He sat there for a minute when the men had gone, his mind wandering over Fleming, over the rapes, over the pretty boys. Fleming-there wasn’t anything routine could do there. Carey had done it. There’d been a search for a block around, not that there’d be many places in that bare city block where a man could be hidden away, and Fleming couldn’t have crawled much farther. Where the hell was the man'?
The rapes. Very queer. It would do no harm to ask if somebody at Juvenile had any ideas.
The pretty boys- He roused himself, told Farrell to get him the Mission Church, and found the younger priest there. There would be a requiem Mass for Father O’Brien on Monday morning at ten o’clock.
He got up and said to Farrell, "I’ll be over in Juvenile if anybody wants me."
Roy Titus, aggrieved and surprised at having been dropped on so quick, parted with the names of his two pals without much persuasion-Floyd Sporler and Bob Bovers. They were both in Records and Sporler was also still on parole, which made the whole caper all the more stupid. Hackett and Higgins tried Sporler's address first, and found both of them there, trying to get Titus on the phone. They were just as surprised as he’d been, and asked how the cops had found out it was them.
"You ever read detective stories, George?" asked Hackett as they came out of the jail.
"Seldom."
"Fairy tales," said Hackett. "The cunning intellectual criminals. I’ve never run across one yet."
They stopped for lunch at Federico’s and went back to the office. Wanda Larsen was on her way out. She eyed Hackett’s notebook and said firmly she was busy, it was her week to qualify at the range. "I’m supposed to be a police officer, not just your secretary, boys."
"So I’ll toss you for who types the report," said Higgins to Hackett, and won the throw. But as Hackett stripped off his jacket and sat down, Duke came in with a fat manila envelope.
"Oh, good, I caught you. Understand you were out on this. We’re still looking at some of the stuff there, blood types and so on, but I thought you’d like to see this." He opened the manila envelope and spread out a sheaf of glossy black and white 8 by 10’s.
Hackett and Higgins looked at them without comment, the mercilessly clear pictures of the carnage worked on the old lady, her place in life. The twisted frail old body was frozen by the camera, its grotesquely smashed-in face, the blood, the bruises, the torn clothes. The little grocery store had been ransacked, cans and packages thrown down from shelves, the cash register opened, but the havoc there was nothing compared to that in the apartment upstairs. They’d seen all this yesterday, after the lab men had been through it; they looked at it again, in the photographs which were somehow worse to look at-a curious effect of timeless photography. The tiny living room with its ancient flowered rug, fat old furniture: the smaller bedroom with its sagging double bed, skimpy carpet, high chest of drawers and chair in golden oak-it had all been ruthlessly torn apart, drawers flung out, upholstered furniture slashed to ribbons, rugs pulled up, the mattress crisscrossed with knife-cuts and off the bed.
"Hunting for the loot, we said at the time," said Higgins. "And it’s a toss-up whether it was somebody who knew her reputation-if that was generally known-for keeping cash around, or just somebody picking her at random. And no way to guess what he got or didn’t."
"No," said Duke, "but there are points. For one thing, you didn’t see the body near to-being good little boys, keeping clear not to spoil evidence for us eagle-eyed scientific types. It was pretty clear she hadn’t been dead long when Weinstein found her. The blood was hardly dry. I think she’d just come down to open the store-he said she was usually open by seven-thirty-she was dressed, you notice. And a customer walked in early. Sorry, we didn’t pick up any useful latents-the ones on the register too smudged to be any good. But that says to me, when it happened at that time, the odds are it was somebody who’d been living or staying right around that neighborhood, recently. And in the midst of all that mess, there was this."
His blunt forefinger came down on one photograph, of the front part of the store. Just beside the front door, a small crumpled object lay on the floor. He removed that photograph and substituted a close-up. The object now showed as a crumpled empty package that had once held cigarettes-Camels.
"Big deal," said Hackett.
"Oh, but you haven’t seen this," said Duke. He pulled out another close-up. This one looked as if it had been made under a microscope: the finest details of the little package showed up clear and clean. They could see where it had been torn open from one end across the top, and the blue seal or part of it left, and another seal superimposed.
"By God!" said Higgins. "By God-eagle-eyed, you’re damn right."
The little seal, torn across, still showed part of a stamp with black letters. PDL TN px.
"That’s beautiful, Duke," said Hackett. "Pendleton Air Force Base PX. It can’t be anything else."
"Narrows it down to whatever personnel has access to the post exchange and wasn’t there yesterday morning," said Higgins. "Or come to think, was this thing here when he walked in? What says he dropped it?"
"Don’t nitpick, George," said Hackett. "I like it. It’s a damned good lead if you ask me. And it makes a picture- him tearing the place to pieces hunting for the loot, after he’d killed her, and then-whatever he got or didn’t get-just as he walked out, lighting the last cigarette in the package. That’s nice work, Duke."
"I thought you’d like it," said Duke complacently.
"It just occurred to me," said Mendoza to Captain Loomis of Juvenile Division, "on these rape cases we’ve got-the description the women gave us, just a kid. About fifteen. He won’t be in any records complete with mug-shot at that age, but if he’s out on this caper that young, it could be he’d given the warning rattle some way before and got into your records."
"That’s the hell of a thing," said Loomis. "Rape, at that age? Well, it does happen. We get ’em in here at four and five, budding pros at burglary and you name it-but we can’t take pictures either, Mendoza. These days, we’re just a sociological counseling service. Let’s hear that description again. Well, it doesn’t ring a bell with me, but let’s ask Melinda and Betty." He opened the office door and beckoned. "Both damn good officers, and they’ve been here six-seven years, they might have some idea."
Melinda and Betty, both trim in uniform, were respectively black and white, and efficient. They listened to the description, consulted with each other, and Melinda asked, "If he has been in trouble before, Lieutenant, would you have any idea what kind?"
"Not a clue. I only thought he might have been in little trouble before he graduated to big."
"Peter Ricksey?" said Betty to Melinda. "He’d be about fifteen, and he’s baby-faced. The last time we had him in was eighteen months ago, for beating up the other kids for their lunch money. He’d fit the description."
"He doesn’t sound like the nice polite youngster our victims say he is," Mendoza said with a grin. "Could he act it?"
Betty laughed. "I wouldn’t think so. He’s completely illiterate, and not very polite by nature. I just can’t think of any boy to fit that description, Lieutenant."
"It was just an idea. For all we know, he’s never so much as stolen a nickel from Mama’s purse," said Mendoza. "But you can see, there’s no way to look for him, damn it. Well, thanks anyway."
Palliser, Conway and Landers came up with nine men out of Records to hunt for, by a process of weeding out the ones with suggestive records who lived or had lived on the Central beat and looked something like the Harry Stephanie had described. They went out looking for them, without any conspicuous success.