Nudger breathed out hard. Utah Avenue! Not Claudia, a woman on Utah! His world had lurched to a stop, then started again. He nodded to the uniform and got into the car.
Utah wasn't far from where Laura Cather lived on Wyoming. They drove back the way Nudger had just come, down Highway 44, then south on Grand. The scenery was still vivid in Nudger's mind, only running in reverse, lending what was happening the air of a recurring bad dream. For a murdered woman on Utah it had been more than a dream; it had been the end of dreams.
The scene of this murder was a brick two-family flat on a good block of Utah. Property here had become expensive despite its near proximity to poverty. The higher tone of the neighborhood hadn't helped; sex murderers were more likely to be influenced by a full moon than by property assessments. The flat's front porch was wide, with brick columns, and featured the ornate stonework that was prevalent in this part of town and that "craftsmen" would charge prohibitively for today, in this the age of the plastic heirloom.
One of the blue uniforms directed Nudger to the door on the right, to the ground-floor unit. Nudger immediately recognized the faint odor of putrefaction as he pushed open the door and stepped into a spacious beige living room decorated with too many potted plants. Something bitter moved at the back of his throat.
"Deja vu, Nudge," Hammersmith said, waving to him from a doorway in the hall.
When Nudger approached, Hammersmith said, "I leave it up to you as to whether you want to look at this one."
Nudger felt his stomach drop a few notches. Beyond Hammersmith, a couple of police technicians inside the bathroom were wearing surgical masks as they went about their specialized tasks. The stench here was horrible, much worse than at the Valpone apartment. Nudger wondered how Hammersmith could stand it.
"The heat did it to her," Hammersmith said, reading Nudger's sickly expression. "She hasn't been dead much longer than Grace Valpone was when we found her, but the bathroom faces south and catches too much sun. I'm afraid it'll make determining the exact time of death a little tricky."
"Have you got an estimate?" Nudger asked.
"The ME's preliminary guess is that she's been dead about two days, two warm days."
A plainclothes cop came out of the bathroom with an alcohol-soaked handkerchief pressed to his nose and mouth. He was greener than the giant who sold peas, and not half as jolly. He seemed to stagger slightly as he walked down the hall, then he got in a big hurry.
Nudger looked at Hammersmith, who gazed back at him and shrugged. Here we go! Clutching his roiling stomach, Nudger slid around Hammersmith and stepped far enough into the bathroom to see the body.
After a glance he backed away and hurried into the kitchen, where he immediately vomited into the sink. He saw that he wasn't the first to use the facility, as he reached up feebly and ran the cold tap water.
Hammersmith had followed him and was standing waiting patiently for the retching to stop.
After several minutes, Nudger finally straightened, his hands still resting on the sink. He felt weak and figured he must be as pale and green as the cop with the handkerchief. He thought he might start trembling; he didn't want that. There was enough machismo lost in being green.
"Let's go out on the back porch," Hammersmith suggested, "get some fresh air." He threw a sliding bolt lock, shoved open the kitchen door to the rear porch, and let Nudger step out in front of him.
They were looking out over a gray, freshly painted wood rail at a small but neat backyard. There was a two-car brick garage there, with a flagstone walk leading back to it. Thick white corner posts at the gray railing supported an identical porch upstairs. In a far corner of the porch were a metal pan half full of water and a thick china bowl containing a lump of fly-covered spoiled dog food or cat food, the kind pet owners buy because it resembles hamburger and they'd like it if they were in the role of pet. Nudger looked away from that.
"This one is even worse than Valpone," Hammersmith observed.
And the five-minute-old image was there again in Nudger's mind: a smallish dark-haired woman in her bath, nude, one breast gone, her throat slashed with such brutal force that she was nearly decapitated. This time there was blood on the floor and walls, not much, but some. Maybe she'd fought harder than the others; maybe the life force had been stronger in her.
"Her name was Susan Merriweather," Hammersmith said. "Twenty-seven years old. Too damned young to die like that. She lived alone, worked as a loan manager at a bank, and had lots of acquaintances but few close friends. She partied now and then, but mostly led a quiet life."
"And met a quiet, nasty death."
"Yeah." Hammersmith caressed the cellophaned tip of a cigar protruding from his shirt pocket, then withdrew his hand. "He worked on her systematically before or after she was dead, or both. Same kind of mutilation as the Valpone woman had, only more so. Much more so."
"I saw," Nudger said, his stomach cartwheeling at the thought of dried blood, gristle, and bone; the Death inside us all.
"You want to sit down?" Hammersmith asked, motioning toward the wooden steps.
Nudger sat down. Hammersmith sat beside him, a step higher. They watched the neighbor's sad-looking beagle amble over to the fence and gaze through the chain link, wondering what all the human fuss was about, then amble away toward some shade.
"Things have firmed up, Nudge," Hammersmith said. "There was a six-six-six number on a slip of paper near Susan Merriweather's phone. And the fingerprint team picked up some smudged prints in a blood smear. I sent them down to Headquarters for a rush ID."
"Hear anything yet?"
"Only that they match exactly the abnormally large size and spread of the prints found in Jenine Boyington's apartment."
Nudger nodded, thinking. He hadn't really doubted the connection between the killings, but this confirmed it. More than that, it placed him on different, more dangerous, ground. It was assumed now by people other than Jeanette Boyington and Nudger that a mass murderer was operating in the city, insatiable and unpredictable, taking his victims in seemingly random harvest. Nudger experienced a fear he couldn't quite define, as if the laws of the universe were, after all, a farce, a grisly celestial joke, and there was nothing but black chaos where he had assumed there was some kind of order and meaning. Theory had become terrifying fact; madness had been stamped official.
"The murders figure to be done by the same perp," Hammersmith was saying. "Jenine Boyington, Grace Valpone, and now Susan Merriweather, all killed more or less the same way and within a relatively short time of each other. We checked on all similar murders, Nudge, put the old computer to work. There were several resting in the back files, four possible tie- ins and three that I'd bet were committed by the killer who did the work on Boyington, Valpone, and Merriweather. They were there all the time in Records, dating back three years."
"Why didn't you draw a connection until now?" Nudger asked.
Hammersmith shook his broad head sadly, his jowls swaying. "There are hundreds of homicides every year in the metropolitan area, Nudge. The ones done by this killer before his last three were simply unsolved and categorized under 'inactive,' lost in the statistics."
Lost in the statistics. Nudger remembered Jeanette Boy- ington saying that, when she'd hired him to find her twin's murderer. He had listened to her mass murder theory mainly because he was between cases while his rent rolled on. The needy ear of poverty. Nobody else would have bought the idea. Maybe you didn't have to be dead to be lost in the statistics.
"Whatever our past oversights," Hammersmith said, "we have to take it from where we are. The news media is on to this now, and the case is top priority with the department. More manpower's been assigned and the Major Case Squad is involved. Leo Springer is involved. You better walk easy, Nudge, thinking all the time about where you're stepping."