I knew the odds and I also knew that the odds didn’t matter. I sat for a moment with my eyes closed and the paper clenched in my fists, trying to alter the story by sheer force of will. Color, the very blue of her northern eyes, flashed behind my closed eyelids. My chest was tight and I could feel that pulse of pain again at the back of my throat.

I turned the goddamned page and there it was on page three just the way I knew it would be. She was dead. The bastard had killed her.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Kim Dakkinen had died in a room on the seventeenth floor of the Galaxy Downtowner, one of the new high-rise hotels on Sixth Avenue in the Fifties. The room had been rented to a Mr. Charles Owen Jones of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who had paid cash in advance for a one-night stay upon checking in at 9:15 p.m. Sunday, after having phoned ahead for a room half an hour earlier. Since a preliminary check revealed no one of Mr. Jones’s name in Fort Wayne, and since the street address he’d entered on the registration card did not seem to exist, he was presumed to have given a false name.

Mr. Jones had made no calls from his room, nor had he billed any charges to his hotel account. After an indeterminable number of hours he had left, and he’d done so without bothering to drop off his key at the desk. Indeed, he’d hung the do not disturb sign on the door of his room, and the housekeeping staff had scrupulously honored it until shortly after the 11:00 a.m. checkout time Monday morning. At that time one of the maids put through a call to the room. When the phone went unanswered she knocked on the door; when that brought no response she opened it with her passkey.

She walked in on what the Post reporter called “a scene of indescribable horror.” A nude woman lay on the carpet at the foot of the unmade bed. Bed and carpet were soaked with her blood. The woman had died of multiple wounds, having been stabbed and slashed innumerable times with what a deputy medical examiner guessed might have been a bayonet or machete. Her killer had hacked her face into “an unrecognizable mess,” but a photograph retrieved by an enterprising reporter from Miss Dakkinen’s “luxurious Murray Hill apartment” showed what he’d had to work with. Kim’s blonde hair was quite different in the photograph, flowing down over her shoulders with one single braid wrapped around the crown like a tiara. She was clear-eyed and radiant in the photo, and looked like a grown-up Heidi.

Identification had been made on the basis of the woman’s purse, found at the scene. A sum of cash in the purse had enabled police investigators to rule out money as a motive in the slaying.