Karen whispered, “Yes, sweetie,” and let her end of the line go dead. Danny hung up, wiped sweat off his neck and thought of ice water. He saw the Frigidaire, reached over and opened the door, bolted for the sink when he caught what was inside.
Two eyeballs coated with clear jelly in an ashtray. A severed human finger on top of a package of green beans.
Danny vomited until his chest ached and his stomach retched itself empty; he turned on the faucet and doused himself until water seeped inside his rubber gloves and he snapped that a sopping wet cop couldn’t forensic a crime scene that Volimer or Maslick would have killed for. He turned the water off and shook himself half dry, hands braced against the sink ledge. The phone rang; he heard it as a gunshot, pulled his piece and aimed it at nothing.
Another ring, silence, a third ring. Danny picked up the receiver. “Yes? Karen?”
The girl had on her singsong pout. “Three DOAs. Two female Caucasians, one male Negro. The females were a pill suicide and a car wreck and the Negro was a wino who died of exposure, and you owe me the Coconut Grove for being so nasty.”
Eight walls of blood spritz and a would-be lady cop who wanted to go dancing. Danny laughed and opened the icebox door for more comic relief. The finger was long, white and thin, and the eyeballs were brown and starting to shrivel. “Anywhere, sweetie, anywhere.”
“Danny, are you sure you’re–”
“Karen, listen real close. I’m staying here to see who shows up. Are you working a double shift tonight?”
“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.