“Right, Joe.”

Curran took his pictures and slipped the plates into his shoulder bag. “We don’t need these right away, do we?”

“No,” Leland said. “Put the bag out in the hall with Carl and give us a hand here.”

The sweater, a medium-sized bulky-knit navy blue, was taken from the closet and labeled, and Schoenstein made a note to have it checked for hair tonic and hair. The sweater’s owner probably was headed out of town, but there was no way to stop him. He had lived here almost secretly, because the woman just downstairs had had no knowledge of his existence. A sweater of this type and hair tonic made him a young man. Light-haired men rarely used hair tonic in large quantities. In a change of mind, Leland told Schoenstein to reverse the sweater here and now and go over it for hair. Leland could feel himself becoming impatient. He wanted to work on the other room, but he was forbidden to disturb the body in any way until the medical examiner had made a preliminary inspection.

“Hair,” Schoenstein reported. “Dark brown curly. You can see it. The sweater smells of body odor and all the spring is out of the wool.”

“Okay. Maybe we can get some more. Dan, let’s you and I turn down this bed. Dave, watch the bed while we turn, in case we start to disturb anything we can’t see.”

These sheets, too, were splattered with semen stains. The sheets were limp, as if they had been slept on many nights, and the bottoms of them were smeared with dirt. “Tape off the bed,” Leland said.

It was seventy-two inches long. The smears of dirt did not come closer than three inches to the bottom of the bed. The pillow was squared away with the top. “I make him to be a little guy,” Curran said. “Five-five or five-six.”

“Short, but not little,” Leland said. “The sweater says he’s broader than you or me. If he took our friend in there, he’s strong as hell.”

“If?” Curran asked.

“I’m not thinking anything yet—but I do want to talk to the guy.”

“Who’s in charge here?” a voice in the living room demanded.

“In the bedroom.”

There were two men, one the assistant medical examiner, a wry young Irishman Leland had met two or three times before on suicides. The other was a surprise, Herbert A. Davis, whom they all knew. He was active in public affairs, not a politician or a representative of any special interest, and over the years he had been appointed to a dozen committees and authorities. “Are you in charge here?” he asked Leland. He was a large, fleshy man in his late fifties, six feet two inches tall and over two hundred and twenty pounds.

“That’s right, Mr. Davis. What’s your business here?”

“I have a badge from the sheriff’s office.”

“This is beyond his jurisdiction. I have to ask you to leave. You’re not qualified to handle evidence.”