Only Child

“The wounds...?”

“That’s one of the things I got to look at, but not bring along. Ever since the slime-sheets started publishing autopsy photos, every coroner’s office in the country tightened up. Good thing, too. What do you want to know?”

“The bloodwork?”

“Not all that useful, since so much time had passed. Coroner said minimum of two weeks since death. But, still, they went the route. Even toxed her hair. Negative on everything. Plus, she had no tracks, and there was no independent indication of drugs.”

“Did it...the killing, look professional?”

“Professional? She was stabbed seventeen times!”

“If a pair of prison hit men cornered their target in the shower, they’d stick him that many times, just to be sure.”

Wolfe lit another cigarette. Sucked in the smoke like bitter medicine. Held it down a couple of seconds, then blew a harsh jet across the room.

“I’d forgotten,” she said softly.

“What?”

“How...tuned in you are. If you’d ever worked the other side of the street—”

“I’m working it now.”

“That’s what you say.”

“Behavior is the truth,” I told her. “We all live by that. Come up with another explanation for what I’m doing,” I challenged her. “I can’t be working for the killer, helping to cover his tracks. According to you, there aren’t even any tracks to cover.”

“You’re working for gangsters.”

“I didn’t say I turned citizen,” I said. “What I said was the truth—my job is to find whoever did it. And that’s what I’m doing. It’s a job a citizen could do, right?”

“Sure,” she said.

“You believe me,” I told her, sure of myself.

“Why do you say that?”

“You wouldn’t have gotten me that info if you didn’t.”

“I’m in business.”

“Bullshit. I know what you do for a living. And I know where your lines are.”

“You’re so certain?”

“Yeah.”

I felt her gunfighter’s eyes measuring me, waited for the judgment.

“She was just a kid,” Wolfe finally said. “I wouldn’t mind helping out anyone hunting whoever did it.”

“More than one?” I asked her, not pressing the personal.

“Come again?”

“Edged weapons leave tracks, just like bullets. If more than one knife was used...”

“That’s only true if they were used at the same time.”

“And...?”

“The TPO is very shaky, you know that much already.”

I nodded. Time and Place of Occurrence is never more than a guess when the body isn’t discovered at the original scene. “It would still help to know if there was more than one blade. Not likely two freaks would go off at the same time.”

“Ask Bianchi and Buono,” she said, in her diamond-cutting prosecutor’s voice.

“The Hillside Stranglings weren’t spontaneous,” I told her. “Those two maggots had spent a lot of time together, mixing their juices, before they blended into a sex-kill unit. Felonious gestalt. Like Leopold and Loeb.”

“Could have been the same thing here,” Wolfe said, stubbornly. “There isn’t enough information to even guess from.”

“Sure,” I said, trying to maneuver her back to where I needed her to be. “Let’s work with what we have.”

Wolfe leaned back a little, cast her eyes up as if the grungy basement ceiling had some answers. “The victim was stabbed and slashed,” she said. “The same weapon could have inflicted all the wounds, if it was configured that way. Or it could have been more than one.”

“Defensives?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Her hands were clean. Wrists, too. Maybe the first thrust brought her down...? I hope so.”

I didn’t say anything, the silence between us ugly with the thought we shared. Sure, it would be better if the first plunge had been right into her heart, so she wouldn’t have died in pain and terror. But if Vonni had even so much as scratched one of them, maybe there’d have been some DNA under her fingernails.

“You see anything in the county-line thing?” I asked her.

“Oh, yes,” she said, the deep contempt acid in her mouth. “There’s jurisdictions known to be soft spots. A DA in charge who cares so much about a perfect conviction rate that he won’t move on anything less than a signed confession.

“Rapists read the papers, especially when they’re Inside, marinating in their own hate. For the child molesters, all the more so. Especially the ‘boy lovers’—they’ve got a real underground wire, pass along information like they do photographs.

“What any freak’s really looking for, with soft prosecutors, is a deal. You get a DA who’s afraid of taking a case to trial, you can get him to give away the courthouse.” She pulled on her cigarette, let the smoke float out her nose, ground out the butt on the side of the file cabinet, dropped it on the floor. “But that’s for sex crimes,” she went on. “For this, I don’t see the logic. Doesn’t matter how spineless the DA is—homicide like this’s a guaranteed life-top, no matter where you do it.”

“So the cops don’t have a clue...whether it was a panic-dump, or part of a plan?”

“They don’t even know where it happened. It’s not possible she was just hanging out in the place where they found the body. She had to have been brought there. But that could have been from any direction. Maybe right after it was done, maybe a week later—nothing points either way, so far.”

“How early can they pinpoint her, on the day she disappeared?”

“They can’t pinpoint her at all,” Wolfe said. “She walked out of her house and that was it. Nobody saw her. Nobody talked to her on the phone, and she didn’t leave any answering-machine messages, either. Nobody got an e-mail from her. She didn’t page anyone. She didn’t have a cell phone. No letter she mailed that date...or after...ever came to anyone. Plus, not a single sighting from the minute she walked out of her house until the body was found.”

“Somebody was supposed to meet her. She was being picked up.”

“That’s what she told her mother, sure.”

“It seems likely to me,” I said. “She didn’t have a car. And the bus service around there is lousy at that hour.”

“It’s not so much lousy as lightly used,” Wolfe corrected me, rapidly leafing through the paper until she found the document she wanted. “The police were all over that the very next morning,” she said, tapping the paper for emphasis. “The driver was emphatic—no one close to the girl’s description got on during his route. And, yes,” she said, anticipating me, “there were already passengers on the bus by the time it got to her stop.” She gave me a level look, waiting. When I didn’t speak, she said, “They checked every car service, too. It’s not like here—cabs don’t cruise, you have to call them.”

Wolfe held out her pack of smokes to me. I took one, fired a wooden match, lit her up first. Neither of us said anything for a while.

“I don’t like this as a random,” I told her. “The girl told her mother she had an appointment. And plans for the whole day, deep into the night. But, unless one or more of them’s lying, none of her friends knew anything about it.”

“People lie.”