"Abby, I know your sources are sacred, but there's something I must know."

She didn't respond.

"In your account of Brenda Steppe's murder, you wrote she was strangled with a tan cloth belt. Where did you get this detail?"

"I can't-"

"Please. It's very important. I simply must know the source."

After a long pause, she said, "No names. A squad member. It was a squad member, okay? One of the guys at the scene. I know a lot of squad members a"

"The information in no shape or form came from my office?"

"Absolutely not," she said emphatically. "You're worrying about the computer breakin Sergeant Marino mentioned a I swear, nothing I've printed came from that, came from your office."

It was out before I thought twice. "Whoever got in, Abby, may have typed this tan cloth belt detail into the case table to make it appear you got it from my office, that my office is the leak. The detail is inaccurate. I don't believe it was ever in our computer. I think whoever broke in got the detail from your story."

"Good G.o.d" was all she said.

Chapter 15.

Marino dropped the morning newspaper on top of the conference table with a loud slap that sent pages fluttering and inserts sliding out.

"What the h.e.l.l is this?"

His face was an angry red and he needed a shave. "Je-sus Christ!"

Wesley's reply was to calmly kick out a chair, inviting him to sit.

Thursday's story was front-page, above the fold, with the banner headline: DNA, NEW EVIDENCE RAISE POSSIBILITY STRANGLER HAS GENETIC DEFECT Abby's byline was nowhere to be found. The account was written by a reporter who usually covered the court beat.

There was a sidebar about DNA profiling, including an artist's sketch of the DNA "fingerprinting" process. I wondered about the killer, imagined him reading and rereading the paper in a rage. My guest was wherever he worked, he called in sick today.

"What I want to know is how come I wasn't told any of this?"

Marino glared at me. "I turn in the jumpsuit. Do my job. Next thing, I'm reading this c.r.a.p! What defect? Some DNA reports just come in some a.s.shole's already leaked, or what?"

I didn't say anything.

Wesley replied levelly, "It doesn't matter, Pete. The newspaper story isn't our concern. Consider it a blessing. We know the killer's got a strange body odor, or at least it seems likely he does. He thinks Kay's office is on to something, maybe he makes a stupid move."

He looked at me. "Anything?"

I shook my head. So far there'd been no attempts at breaking into the OCME computer. Had either man come into the conference room twenty minutes earlier, he would have found me ankle-deep in paper.

It was no wonder Margaret had been hesitant last night when I asked her to print out the flat file. It included about three thousand statewide cases through the month of May, or a run of green striped paper that stretched practically the length of the building.

What was worse, the data were compressed in a format not meant to be readable. It was like fishing for complete sentences in a bowl of alphabet soup.

It took me well over an hour to find Brenda Steppe's case number. I don't know if I felt thrilled or horrified-maybe it was both-when I discovered the listing under "Clothing, Personal Effects": "Pair of nude pantyhose around neck."

There was no mention of a tan cloth belt anywhere. None of my clerks remembered changing the entry or updating the case after it was entered. The data had been altered. It was altered by someone other than my staff.

"What about this mental impairment stuff?"

Marino rudely shoved the newspaper my way. "You find out something in this DNA hocus-pocus to make you think he ain't operating on all cylinders?"

"No," I honestly replied. "I think the point of the story is some metabolic disorders can cause problems like that. But I have come up with no evidence to suggest such a thing."

"Well, it sure as h.e.l.l ain't my opinion the guy's got brain rot. Me, I'm hearing the same garbage again. The squirrel's stupid, nothing more than a lowlife. Probably works in a car wash, cleans out the city sewers or something a " Wesley was beginning to register impatience. "Give it a rest, Pete. "

"I'm supposed to be in charge of this investigation and I gotta read the d.a.m.n newspaper to know what the h.e.l.l's going ona"

"We've got a bigger problem, all right?" Wesley snapped.

"Well, what?" Marino asked.

So we told him.

We told him about my telephone conversation with Cecile Tyler's sister.

He listened, the anger in his eyes retreating. He looked baffled.

We told him all five women definitely had one thing in common. Their voices.

I reminded him of Matt Petersen's interview. "As I recall, he said something about the first time he met Lori. At a party, I believe. He talked about her voice. He said she had the sort of voice that caught people's attention, a very pleasant contralto voice. What we're considering is the link connecting these five murders is voice. Perhaps the killer didn't see them. He heard them."

"It never occurred to us," Wesley added. "When we think of stalkers, we think of psychopaths who see the victim at some point. In a shopping mall, out jogging, or through a window in the apartment or house. As a rule, the telephone, if it figures in at all, comes after the initial contact. He sees her. Maybe he calls her later, just dials her number to hear her voice so he can fantasize. What we're considering now is far more frightening, Pete. This killer may have some occupation that involves his calling women he doesn't know. He has access to their numbers and addresses. He calls. If her voice sets him off, he selects her."

"Like this really narrows it down," Marino complained. "Now we got to find out if all these women was listed in the city directory. Next we got to consider occupation possibilities. I mean, not a week goes by the missus don't get a call. Some drone selling brooms, light bulbs, condos. Then there's the pollsters. The let-me-ask-you-fifty-questions type. They want to know if you're married, single, how much money you earn. Whether you put your pants on one leg at 9 time and floss after brushing."

"You're getting the picture," Wesley muttered.

Marino went on without pause, "So you got some guy who's into rape and murder. He could get paid eight bucks an hour to sit on his a.s.s at home and run through the phone book or city directory. Some woman tells him she's single, earns twenty g's a year. So I ask you. How the h.e.l.l we going to find him?"

We didn't know.

The possible voice connection didn't narrow it down. Marino was right. In fact, it made our job more difficult instead of easier. We might be able to determine who a victim saw on any given day. But it was unlikely we could find every person she talked to on the phone. The victim might not even know, were she alive to tell. Telephone solicitors, pollsters and people who dial wrong numbers rarely identify themselves. All of us get multiple calls day and night we neither process nor remember.

I said, "The pattern of when he hits makes me wonder if he has a job outside of the home, if he goes to work somewhere Monday through Friday. Throughout the week his stress builds. Late Friday night or after midnight, he hits. If he's using a borax soap twenty times a day, then it isn't likely this is something he has in his household bathroom. Hand soaps you buy at your local grocery store don't contain borax, to my knowledge. If he's washing up with borax soap, I suspect he's doing so at work."

"We're sure it's borax?" Wesley asked.

"The labs determined it through ion chromatography. The glittery residue we've been finding on the bodies contains borax. Definitely."

Wesley considered this for a moment. "If he's using borax soap on the job and gets home at five, it's not likely he'd have such a buildup of this glittery residue at one o'clock in the morning. He may work an evening shift. There's borax soap in the men's room. He gets off sometime before midnight, one A.M., and goes straight to the victim's residence."

The scenario was more than plausible, I explained. If the killer worked at night, this gave him ample opportunity during the day while the rest of the world was at work to cruise through the neighborhood of his next victim and look over the area. He could drive by again late, maybe after midnight, to take another look. The victims were either out or asleep, as were most of their neighbors. He wasn't going to be seen.

What night jobs involve the telephone? We batted that around for a while.

"Most telephone solicitors call right in the middle of the dinner hour," Wesley said. "It seems to me it's unusual for them to call much later than nine."

We agreed.

"Pizza deliverers," Marino proposed. "They're out all hours. Could be it's the drone who takes the call. You dial up and the first thing the operator asks is your phone number. If you've ever called before, your address pops up on the computer screen. Thirty minutes later some squirrel's at your door with a pepperoni-hold-the-onions. It could be the delivery guy who figures out in a hurry he's got some woman who lives alone. Maybe it's the operator. He likes her voice, knows her address."

"Check it," Wesley said. "Get a couple of guys to go around to the various pizza delivery places p.r.o.nto."

Tomorrow was Friday! "See if there's any one pizza place all five women called from time to time. It should be in the computer, easy to track."

Marino left for a moment, returning with the Yellow Pages. He found the pizza section and started scribbling down names and addresses.

We kept coming up with more and more possible occupations. Switchboard operators for hospitals and telephone companies were up all hours answering calls. Fund-raisers didn't hesitate to interrupt your favorite television program as late as ten P.M. Then there was always the possibility of someone playing roulette with the city directory or telephone book-a security guard with nothing better to do while he's sitting inside the lobby of the Federal Reserve, or a gas station attendant bored late at night during the slow hours.

I was getting more confused. I couldn't sort through it all.

Yet there was something bothering me.

You're making it too complicated, my inner voice was telling me. You're getting farther and farther removed from what you actually know.

I looked at Marino's damp, meaty face, at his eyes shifting here and there. He was tired, stressed. He was still nursing a deep-seated anger. Why was he so touchy? What was it he said about the way the killer would think, something about him not liking professional women because they're snooty? Every time I tried to get hold of him, he was "on the street."

He'd been to every strangling scene.

At Lori Petersen's scene he was wide-awake. Had he even been to bed that night? Wasn't it a little odd he was so rabid in trying to pin the murders on Matt Petersen? Marino's age doesn't profile right, I told myself.

He spends most of his time in his car and doesn't answer the phone for a living, so I can't see the connection between him and the women.

Most important, he doesn't have a peculiar body odor, and if the jumpsuit found in the Dumpster was his, why would he bring it in to the lab? Unless, I thought, he's turning the system inside out, playing it against itself because he knows so much. He is, after all, an expert, in charge of the investigation and experienced enough to be a savior or a satan.

I suppose all along I'd been harboring the fear that the killer might be a cop.

Marino didn't fit. But the killer might be someone he'd worked around for months, someone who bought navy blue jumpsuits at the various uniform stores around the city, someone who washed his hands with the Borawash soap dispensed in the department's men's rooms, someone who knew enough about forensics and criminal investigation to be able to outsmart his brothers and me. A cop gone bad. Or someone drawn to law enforcement because this is often a very attractive profession to psychopaths.

We'd tracked down the squads that responded to the homicide scenes. What we'd never thought to do was to track down the uniformed men who responded when the bodies were discovered.

Maybe some cop was thumbing through the telephone or city directory during his shift or after hours. Maybe his first contact with the victims was voice. Their voices set him off. He murdered them and made sure he was on the street or near a scanner when each body was found.

"Our best bet is Matt Petersen," Wesley was saying to Marino. "He still in town?"

"Yeah. Last I heard."

"I think you'd better go see him, find out if his wife ever mentioned anything about telephone soliciting, about someone calling up to say she'd won a contest, someone taking a poll. Anything involving the phone."

Marino pushed back his chair.

I hedged. I didn't come right out and say what I was thinking.

Instead, I asked, "How tough would it be to get printouts or tape recordings of the calls made to the police when the bodies were found? I want to see the exact times the homicides were called in, what time the police arrived, especially in Lori Petersen's case. Time of death may be very important in helping us determine what time the killer gets off work, a.s.suming he works at night."

"No problem," Marino replied abstractedly. "You can come along with me. After we hit Petersen, we'll swing by the radio room."

We didn't find Matt Petersen at home. Marino left his card under the bra.s.s knocker of his apartment.

"I don't expect him to return my call," he mumbled as he crept back out into traffic.

"Why not?"

"When I dropped by the other day he didn't invite me in. Just stood in the doorway like a d.a.m.n barricade. Was big enough to sniff the jumpsuit before basically telling me to buzz off, practically slammed the door in my face, said in the future to talk to his lawyer. Petersen said the polygraph cleared him, said I was hara.s.sing him."

"You probably were," I commented dryly.

He glanced at me and almost smiled.

We left the West End and headed back downtown.

"You said some ion test came up with borax."

He changed the subject. "This mean you didn't get squat on the greasepaint?"

"No borax," I replied. "Something called *Sun Blush' reacted to the laser. But it doesn't contain borax, and it seems quite likely the prints Petersen left on his wife's body were the result of his touching her while he had some of this *Sun Blush' on his hands."

"What about the glittery stuff on the knife?"

"The trace amounts were too small to test. But I don't think the residue is *Sun Blush.'"

"Why not?"

"It isn't a granular powder. It's a cream base - you remember the big white jar of dark pink cream you brought into the lab?"

He nodded.

"That was *Sun Blush.'

Whatever the ingredient is that makes it sparkle in the laser, it's not going to acc.u.mulate all over the place the way borax soap does. The creamy base of the cosmetic is more likely to result in high concentrations of sparkles left in discrete smudges, wherever the person's fingertips come in firm contact with some surface."

"Like over Lori's collarbone," he supposed.

"Yes. And over Petersen's tenprint card, the areas of the paper his fingertips actually were pressed against. There were no random sparkles anywhere else on the card, only over the inky ridges. The sparkles on the handle of the survivor knife were not cl.u.s.tered in a pattern like this. They were random, scattered, in very much the same way the sparkles were scattered over the women's bodies. "

"You're saying if Petersen had this *Sun Blush' on his hands and took hold of the knife, there'd be glittery smudges versus individual little sparkles here and there."