“Then he cleaned up, packed the dirty towels along with the machete, and got out of there. He left the fur jacket and he left the money in the purse but he took her ring.”

“Because it was worth so much money?”

“Possibly. There’s no hard evidence on the ring, and for all I know it was cut glass and she bought it for herself. But it might have been an emerald, and even if it wasn’t the killer might have thought it was. It’s one thing to leave a few hundred dollars on a dead body to show you don’t rob the dead. It’s something else to leave an emerald that might be worth fifty thousand dollars, especially if it’s your emerald in the first place.”

“I follow you.”

“The room clerk at the Galaxy Downtowner was a Colombian, a young kid named Octavio Calderón. Maybe that was a coincidence. There are a lot of Colombians in town these days. Maybe the killer picked the Galaxy because he knew somebody who worked there. It doesn’t matter. Calderón probably recognized the killer, or at least knew enough about him to keep his mouth shut. When a cop came back to have another talk with him, Calderón disappeared. Either the killer’s friends told him to disappear or Calderón decided he’d be safer somewhere else. Back home in Cartagena, say, or another rooming house in another part of Queens.”

Or maybe he got killed, I thought. That was possible, too. But I didn’t think so. When these people killed, they liked to leave the corpses in plain sight.

“There was another whore that got killed.”

“Sunny Hendryx,” I said. “That was a suicide. Maybe Kim’s death triggered that, so maybe the man who killed Kim has some moral responsibility for Sunny’s death. But she killed herself.”

“I’m talking about the street hustler. The TV.”

“Cookie Blue.”

“That’s the one. Why did she get killed? To throw you off the track? Except you weren’t on the track to begin with.”

“No.”

“Then why? You think the first killing turned the killer nuts? Triggered something in him that made him want to do it again?”

“I think that’s part of it,” I said. “Nobody would do a second butcher job like that unless he enjoyed the first one. I don’t know if he had sex with either of his victims, but the kick he got out of the killings had to be sexual.”

“So he just picked up Cookie for the hell of it?”

Bryna blanched again. It was bad enough hearing about someone who got killed for being the wrong person’s girl- friend. It was even worse hearing about a girl getting killed at random.