“Jesus, that’s convoluted.”
“We know he’s a planner.”
“And a tricky bastard altogether. But this doesn’t make any sense, Matthew. Giving us somebody else’s DNA doesn’t lead us down any primrose path. It’s not like he’s trying to frame somebody else for this.
I mean, he knows we’ve got an eyewitness, a friend of the victim who sold him the murder weapon. We pull him in, we’re not gonna cut him loose because the DNA’s not a match.”
“It gives his lawyer something to play with in court,” I said.
“ ‘Isn’t it true that you found male facial hair at the crime scene?
And isn’t it true that you tried and failed to match that DNA with that of the defendant’s?’ ”
“ ‘And isn’t it within the realm of possibility that another man visited 232
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the victim’s apartment after my client had gone home, and how can you rule out the possibility that this other man was responsible for her death?’ ”
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Sussman said. “But what kind of psycho pervert murderer is so fucking painstaking? Listen, are you gonna be around for the next couple of hours?”
“Whether I am or not, I’ll have my cell with me.”
“Good. I want to talk to the lab guys, and then I want to talk to you some more.”
I was just walking in the door when the phone rang. “They didn’t have to do anything,” he said. “All I had to do was ask. The three hairs they recovered are male human facial hair, like I said. Facial hair is like body hair, it grows to a certain length and then it falls out, at which time the follicle sets about sprouting another hair.”
“And?”
“And these hairs didn’t fall out. They were severed, probably by a scissors. Now what happens sometimes is you take a scissors and trim your mustache, and you don’t comb it when you’re done, and some of the trimmings stay in the mustache and get dislodged later. Which is why they weren’t suspicious when they examined the hairs and saw they’d been cut.”
“Makes sense.”
“And the thing is it could have happened just that way. I can’t prove it didn’t. But I know it didn’t, because if our Mr. Neat trimmed his fucking mustache he’d have damn well combed it afterward.”
“Right.”
“He combed her crotch. Either that or he shaved his own bush, the way some of them do, to keep from leaving telltale evidence. Man, I bet every TV in every prison is tuned to C.S.I. when it comes on, I bet the motherfuckers sit there and take notes. Anyway, we didn’t come up with any loose pubic hairs there, not his and not hers, but what we did find were those hairs from his mustache. So it was a fake.”
“Had to be.”
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“And he wore it all along. When he met her, when he went to your wife’s shop. Incidentally, forget what I said before about her going back to work. This prick’s too fucking clever.”
“My thought exactly.”
“I don’t know if we should change the sketch for TV and the papers.
It might just tip him off that we know what he’s doing. Besides, he could have a full beard by now.”
“If he found someone to sell it to him.”
“That’s a line of inquiry I was just thinking about. Theatrical supply houses, because somebody had to sell him that mustache. Matt, I’ve got to thank you for this one. I never even thought of a false mustache.
I’m not used to thinking that way. Maybe criminals were a shiftier lot back in the day, huh?”
“That must be it,” I said. “The guy’s a throwback.” TJ was on the computer and Elaine was reading a magazine, but they both took a break to hear about David Thompson. Elaine was bothered by the idea that Louise was going to break up with him. “So he hasn’t got a place to live. So what?”
“I think it bothers her that he didn’t tell her.”
“It’s like herpes,” she said. “You don’t tell anybody until they need to know. Besides, he did tell her his place was too small for company. He just didn’t tell her quite how small it was.”
“He said it was in Kips Bay.”
“Well, maybe he likes to park there, maybe there are lots of good spaces. I think she should buy a house in Montclair and let him park in her driveway.”
“You’re just a sucker for happy endings.”
“Well, you’re right about that.”
TJ remembered how, on the night we tried to tail him, Thompson had stopped to make a quick phone call as soon as he was out of Louise’s building.
“We figured he was calling a woman,” I said, “and we were right. He called Louise, to tell her what a good time he’d had. Then he took the 234
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