They were twelve minutes too late.
The door to Naomi’s apartment was wide open.
Naomi was lying on the bed with a bullet hole between her eyes.
The pillow under her head was very red.
Well, now they had a bullet.
The bullet had entered Naomi Schneider’s skull just above the bridge of her manicured nose, and angled up slightly and exited at the back of her head, and had gone through the down pillow under her head to lodge in the mattress, where the lab technicians dug it out.
The bullet told them that the murder weapon was a Colt Detective Special—similar to any one of the eleven on the picture the Deaf Man had sent I hem
But that was all they had.
And until they were in possession of an actual weapon they could test-fire for comparison purposes, the bullet was virtually useless to them.
* * * *
On Monday morning, December 12, another message from the Deaf Man arrived in the maiclass="underline"
They were looking at seven wanted flyers.
‘Beautiful people, each and every one of them,’ Meyer said.
‘Maybe he’s telling us who the gang is,’ Brown said.
‘He wouldn’t be that crazy, would he?’ Carella said. ‘To name them for us?’
‘Why not?’ Brown said. ‘If these guys are still loose, their pictures are in every precinct in town.’
Which was just the problem.
Even before they tacked the latest message to the bulletin board, the pictures were already there. All seven of them. Plus a dozen more like them. The detectives looked at all the Deaf Man’s messages now, marching across the bulletin board in a single, inscrutable horizontal line:
Two nightsticks. Three pairs of handcuffs. Four police hats. Five walkie-talkies. Six police shields. Seven wanted flyers. Eight black horses, Eleven Colt Detective Specials.
‘What’s missing?’ Carella asked.
‘Everything’s missing,’ Brown said.
‘I mean ... there’s no one, right? Nothing for the number one. And nothing for nine or ten either.’
‘Assuming he plans to stop at eleven,’ Meyer said. ‘Suppose he plans to go to twenty? Or a hundred and twenty? Suppose he plans to keep sending these damn things forever?’
* * * *
‘Fun is fun,’ Lieutenant Byrnes said, ‘but we happen to have two dead bodies.’
He was sitting behind a desk in his corner office, the blinds open to the parking lot behind the police station. Inside the cyclone fence with its barbed wire frosting, pale December sunlight glanced off the white roofs of the patrol cars parked below. Carella thought the lieutenant looked tired. His hair seemed a bit grayer, his blue eyes a bit more faded. Am I going to look that way in a few years? he wondered. Is that what the job does to you? Burns you out, grinds you down to graying cinders?
‘Technically,’ Carella said, ‘the Schneider murder...’
‘It’s linked, it’s ours,’ Byrnes said flatly. ‘Wherever the hell it actually...’
‘The Four-One,’ Carella said.
‘So? Are they working it?’
‘No, Pete. They were happy to turn it over.’
‘Sure. Christmas coming up...’
He let the sentence trail. He was thinking, Carella knew, that there’d be enough headaches ahead in the next two weeks. All the bad guys doing their Christmas shopping. The bad guys didn’t need cash or credit cards or charge accounts. The bad guys only needed nimble fingers. He wondered if the bad guys ever got to look as gray and as pale as Byrnes did. Send them to jail, they complained that the swimming pool wasn’t properly filtered. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. They laughed at the old police adage and did their time standing on their heads, laughing. Came out looking healthier than when they went in, all that weight lifting in the prison gym. Came out ready to victimize again. Laughing all the way. Oh what fun it is to ride...
‘So what’ve you got?’ Byrnes asked.
‘Nothing,’ Carella said.
‘Don’t tell me nothing, Byrnes said, ‘I’m starting to get heat on this. The cops in New York, they get a dead Harvard graduate, they wrap it in forty-eight hours. We got two dead girls, and you tell me nothing’
‘Well, we know it’s the Deaf Man, but...’
‘Then find him.’
‘That’s the trouble, Pete. We...’
‘What’s all this crap he keeps sending us? What’s any of it got to do with the victims?’
‘We don’t know yet.’
‘According to this ...’ He picked up the D.D. report on his desk. ‘According to this, the second girl knew him, is that right?’
‘Yes, sir. But only as Steve Carella. That’s the name he gave her.’
‘Used your name.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Why’d she let him in that apartment? You told her he was dangerous, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So why’d she let him in? Was she crazy or something? Man like that, she lets him in her apartment?’ He shook his head. ‘What about the first victim? Did this ... what’s her name?’ He began leafing through the other D.D. reports.
‘Elizabeth Turner, sir.’
‘Did she know him, too?’
‘We don’t know, Pete. We’re assuming she did.’
‘Still don’t know where she worked, huh?’
‘No, sir.’
‘But you’re assuming it was a bank.’
‘That’s the line we’re taking, yes.’
‘Which would tie in. His M.O., I mean.’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe planning an inside job, is that what you figure?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Use the girl.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you don’t know which bank.’
‘We’ve checked them all, Pete.’
‘If he planned to use her, why’d he kill her?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘Same gun?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘This picture of the guns ... the one he sent. All Colt Detective Specials, huh?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And the Schneider girl was killed with a Colt Detective Special, huh?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Eleven of them, huh? In the picture.’
‘Eleven, yes, sir.’
‘You think he plans to kill eleven girls?’
‘We don’t know, sir.’