The killer was monstrously, _suicidally_ bold to kill two other men–probably at the same time–in the same place. The killer probably had the subconscious desire to be captured that many psychopaths evinced; he was an exhibitionist and was probably distressed that the Goines snuff had received virtually no publicity. The other two bodies had probably been dumped someplace Side 58
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The where they would be found, which meant that last night or yesterday was when murders two and three occurred. Questions: were the patterns on the wall significant in design or just blood spat in rage? What did the letter W mean?
_Were the three victims randomly chosen on the basis of homosexuality or dope addiction, or were they previously known to the killer_?