Belson still gazed at the room.
"Forty-five percent of all white males are blood type C. Eighty percent of all males secrete PGM when they ejaculate. Fifty-eight percent of them are white. That shit is good for eliminating suspects, but it's useless when you don't have any. He didn't have a vasectomy either."
"Whose room is it?" I said.
"Hers. No booze. No sign the bed had been slept in. No sign the door had been forced."
"I suppose no one heard the shot," I said.
"He probably muffled it with a pillow," Belson said. He inhaled some cigar smoke and let it out slowly. "Her body would have muffled it some."
I nodded.
"We got people checking all the guests. Figure he might have stayed here. Figure it's hard to walk around carrying twenty feet of rope, a roll of duct tape, and a gun without being noticed."
"Could wrap the rope around your waist," I said, "under your shirt, put a small roll of duct tape in your pocket."
"Yep," Belson said. "Or carry it in a briefcase. But we're checking anyway. You never know."
"She tied the same way?"
"I haven't compared the photos and the write-ups," Belson said, "but it looks the same."
"We should check that," I said. Belson nodded. Quirk came to stand with us.
"Hotel staff," Quirk said. "Guests, people drinking in the bar?"
"Dino's collecting all the credit card receipts," Belson said. "Richie's got the staff, O'Donnell and Rourke got the guests."
"Parking?" Quirk said.
"Unattended," Belson said. "We got the registration of everything that's in the lot, but we got no way to know who was there and left."
"Okay. I'll talk with the press," Quirk said. "We got someplace set aside?"
"The ballroom, second floor."
Quirk nodded and moved toward the door. I went with him. "They've heard about you," Quirk said as we went down in the elevator. "You may as well be around while they ask me about you."
There were folding chairs in the ballroom and maybe two dozen reporters.
Most of those in the hallway upstairs had moved down here. Television lights had been set up and aimed at a speaker's lectern at the front of the room. I leaned against the wall near the door with my arms folded across my chest while Quirk walked to the lectern. He still had his raincoat on. The TV sound men moved closer to the lectern, crouching under camera shot, holding forward long, soft microphones with black foam covering. The press photographers began to snap pictures.
"I'm Lieutenant Martin Quirk and I'm in charge of the investigation."
Quirk said. "So far we have no suspects in the killings, which we believe to be related. The commissioner has asked me to assure you that every resource of the department will be placed at my disposal until the killer is apprehended." Quirk said the stuff about the commissioner the way a child recites the pledge to the flag.
"Any questions?" Quirk said. It was like asking a shark if it was hungry.
"Do you expect the killings to continue, Lieutenant?"
"Probably."
"What steps are you taking to apprehend the killer, Lieutenant?"
"All."
"Lieutenant, is the modus operandi the same for this killing as the others?"
"Yes."
"When do you expect to make an arrest, Lieutenant?"
"As soon as we have a suspect with enough evidence to warrant it."
"Lieutenant, do you have any suspects now?"
"No."
"Is it true, Lieutenant, that the killer may be a policeman?"
"I have an unsigned letter which makes that claim."
"Is it authentic, Lieutenant?"
"I don't know."
"I am told that there was spermatozoa at the scene of each crime, Lieutenant. Is that true? And if so, how did it get there?"
Quirk looked without expression at the questioner for a moment before he answered.
"It is true. We are assuming the killer ejaculated."
"Are you treating this as a racially motivated sequence of crimes, Lieutenant?"
"We don't know the killer. We don't know why he kills. We thought it prudent to hold judgment until we did."
"But, Lieutenant, isn't it odd that all the victims are black?"
"Yes."
"And yet, Lieutenant, you are not prepared to say it's racial?"
"No."
"Isn't that denying the obvious, Lieutenant?"
"No."
"Is it true, Lieutenant, that a Boston private detective is assisting you on this case?"
"Yes."
"Is he being paid with city funds, Lieutenant?"
"No."
"Who is paying him, sir?"
"No one. It's a charitable action on his part."
"Is it because you don't trust your colleagues, Lieutenant?"
"No."
"What is his name, Lieutenant?"
"Spenser. He's back there by the door," Quirk said. "I'm sure he'll enjoy talking with you."
Then Quirk stepped down from the lectern and walked through the reporters and past me, out the door. As he passed me, he said, "Enjoy."
CHAPTER 4
On Wednesday morning there was a profile of me in the Globe. PRIVATE
EYE ON RED ROSE CASE, it said. It mentioned that I'd been involved in a number of cases, that I'd had a longtime relationship with Susan Silverman, a Cambridge psychologist, and that I had once been a boxer.
It neglected to mention that when I smiled, my cheeks dimpled sweetly.
The press never gets it right.
Wayne Cosgrove called to see if there was anything I knew that I hadn't told the beat man at the news conference. I said no. He said would I lie to him. I said yes. And we hung up. I turned to the sports page and read "Tank Macnamara," and was checking the "Transactions" listing when Quirk came in. He was carrying an easel and a chalkboard, and a large paper bag. I said, "Are you going to brief me?"
Quirk set up the easel, put the chalkboard on it, and took a new package of yellow chalk out of his coat pocket and set it on my desk. He took two napkins out of the bag and put them on my desk. Then he got two paper cups of coffee out, and two corn muffins. He put one muffin carefully on each napkin, and sat down in my client chair.
"How's Susan?" he said.
"The usual," I said, "glamorous, smart, hot for me."
Quirk bent the plastic lid of his coffee cup carefully up on one side and twisted out a neat triangle, leaving the rest of the lid in place.
"Hard to understand how someone could be all three," Quirk said.
"You're just sulky because they ran my picture in the Globe today and not yours," I said.
Quirk drank a little coffee. "Yeah," he said. "Let's go over this Red Rose thing."
"Sure," I said.
Quirk stood and walked to the chalkboard.
"If you don't mind, I'm going to want to leave this set up here," he said.
"Fine," I said.
Quirk began to write on the board.
Killer 1. Probably white
2. Blood type C 3. No vasectomy
4. Secretes PGM I 5. Ejaculates at scene
6. Victims black a. Hooker b. Waitress c. Exotic dancer d. Singer
"What else do we know about him?" Quirk said.
"Victims are black," I said. "Scene of crime is white, or mostly white."
"See 1 above," Quirk said.
"What about the victims?" I said. "Pattern?"
"Like from hooker to singer?" Quirk said.
"Might be a kind of progression up the social scale," I said.
"If he thinks like that," Quirk said.
"You got a profile of him from the forensic shrinks yet?" I said.
Quirk shrugged, "Yeah, but what? Rage against women, or rage against blacks, or both. Powerfully repressed sexuality, manifested through the gun; the semen traces may be masturbation, or they may be involuntary ejaculation. Like when he shoots her."
"Jesus Christ," I said.
"Um," Quirk said. "You talk with Susan about this?"
"Yeah."
"What's she got to say?"
"Same sort of stuff. One thing she said is to remember that psychopaths have their own symbolic system and it may not be like other people's."
"So it doesn't necessarily mean that because he kills black women he hates black women," Quirk said.