home from work, but he had a hot date that night. Lots of guilt over what happened. On top of everything else, the date stood him up.”
“So because of his sister, he got caught up in the story of this Jane Doe without the hands?”
“Right. The old bulldog kept trying to figure out who she was. It was an obsession, really. When the coroner’s office got tired of holding her in the morgue, O’Connor spent his own money to arrange for a decent burial and a tombstone for her.
“He would even use his vacations to try to figure out where she had come from, what she might have been doing here. Every year, on the anniversary of the day they found her, he’d write his famous ‘Who Is Hannah?’ story. He wrote about her case and any recent Jane or John Does lying around in the morgue. Sometimes the story would get picked up by out-of-town papers. He actually helped to get the identification on a couple of bodies. But nobody ever claimed Hannah. Every year someone looking for a missing daughter or sister or wife would contact him, but it wouldn’t turn out to be Hannah. Now and then he’d tell me he thought he had a lead on it, but I don’t think he ever really learned much.
“‘Irene,’ he’d say, ‘somebody misses that girl. Every night they go past her room and wonder if she might still be alive, if maybe she has amnesia, if she secretly hated them and ran away, if she has been tortured or treated cruelly. They miss her. And somewhere some black-hearted bastard knows he killed her, knows where her hands and feet are buried. I aim to make him feel a little worried.’”
Frank stretched and sighed. “Thirty-five years ago. The killer may not even be alive now, let alone worried.” He stood up and walked around a little. “I guess O’Connor ruffled a few feathers along the way.”
“I’ve thought about that,” I said, standing up too. “This town’s so thick with potential enemies, you can’t stir ’em with a stick. Lots of people who didn’t like what he had to say about them, people with the power to do something about it. He got death threats occasionally. Didn’t mention any lately, though.”
There was a knock at the front screen door. We turned to look, and it appeared that no one was there.
“Cody. Wild Bill Cody, my cat,” I explained. “He’s got a cat door, but this way he can make a nuisance of himself.” I opened the door and let him in. He pranced over to sniff Frank’s shoes — shoes must be to cats what crotches are to dogs, although cats are more delicate about it — and Frank bent down and picked him up. Cody is a sucker for affection, and even with the heat he was happy to be scratched between the ears. Frank stood there holding Cody and looking out the window. He seemed to be staring at something, when suddenly he dived toward me and knocked me to the floor, landing on top of me and knocking my breath out. Cody went tearing out from between us just as three gunshots blew out the window.
3
FRANK LIFTED HIS HEAD and I saw blood on his face. I started to cry out, but he put his hand over my mouth. He was listening for something. We heard the car drive off. He scrambled up off me and pulled out his gun, looking outside quickly before going out the front door. I got up a little more slowly. There was glass all over the place and a gaping hole in the back of my armchair. That really pissed me off. Trying not to step on any glass, I went out to the front porch.
The gunshots had been loud enough to draw a few of my neighbors out for a little rubbernecking. “Frank, get in here, you’re scaring the neighbors.” Not every day they saw a bloodied man with a gun standing out on my lawn. “Nothing to worry about, folks, he’s a cop.”
“You’re a real laugh riot. I guess that means you’re not hurt.”
“Thanks to you, I’m not.”
He managed a quick smile and said, “All in the line of duty.”
He was looking out at the street in front of the house next door. Suddenly, I saw what he was staring at. A red Corvette.
“That your neighbor’s?” he asked.
“No,” I said in disbelief, “but it looks just like Kenny O’Connor’s.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.” He walked over to it, took a quick look through the windshield that apparently didn’t reveal anything special, and came back to my house. “Let’s go back inside,” he said.
He made a phone call to headquarters while I went to get something to clean up his face.
“Yeah, dark blue, late model Lincoln, no front plate. Probably headed up Ocean Boulevard. Also, check out the registration of an ’87 Corvette, license 3RVE070. Yeah. No, we’re all right. Okay, thanks.” He hung up.
I sat him down at the kitchen table and then pulled a chair up facing him, and started to sponge the blood off his face with a warm washcloth. He winced a little, and I realized that he hadn’t been cut by glass or shot — he had a lovely deep set of Cody’s claw marks on the right side of his face.
“Cody got you good, didn’t he?”
“Not his fault, I scared him. Where is he?”
“Ran off — if my closet door is open, he’s up on the top shelf. Otherwise, ten to one he’s hiding under my bed.”
I had some antibiotic ointment and tried to be tender as I put it on the scratches. He was watching me with those beautiful gray-green eyes. He reached up and touched my hair.
“You’ve got little pieces of glass in your hair,” he said, and gently pulled a bead of it from near my ear.
“So do you,” I said, and reached into his soft brown hair to retrieve one of them. We took care of each other like a couple of parrots for a few minutes. We were interrupted by a knock at the door by something bigger than a cat and parted, both looking a little sheepish.
“Detective Harriman?”
“Yeah, be right with you,” Frank answered.
He stood up, shook his head, and squared his shoulders, trying to get into his Detective Harriman mode again.
The young, pink-faced, uniformed officer who came in the door looked as if the heat was about to do him in.
