Chapter V
Lieutenant of Detectives Joseph Fenton of Homicide West was remembering some of the others. The tragic and unusual cases, the sensational ones, the kind that stayed in the headlines for weeks and months and increased the circulation of newspapers from coast to coast by hundreds of millions of copies.
He sat staring down at his best lead so far, the only lead he could really sink his teeth into, wishing to hell he didn't have to remember. He drummed with his fingers on the desktop and hunched his shoulders a little. He was making a big mistake and he knew it. It was always a mistake to think back across the years when he had a job to do that called for a maximum of effort and concentration. It made him feel guilty and took the edge off his keenness. It was the worst kind of mistake but he kept on making it, because murder was always a shock to him.
Every time he saw a beautiful white body stretched out cold on a mortuary slab he remembered how he'd fainted at the sight of the first one, twenty-five years in the past when he'd been a young rookie. Just fallen to the floor and passed out, the way medical students sometimes do when they first have to dissect a cadaver—the organs are put in separate trays, each neatly labeled—and even experienced, case-hardened surgeons when an operation is especially sanguinary ... like on the human eye, for instance. He'd read that somewhere, and he didn't doubt it, not for a moment.
Well ... there was no danger of that happening to him now. He'd seen too many of the really gruesome ones, and the badly marked up ones, and the "floaters" with no fingerprints left to identify them by, every vestige of flesh dissolved away by weeks in the water, and ... the beautiful unmarked ones who were in some respects the most tragic of all.
He had watched many of them carried away in baskets, feeling angry and resentful but forcing himself to remain calm, refusing to let the photographers and print men suspect that he was dying himself a little inwardly, and had kept right on dying, inch by slow inch, across the years. His hair was white now and his face a little more heavily lined than it should have been, but otherwise it didn't show on the surface.
In some of them he had sensed a strange kind of peace—like a hand reaching out to touch him from beyond the grave; cool, steady, no longer feverish. But over most of them there still seemed to hover a penumbra of violence, a crying out for vengeance and retribution, a protest that even death could not wholly silence.
There was no need for him to remind himself that the Lathrup case was one of the explosively violent ones, with that strange residual violence remaining, making itself felt, every time his thoughts returned to it. Not only in the magazine office itself, with her loveliness only slightly marred by the small, dark hole in her temple—the wound had bled profusely, but the blood had not spread over her features—but later, when the body had been lifted into a sheet, and removed from the office, and the last flash-bulb had gone off and he'd been left alone with the medical examiner. He had been just the same as being completely alone, because Hunter had completed his preliminary examination, and his thoughts were back in a smoke-filled room where a poker game was in progress. To Hunter it had been no more than a routine interruption, breaking in on a winning hand and making him so morose and ill-tempered that Fenton, who had always found him a hard man to deal with, had shut up after asking him only two questions.
The residual violence was there, all right, a something in the room that seemed to point an accusing finger, to demand that justice be not too long delayed, to threaten reprisals if the vanished killer were not relentlessly tracked down and made to answer for his crime. It was a feeling Fenton had—nothing more. The threat of reprisal was not directed at him, but at the nebulous entity known as society. But it was always there, always present, a demand for retribution from beyond the grave, a screaming and a pleading, an insistence that justice be done or all hell would yawn for someone.