She said nothing.
Her reluctance to talk about it gave Chase time to consider the situation. As he recalled the killer's approach from the top of the ridge, he began to wonder whether the man had known which car he was after or whether any car would have done, whether this was an act of revenge directed against Mike specifically or only the work of a madman. Even before he had been sent overseas, the papers had been filled with stories of meaningless slaughter. He had not read any papers since his discharge, but he suspected that the same brand of senseless murder still flourished.
The possibility of random, unmotivated homicide unnerved him. The similarity to Nam, to Operation Jules Verne and his part in it, stirred bad memories.
Fifteen minutes after they had left the ridge, Chase parked in front of the divisional police headquarters on Kensington Avenue.
"Are you feeling well enough to talk with them?" Chase asked.
"Cops"
"Yeah."
She shrugged. "I guess so."
She had recovered remarkably fast. She even had the presence of mind to take Chase's pocket comb and run it through her dark hair. "How do I look?"
"Fine."
Maybe it was better to be without a woman than to die and leave behind one who grieved so briefly as this.
"Let's go," she said. She opened her door and stepped out, her lovely, trim legs flashing in a rustle of brief cloth.
The door of the small gray room opened, admitting a small gray man. His face was lined, and his eyes were sunken as if he had not slept in a day or two. His light-brown hair was uncombed and in need of a trim. He crossed to the table behind which Chase and the girl sat, and he took the only chair left. He folded into it as if he would never get up again. "I'm Detective Wallace."
"Glad to meet you," Chase said, though he was not glad at all.
The girl was quiet, examining her nails.
"Now, what's this all about?" Wallace asked, folding his hands on the scarred table and regarding them wearily, as if he'd already heard their story countless times.
"I already told the desk sergeant most of it," Chase said.
"He isn't in homicide. I am," Wallace said.
"Someone should be on the way out there. The body-"
"A car's been despatched. Your report's being checked out. That's what we do. Maybe not always well, but we do it. So you say someone was murdered."
"Her boyfriend, stabbed," Chase told him.
Wallace studied the girl as she studied her nails. "Can't she speak?"
"She's in shock maybe."
"These days?" Wallace joked, exhibiting a disregard for the girl's feelings that Chase found disconcerting.
The girl said, "Yeah, I can speak."
"What's your name?" Wallace asked.
"Louise."
"Louise what?"
"Allenby. Louise Allenby."
Wallace said, "You live in the city?"
"In Ashside."
"How old?"
Anger flared in her, but then she damped it and turned her gaze back to her nails. "Seventeen."
"In high school?"
"I graduated in June," she said. "I'm going to college in the fall. Penn State."
Wallace said, "Who was the boy?"
"Mike."
"That's it?"
"That's what?"
"Just Mike? Like Liberace. Like Picasso? One name?"
"Michael Karnes," she said.
"Just a boyfriend, or you engaged?"
"Boyfriend. We'd been going together for about a year, kind of steady."
"What were you doing on Kanackaway Ridge Road?" Wallace asked.
She looked boldly at him. "What do you think?"
Though Wallace's bored tone was disconcerting, Chase found the girl's detachment so unnerving that he wanted to be away from her as quickly as possible. "Look, Detective Wallace," he interjected, "is this really necessary? The girl wasn't involved in it. I think the guy might've gone for her next if I hadn't stopped him."
Wallace said, "How'd you happen to be there in the first place?"
"Just out driving," Chase said.
A light of interest switched on in the detective's eyes. "What's your name?"
"Benjamin Chase."
"I thought I'd seen you before." His manner softened and his energy level rose. "Your picture was in the papers today."
Chase nodded.
"That was really something you did over there," Wallace said. "That really took guts."
"It wasn't as much as they make out," Chase said.
"I'll bet it wasn't!" Wallace said, though it was clear that he thought Chase's actions in Vietnam must have been even more heroic than the papers had portrayed them.
The girl had taken a new interest in Chase and was studying him openly.
Wallace's tone toward her changed too. He said, "You want to tell me about it, just how it happened?"
She told him, losing some of her eerie composure in the process. Twice Chase thought that she was going to cry, and he wished that she would. Her cold manner, so soon after all the blood, gave him the creeps. Maybe she was still in denial. She repressed the tears, and by the time she had finished her story, she was calm again.
"You saw his face?" Wallace asked.
"Just a glimpse," she said.
"Can you describe him?"
"Not really."
"Try. "
"He had brown eyes, I think."
"No mustache or beard?"
"I don't think so."
"Long sideburns or short?"
"Short, I think."
"Any scars?"
"No."
"Anything at all memorable about him?"
"No."
"The shape of his face-"
"No."
"No what?"
"It was just a face, any shape."
"His hair receding or full?"
"I can't remember," she said.
Chase said, "When I got to her, she was in a state of shock. I doubt she was registering anything."
Instead of a grateful agreement, Louise scowled at him.
He realized, too late, that the worst embarrassment for someone Louise's age was to lose her cool, to fail to cope. He had betrayed her momentary lapse to, of all people, a cop. She would have little gratitude for him now, even though he had saved her life.
Wallace got up. "Come on," he said.
"Where?" Chase asked.
"We'll go out there."
"Is that really necessary? For me, anyway?" Chase asked.
"Well, I have to take statements from both of you, in more detail than this. It would help, Mr. Chase, to be on the scene when you're describing it again. It'll only take a short while. We'll need the girl longer than we'll need you."
Chase was sitting in the rear of Wallace's squad car, thirty feet from the scene of the murder, answering questions, when the staff car from the Press-Dispatch arrived. Two photographers and a reporter got out.
For the first time, Chase realized that there would be local newspaper and television coverage. They would make a reluctant hero of him. Again.
"Please," he said to Wallace, "can we keep the reporters from learning who helped the girl?"
"Why?"
"I'm tired of reporters," Chase said.
Wallace said, "But you did save her life. You ought to be proud of that."
"I don't want to talk to them," Chase said.
"That's up to you. But they'll have to know who interrupted the killer. It'll be in the report."
Later, when Wallace was finished and Chase was getting out of the car to join another officer who would take him back to town, he felt the girl put a hand on his shoulder. He turned, and she said, "Thank you."
Maybe he was imagining it, but he thought that her touch had the quality of a caress and that her hand lingered. Even the possibility sickened him.
He met her eyes. Looked away at once.
At the same instant, a photographer snapped a picture. The flashbulb sprayed light. The light was brief — but the photograph would haunt him forever.