The efficient bunch of patrolmen had followed their orders to the letter, rounding up every ten-year-old kid wearing dungarees and a red-striped shirt. They had not asked for birth certificates, and so the kids ranged from seven to thirteen. The tee shirts, too, were not all tee shirts. Some of them sported collars and buttons. But the patrolmen had done their job, and a hasty count of the kids revised Hawes's earlier estimate of eight thousand. There were only seven thousand. Well, at least three dozen, anyway. Apparently there had been a run on red-striped tee shirts in the neighbourhood. Either that, or a new street gang was forming and they had decided upon this as their uniform.
'Which of you kids delivered a letter to this precinct this morning?' Byrnes asked.
'What kinda letter?' one kid asked.
'What difference does it make? Did you deliver it?'
'Naw,' the kid answered.
'Then shut up. Which one of you delivered it?'
Nobody answered.
'Come on, come on, speak up,' Byrnes said.
An eight-year-old kid, obviously impressed by the Hollywood effort, piped, 'I wanna call my lawyer.'
The other kids all laughed.
'Shut up!' Byrnes roared. 'Now, listen, you're not in any trouble. We're only trying to locate the man who gave you that letter, that's all. So if you delivered it, speak up.'
'What'd he do, this guy?' a twelve-year-old asked.
'Did you deliver the letter?'
'No. I just wanna know what he done, this guy.'
'Any of you deliver the letter?' Byrnes asked again. The boys were all shaking their heads. Byrnes turned to Murchison. 'How about it, Dave? Recognize one of them?'
'Hard to say,' Murchison said. 'One thing for sure, he was a blond kid. You can let all the dark-haired kids go. We've got a couple of redheads in there, too. They're no good. This kid was blond.'
'Steve, keep only the blonds,' Byrnes said, and Carella began walking through the room, tapping boys, telling them to go home. When he'd finished the culling process, the room had thinned down to four blond boys. The other boys idled on the other side of the slatted rail divider, watching.
'Beat it,' Hawes said. 'Go home.'
The boys left reluctantly.
Of the four blonds remaining, two were at least twelve years old.
'They're too old,' Murchison said.
'You two can go,' Byrnes told them, and the boys drifted out. Byrnes turned to one of the remaining two.
'How old are you, sonny?' he asked.
'Eight.'
'What do you say, Dave?'
'He's not the kid.'
'How about the other one?'
'Him neither.'
'Well, that's—' Byrnes seemed suddenly stabbed with pain. 'Hawes, stop those other kids before they get past the desk. Get their names, for Christ's sake. We'll put them on the radio. Otherwise we'll be getting the same damn kids in here all day long. Hurry up!'
Hawes went through the railing and sprinted for the steps. He stopped some of the kids in the muster-room, rounded up the rest on the sidewalk, and sent them all back into the precinct. One kid sighed reluctantly and patted a huge German shepherd on the head.
'You wait, Prince,' he said. 'I gotta handle this again,' and then he walked into the building.
Hawes looked at the dog. The idea clicked into his mind. He ran into the building, climbed the steps, and rushed into the squad-room.
'A dog!' he said. 'Suppose it's a dog!'
'Huh?' Byrnes asked. 'Did you stop those kids?'
'Yes, but it could be a dog!'
'What could be a dog?'
'Lady! The Lady!'
Carella spoke instantly. 'He could be right, Pete. How many dogs named Lady do you suppose there are in the precinct?'
'I don't know,' Byrnes said. 'You think the nut who wrote that letter…?'
'It's a possibility.'
'All right, get on the phone. Meyer! Meyer!'
'Yah, Pete?'
'Start taking these kids' names. Jesus, this place is turning into a madhouse!'
Turning, Byrnes stamped into his office.
Carella's call to the Bureau of Licenses revealed that there were thirty-one licensed dogs named Lady within the precinct territory. God alone knew how many unlicensed dogs of the same name there were.
He reported his information to Byrnes.
Byrnes told him that if a man wanted to kill a goddamn lady dog, that was his business and Byrnes wasn't going to upset his whole damn squad tracking down every bitch in the precinct. They'd find out about it the minute the dog was killed, anyway, and then they might or might not try to find the canine killer.
He suggested that in the meantime Hawes call Eastern Shipping in an attempt to find out whether or not any shops in the precinct carried the paper the letter was pasted on.
'And close the goddamn door!' he shouted as Carella left.
CHAPTER SIX
It was 11.32a.m.
The sun was climbing steadily into the sky and now was almost at its zenith, its rays baking the asphalt and the concrete, sending shimmering waves of heat up from the pavements.
There was no breeze in the park.
The man with the binoculars sat atop a high outcropping of rock, but it was no cooler there than it was on the paths that wound through the park. The man wore blue-gabardine trousers and a cotton-mesh short-sleeved sports shirt. He sat in cross-legged Indian fashion, his elbows resting on his knees, the binoculars trained on the police precinct across the street.
There was an amused smile on the man's face.
He watched the kids streaming out of the police station, and the smile widened. His letter was bringing results. His letter had set the precinct machinery in motion, and he watched the results of that motion now, and there was a strange pulsing excitement within him as he wondered if he would be caught.
They won't catch me, he thought.
But maybe they will.
The excitement within him was contradictory. He wanted to elude them, but at the same time he relished the idea of a chase, a desperate gun battle, the culminating scene of a carefully planned murder. Tonight he would kill. Yes. There was no backing away from that. Yes. He had to kill, he knew that, there was no other way, that was it, yes. Tonight. They could not stop him, but maybe they would. They could not stop him.
A man was leaving the precinct, coming down the stone steps.
He focused the binoculars tightly on the man's face. A detective, surely. On business his letter had provoked? His grin widened.
The detective had red hair. The hair caught the rays of the brilliant sun. There was a white streak over one temple. He followed the detective with his binoculars. The detective got into an automobile, an unmarked police car, undoubtedly. The car pulled away from the curb quickly.
They're in a hurry, the man thought, lowering the binoculars. He looked at his wrist watch.
11.35.
They haven't got much time, he thought. They haven't got much time to stop me.
The bookshop was unusual for the 87th Precinct neighbourhood. You did not expect to find a store selling books in such a neighbourhood. You expected all the reading matter to be in drugstore racks, and you expected sadistic mysteries like I, the Hangman, historical novels like See My Bosom, dramas of the Old West like Sagebrush Sixgun.
The shop was called Books, Incorporated. It huddled in one of the side streets between two tenements, below street level. You passed through an old iron gate, walked down five steps, and were face to face with the plate-glass window of the shop and its display of books. A sign in the window said, 'We stock Spanish-language books'. Another sign said, 'Aquí habla Español.'