'Finished. We're finished.' Kinderman was dotting a final i. 'Oh, no, wait,' he abruptly remembered. 'Mrs. Engstrom. They went and came together?' He was gesturing toward Karl.
'No, she went to see a Beatles film,' Chris answered just as Karl was turning to reply. 'She got in a few minutes after I did.'
'Why did I ask that? It wasn't important.' He shrugged as he folded up the program and tucked it away in the pocket of his jacket along with the pencil. 'Well, that's that. When I'm back in the office, no doubt I'll remember something I should have asked. With me, that always happens. Oh, well, I could call you,' he puffed, standing up.
Chris rose along with him.
'Well, I'm going out of town for a couple of weeks,' she said.
'It can wait' he assured her. 'It can wait.' He was staring of the sculpture with a smiling fondness. 'Cute. So cute,' he said. He'd leaned over and picked it up and was rubbing his thumb along is beak.
Chris bent over to pick up a thread on the kitchen floor.
'Have you got a good doctor?' the detective asked her. 'I mean for your daughter.'
He replaced the figure and began to leave. Glumly Chris followed, winding the thread around her thumb.
'Well, I've sure got enough of them,' she murmured. 'Anyway, I'm checking her into a clinic that's supposed to be great at doing what you do, only viruses.'
'Let's hope they're a great deal better. It's out of town, this clinic?'
'Yes, it is.'
'It's a good one?'
'We'll see.'
'Keep her out of the draft.'
They had reached the front door of the house. He put a hand on the doorknob. 'Well, I would say that it's been a pleasure, but under the circumstances...' He bowed his head and shook it. 'I'm sorry. Really. I'm terribly sorry.'
Chris folded her arms and looked down at the rug. She nodded briefly.
Kinderman opened the door and stepped outside. As he turned to Chris, he was putting on his hat. 'Well, good luck with your daughter.'
'Thanks.' She smiled wanly. 'Good luck with the world.'
He nodded with a gentle warmth and sadness, then waddled away. Chris watched as he listed toward a waiting squad car parked near the corner in front of a fire hydrant. He flung up a hand to his hat as a shearing wind sprang sharp from the south. The hem of his coat flapped. Chris closed the door.
When he'd entered the passenger side of the squad car, Kinderman fumed and looked back at the house. He thought he saw movement at Regan's window, a quick, lithe figure flashing to the side and out of view. He wasn't sure. He'd seen it peripherally as he'd turned. But he noted that the shutters were open. Odd. For a moment he waited. No one appeared. With a puzzled frown, the detective turned and opened the glove compartment, extracting a small brown envelope and a penknife. Unclasping the smallest of the blades of the knife, he held his thumb inside the envelope and surgically scraped paint from Regan's sculpture from under his thumbnail. When he had finished and was sealing the envelope, he nodded to the detective-sergeant behind, the wheel. They pulled away.
As they drove down Prospect Street, Kinderman pocketed the envelope. 'take it easy,' he captioned the sergeant, glancing at the traffic building up ahead. 'This is business, not pleasure.' He rubbed at his eyes with weary fingers. 'Ah, what a life,' he sighed. 'What a life.'
Later, that evening, while Dr. Klein was injecting Regan with fifty milligrams of Sparine to assure her tranquillity on the journey to Dayton, Lieutenant Kinderman stood brooding in his office, palms pressed flat atop his desk as he pored over fragments of baffling data. The narrow beam of an ancient desk lamp flared on a clutter of scattered reports. There was no other light. He believed that it helped him narrow the focus of concentration.
Kinderman's breathing labored heavy in the darkness as his glance flitted here; now there. Then he took a deep breath and shut his eyes. Mental Clearance Sale! he instructed himself, as he did whenever he wished to tidy his brain for a fresh point of view: Absolutely Everything Must Go!
When he opened his eyes, he examined the pathologist's report on Dennings: ... tearing of the spinal cord with fractured skull and neck, plus numerous contusions, lacerations, and abrasions; stretching of the neck skin; ecchymosis of the neck skin; shearing of platysma, sternomastoid, splenius, trapezius and various smaller muscles of the neck, with fracture of the spine and of the vertebrae and shearing of both the anterior and posterior spinous ligaments....
He looked out a window at the dark of the city. The Capitol dome light glowed. The Congress was working late. He shut his eyes again, recalling his conversation with the District pathologist at eleven-fifty-five on the night of Denning's death.
'It could have happened in the fall?'
'No, it's very unlikely. The sternomastoids and the trapezius muscles alone are enough to prevent it. Then you've also got the various articulations of the cervical spine to be overcome as well as the ligaments holding the bores together.'
'Speaking plainly, however, is it possible?'
'Well, of course, he was drunk and these muscles were doubtless somewhat relaxed. Perhaps if the force of the initial impact were sufficiently powerful and---'
'Falling maybe twenty or thirty feet before he hit?'
'Yes, that, and if immediately after impact his head got stuck in something; to other words, if there were
