The pipe was not lit when Dan entered Porteau’s office, but the SID man snatched it up from an ashtray and used it to point toward a chair. ‘Sit down, Daniel, sit down. I’ve been expecting you, of course. I imagine you’re here to inquire after my findings in the Studio City affair.’
‘Amazingly perceptive, Felix.’
Porteau rocked back in his chair. ‘A singular case, this one. Naturally, it will be several days before the full results are in from my laboratory.’ It was always my laboratory with Felix, as if he wasn’t in charge of a big-city police department’s forensics unit but was, instead, conducting experiments in one room of his private quarters above Baker Street.
‘However, I could, if you wish, share some of the preliminary findings.’
‘That would be gracious of you.’
Porteau bit on the mouthpiece of the pipe, gave Dan a sly look, and smiled. ‘You mock me, Daniel.’
‘Never.’
‘Yes. You mock everyone.’
‘You make me sound like a wiseass.’
‘You are.’
‘Thanks so much.’
‘But a nice, witty, intelligent, charming wiseass — and that makes all the difference.’
‘Now you make me sound like Cary Grant.’
‘Isn’t that how you see yourself?’
Dan thought about it. ‘Well, maybe half Cary Grant and, right now, half Wile E. Coyote.’
‘Who?’
‘The coyote in the road-runner cartoons.’
‘Ah. And how so?’
‘I get the feeling a giant boulder just rolled off the edge of a cliff above me, and it’s falling toward me right now, going to smash me flat at any second.’
‘The rock is this case?’
‘Yeah. Any latent prints that’re going to help us?’
Porteau opened a desk drawer and withdrew a pouch of tobacco. He began to prepare his pipe. ‘Lots of prints belonging to the three victims. All over the house. Others belonging to the little girl — although those were in the converted garage.’
‘The lab.’
‘The gray room, as one of my men called it.’
‘Then she was always kept in that room?’
‘That’s certainly the most logical deduction, yes. We do have a few partials from the hall bathroom that conceivably could be hers, but none anywhere else in the house.’
‘And nothing else? No prints at all that might’ve belonged to the killers?’
‘Oh, certainly, we found numerous other prints, mostly partials. We’re putting them through the new high-speed computerized comparison program, trying to match them with prints of known criminals on file, but we’ve had no luck so far. Not likely to have any, either.’ He paused, having tamped the tobacco into the generous bowl of his pipe, and searched his pockets for a match. ‘In your experience, Daniel, how many times has a murderer left clear, unsmudged, and easily identifiable fingerprints at the scene of his crime?’
‘Twice,’ Dan said. ‘In fourteen years. So we’ll get no help from prints. What have we got?’
Porteau got his pipe fired up, exhaled sweetish smoke, and shook out the match. ‘No weapon was found—’
‘One of the victims had a fireplace poker.’
Porteau nodded. ‘Mr. Cooper intended to defend himself with it, apparently. But it was never used to strike anyone. The only blood on it was Cooper’s own, and only a few drops of that, all part of the natural spray pattern that spotted the walls and the floor around the body.’
‘So Cooper didn’t manage to land any blows on his assailant, and he wasn’t hit with the poker himself.’
‘Precisely.’
‘Did the vacuum crew come up with anything besides dirt?’
‘The results are being analyzed. Frankly, I’m not optimistic.’
Porteau usually was optimistic, another Holmesian trait, so his pessimism in the current case was especially disturbing. Dan said, ‘What about the scrapings from under the victims’ fingernails?’
‘Nothing of interest. No skin, no hair, no blood but their own under their nails, which probably means they didn’t get a chance to claw at their assailants.’
‘But the killers had to move in close. I mean, Felix, they beat these people to death.’
‘Yes. But although they had to get close, none of them seems to have been wounded. We took scores of blood samples from every surface in those rooms, only to discover that all of it belonged to the victims.’