The laboratory technicians who went over Ambrose Harding’s apartment were not necessarily looking for clues that would connect his murder to those of George Chadderton and Clara Jean Hawkins. The recovered bullets — one of them found embedded in the windowsill over the sink, the other one dug out of Harding’s skull by the assistant medical examiner performing the autopsy — would tell the Ballistics Section whether or not the same pistol had been used in all three killings, and that would be connection enough. They were, instead, looking for any clue at all, anything they could pass on to the detectives in the field, anything that might move the case off the dime and into the realm of meaningful speculation.
There was already, and even before Ballistics came through with its report on the bullets, a sense of continuity bordering on serialization; one more murder and the network would surely renew for another season. In a city like this one, a single murder was nothing to attract a crowd; you could get your single garden-variety murder any day of the week, so ho-hum, what else was new? Two murders committed with the same weapon, however, or even two murders committed in the same part of the city within a relatively short period of time, or two murder victims who vaguely resembled each other in age, occupation, or hair coloring were enough to cause one or another of the city’s more creative journalists to speculate idly and out loud whether or not yet another demented assassin was loose on the streets while the police sat with their thumbs up their asses. But three murders? Three murders within the space of five days? Three murders that had in all probability been committed with the same weapon? Three murders of three blacks, one of them a denizen of, if not the underworld, then at least the soft white underbelly of the underworld, that nighttime world of whispered invitations and promises discreetly fulfilled.
There was nothing that stimulated the public’s imagination more than the murder of a prostitute. It provided the morally righteous with a sense of extreme gratification, the guilty party punished if not by the hand of God, then at least by the hand of someone who understood the dangers prostitution posed in a society where men walked around with their flies open. For many others — those men and women who had at one time or another flirted with the notion either of using the services of a prostitute or providing the services of a prostitute — the murder was proof, if any was needed, that in this city there indeed existed a large army of women ready and indeed willing to service anyone regardless of race, creed, color, gender, or persuasion. That the service in question was sometimes fraught with danger was a fact indisputably supported by the murder. The wages of sin is death, brother — but Jesus, it sounded exciting nonetheless. And for those who had in fact dallied hither and yon, here or there, in this or that shoddy hotel room, or in “X”-rated motels across the river where one could watch a porn flick while simultaneously performing in his own private real-life movie on a water bed, or in any of the massage parlors that lined the city’s thoroughfares north, south, east, and west, for those, in short, who had stepped over the line dividing simple sex for fun and enjoyment (your place or mine, baby?) from sex for profit, sex as sin, sex as the longest-running business in the history of the race (your race or mine, baby?), for those simple folk as well, there was fascination in the murder of a prostitute because they wondered (a) whether a john like themselves had killed her, or (b) whether one of those ferocious-looking pimps with their wide-brimmed pimp hats had killed her, or (c) whether the girl who’d been killed was somebody who’d maybe given them great head just the night before — they all looked the same after a while. So yes, there were all sorts of exciting possibilities to consider when a prostitute got killed. Kill your average calypso singer, kill your average calypso singer’s business manager, and nobody got too terribly excited, even if there was continuity to the murders. But kill a hooker? Blond wig on the sidewalk, for Christ’s sake! Skirt up around her ass! A bullet in her heart and two more in her head! Now that was unusual and interesting.
So was sand.
What the technicians found in Ambrose Harding’s apartment was sand.
“Sand,” Grossman told Carella on the phone.
“What do you mean, sand?”
“Sand, Steve.”
“Like on a beach?”
“Yes, like on a beach.”
“I’m very happy to hear that,” Carella said, “especially since there are no beaches in Diamondback.”
“There are a few beaches in Riverhead, though,” Grossman said.
“Yes, and lots of beaches out on Sands Spit.”
“And even more beaches on the Iodine Islands.”
“How much sand did you guys find up there?” Carella asked.
“Not enough to make a beach.”
“Enough to pave a sidewalk?”
“A minuscule amount, Steve. The vacuum picked it up. It seemed unusual enough to report, however. Sand in a Diamondback apartment? I’d say that was unusual.”
“And interesting,” Carella said.
“Unusual and interesting, yes.”
“Sand,” Carella said.
A look at the map of this city showed five distinct sections, some of which were separated by waterways and joined like Siamese twins by bridges at hip or shoulder, others with common borders that nonetheless defined political and geographical entities, one an island unto itself, entirely surrounded by water and — in the minds and hearts of its inhabitants — entirely surrounded by enemies as well. This was not a city as paranoid as Naples, which holds the undisputed record for that disease, but it was a fairly suspecting city nonetheless, a city that felt every other city on the face of the earth was rooting for its fiscal downfall only because it happened to be the foremost city in the world. The damn trouble with such a crazy paranoid supposition was that it happened to be true. This was not only a city, this was the city. The way Carella looked at it, if you had to ask what a city was, then you didn’t live in one, or you only thought you lived in one. This city was the goddamnedest city in the world, and Carella shared with every one of its citizens — world traveler or apartment recluse — the certain knowledge that there was no place like it anywhere else. It was, quite simply, the one and onliest place to be.
Looking at a map of it, searching for sand in and around it, Carella studied the long finger of land that was not truly a part of the city but that nonetheless, and despite the fact that it belonged to the neighboring county, was righteously considered a backyard playground by anyone who lived in the city proper. Elsinore County, so named by an English colonist well versed in the works of his most illustrious countryman, consisted of some eight communities on the eastern seaboard, all of them buffered from erosion and occasional hurricane force winds by Sands Spit, which — and with all due understanding of the city’s chauvinist attitude — did possess some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Sands Spit ran pristinely north and south, forming a natural seawall that was protection for the mainland but not for itself or for the several smaller islands clustered around it like pilot fish around a shark. These were called the Iodines.