'Mostly she looked dead.'
'I know. Meat in a butcher's window.' We were in his car, driving over the bumpy surface of the Queensboro Bridge. The sky was starting to lighten up already. I was beyond tiredness by now, with the ragged edges of my emotions perilously close to the surface. I could feel my own vulnerability; the smallest thing could nudge me to tears or laughter.
'You gotta wonder what it would be like,' he said.
'What?'
'Picking up somebody who looked like that. On the street or in a bar, whatever. Then you get her someplace and she takes her clothes off and surprise. I mean, how do you react?'
'I don't know.'
' 'Course if she already had the operation, you could go with her and never know. Her hands didn't look so big to me. There's women with big hands and men with little hands, far as that goes.'
'Uh-huh.'
'She had a couple rings on, speaking of her hands. You happen to notice?'
'I noticed.'
'One on each hand, she had.'
'So?'
'So he didn't take 'em.'
'Why would he take her rings?'
'You were saying he took Dakkinen's.'
I didn't say anything.
Gently he said, 'Matt, you don't still think Dakkinen got killed for a reason?'
I felt rage swelling up within me, bulging like an aneurysm in a blood vessel. I sat there trying to will it away.
'And don't tell me about the towels. He's a ripper, he's a cute fucking psycho who makes plans and plays by his own private rules.
He's not the first case like that to come along.'
'I got warned off the case, Joe. I got very professionally warned off the case.'
'So? She got killed by a psycho and there could still be something about her life that some friends of hers don't want to come out in the open. Maybe she had a boyfriend and he's a married guy, just like you figured, and even if what she died of was scarlet fucking fever he wouldn't want you poking around in the ashes.'
I gave myself the Miranda warning. You have the right to remain silent, I told myself, and exercised the right.
'Unless you figure Dakkinen and Blaustein are tied together.
Long-lost sisters, say. Excuse me, brother and sister. Or maybe they were brothers, maybe Dakkinen had her operation a few years ago. Tall for a girl, wasn't she?'
'Maybe Cookie was a smokescreen,' I said.
'How's that?'
I went on talking in spite of myself. 'Maybe he killed her to take the heat off,' I said. 'Make it look like a train of random murders. To hide his motive for killing Dakkinen.'
'To take the heat off. What heat, for Christ's sake?'
'I don't know.'
'There's been no fucking heat. There will be now. Nothing turns the fucking press on like a series of random killings. The readers eat it up, they pour it on their corn flakes. Anything gives 'em a chance to run a sidebar on the original Jack the Ripper, those editors go crazy for it.
You talk about heat, there'll be enough heat now to scorch his ass for him.'
'I suppose.'
'You know what you are, Scudder? You're stubborn.'
'Maybe.'
'Your problem is you work private and you only carry one case at a time. I got so much shit on my desk it's a pleasure when I get to let go of something, but with you it's just the opposite. You want to hang onto it as long as you can.'
'Is that what it is?'
'I don't know. It sounds like it.' He took one hand off the wheel, tapped me on the forearm. 'I don't mean to bust balls,' he said. 'I see something like that, somebody chopped up like that, I try to clamp a lid on it and it comes out in other directions. You did a lot of good work.'
'Did I?'
'No question. There were things we missed. It might give us a little jump on the psycho, some of the stuff you came up with. Who knows?'
