“Why didn’t he take his little machete to her place on Thirty-seventh Street?”

“Instead of having her make house calls?”

“Right. I spent the day talking to hookers. They aren’t nuts about outcalls because of the travel time. They’ll do them, but they usually invite the caller to come to their place instead, tell him how much more comfortable it is. She probably would have done that but he wasn’t having any.”

“Well, he already paid for the room. Wanted to get his money’s worth.”

“Why wouldn’t he just as soon go to her place?”

He thought about it. “She had a doorman,” he said. “Maybe he didn’t want to walk past the doorman.”

“Instead he had to walk through a whole hotel lobby and sign a registration card and speak to a desk clerk. Maybe he didn’t want to pass that doorman because the doorman had seen him before. Otherwise a doorman’s a lot less of a challenge than an entire hotel.”

“That’s pretty iffy, Matt.”

“I can’t help it. Somebody did a whole batch of things that don’t make sense unless he knew the girl and had a personal reason for wanting her dead. He may be emotionally disturbed. Perfectly levelheaded people don’t generally go batshit with a machete. But he’s more than a psycho picking women at random.”

“How do you figure it? A boyfriend?”

“Something like that.”

“She splits with the pimp, tells the boyfriend she’s free, and he panics?”

“I was thinking along those lines, yes.”

“And goes crazy with a machete? How does that mesh with your profile of a guy who decides he’d rather stay home with his wife?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know for sure she had a boyfriend?”

“No,” I admitted.

“These registration cards. Charles O. Jones and all his aliases, if he ever had any. You think they’re gonna lead anywhere?”

“They could.”

“That’s not what I asked you, Matt.”

“Then the answer’s no. I don’t think they’re going to lead to anything.”

“But you still think it’s worth doing.”

“I’d have gone through the cards myself at the Galaxy Downtowner,” I reminded him. “On my own time, if the guy would have let me.”

“I suppose we could run the cards.”

“Thanks, Joe.”

“I suppose we can run the other check, too. First-class commercial hotels in the area, their Jones registrations for the past six months or whatever. That what you wanted?”

“That’s right.”

“The autopsy showed semen in her throat and esophagus. You happen to notice that?”

“I saw it in the file last night.”

“First he had her blow him, then he chopped her up with his boy scout hatchet. And you figure it was a boyfriend.”

“The semen could have been from an earlier contact. She was a hooker, she had a lot of contacts.”