more about Hubert’s only child than he had known when he’d looked at everything the previous morning. During the week since Cove’s original phone call, Rickenbacher had exhausted the obvious sources of information. He’d tracked Katherine’s driver’s license through the Department of Motor Vehicles, but she’d not submitted a change of address, nor had she ever received any moving violations; he’d tracked her social security number through both the Social Security Administration and the state’s Department of Employment Security, but they had no record of her ever obtaining legitimate employment; neither of the city’s two largest credit agencies had any record of her; she’d not obtained a phone in her own name; nor, according to Lieutenant Castellano, had she ever been arrested in the city.
Rickenbacher didn’t like dead ends—dead ends had a bad habit of leading to dead people. And he didn’t like Hubert Cove. Even though they’d never met, even though all he knew about Cove was the sound of the man’s voice, his dislike for incompetent agencies that did little and charged heavily, and the fact that his checks didn’t bounce, Cove grated on his nerves. If he’d been hired for any reason other than the disappearance of Cove’s daughter, Rickenbacher would have refunded the advance to be shed of the man.
Instead, he pushed himself away from the table and up from the yellow vinyl kitchen chair, rinsed his coffee mug under cold tap water and set it upside down on a faded dishtowel next to the sink, then retrieved a sky blue windbreaker from the coat closet to pull over his bulky sweater. From his collection of nearly a dozen hats, Rickenbacher selected a dark blue baseball cap devoid of logos and pulled it snug over his head, covering the bald spot whose very presence annoyed him almost as much as Hubert Cove.
The apartment door opened directly to the outside and Rickenbacher carefully secured the dead bolt behind him before looking over the second-floor railing and down at the parking lot where his Pontiac 6000 used to be. Three weeks earlier the car had disappeared during the night and pieces of it had probably made their way from a local chop shop to service stations and auto parts stores all over the midwest. The dark green Dodge van now in his parking space had belonged to his brother-in-law until Rickenbacher had peeled five crumpled hundreds out of his wallet and had taken possession away from the wiry young auto mechanic his sister had married seven years earlier. The van—all he could afford when the insurance company’s check did little more than pay off the outstanding loan balance on the Pontiac—had quickly become familiar.
The concrete stairs leading down were halfway between his apartment and the one to his left as he faced the street and he took them two at a time, zipping his windbreaker closed against the late morning chill.
He nodded to Mrs. Stegmann and her obese white poodle as he climbed into the van, then he brought the engine to life and backed out of his parking space. When he pulled into traffic, Rickenbacher pointed the van toward the bus station downtown. One of the two file folders on the passenger seat contained the material he’d obtained from Mr. Johnson’s office the night before. In the other were a dozen copies of Katherine’s graduation photo. He would show Katherine’s photograph around and see if anyone remembered a nervous young blonde from downstate Illinois stepping off a bus six weeks earlier.
And who might have met her or picked her up.
* * * *
Less than a mile away, someone had turned a hotel room into a Jackson Pollock abstract using only red. Blood red.
Inside the room, officers from the Mobile Crime Scene Unit finished photographing the scene, then called the Emergency Medical Technicians back in to remove the body.
In the hall just outside, a greasy little man stood with Lieutenant Castellano, twitching nervously. “Rosalinda didn’t come in today, that’s why I was cleaning the rooms. I told her if she misses work one more time I’ll fire her. That’s what I’ll do if she ever comes back. Fire her. I’ll bet she doesn’t even have a green card. I’ll bet—”
The Lieutenant lightly touched the manager’s bony shoulder, silencing him. The little man swallowed hard, then pushed his hair off his forehead with one gnarled hand and waited for the Lieutenant’s question.
“You touch anything?”
“Just the door when I opened it. It was 11:30. Check-out’s at 11:00 but the Do Not Disturb sign was still hanging from the door. I knocked and when nobody answered, I used my pass key to open the door. The drapes were pulled shut so I turned on the light. I didn’t see her. I just saw the blood.” He pushed his hair away from his face again. “I saw all the blood and then I turned and I saw her on the bed and—”
“You touched the light switch?”
“Yeah, I turned on the light.”
“You touch anything else?”
“Nothing. I swear it. I didn’t touch nothing.”
Two Emergency Medical Technicians wheeled a stretcher out of the room, a full body bag its only occupant. The Grafenberg Hotel’s manager turned away, almost gagging when he realized what the body bag contained.
“What did you do then?”
“I backed up, backed right out of the room and pulled the door closed.”
“Closed?”
“It wouldn’t do for the other guests to see something like that.”
“Then?”
“I dialed 911.”
“From where?”
“My office. I went straight to my office and dialed 911 and I waited in the lobby until a cop showed up. I took him directly to the room and then I got the hell out of the way like he told me to.”
Both men were silent for a moment, then Lieutenant Castellano asked, “Who rented the room?”
“I don’t know. He said his name was Marky D. Sod. That’s how he registered.”
“Did he show you any identification?”
“I didn’t ask. Why would I ask? He paid cash up front. Most people do when they come here.”
“Do you know who the Marquis de Sade is?”
“Should I?”
The Lieutenant shrugged, then dismissed the nervous little man and stepped into the hotel room where a pair of officers from the Mobile Crime Scene Unit used tongs and tweezers to slip various bits of potential evidence into individual evidence bags, each one labeled like leftovers from a particularly messy holiday gathering. Someone had forced open the room’s only window and had propped it up with a Gideon’s Bible. Air moved slowly through the opening but a dying city’s smog smelled little better than one woman’s death and the Lieutenant covered his mouth with his fist and coughed into it.
“Anything?” the Lieutenant asked the taller officer as he leaned against the dresser, his hands at his side, the palm and two fingers of his right hand pressed against the wood.
“Partials on the night stand and all over the bathroom. Lots of fluids, apparently seminal.”
“We got a cause of death?”
“Multiple stab wounds to the abdomen and torso, defensive cuts on the dorsal side of her arms where she tried to defend herself. You’ll have to wait for the M.E.’s
