“And don’t tell me about the towels. He’s a ripper, he’s a cute fucking psycho who makes plans and plays by his own private rules. He’s not the first case like that to come along.”

“I got warned off the case, Joe. I got very professionally warned off the case.”

“So? She got killed by a psycho and there could still be something about her life that some friends of hers don’t want to come out in the open. Maybe she had a boyfriend and he’s a married guy, just like you figured, and even if what she died of was scarlet fucking fever he wouldn’t want you poking around in the ashes.”

I gave myself the Miranda warning. You have the right to remain silent, I told myself, and exercised the right.

“Unless you figure Dakkinen and Blaustein are tied together. Long-lost sisters, say. Excuse me, brother and sister. Or maybe they were brothers, maybe Dakkinen had her operation a few years ago. Tall for a girl, wasn’t she?”

“Maybe Cookie was a smokescreen,” I said.

“How’s that?”

I went on talking in spite of myself. “Maybe he killed her to take the heat off,” I said. “Make it look like a train of random murders. To hide his motive for killing Dakkinen.”

“To take the heat off. What heat, for Christ’s sake?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s been no fucking heat. There will be now. Nothing turns the fucking press on like a series of random killings. The readers eat it up, they pour it on their corn flakes. Anything gives ’em a chance to run a sidebar on the original Jack the Ripper, those editors go crazy for it. You talk about heat, there’ll be enough heat now to scorch his ass for him.”

“I suppose.”

“You know what you are, Scudder? You’re stubborn.”

“Maybe.”

“Your problem is you work private and you only carry one case at a time. I got so much shit on my desk it’s a pleasure when I get to let go of something, but with you it’s just the opposite. You want to hang onto it as long as you can.”

“Is that what it is?”

“I don’t know. It sounds like it.” He took one hand off the wheel, tapped me on the forearm. “I don’t mean to bust balls,” he said. “I see something like that, somebody chopped up like that, I try to clamp a lid on it and it comes out in other directions. You did a lot of good work.”

“Did I?”

“No question. There were things we missed. It might give us a little jump on the psycho, some of the stuff you came up with. Who knows?”

Not I. All I knew was how tired I was.