The coroner explained that in most homicides where rape was suspected, the examiner searched for injuries of the genital organs, blood and semen stains, and foreign hairs or other foreign substances. The coroner had found no traces of seminal fluid in the dead girl’s vaginal, rectal, or digestive tracts, and there had been no semen stains on her clothing. This did not eliminate the possibility of rape; it merely indicated that there had been no attendant ejaculation. Neither did he find foreign hairs or substances, but there was one wound that indicated the crime might have been sexually motivated, a wound that in itself had hemorrhaged severely enough to have been a possible cause of death. This wound had been the result of the tearing of the vaginal vault, the introduction into the pelvis of a sharp instrument, most probably the murder weapon, and the subsequent tearing of the left common iliac artery. At this point the coroner asked if he might introduce an opinion somewhat beyond the scope of pathology or toxicology, and then suggested to the detectives that perhaps they were dealing with a sadistic killer here, the murder having all the earmarks of so-called “lust” murders, in which the perpetrator’s libido could be satisfied only by slaying. The coroner mentioned again that he was not a psychiatrist, of course, and this was merely his opinion.
The detectives thanked him, and then went uptown again to the abandoned tenement on Fourteenth and Harding.
2
The homicide was officially Carella’s, and as the detective in charge of the investigation, he had promptly notified the desk officer and asked him to make the necessary calls that were the routine after-math of any murder. The desk sergeant had immediately notified the office of the chief medical examiner, and then had called the Communications Unit to give them the aided number and the ME’s report number. He had then informed Detective-Lieutenant Byrnes, who commanded the 87th Squad, and Captain Frick, who commanded the entire precinct, that a homicide investigation was in progress. And then he had called the Chief of Detectives’ office, and the Section Command and District Office, and the Homicide Division, and the Photo Unit, and the Police Lab, and the Latent Unit, and he would have called Ballistics had a gun been involved in the murder, and he was ready to call the DA’s office with a request for an attorney and a stenographer should the perpetrator be apprehended, as they say in the trade. (He also called his wife to tell her things had begun jumping and he might be home late.)
At the scene earlier, Carella had instructed the man from the Photo Unit to take his Polaroids of the dead girl and the murder scene so that Carella could put a UF95 tag on her toe and get her to the hospital for immediate autopsy. There was no electricity in the abandoned building, so Carella ordered floodlights from the Emergency Service Division, and these were in place and operating by the time the ambulance came to pick up the murdered girl’s body. By then, too, the area had been roped off and posted with CRIME SCENE and NO SMOKING signs. The signs warning against smoking had nothing to do with cancer. Cigars or cigarettes were often valuable evidence, and the investigating officer didn’t want a bunch of good guys dropping their butts in with something the bad guy may have left behind.
Carella had drawn his own pencil sketch of the crime scene, and then — together with the lab technician — had begun looking for (a) the murder weapon and (b) any traces of hair, clothing, excrement, urine, or stains that might have been left by the killer before, during, or immediately following the murder. At the same time he instructed the man from Latent to conduct a thorough search for fingerprints and footprints that could be compared against the dead girl’s. (There was, at the moment, an imprint of a size-twelve gunboat in the sticky hallway blood — but that was Officer Shanahan’s.) When Carella left for the hospital, he did so secure in the knowledge that a team of highly trained professionals was busily at work looking for any evidence that might help identify the murderer. He did not know, of course, until Kling called him in the mortuary, that the murder had been witnessed, or that Patricia Lowery was alive and entirely capable of identifying the killer.
He now tried to retrace, with Kling and the lab technician, the route Patricia must have taken from the tenement to the police station. He did not expect to find any traces of blood on the route; the rain had undoubtedly washed them all away. Nor was he particularly interested in locating either Patricia’s shoes or her handbag. She had arrived at the precinct shoeless, and carrying nothing in her bleeding hands; presumably, she had either lost her shoes and handbag in her desperate rush for freedom, or else had deliberately discarded them. Carella was interested only in finding the murder weapon. If the killer had indeed pursued her from that abandoned building, he must have been carrying the weapon during his chase. It was entirely possible he had finally thrown it away somewhere along the route.
They found one of Patricia’s high-heeled satin pumps half a block away from the tenement. It was stained only with muddy water. A little way beyond that, they found the second pump. This one had bloodstains near the heel. The three men — Carella, Kling, and the lab technician — debated the meaning of this. They finally decided that the first pump had fallen from Patricia’s foot, but that she had deliberately taken off the second pump after hobbling along on just one shoe for some ten or fifteen yards. She had undoubtedly grabbed the pump near the heel when removing it, and the bloodstains were probably from her own palm. Three blocks beyond where they’d found the second pump, they found Patricia’s handbag. It was a long, narrow bag, some ten inches in length, some four inches wide, covered in blue satin that matched the high-heeled pumps. There were bloodstains on the satin. Inside the bag, they found a package of cigarettes, a lighter, a comb, a change purse with 63¢ in it, four loose subway tokens, and a wallet containing $17 and a photograph of a slender young man with dark hair and dark eyes.
They did not find the knife that had been used to murder Muriel Stark. But five blocks from the tenement in which she had been killed, they found a man sleeping in the doorway of a Chinese laundry. The man was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt, no tie. His hair was brown. There appeared to be bloodstains on the front of his white shirt.
“Hey, wake up,” Carella said.
“Go ’way,” the man said.
“You,” Carella said. “Wake up.”
Kling flashed his light onto the man’s face. The man opened his eyes and then immediately closed them against the glare. His eyes were blue, they had seen that. And Patricia Lowery had described the murderer as a dark-haired man with blue eyes.
“What do you want, huh?” he said, and turned his head to one side and squinted his eyes only partially open.
“What are you doing here?” Carella asked.
“Trying to sleep,” the man said.
“What’s that on your shirt?” Kling asked.
“Where? What do you mean?”
“There. Is that blood?”
“Yeah, that’s blood. What do you guys want?”
“We’re police officers,” Carella said, and flashed his shield.
“Oh, shit,” the man said.
“What’s your name?”
“Louis Sully.”