The Zero Hour

“I don’t see any, not at first glance anyway. I can tell you for certain in a couple of hours.”

“No, there probably won’t be any,” Sarah said.

“Why not?” Peter said.

“Apart from the fact that Val always, but always, made her clients use condoms-”

He interrupted: “But if it was a rape-”

“No signs of that,” the medical examiner said.

“No,” Sarah echoed. “And it sure wasn’t a client.”

“Oh, come on,” Peter objected. “How the hell can you say that?”

With a slightly chewed Blackwing pencil, Sarah pointed to a folded pair of glasses on the bedside end table. The frames were heavy and black and geeky.

“She told me she never saw clients at her apartment. And she wasn’t wearing these when she was killed. They’re too ugly to wear regularly-I certainly never saw her in them. She wore contacts, but you can see she didn’t have them in, either.”

“That’s right, now that you mention it,” Rena Goldman said.

“Of course, it may have been a disgruntled client who tracked her down at home,” Sarah said. “But she wasn’t on a business call. She fought, didn’t she?”

“Oh, yeah. Defense wounds on the body. Contusions on the arm, probably from warding off blows.” Goldman leaned toward the body and pointed a thin index finger at Valerie’s head. “Wound across the face. A curved laceration about half an inch wide, with diffuse abrasion and contusion approximately one inch around, extending from the temple to the zygoma.”

“All right,” Sarah said. “What about the gunshot?”

“Typical contact gunshot wound,” Peter said.

Rena Goldman nodded and tucked a wisp of gray hair behind one ear.

“The hair’s singed,” Peter said. “Probably a big gun, wasn’t it?”

“I’d guess a.357,” the medical examiner said, “but that’s just a guess. Also, there’s stippling.” She was referring to fragments of gunpowder embedded around the point of entry, indicating that the gun was fired at close range.

Sarah suddenly felt nauseated and was relieved that she had no more questions to ask. “Thanks,” she said.

Rena Goldman nodded awkwardly, turned, and drifted away.

In the “efficiency” kitchen area a few feet away, a handsome young black man, attired in a double-breasted Italian blue blazer and foulard tie, gingerly placed an empty beer can into a paper evidence bag. Peter’s partner, Sergeant Theodore Williams, was the best-dressed cop on the force. A few years younger than Peter but unquestionably the better homicide investigator.

Next to him at the Formica kitchenette counter stood a tech from Latent Prints, a round-shouldered, older black man, delicately applying with a feather brush the fingerprint powder the techs liked to call “pixie dust” to a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. Sarah watched him lift a print from the bottle with a clear plastic Sirchie hinged lifter.

“So who kills a call girl?” Peter asked. “A john?”

“I doubt it,” Sarah said. “She told me she only did outcalls, mostly hotel rooms.”

“Yeah, but these mirrors…” he began.

She sighed. “Who knows? She did have a personal life. But a sex life, outside of work? I don’t know. A lot of these girls hate sex. What about her little black book?”

“Nothing. A date book, that’s all. Purse, wallet, cigarettes. A fucking arsenal of makeup in the bathroom. Some Valium and a couple of tabs of speed. A Port-a-Print. But no little black book.”

“A what?”

“Port-a-Print. One of those things they use in department stores or whatever to imprint your credit card, you know? I guess she took Visa, MasterCard, and Discover.”

“Most call girls do these days. Though they still prefer cash.”

“Bad form to have the wife doing the bills and discover a Discover Card charge for a blow job.”

“Which is why you used to pay cash, right?”

“Touché,” Peter replied, unperturbed.

CHAPTER SIX

A Latent Prints technician sat on the floor of the dark bathroom wearing foolish-looking orange plastic goggles. An eerie orange light emanated from the Polilight, a heavy, compact gray-and-blue box attached to a flexible metal tube that, using liquid optical technology, emits light in various hues: white, red, yellow, orange. Shone obliquely, it is used to check for fingerprints on walls and other hard-to-inspect areas.

“Anything?” Sarah asked.

Startled, the tech said: “Oh. Uh… no, nothing.” He got to his feet and switched on the light.

More mirrors here, Sarah noted: the medicine cabinet above the sink, and another one, strangely placed, low and directly across from the toilet. Newly, and maladroitly, installed. Both mirrors were dusted with splotches of the gray pulverized charcoal and volcanic ash used to lift prints. In a few places, the gray was overlaid with smudges of Red Wop powder to bring out more ridge detail.

She watched him dust an area of one of the mirrors. “You know,” she said, “a little Windex’ll get those real clean.”

The tech turned around, confused, not getting her joke, but at that moment a voice boomed from just outside the bathroom threshold: Frank Herlihy.

“Is that the famous twenty-thousand-dollar paperweight I keep hearing about?”