water, as hot as I could stand it, and I lay gratefully in it, feeling it draw the misery out of me.
I was in the tub when the phone rang, and I let it ring. When I got out I called down to the desk to see if the caller had left a message, but he hadn't, and the genius on duty couldn't remember if it had been a man or a woman.
I suppose it must have been him, but I'll never know for sure. I didn't notice what time it was. It could have been anybody, really. I'd passed out my business cards all over town, and any of a thousand people could have been moved to call me.
And if it was him, and if I'd been there to take the call, it wouldn't have changed a thing.
When the phone rang again I was already awake. The sky was light outside my window and I'd opened my eyes ten or fifteen minutes ago.
Any minute now I'd get up and go to the bathroom and find out what color urine I was producing today.
I picked up the phone and he said, 'Good morning, Scudder,' and it was chalk on a blackboard again, and an arctic chill that went right through me.
I don't remember what I said. I must have said something, but maybe not. Maybe I just sat there holding the goddamned phone.
He said, 'I had a busy night. I suppose you've already read about it.'
'What are you talking about?'
'I'm talking about blood.'
'I don't understand.'
'No, evidently you don't. Blood, Scudder. Not the kind you spill, although I'm afraid that did happen.
But there's no sense crying over spilled blood, is there?'
My grip tightened on the telephone. I felt the anger and impatience rising in me, but I kept a lid on it, refusing to give him the response he seemed to want. I made myself take a breath, and I didn't say anything.
'Blood as in blood ties,' he said. 'You lost someone near and dear to you. My sympathies.'
'What do you—'
'Read the paper,' he said shortly, and he broke the connection.
I called Anita. While the phone rang I felt as though an iron band was tightening around my chest, but when I heard her voice on the other end of the line I couldn't think of a thing to say to her. I just sat there as wordless as a heavy breather until she got tired of saying 'hello?' and hung up on me.
A blood tie, someone near and dear to me. Elaine? Did he know that she was my honorary cousin Frances? It didn't make sense but I called anyway. The line was busy. I decided he must have killed her and left her phone off the hook, and I got an operator to check and make sure. She did, and reported that the phone was in use. I'd identified myself as a police officer, so she cooperatively offered to break into the call if it was an emergency. I told her not to bother. It might or might not be an emergency, but I didn't want to talk to Elaine any more than I'd wanted to talk to Anita. I just wanted to assure myself that she was alive.
My sons?
I was looking in my book for phone numbers before the unlikelihood of that struck me. Even if he'd managed to find one of them and chase across the country after him, how could it have made today's paper? And why didn't I quit wasting time and go out and buy the paper and read about it, whatever it was?
I threw some clothes on, went downstairs and picked up the News and the Post. They both had the same story headlined on the front page.
The Venezuelan family, it turned out, had been killed by mistake.
They weren't drug dealers after all. The Colombians across the street were drug dealers, and the killers had evidently gone to the wrong house.
Nice.
I went to the Flame and sat at the counter and ordered coffee. I opened one of the papers and started going through it without knowing what I was looking for.
I found it right away. It would have been hard to miss. It was spread all over page 3.
A young woman had been killed in a particularly brutal fashion by a killer or killers who had invaded her home early the previous evening.
She was a financial analyst employed by an investment-management corporation headquartered on Wall Street, and she had lived just below Gramercy Park on Irving Place, where she'd occupied the fourth floor of a brownstone.
Two photos ran with the article. One showed an attractive girl with a long face and a high forehead, her expression serious, her gaze level.
The other showed the entrance to her building, with police personnel carrying her out in a body bag. The accompanying text stated that the well-appointed apartment had been ransacked by the killer or killers, and that the woman had been subjected to repeated sexual assault and unspecified sadistic mistreatment. The police were withholding details, as was customary in such cases, but the news story did mention that the victim had been decapitated, and one sensed that this was not the only surgery that had been performed.
Bugs Moran, intended victim of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, knew right away who'd machine-gunned his men in a Chicago garage.
'Only Capone kills that way,' he said.
You couldn't say that here. All too many people kill in all too many ways, and Motley's murders didn't run to type, not as far as I could see.
