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  He stood with face set, ready to catch Verneau if need be, but although the salesman went deathly gray, he remained on his feet. "Oh, My God!"

  The attendant lowered the sheet and they left the locker area.

  "When was the last time you saw him?" Harry asked.

  Verneau swallowed. "Last night. The exhibition hall closes at seven and we walked out together."

  "Do you know what his plans for the evening were?"

  "Eating out with conventioneers, I suppose. He did Monday night, and that was his usual practice . . . to make personal contacts, you know."

  "Did he happen to mention any names, or where he was going?"

  "I don't think so."

  "A watch and ring were taken from him. Can you describe them?"

  Verneau shook his head. "Maybe his wife can. She's in Denver." He ran his hands through his hair. "Oh, God; I can't believe it. This was his first trip to San Francisco."

  As though that should be some charm against harm. Garreth said, "He had a large bruise on his neck. Do you remember seeing it last night?"

  "Bruise?" Verneau blinked distractedly. "I-no, I don't remember. Who would do something like that? Why?"

  Harry caught Garreth's eye. "Why don't I take Mr. Verneau back to the hotel and start talking to people there? You get on the horn to Denver P.D. and have them contact the wife. See if she knows his enemies. Tell them we need a description of his jewelry ASAP to put out to the pawnshops. Come on back to the hotel when you can."

  5

  Garreth hung up the phone. Denver was sending someone to break the news to Mossman's wife. They promised to get back about the jewelry. A message from the Coast Guard lay on Harry's desk. According to their charts, the body had most likely gone in somewhere along the southern end of the Embarcadero and the China Basin, although probably not as far south as Potrero's Point. Garreth noted the information in his notebook while he munched on pink wintergreen candy from the sack in his desk. They would need to start talking to people in that area, too. Perhaps someone had seen something.

  Serruto came out of his office to sit on a corner of Garreth's desk. "What's the story on the floater?"

  Garreth told him what they had so far.

  Serruto frowned. "Robbery? Odd that the thief wouldn't take the hotel key, too, so he could rifle the room."

  "Unless it's only supposed to look like a robbery."

  The lieutenant tugged at an ear. "You have other thoughts?"

  Garreth ate another piece of candy. "There's a bruise on his neck." He held a circle of his thumb and first forger against his own neck to indicate the size and location. "I remember another case with the same kind of mark, also with a broken neck. It's been within the last couple of years."

  Serruto pursed his lips for a minute, then shook his head. "I'm afraid I don't remember anything like that. Keep thinking. Maybe you'll remember more." He went back into his office.

  Garreth looked around the room. Evelyn Kolb and Art Schneider worked at their desks. He asked them if they remembered the case.

  Kolb pumped the top of the thermos she brought to work every day, filling her cup with steaming tea. "Not me. Art?"

  He shook his head. "Doesn't ring any bells."

  Nor did it for anyone else in the squad room. Garreth sighed. Damn. If only he could remember something more. If only he could remember who worked the case.

  Loud footsteps brought his attention around to the door. Earl Faye and Dean Centrello stormed in. He raised his brows. "You two didn't wreck another car, did you?"

  Faye flung himself into his chair. Centrello snarled, "You know the Isenmeier thing? Turkey tried to cut up his girlfriend? Well, we have everything set to arrest the dude, statements from the neighbors and a warrant in the works. Then the lady says it's off. She refuses to press charges. Seems he asked her to many him."

  "Save the warrant," Schneider said. "You can use it next time."

  "Lord, I'd hate to see this fox chopped up," Faye said. He rolled his eyes. "Everything she wears is either transparent or painted on. The first time we went to see her-"

  Kolb cocked a brow at Garreth. "Comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the fairy-tale hour."

  Faye frowned but continued talking. Garreth listened with amusement. Faye was walking proof that the art of storytelling had survived the age of electronic entertainment. If short on anecdotes, he waxed eloquent on women or sports, or described crime scenes in graphic detail.

  That thought nudged something in Garreth's head. He suspended all other thought, hunting for the source of the nudge. But the telephone shattered his concentration. The feeling of being close to something faded.

  With a sigh, Garreth reached for the receiver. "Homicide, Mikaelian."

  "This is the coroner's office, Inspector. We're starting the autopsy on your floater."

  Garreth gathered a handful of wintergreen candy to eat on the way over to the wing where the coroner's office was located. He knew he would not feel like eating later.

  6

  Not every room in the morgue echoed, Garreth reflected. The autopsy room with its row of troughlike steel tables did not. It always sounded horribly quiet . . . no footsteps or casual chatter, only the droning voices of the pathologists dictating their findings into the microphones dangling from the ceiling and the whisper of running water washing down the tables, carrying away the blood.

  The Oriental doctor had already opened the abdominal cavity and removed the viscera when Garreth came in and stood at the head of the table, hands buried in his suit coat pockets. She nodded a greeting at him, never breaking her monologue.

  The water ran clear this time, Garreth noticed. Even that in the sink at the foot of the table, usually rosy from the organs floating in it awaiting sectioning, sat colorless. The doctor examined the organs one at a time, slicing them like loaves of bread with quick, sure strokes of her knife and peering at each section . . . and tossing some slices into specimen containers. She opened the trachea its full length and snipped apart the heart to check each of its chambers and valves. As Garreth watched, a crease appeared between her eyes. She moved back to the empty gray shell that had been a man and went over the skin surface carefully, even rolling the body on its side to peer at the back. She explored the edges of the neck wound.

  The neck had another mark, too, Garreth noticed, one that had been hidden before by the dead man's shirt. A thin red line ran around, biting deep on the sides. A mark from a chain ripped off?

  "Trouble?" he asked.

  She looked up. "Exsanguination-blood loss-is indeed the cause of death. However . . ."

  Garreth waited expectantly.

  "It did not result from the throat wound. That was inflicted after death. So was the broken neck. The cord is completely severed but there's no hemorrhage into it."

  Déjà vu struck again. Death by bleeding, wounds and a broken neck inflicted after death. Now he knew he had knowledge of a previous crime with similar circumstances. Garreth bit his lip, straining to remember the previous case.

  "He didn't bleed to death internally and I can't find any exterior wound to account for-"

  There had been something else strange about that bruise on the other man. Now, what had it been? "What about the bruise?" he interrupted.

  ". . . for a blood loss of that magnitude," the doctor went on with a frown at Garreth, "unless we assume that the punctures in the jugular vein were made by needles and the blood drained that way."

  That was the other thing about the bruise!

  "Two punctures, right? An inch or so apart, in the middle of the bruise?"

  She regarded him gravely. "I could have used your crystal ball before I began, Inspector. It would have saved me a great deal of work."

  Garreth smiled. Inside, however, he swore. He remembered that much, those facts, but still nothing that could help him locate the case in the files, not a victim or detective's name.

  The remainder of the autopsy proceeded uneventfully. La
ck of water in the lungs established that the victim had been dead before entering the water. The skull and brain showed no signs of bruises or hemorrhage to indicate that he might have been struck and knocked unconscious. The stomach contained no food, only liquid.

  "Looks like he died some time after his last meal. We'll analyze the liquid," the doctor said.

  Garreth bet it would prove alcoholic.

  When the body was on its way back to its locker, Garreth prepared to leave. He had missed lunch but had no appetite. Perhaps he should just go on to the hotel. At least the fog had burned off, leaving a bright, clear day.

  Before leaving the morgue, he called up to the office. Kolb answered. "Is there a message from the Denver P.D. with descriptions of some men's jewelry?" he asked her.

  She went to look and came back on the line in a minute. "No, but there's a message to call-damn, I wish Faye would learn to write legibly. I think the name is Ellen or Elvis Hague or Hugie. I can't read the number at all."

  "Never mind. I think I know." Mrs. Elvira Hogue was one of the witnesses to the Mission Street liquor store shooting. He looked up the number in his notebook and dialed it. "Mrs. Hogue? This is Inspector Mikaelian. You wanted to talk to me?"

  "Yes." Her thin, old-woman's voice came back over the wire. "I saw the boy who did it, and I learned his name."

  Garreth whooped silently. Once in a while the breaks came their way! "What is it?"

  "You remember I told you I've seen him in the neighborhood before? Well, he was here this morning again, bold as brass, talking to that Hambright girl up the street. I walked very close to them and I heard her call him Wink."

  "Mrs. Hogue, you're a wonderful lady. Thank you very much."

  "You just catch that shtunk. Mr. Chmelka was a nice gentleman."

  Garreth headed for R and I-records and identification-to check the name Wink through the moniker file. They came up with a make, one Leroy Martin Luther O'Hare, called Wink, as in "quick as a," for the way he snatched purses in his juvenile delinquency days by sweeping past victims on a skateboard. Purse snatching had been only one of his offenses. Wink added burglary and auto theft to his yellow sheet as he approached legal adulthood, though he had not been convicted of either charge.

  With Wink's photograph tucked among half a dozen others of young black males, he drove to Mrs. Hogue's house.

  She quickly picked out Wink. "That's him; that's the one I saw this morning and the one I saw coming out of the liquor store after I heard the shooting."

  Garreth called Serruto.

  "We'll get a warrant for him," the lieutenant said.

  Garreth visited Wink's mother and the Hambright girl, first name Rosella. He also talked to the neighbors of both. No one, of course, offered any help. Garreth gained the impression that even Wink's mother hardly knew the person Garreth asked about. The neighbors denied any knowledge of comings and goings from Mrs. O'Hare's or Miss Hambright's apartment.

  "Hey, man, I gots enough to do chasin' rats over here without wachin' someone else over there," they said, or else: "You wrong about Wink. He no good, but he no holdup man. He never owned no gun."

  Garreth dropped word of wanting Wink into a few receptive ears whose owners knew he could promise some reward for turning the fugitive, then he headed for the Jack Tar. He would see Serruto about staking out the mother's and girlfriend's apartments. For now, he had better check in with Harry before his partner put out an APB on him.

  7

  "So we both came up empty today," Harry said, hanging up his coat in the squad room.

  "Except for identifying our liquor store gunman and the odd results of the autopsy."

  "I'd just as soon do without the autopsy." Harry grimaced. "Who needs a bled-out corpse who died before his throat was cut?"

  Garreth had arrived at the hotel just in time to follow Harry back to Bryant Street.

  "The meetings are breaking up for the day," Harry had said. "Everyone will be going out to play. We'll start in on them again tomorrow, and this time you can join the fun."

  In the squad room Garreth rolled a report form into his typewriter. "Did I miss anything interesting at the hotel?"

  "Just Susan Pegans fainting dead away when we told her about Mossman. No one I talked to, conventioneers or other exhibitors around Kitco's booth, saw him last night or knew where he was going."

  Garreth began his report. "Did you go through Mossman's room?"

  "Right away. There was about what you'd expect . . . a couple of changes of clothes and a briefcase full of company propaganda. A return plane ticket to Denver. He traveled light in the city; there's a false bottom in his shaving kit where I found his credit cards, extra cash and traveler's checks, and personal keys. No billfold, so he must have had that on him when he was killed. He made two calls, one Monday and one last night, both a little after seven in the evening and both to his home phone in Denver."

  "Tomorrow why don't I check with the cab companies to see if one of them took a fare of Mossman's description anywhere last night?"

  "Do that."

  Garreth remembered then that he needed to talk to the lieutenant. He knocked on Serruto's door. "May I see you?"

  "If it's about the warrant on O'Hare, we have it. There's an APB out on him, too."

  "I'd like to stake out his mother's and girlfriend's apartments. He's bound to get in touch with one or the other."

  Serruto leaned back in his chair. "Why don't we see if the APB and your street contacts can turn him first? Two stakeouts use a lot of men." He did not say it, but Garreth heard, nonetheless: We can't spend that much manpower on one small-time crook.

  Garreth nodded, sighing inwardly. All are not equal in the eyes of the law. "Yes, sir." And he went back to his typewriter.

  An hour later he and Harry checked out for the night.

  8

  Garreth always liked going home with Harry. The house had the same atmosphere Marti had given their apartment, a sense of sanctuary. The job ended at the door. Inside, he and Harry became ordinary men. Where Marti had urged him to talk, however, Lien bled away tensions with diversion and serenity. A judicious scattering of Oriental objects among the house's contemporary furnishings reflected the culture of her Taiwanese childhood and Harry's Japanese grandparents. The paintings on the walls, mostly Lien's and including examples of her commercial artwork, reflected Oriental tradition and moods.

  Lien stared at them in disbelief. "Home before dark? How did you do it?"

  Harry lowered his voice to a conspiratorial tone. "We went over the wall. If someone calls, you haven't seen us." He kissed her with a great show of passion. "What's for supper? I'm starved."

  "Not lately." She patted his stomach fondly. "Both of you sit down; I'll bring tea."

  Strong and well laced with rum . . . an example of what Garreth considered a happy blend of West and East. Between sips of tea, he pulled off his shoes and tie. One by one his nerves loosened. These days, he reflected, Harry's house felt more like home than his own apartment did.

  During dinner Lien monopolized the conversation, heading off any threat of shop talk with anecdotes from her own day. She brushed by the frustrations of finishing drawings for a fashion spread in the Sunday paper to talk about the art appreciation classes she taught at various grade schools in the afternoons. Garreth listened, bemused. Her kids carne from a different world than the one he saw everyday. They never took drugs or shoplifted. They were well fed and well dressed, bright-eyed with promise. Sometimes he wondered if she deliberately told only cheerful stories, but he never objected; he liked hearing about a pleasant world populated by happy, friendly people.

  Not that he regretted becoming a cop, but sometimes he wondered what he would be doing now, what kind of world he would live in, if he had finished college . . . if he had been good enough to win a football scholarship like his older brother Shane, if he and Judith had not married so young, if she had not gotten pregnant his sophomore year and had to stop working, leaving them with no m
oney to continue school.

  Or would things have been any different? He had always worshipped his father and wanted to be just like him. He loved going down to the station and watching the parade of people and officers. While Shane had been starring in backyard scrimmages and Little League football, Garreth played cops and robbers. Police work had seemed a natural choice when he had to go to work.

  After dinner, helping Lien with the dishes, he asked, "Do you believe people really have free choice, or are they pushed in inevitable directions by social conditioning?"

  She smiled at him. "Of course they have choices. Background may limit or influence, but the choices are still there."

  He considered that. "Consulting I Ching isn't a contradiction of that?"

  "Certainly not. If anything, the sage supports the idea that people have control over their futures. He merely advises of the possibilities."

  She looked up in concern. "What's the matter? Are the dreadful broody what-if's chewing at you?"

  He smiled at her understanding. "Sort of."

  Or maybe what really chewed was the thought that tonight one man no longer had any choices at all. Someone else had taken them away from him.