Joseph Leland, in his shirt sleeves, turned the radio off. Puffing on his cigarette, he hurried with the buttons of his cuffs. He had awakened with his mind racing. Usually he had time to stop over coffee and get things aligned, but not this morning: as of this moment he had been awake seventeen minutes. He hoped that he could get the taste of toothpaste out of his mouth with cigarettes while he rode downtown. He hated the taste of toothpaste, and for some reason it always made him feel that he was wearing the clothing he had slept in. He puffed again. Now he shivered; somebody stepping on his grave. It was the shock of getting going. The reaction of his body reminded him of a dog shaking water off his back, and he grinned as he returned to the bedroom for a tie.

The newsman’s words followed him through the apartment. Leland had turned on the radio for the weather and the international news; he had forgotten the Shoftel case. He did not want to hear about it, for he knew that Mary Shoftel was dead. The responses of the Port Smith Police Department after the failure to find her quickly, the number of men working on the case, the cooperation with the press, and the lack of an announcement of a kidnap, all pointed to a rape and murder. On the face of it there was some piece of evidence, perhaps the report of a neighborhood man suddenly moving from his boarding house, that gave the P.S.P.D. a direction in which to go. The men who were in on the search were looking for the girl’s body. They knew it. The only thing they had going for them was that most child-rapist-murderers had no taste for the act once it was done. They cleaned up after themselves the way cats scratched at their droppings.