Dusk came on. Danny kept the lights off, working with a pen flash held in his teeth. He dusted for latent prints, exhausting rolls of touch, grab and press surfaces, getting a rubber glove set—most likely the killer—and a full right- and partial left-hand unknown—which did not match the Marty Goines print abstract. Knowing Goines latents should appear, he kept going and was rewarded—a left spread off the kitchen sink ledge. Reconstructing the killer showering himself free of blood, he rolled every touch surface in the bathroom—bringing up one-, two-, three-finger and full hand spans, surgical rubber tips, the hands of a large man, widely spaced where he braced himself into the shower/tub wall.

Midnight.

Danny took the severed finger out of the icebox, rolled it in ink, then on paper. A matchup to the middle right digit on the unknown set. The cut point was jagged, just above the knuckle, cauterized by scorching—charred black flesh scabbing it up. Danny checked the hot plate in the living room. Paydirt: fried skin stuck to the coils; the killer wanted to preserve the finger, a shock to whoever discovered the carnage.

Or was he planning to return with another victim?

And was he keeping the pad under surveillance to know when that option was blown?

12:45.

Danny gave the place a last toss. The one closet was empty; there was nothing secreted under the rugs; a penlight wall scan gave him another notch on his reconstruction: approximately two thirds of the blood caking was texturally uniform—victims two and three were almost certainly killed at the same time. Checking out the floor on his knees got him a last piece of evidence: a glob of hardened white paste residue, neutral in smell. He tagged and bagged it, tagged and bagged Marty Goines’ eyeballs, sat down on the nonblooded edge of the sofa, gun out and resting on his knee—and waited.

Exhaustion crept in. Danny closed his eyes and saw blood patterns superimposed on the lids, white on red, the colors reversed like photographic negatives. His hands were numb from hours of working in rubber gloves; he imagined the metallic smell of the room as the smell of good whiskey, started tasting it, shut down the thought and ran theories in his head so the taste would stay away.

2307 Tamarind was a thirty-minute drive to the Strip tops—the killer had his maximum time of two hours to play with Marty Goines’ corpse and decorate the pad. The killer was monstrously, suicidally bold to kill two other men—probably at the same time—in the same place. The killer probably had the subconscious desire to be captured that many psychopaths evinced; he was an exhibitionist and was probably distressed that the Goines snuff had received virtually no publicity. The other two bodies had probably been dumped someplace where they would be found, which meant that last night or yesterday was when murders two and three occurred. Questions: were the patterns on the wall significant in design or just blood spat in rage? What did the letter W mean? Were the three victims randomly chosen on the basis of homosexuality or dope addiction, or were they previously known to the killer?

More exhaustion, his brain wires frazzling from too much information, too few connecting threads. Danny took to looking at his luminous wristwatch dial to stay awake; 3:11 had just passed when he heard the outside lock being picked.

He got up and padded to the curtains beside the light switch, the door a foot away, his gun arm extended and braced with his left hand. The locking mechanism gave with a sharp ka-thack; the door opened; Danny hit the switch.

A fortyish fat man was frozen by the light. Danny took a step forward; the man pivoted into the muzzle of a .45 revolver. His hands jerked toward his pockets; Danny toed the door shut and barrel-lashed him across the face, knocking him into wallpaper zigzagged with blood. The fat man let out a yelp, saw the wall gore for real and hit his knees, hands clasped, ready to beg.

Danny squatted beside him, gun aimed at the trickle of blood on his cheek. The fat man mumbled Hail Marys; Danny fished out his cuffs, slid his .45 out of trouble, worked the ratchets and slapped them around prayer-pressed wrists. The bracelet teeth snapped; the man looked at Danny like he was Jesus. “Cop? You’re a cop?”

Danny gave him the once-over. Convict pallor, prison shoes, secondhand clothes and grateful that a policeman caught him breaking and entering, a parole violation and a dime minimum. The man looked at the walls, brought his eyes down, saw that he was kneeling two inches from a pool of blood with a dead cockroach basted in the middle. “Goddamnit, tell me you’re—”

Danny grabbed his throat and squeezed it. “Sheriff’s. Keep your voice down and play straight with me and I’ll let you walk out of here.” With his free hand, he gave Fats a pocket and waistband frisk, pulling out wallet, keys, a switchblade and a flat leather case, compact but heavy, with a zippered closure.

He eased off his throat hold and examined the wallet, dropping cards and papers to the floor. There was an expired California driver’s license for Leo Theodore Bordoni, DOB 6/19/09; a County Parole identification card made out to the same name; a plasma bank donor slip stating that Leo Bordoni, type AB+, could sell his plasma again on January 18, 1950. The cards were racetrack stuff—voided betting stubs, receipts, matchbook covers with the names of hot horses and race numbers jotted on the back.

Danny let go of Leo Theodore Bordoni’s neck, the fat man’s reward for a parlay—reaction to the gore, blood type and physical description—that eliminated him as a killing suspect. Bordoni gurgled and wiped blood off his face; Danny unzipped the leather case and saw a set of bonaroos: pick gouger, baby glass cutter, chisel pry and window snap, all laid out on green velvet. He said, “B&E, possession of burglar’s tools, parole violation. How many falls have you taken, Leo?”

Bordoni massaged his neck. “Three. Where’s Marty?”

Danny pointed to the walls. “Where do you think?”

“Oh fucking God.”

“That’s right. Old Marty that nobody knows much about, except maybe you. You know about Governor Warren’s habitual offender law?”

“Uh… no.”

Danny picked up his .45 and holstered it, helped Bordoni to his feet and shoved him into the one chair not soaked red/brown. “The law says any fourth fall costs you twenty to life. No plea bargains, no appeals, nada. You boost a fucking pack of cigarettes, it’s a double dime. So you tell me everything there is to know about you and Marty Goines, or you hang twenty up at Quentin.”

Bordoni flicked his eyes around the room. Danny walked to the curtains, looked out at dark yards and houses and thought of his killer leaving him, clued to a trap by the light burning. He flipped the wall switch; Bordoni let out a long breath. “Really bad for Marty? That the truth?”

Danny could see neon signs on Hollywood Boulevard, miles away. “The worst, so tell me.”

Bordoni talked while Danny looked out at neon and dwindling headlights. “I came out of Quentin two weeks ago, seven out of seven for heists. I knew Marty when he did his turn for reef, and we were buddies. Marty knew I had a parole date, and he knew my sister’s number in Frisco. He’d send me these letters every once in a while after he got out, phony name, no return address, ‘cause he was an absconder and he didn’t want the censors to get a handle on him.

“So Marty calls me at my sister’s five days or so ago, maybe the thirtieth, maybe the thirty-first. He says he’s playing horn for peanuts and hates it, he took the cure, he’s gonna stay off horseback and pull jobs—burglaries. He says he just got together with an old partner and they needed a third man for a housebreak gang. I told him I’d be down in a week or so, and he gave me this address and told me to let myself in. That’s me and Marty.”