Number six had a broken leg that had healed, oh, two years before she died, more or less. These are normal childhood traumas, — irls are active athletically these days, None of this could have caused their deaths."
"If they were smothered, for instance, would anything show now?"
"Not unless a vertebra had been cracked during the act."
"If they'd been given lethal injection, bled to death, drowned?"
"Nothing. If they'd been subjected to slow poisoning, that would show up-if I knew what poison to look for."
"It wouldn't surprise me if they died slowly," Becker said. "But not that slowly. What else can you tell me?"
"Well, Johnny likes very clean women. There are traces of soap or detergent in their hair. All of them."
"is that unusual?"
"That depends on how you wash your hair. Usually it takes more than one rinse to get all the detergent from shampoo out. Most people carry around traces of their last shampoo until the next one. You wouldn't expect to find as much as we found after six years though. Especially soap. Soap's organic, you would expect it to be gone after a few months, unless there was a lot of it. In other words, a big lather, a bad rinse. In fact, if you had that much soap in your hair to begin with, you'd probably notice, it would bother you.
"Meaning..
"Well, meaning they didn't put it in in the first place. I think Johnny did, I think Johnny washed their hair just before he killed them."
"Or just after," Becker added.
"You think he's a hairdresser?"
"Any way to tell what brand of shampoo?"
"Not now, the formulas are all much the same anyway. It's not good soap though. The percentage of fat content seems rather low, although that might be as a result of microbial degradation. It's hard to say."
"Laundry soap?"
"I don't think so. The chemical balance doesn't look quite right for that. Just cheap soap, would be my guess."
"Some were soap and some were shampoo?"
"Right."
"Were any both?"
"No. Just one or the other."
Becker looked at the displayed skeletons. The samples of hair, enclosed in plastic bags, lay next to each skull.
"So he took whatever was at hand," Becker said. "But something was always at hand. That means he had access to soap, or shampoo, and water every time. Cheap soap. A bathroom, maybe a kitchen, a laundry room, anywhere there was a tap and a drain."
"Or a hose," Grone volunteered. "He could have done it outside."
"He's not apt to have soap available at an outdoor hose, and I'm assuming he didn't bring it with him or he'd probably be more consistent in his choice. They develop their favorites, you know. They like to do things in the same way, once they perfect their rituals. Johnny is showing more flexibility than most… Sounds like a cheap hotel to me.
If they have samples of shampoo, he uses those; if not, he uses the hand soap… What else from the hair?"
"They 're all Caucasian, Numbers six, five, and two had used some form of bleach, although they were blondish to begin with. None of them were too particular about their roots. Again, maybe a hairdresser, he got to know them as customers…"
"You like that idea, don't you? Do you have something against hairdressers, Grone?"
"What's wrong with it?"
I 'Nothing, it's just a little early to categorize him. You shut off too many other possibilities that way. Any pattern in the length of hair?"
"Four of them shoulder-length or longer. Two of them much shorter, fairly tight cuts. In addition to the three semiblondes, there were two brunettes and a kind of rust-colored one. She had curly hair, the others were relatively straight He has eclectic tastes."
"'Anything else about the hair?"
Grone shrugged. "What would you like?"
"I'm surprised at you, Grone. It's not all chemical analysis. How was it cut? Scissors? Razor? Professionally? Did they cut it themselves with kitchen shears, or did they go to your favorite hairdresser?"
Grone was embarrassed. He breathed deeply before responding. "I'll check it out."
"And the bones. How did he hack them up?"
"He didn't hack them. They were separated at the joints with an instrument with a small blade. An awfully timeconsuming way to do it, it seems to me. Johnny doesn't seem to be in any hurry."
"True. But he may not have any choice. Assuming he cut them up to make them easier to transport, he would need something big and heavy to cut through the bones, right? A butcher's cleaver or a big chef's knife at the least.
You can't carry that around in your pocket like a penknife. Someone is going to notice-the girls are going to notice. He probably wasn't carrying his equipment with him in anticipation of what he was going to do, no briefcase, no shopping bag, or else he would have his own shampoo with him. Sound right?"
Grone nodded.
"He may have been making a virtue of necessity. The wonder is that he managed at all."
"He managed, but he was pretty clumsy at it," said Grone.
Grone went down the line, lifting the bones with his gloved hands-the femurs, tibiae, humeri, and ulnae-and showing the end of each in its turn to Becker.
"Here and here and here and here," he said. "Slash marks. See them?"
"Like on the first bone we saw," Becker said. "The humerus."
"He had trouble getting through the joints. It's not surprising."
Becker stared at the display for a moment, then donned a pair of disposable plastic gloves and picked up one of the thighbones himself.
"Similar, aren't they?"
"How do you mean?"
"The cut marks are almost parallel. They look pretty much the same in every case. Right? Or is it my imagination?"
"You're right," Grone agreed. "They're very similar." Becker walked the length of the grisly display, picking up one bone, then the other, holding them together where they joined, examining the two parallel lines on each end, seeing where they joined. In some cases he made fine motions with his hand over the bone, looking to Grone rather like a priest making the sign of the cross in miniature.
"I should have noticed that about the similarity, I'm sorry," said Grone.
"It's not your job," Becker said. "Don't worry about it. You're looking at things through a microscope, it's very hard to see a larger picture that way. Not your fault at all."
"Well…" Grone let the thought fall away. Becker was offering him a graceful way out; he decided to take it.
"A question," Becker said, holding the tibia and femur of number five in either hand.
"Sure."
"Am I holding these right? Is this the way these bones line up-in life?"
Grone adjusted the bones slightly.
"Okay. Like this?" Becker said. "You're trying to separate these two with your pocketknife. There are those two parallel cuts on both sides of the joint, right? Almost exactly opposite each other."
He placed the bones on the table in the position Grone had indicated.
The ends of the two bones were a quarter-inch apart.
"Show me how those cuts in the bone got there," Becker continued. Using his forefinger as a knife, Grone made slashing motions in one direction, then turned his hand and made the same motions in reverse order. He looked to Becker to gauge his reaction.