"This is the damndest thing I ever remember," said Hackett. Somebody in the lab went out and took his prints and he wasn't in their records, so they wired them to the Feds and NCIC. Just before six o'clock they got a teletype back from NCIC. The prints belonged to Richard Conroy who was an escapee from a state mental asylum in New Jersey. He had been committed, further information added later, for twenty-five years and was known to be homicidal. Prior to the commitment, he had raped eleven women and murdered five. He had escaped five months ago and New Jersey was looking for him hard. There was evidence that since he had got out, he had raped three more women and was thought to be responsible for the murder of a prostitute in Newark. One of the rape victims had had nearly ninety thousand dollars in cash hidden in the house and he had walked away with it.
Palliser said, "Good God. The things we see."
Hackett fired off a teletype to the New Jersey State Police. On Saturday morning, a Captain Runyon called him.
"Thank God you picked up that nut. We've had visions of him leaving a trail of bodies all over the state. I wonder how in hell he ended up in California, he's never been out of the East as far as we know. But of course he had all that cash. I swear to God, I sometimes wonder who is sane and who isn't. The idea of keeping that much cash loose in a box on a closet shelf-my God in heaven."
Hackett said, "People will do it. Well, he's tucked away safe. I suppose you want him back?"
Runyon said, "It's a goddamn nuisance. But, yes, we'll have to send somebody out to fetch him. How did you drop on him, by the way?" When he heard, he laughed. "We do sometimes get the breaks, don't we? Well, a lot of females can sleep easier tonight. There's been a little wave of terror around the southern part of the state where the asylum is. I'll get back to you and let you know who'll be out to get him."
"Any time," said Hackett.
It was still hot but not as bad as the last few weeks and by the middle of October it would probably slack off. The night watch had left them another heist and everybody seemed to be out on something except Palliser who was on the phone. After a minute he put it down and said, "Just trying to prod the lab on this Rawson thing. They didn't pick up any good latents in that place except the victim's. That's got to be something else insane. Like your fruitcake. The drunk running amuck, something like that."
"It sounds that way. And another one without a handle, if there's no lab evidence. God, I'll be glad when we get into fall and it cools off. This has been a rough summer. I wonder how Luis is doing in Paris. Damn it, there must be some record of that girl there, But just how to find it-"
Palliser said, "I just hope he's not getting high blood pressure arguing with the Surete." Landers came in with another heist suspect and he went to sit in on the questioning.
Higgins and Galeano had prodded at Vasquez some more yesterday but he wasn't about to give them a confession and it didn't matter.
There were no five possible heist suspects they were looking for. The tedious legwork was always there to be done. When Hackett came back from lunch, Lake greeted him with some relief. "I was afraid I wouldn't see any of you the rest of the day. Something new's gone down, half an hour ago. A couple of bodies on Allesandro Street."
"Oh, hell," said Hackett. "More paperwork." Galeano came in just then so they went to look at it together. It was a small apartment in an old building on that narrow street and there were two bodies-a rather pretty young blond woman in the mid-twenties and a little girl about four. Patrolman Zimmerman said, "Where the hell have you been? I called in forty minutes ago when I got sent up here. I didn't know what to do with the woman. She's sitting in the squad still crying. Well, the girl was her daughter. She found them about an hour ago." Even Zimmerman, taking a casual look at the scene, had read it as faked. "I had to turn the gas off. There wasn't much built up in here, but I figured it was safer. These old windows are so loose, there wasn't much gas in here at all, just enough smell so you'd notice it. It was the oven turned on and the pilot light off, but it could be there was a clogged line."
Galeano said, "Hell, you touched the knob."
"Well, I tried to be careful, sir. I'm sorry about any prints, but I thought it'd be safer."
The girl was on the livingroom floor, on her side in front I of the couch. She was wearing a white sundress and thong T sandals. Hackett squatted down and looked at her. There was a dark bruise on one side of her jaw. She'd been alive when she got that or it wouldn't have showed. He felt carefully through the disheveled blond hair and said to Galeano, "She's had the hell of a crack on the skull here-just back of the temple. Feels as if the bone's caved in."
Galeano said, "Anyway, neither of them died of the gas."
The bodies were the wrong color for that. Victims of gas poisoning showed bright pink skin. The little girl was in a chair in the living room, lying across one arm of the chair, her head twisted at an odd angle to her shoulders. She had on a skimpy playsuit and thong sandals.
"I'd have an educated guess her neck is broken," said Galeano.
"Yes," said Hackett. "Somebody trying to set up the fake suicide, Nick, and a damned crude one. You'd think any fool would know the autopsies would show it up. We'd better talk to this woman, find out who they were."
She was sitting in the back of the squad and she had stopped crying now. Galeano got into the backseat with her and Hackett into the front. She was a woman probably in the forties, plain-faced with greying brown hair. Her name was Ena Schwartz. She said the bodies were her daughter Gloria and Gloria's little girl, Joan. Gloria Pratt. She said, "Gloria'd never kill herself. That's just impossible. And I besides, there wasn't hardly any gas- I'd never believe that, and she'd sure never want to kill Joan. They'd just moved in here, got settled, and had everything arranged and it was going to work out good- I was so glad when she left that man, he's a no-good drunken bum. I tried to tell her when she married him, but she was only eighteen and you can't talk to a girl in love. She found out-she put up with him too long, but she finally had the sense to leave him, and the divorce just got final. She was going to get alimony and support for Joan-not much, but with the job she could make it all right. She'd just got the job, going to start Monday, at a drugstore up on Vermont, and this place was handy to me. I'm just over on Rowena. She was going to drive Joan over to me every morning-"
"What's her husband's name?" asked Galeano.
"Neil Pratt. He's a no-good bum. He never supported her and he was mad when she had the baby."
"Do you know where he lives?" asked Hackett.
"They had an apartment on Fountain, I don't know if he still lives there. Why? Please, can I go home now? This has been an awful shock to me, I want to call my sister. Oh, I'm thankful my husband's dead, and that's a terrible thing to say, but this would have broke his heart, he loved Gloria so much. We tried to stop her marrying that guy-but Gloria'd never kill herself and the baby, she'd got over that ‘ man. She was going to have a better life. Everything was all arranged-"
"Are you all right to drive yourself home, Mrs. Schwartz?" asked Galeano.
"Yes, I'm all right. Thank you." She got out of the squad and walked down to an old Chevy at the curb.
Hackett said, "Let's hope there'll be some lab evidence. But it looks open and shut, Nick. Unless people have got more complicated since the last time I noticed."
"We can poke around here a little," said Galeano. "See who's home."
The apartment was on the second floor and there was a manager on the premises, in a downstairs front apartment. There were four apartments down and four up. And on a hot Sunday, only five people were at home. Four of them said they'd been watching T.V. or reading, didn't know if anybody had come visiting other tenants. But the manager, a sharp-eyed elderly woman named Potts, said, "Why, yes. I noticed a man come in about nine this morning, I'd just stepped out to get the paper-the boy comes by about then. What's this about that girl killing herself? I never had any police here before, any trouble like this. No, he was a stranger to me."