He heard footsteps approaching. Long, firm strides. A man in a hurry. He stared up the street. Yes.

  Yes, this was his man.

  His hand tightened on the .45.

  The cop was closer now. The man in black stepped out of the alleyway abruptly. The cop stopped in his tracks. They were almost of the same height. A streetlamp on the corner cast their shadows onto the pavement.

  “Have you got a light, Mac?”

  The cop was staring at the man in black. Then, suddenly, the cop was reaching for his back pocket. The man in black saw what was happening, and he brought up the .45 quickly, wrenching it free from his pocket. Both men fired simultaneously.

  He felt the cop’s bullet rip into his shoulder, but the .45 was bucking now, again and again, and he saw the cop clutch at his chest and fall for the pavement. The Detective’s Special lay several feet from the cop’s body now.

  He backed away from the cop, ready to run.

  “You son of a bitch,” the cop said.

  He whirled. The cop was on his feet, rushing for him. He brought up the .45 again, but he was too late. The cop had him, his thick arms churning. He fought, pulling free, and the cop clutched at his head, and he felt hair wrench loose, and then the cop’s fingers clawed at his face, ripping, gouging.

  He fired again. The cop doubled over and then fell to the pavement, his face colliding with the harsh concrete.

  His shoulder was bleeding badly. He cursed the cop, and he stood over him, and his blood dripped onto the lifeless shoulders, and he held the .45 out at arm’s length and squeezed the trigger again. The cop’s head gave a sideward lurch and then was still.

  The man in black ran off down the street.

  The cop on the sidewalk was Hank Bush.

  Sam Grossman was a police lieutenant. He was also a lab technician. He was tall and angular, a man who’d have looked more at home on a craggy New England farm than in the sterile orderliness of the police laboratory, which stretched almost half the length of the first floor at Headquarters.

  Grossman wore glasses, and his eyes were a guileless blue behind them. There was a gentility to his manner, a quiet warmth reminiscent of a long‐lost era, even though his speech bore the clipped stamp of a man who is used to dealing with cold scientific fact.

  “Hank was a smart cop,” he said to Carella.

  Carella nodded. It was Hank who’d said that it didn’t take much brainpower to be a detective.

  “The way I figure it,” Grossman went on, “Hank thought he was a goner. The autopsy disclosed four wounds altogether, three in the chest, one at the back of the head. We can safely assume, I think, that the head shot was the last one fired, a coup de grâce.”

  “Go ahead,” Carella said.

  “Figure he’d been shot two or three times already, and possibly knew he’d be a dead pigeon before this was over. Whatever the case, he knew we could use more information on the bastard doing the shooting.”

  “The hair, you mean?” Carella asked.

  “Yes. We found clumps of hair on the sidewalk. All the hairs had living roots, so we’d have known they were pulled away by force even if we hadn’t found some in the palms and fingers of Hank’s hands. But he was thinking overtime. He also tore a goodly chunk of meat from the ambusher’s face. That told us a few things, too.”

  “And what else?”

  “Blood. Hank shot this guy, Steve. Well, undoubtedly you know that already.”

  “Yes. What does it all add up to?”

  “A lot,” Grossman said. He picked up a report from his desk. “This is what we know for sure, from what we were able to piece together, from what Hank gave us.”

  Grossman cleared his throat and began reading.

  “The killer is a male, white, adult, not over say fifty years of age. He is a mechanic, possibly highly skilled and highly paid. He is dark complected, his skin is oily, he has a heavy beard which he tries to disguise with talc. His hair is dark brown, and he is approximately six feet tall. Within the past two days, he took a haircut and a singe. He is fast, possibly indicating a man who is not overweight. Judging from the hair, he should weigh about one‐eighty. He is wounded, most likely above the waist, and not superficially.”

  “Break it down for me,” Carella said, somewhat amazed—as he always was—by what the lab boys could do with a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair.

  “Okay,” Grossman said. “Male. In this day and age, this sometimes poses a problem, especially if we’ve got only hair from the head. Luckily, Hank solved that one for us. The head hairs of either a male or a female will have an average diameter of less than eight‐hundredths of a millimeter. Okay, having only a batch of head hairs to go on, we’ve got to resort to other measurements to determine whether or not the hair came from a male or a female. Length of the hair used to be a good gauge. If the length was more than eight centimeters, we could assume the hair came from a woman. But the goddamn women nowadays are wearing their hair as short as, if not shorter than, the men. So we could have been fooled on this one, if Hank hadn’t scratched this guy’s face.”

  “What’s the scratch have to do with it?”

  “It gave us a skin sample, to begin with. That’s how we knew the man was white, dark complected, and oily. But it also gave us a beard hair.”

  “How do you know it was a beard hair?”

  “Simple,” Grossman said. “Under the microscope, it showed up in cross‐section as being triangular, with concave sides. Only beard hairs are shaped that way. The diameter, too, was greater than one‐tenth of a millimeter. Simple. A beard hair. Had to be a man.”

  “How do you know he was a mechanic?”

  “The head hairs were covered with metal dust.”

  “You said possibly a highly skilled and highly paid one. Why?”

  “The head hairs were saturated with a hair preparation. We broke it down and checked it against our sample sheets. It’s very expensive stuff. Five bucks the bottle when sold singly. Ten bucks when sold in a set with the aftershave talc. This customer was wearing both the hair gook and the talc. What mechanic can afford ten bucks for such luxuries—unless he’s highly paid? If he’s highly paid, chances are he’s highly skilled.”

  “How do you know he’s not over fifty?” Carella asked.

  “Again, by the diameter of the hair and also the pigmentation. Here, take a look at this chart.” He extended a sheet to Carella.

  Age Diameter

  12 days 0.024 mm.

  6 months 0.037 mm.

  18 months 0.038 mm.

  15 years 0.053 mm.

  Adults 0.07 mm.

  “Fellow’s head hair had a diameter of 0.071,” Grossman said.

  “That only shows he’s an adult.”

  “Sure. But if we get a hair with a living root, and there are hardly any pigment grains in the cortex, we can be pretty sure the hair comes from an old person. This guy had plenty of pigment grains. Also, even though we rarely make any age guesses on such single evidence, an older person’s hair has a tendency to become finer. This guy’s hair is coarse and thick.”

  Carella sighed.

  “Am I going too fast for you?”

  “No,” Carella said. “How about the singe and the haircut?”

  “The singe was simple. The hairs were curled, slightly swelled, and grayish in color. Not naturally gray, you understand.”

  “The haircut?”

  “If the guy had had a haircut just before he did the shooting, the head hairs would have shown clean‐cut edges. After forty‐eight hours, the cut begins to grow round. We can pretty well determine just when a guy’s had his last haircut.”

  “You said he was six feet tall.”

  “Well, Ballistics helped us on that one.”

  “Spell it,” Carella said.

  “We had the blood to work with. Did I mention the guy has type O blood?”

  “You guys—” Carella started.

  “Aw come on, Steve, that was simple.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah,” Grossman said. “Look, Steve, the blood serum of one person has the ability to agglutinate…” He paused. “That means clump, or bring together the red blood cells of certain other people. There are four blood groups: Group O, Group A, Group B, Group AB. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Carella said.

  “We take the sample of blood, and we mix a little of it with samples from the four groups. Oh, hell, here’s another chart for you to look at.” He handed it to Carella.

  1. Group O — no agglutination in either serum.

  2. Group A — agglutination in serum B only.

  3. Group B — agglutination in serum A only.

  4. Group AB — agglutination in both serums.

  “This guy’s blood—and he left a nice trail of it when he was running away, in addition to several spots on the back of Hank’s shirt—would not agglutinate, or clump, in any of the samples. Hence, type O. Another indication that he’s white, incidentally. A and O are most common in white people. Forty‐five percent of all white people are in the O group.”

  “How do you figure he’s six feet tall? You still haven’t told me.”

  “Well, as I said, this is where Ballistics came in—in addition to what we had, of course. The blood spots on Hank’s shirt weren’t of much value in determining from what height they had fallen since the cotton absorbed them when they hit. But the blood stains on the pavement told us several things.”

  “What’d they tell you?”

  “First, that he was going pretty fast. You see, the faster a man is walking, the narrower and longer will be the blood drops and the teeth on those drops. They look something like a small gear, if you can picture that, Steve.”

  “I can.”

  “Okay. These were narrow and also sprinkled in many small drops, which told us that he was moving fast and also that the drops were falling from a height of somewhere around two yards or so.”

  “So?”

  “So, if he was moving fast, he wasn’t hit in the legs or the stomach. A man doesn’t move very fast under those conditions. If the drops came from a height of approximately two yards, chances are the man was hit high above the waist. Ballistics pried Hank’s slug out of the brick wall of the building, and from the angle—assuming Hank only had time to shoot from a draw—they figured the man was struck somewhere around the shoulder. This indicates a tall man—I mean, when you put the blood drops and the slug together.”

  “How do you know he wasn’t wounded superficially?”

  “All the blood, man. He left a long trail.”

  “You said he weighs about one‐eighty. How—”

  “The hair was healthy hair. The guy was going fast. The speed tells us he wasn’t overweight. A healthy man of six feet should weigh about one‐eighty, no?”

  “You’ve given me a lot, Sam,” Carella said. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. I’m glad I’m not the guy who has to check on doctors’ gunshot wound reports or absentee mechanics. Not to mention this hair lotion and talc. It’s called ‘Skylark,’by the way.”

  “Well, thanks, anyway.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Grossman said.

  “Huh?”

  “Thank Hank.”

  The teletype alarm went out to fourteen states.

  It read:

  XXXXX APPREHEND SUSPICION OF MURDER XXX UNIDENTIFIED MALE WHITE CAUCASIAN ADULT BELOW FIFTY XXXXX POSSIBLE HEIGHT SIX FEET OR OVER XXX POSSIBLE WEIGHT ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY XXX DARK HAIR SWARTHY COMPLEXION HEAVY BEARD XXXX USES HAIR PREPARATION AND TALC TRADENAME “SKYLARK” XXXX SHOES MAY POSSIBLY CARRY HEELS WITH “O’SULLIVAN” TRADENAME XXXX MAN ASSUMED TO BE SKILLED MECHANIC MAY POSSIBLY SEEK SUCH WORK XXXXX GUNWOUND ABOVE WAIST POSSIBLE SHOULDER HIGH MAN MAY SEEK DOCTOR XXXX THIS MAN IS DANGEROUS AND ARMED WITH COLT .45 AUTOMATIC XX

  “Those are a lot of ‘possiblys,’” Havilland said.

  “Too damn many,” Carella agreed. “But at least it’s a place to start.”

  It was not so easy to start.

  They could, of course, have started by calling all the doctors in the city, on the assumption that one or more of them had failed to report a gunshot wound, as specified by law. However, there were quite a few doctors in the city. To be exact, there were:

  4,283 doctors in Calm’s Point

  1,975 doctors in Riverhead

  8,728 doctors in Isola (including the Diamondback and Hillside sectors)

  2,614 doctors in Majesta and 264 doctors in Bethtown

  for a grand total of COUNT ’EM! 17,864 DOCTORS 17,864

  Those are a lot of medical men. Assuming each call would take approximately five minutes, a little multiplication told the cops it would take them approximately 89,320 minutes to call each doctor in the classified directory. Of course, there were 22,000 policemen on the force. If each cop took on the job of calling four doctors, every call could have been made before twenty minutes had expired. Unfortunately, many of the other cops had other tidbits of crime to occupy themselves with. So, faced with the overwhelming number of healers, the detectives decided to wait—instead—for one of them to call with a gunshot wound report. Since the bullet had exited the killer’s body, the wound was in all likelihood a clean one, anyway, and perhaps the killer would never seek the aid of a doctor. In which case the waiting would all be in vain.

  If there were 17,864 doctors in the city, it was virtually impossible to tally the number of mechanics plying their trade there. So this line of approach was also abandoned.

  There remained the hair lotion and talc with the innocent‐sounding name, “Skylark.”

  A quick check showed that both masculine beauty aids were sold over the counter of almost every drugstore in the city. They were as common as—if higher priced than—aspirin tablets.

  Good for a cold.

  If you don’t like them…

  The police turned, instead, to their own files in the Bureau of Identification and to the voluminous files in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  And the search was on for a male, white Caucasian, under fifty years in age, dark haired, dark complected, six feet tall, weighing 180 pounds, addicted to the use of a Colt .45 automatic.

  The needle may have been in the city.

  But the entire United States was the haystack.

  * * *

  “Lady to see you, Steve,” Miscolo said.

  “What about?”

  “Said she wanted to talk to the people investigating the cop killer.” Miscolo wiped his brow. There was a big fan in the Clerical office, and he hated leaving it. Not that he didn’t enjoy talking to the DD men. It was simply that Miscolo was a heavy sweater, and he didn’t like the armpits of his uniform shirts ruined by unnecessary talk.

  “Okay, send her in,” Carella said.

  Miscolo vanished and then reappeared with a small birdlike woman whose head jerked in short arcs as she surveyed first the dividing railing and then the file cabinets and then the desks and the grilled windows and then the detectives on phones everywhere in the squadroom, most of them in various stages of sartorial inelegance.

  “This is Detective Carella,” Miscolo said. “He’s one of the detectives on the investigation.” Miscolo sighed heavily and then fled back to the big fan in the small Clerical office.

  “Won’t you come in, ma’am?” Carella said.

  “Miss,” the woman corrected. Carella was in his shirtsleeves, and she noticed this with obvious distaste and then glanced sharply around the room again and said, “Don’t you have a private office?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Carella said.

  “I don’t want them to hear me.”

  “Who?” Carella asked.

  “Them,” she said. “Could we go to a desk somewhere in the corner?”

  “Certainly,” Carella said. “What did you say your name was, miss?”

  “Oreatha Bailey,” the woman said. She was at least fifty‐five or so, Carella surmised, with the sharp‐featured face of a stereotyped witch. He led her through the gate in the railing and to an unoccupied desk in the far right corner of the room, a corner which—unfortunately—did not receive any ventilation from the windows.

  When they were seated, Carella asked, “What can I do for you, Miss Bailey?”

  “You don’t have a bug in this corner, do you?”

  “A…bug?”

  “One of them Dictaphone things.”

  “No.”

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Detective Carella.”

  “And you speak English?”

  Carella suppressed a smile. “Yes, I…I picked up the language from the natives.”

  “I’d have preferred an American policeman,” Miss Bailey said in all seriousness.

  “Well, I sometimes pass for one,” Carella answered, amused.

  “Very well.”

  There was a long pause. Carella waited.

  Miss Bailey showed no signs of continuing the conversation.

  “Miss…?”

  “Shh!” she said sharply.

  Carella waited.

  After several moments, the woman said, “I know who killed those policemen.”

  Carella leaned forward, interested. The best leads sometimes came from the most unexpected sources. “Who?” he asked.

  “Never you mind,” she answered.

  Carella waited.

  “They are going to kill a lot more policemen,” Miss Bailey said. “That’s their plan.”

  “Whose plan?”

  “If they can do away with law enforcement, the rest will be easy,” Miss Bailey said. “That’s their plan. First the police, then the National Guard, and then the regular Army.”

  Carella looked at Miss Bailey suspiciously.

  “They’ve been sending messages to me,” Miss Bailey said. “They think I’m one of them. I don’t know why. They come out of the walls and give me messages.”

  “Who comes out of the walls?” Carella asked.

  “The cockroach‐men. That’s why I asked if there was a bug in this corner.”