“So she says how are they gonna catch the guys if she doesn’t report it? So I explain how nobody’s got the time to investigate a burglary anymore. You fill out a report and it goes in a file, but you don’t run around looking to see who did it. Catching a burglar in the act is one thing, but investigating, hell, it’s low priority, nobody’s got time for it. She says okay, she can understand that, but suppose they happen to recover the goods? If she never reported the theft in the first place, how will the stuff get returned to her? And then I had to tell her just how fucked up the whole system is. We got warehouses full of stolen goods we recovered, and we got files full of reports people filled out, stuff lost to burglars, and we can’t get the shit back to the rightful owners. I went on and on, I won’t bore you with it, but I don’t think she really wound up believing me. Because you don’t want to believe it’s that bad.”

He found a sheet in the file, frowned at it. He read, “One bath towel, white. One hand towel, white. Two wash cloths, white. Doesn’t say used or unused.” He drew out a sheaf of glossies and went rapidly through them. I looked over his shoulder at interior shots of the room where Kim Dakkinen had died. She was in some but not all of the pictures; the photographer had documented the murder scene by shooting virtually every inch of the hotel room.

A shot of the bathroom showed a towel rack with unused linen on it.

“No dirty towels,” he said.

“He took them along.”

“Huh?”

“He had to wash up. Even if he just threw a topcoat over his bloody clothes. And there aren’t enough towels there. There ought to be at least two of everything. A double room in a class hotel, they give you more than one bath towel and one hand towel.”

“Why would he take ’em along?”

“Maybe to wrap the machete in.”

“He had to have a case for it in the first place, some kind of a bag to get it into the hotel. Why couldn’t he take it out the same way?”

I agreed that he could have.

“And why wrap it in the dirty towels? Say you took a shower and dried yourself off and you wanted to wrap a machete before you put it in your suitcase. There’s clean towels there. Wouldn’t you wrap it in a clean one instead of sticking a wet towel in your bag?”

“You’re right.”

“It’s a waste of time worrying about it,” he said, tapping the photo against the top of his desk. “But I shoulda noticed the missing towels. That’s something I should have thought of.”