Eight Million Ways To Die

"We don't know for sure the towels were dirty, Matt. We don't know he took a shower."

"He chopped her up and put blood all over the walls. You think he got out of there without washing up?"

"I guess not."

"Would you take wet towels home for a souvenir? He had a reason."

"Okay." A pause. "A psycho might not want to leave evidence.

You're saying he's someone who knew her, who had a reason to kill her.

You can't be sure of that."

"Why did he have her come to the hotel?"

"Because that's where he was waiting. Him and his little machete."

"Why didn't he take his little machete to her place on Thirty-seventh Street?"

"Instead of having her make house calls?"

"Right. I spent the day talking to hookers. They aren't nuts about outcalls because of the travel time.

They'll do them, but they usually invite the caller to come to their place instead, tell him how much more comfortable it is. She probably would have done that but he wasn't having any."

"Well, he already paid for the room. Wanted to get his money's worth."

"Why wouldn't he just as soon go to her place?"

He thought about it. "She had a doorman," he said. "Maybe he didn't want to walk past the doorman."

"Instead he had to walk through a whole hotel lobby and sign a registration card and speak to a desk clerk. Maybe he didn't want to pass that doorman because the doorman had seen him before. Otherwise a doorman's a lot less of a challenge than an entire hotel."

"That's pretty iffy, Matt."

"I can't help it. Somebody did a whole batch of things that don't make sense unless he knew the girl and had a personal reason for wanting her dead. He may be emotionally disturbed. Perfectly levelheaded

people don't generally go batshit with a machete. But he's more than a psycho picking women at random."

"How do you figure it? A boyfriend?"

"Something like that."

"She splits with the pimp, tells the boyfriend she's free, and he panics?"

"I was thinking along those lines, yes."

"And goes crazy with a machete? How does that mesh with your profile of a guy who decides he'd rather stay home with his wife?"

"I don't know."

"Do you know for sure she had a boyfriend?"

"No," I admitted.

"These registration cards. Charles O. Jones and all his aliases, if he ever had any. You think they're gonna lead anywhere?"

"They could."

"That's not what I asked you, Matt."

"Then the answer's no. I don't think they're going to lead to anything."

"But you still think it's worth doing."

"I'd have gone through the cards myself at the Galaxy Downtowner," I reminded him. "On my own time, if the guy would have let me."

"I suppose we could run the cards."

"Thanks, Joe."

"I suppose we can run the other check, too. First-class commercial hotels in the area, their Jones registrations for the past six months or whatever. That what you wanted?"

"That's right."

"The autopsy showed semen in her throat and esophagus. You happen to notice that?"

"I saw it in the file last night."

"First he had her blow him, then he chopped her up with his boy scout hatchet. And you figure it was a boyfriend."

"The semen could have been from an earlier contact. She was a hooker, she had a lot of contacts."

"I suppose," he said. "You know, they can type semen now. It's not like a fingerprint, more like a blood type. Makes useful circumstantial evidence. But you're right, with her lifestyle it doesn't rule a guy out if the semen type's not a match."

"And it doesn't rule him in if it is."

"No, but it'd fucking well give him a headache. I wish she'd scratched him, got some skin under her nails.

That always helps."

"You can't have everything."

"For sure. If she blew him, you'd think she could have wound up with a hair or two between her teeth.

Whole trouble is she's too ladylike."

"That's the trouble, all right."

"And my trouble is I'm starting to believe there's a case here, with a killer at the end of a rainbow. I got a desk full of shit I haven't got time for and you've got me pulling my chain with this one."

"Think how good you'll look if it breaks."

"I get the glory, huh?"

"Somebody might as well."

I had three more hookers to call, Sunny and Ruby and Mary Lou.

Their numbers were in my notebook.

But I'd talked to enough whores for one day. I called Chance's service, left word for him to call me. It was Friday night. Maybe he was at the Garden, watching a couple of boys hit each other. Or did he just go when Kid Bascomb was fighting?

I took out Donna Campion's poem and read it. In my mind's eye all the poem's colors were overlaid with blood, bright arterial blood that faded from scarlet to rust. I reminded myself that Kim had been alive when the poem was written. Why, then, did I sense a note of doom in Donna's lines? Had she

picked up on something? Or was I seeing things that weren't really there?