Sam was a tall, loosely jointed man who moved with angular nonchalance and ease. He was a gentle man with a craggy face, a man who wore glasses because too much reading as a child had ruined his eyesight. His eyes were blue and mild, guileless eyes that denied the fact that their owner used them to pry into the facts of crime and violence—and very often death. Sam loved lab work, and when he was not busy with his test tubes in an effort to prove the lab’s effectiveness in crime detection, he could be found talking to the nearest detective, trying to impress upon him the need for cooperation with the lab.

  When the letter from the 87th Precinct had arrived by messenger that morning, Sam had put his men to work on it immediately. The phone call preceding it had urged speed. His men had photographed the letter and sent the photo back to the 87th at once. And then they had begun the task of scrutinizing the letter and the envelope for latent fingerprint impressions before beginning their other tests.

  The original letter was handled with the utmost care. Sam sourly reflected that half the cops in the city had probably handled it already, but he had no desire to compound the felony. Carefully, methodically, his men put a very thin, uniform layer of a 10 percent solution of silver nitrate onto the letter, passing the sheet of paper between two rollers that had been moistened with the solution. They waited while the sheet of paper dried, and then they put it under the ultraviolet light. In a few seconds, the prints appeared.

  This is what the letter looked like:

  There were a lot of fingerprints all over the letter. Sam Grossman had expected as much. The letter had been created by snipping words from newspapers or magazines and pasting them to a sheet of paper. Sam expected that the pasting process would have left finger marks all over the page, and such was exactly the case. Each snip of paper had been pressed to the page so that it would stick. Each word on the page carried its own full complement of prints.

  And each print on the page was hopelessly smeared or blurred or overlaid with another print—except for two thumbprints. These thumbprints were on the left-hand side of the page, one close to the top, the other just a little below center. Both were good prints.

  Both—unfortunately—belonged to Sergeant Dave Murchison.

  Sam sighed. It was a crying shame. He always had to make his point the hard way.

  Hawes took the call from Grossman in the interrogation room, where he had gone to study the photo of the letter. The call came at 11:17.

  “Hawes?” Grossman said.

  “Yes.”

  “Sam Grossman at the lab. I’ve got a report on that letter. Since there’s a time element on this, I thought I’d give it to you on the phone.”

  “Shoot,” Hawes said.

  “Not much help on the prints,” Grossman said. “Only two good prints on the letter itself, and they’re your desk sergeant’s.”

  “This is the front of the letter?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about the back?”

  “Everything smeared. The letter was folded. Whoever folded it ran his bunched fist along the crease. Nothing there, Hawes. I’m sorry.”

  “And the envelope?”

  “Murchison’s prints—and yours. Nothing else except some good prints left by a child. Did a child handle the envelope?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ve got a good batch of his prints, in case you need them for comparison. Want me to send them over?”

  “Please,” Hawes said. “What else have you got?”

  “On the letter itself, we dug up a few items that might help you. The paste used was five-and-dime stuff put out by a company called Brandy’s. They manufacture it in a jar and in a tube. We found a microscopic blue-metallic-paint scraping stuck to one corner of the letter. Their tube is blue, so chances are your letter writer used the tube. That’s no help, though. He could have bought the paste anywhere. It’s a common item. The paper, though…”

  “Yes, what about that?”

  “It’s a good-rag-content bond, manufactured by the Cartwright Company in Boston, Massachusetts. We checked our watermark file. The catalogue number on the paper is 142Y. It costs about five and a half bucks a ream.”

  “But it’s a Boston company, huh?”

  “Yes, but distributed nationally. There’s a distributor in this city. Want the name?”

  “Please.”

  “Eastern Shipping. That’s on Gage Boulevard in Majesta. Want the phone number?”

  “Yes.”

  “Princeton 4-9800.”

  Hawes jotted it down. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. We know where the letter writer got his words.”

  “Where?”

  “The tip-off was the T in the word tonight. That T is famous, Hawes.”

  “It’s the New York Times, isn’t it?”

  “Exactly. Distributed here, as in every city in the country. I’ll confess our newspaper and magazine file doesn’t go back too far. But we try to keep abreast of the major dailies and all the big publications. We sometimes get parts of bodies wrapped in newspapers or portions of newspapers. Every once in a while it helps to have a file.”

  “I see,” Hawes said.

  “This time we were lucky. Using that New York Times T as a springboard, we looked through what we had and pinpointed the sections of the Times he used, and the date.”

  “And they were?”

  “He used the magazine section and the book section of the Times for Sunday, June twenty-third. We’ve located enough of the words he’s used to eliminate coincidence. For example, The Lady came from the book section. Snipped from an ad for the Conrad Richter novel. The word can was from an ad in the magazine section for Scandale. That’s a woman’s undergarment trade name.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The figure eight was obvious, again from the magazine section. An ad for Ballantine beer.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The word kill was easy. Not many advertisers use that word unless it’s pertinent to their product. This ad said something about killing bathroom odors. ‘Kill bathroom odors with—’ and the name of the product. In any case, there’s no doubt in our minds. He used the June twenty-third Times.”

  “And this is July twenty-fourth,” Hawes said.

  “Yeah.”

  “In other words, he planned this thing as long as a month ago, made up his letter, and then held it until he’d decided on the date for the murder.”

  “It would seem that way. Unless he used an old paper that was around.”

  “It would also seem to eliminate a crank.”

  “It looks legit to me, Hawes,” Grossman said. “I was talking to our psychologist upstairs. He didn’t seem to think a crank would wait a month between composing a letter and delivering it. He also feels the delivery of the letter was an act of compulsion. He thinks the guy wants to be stopped, and he further thinks the letter will give you a clue about how to stop him.”

  “How?” Hawes asked.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Mmmm. Well, have you got anything else for me?”

  “That’s it. Oh, wait. The guy smokes cigarettes. There were a few grains of tobacco in the envelope. We tested them, but they could have come from any of the major brands.”

  “Okay, Sam. Thanks a lot.”

  “Don’t mention it. I’ll send that kid’s prints over. So long.”

  Grossman hung up. Hawes lifted his copy of the letter from the desk, opened the door, and started for Lieutenant Byrnes’s office. It was then that he noticed the chaos in the squadroom.

  It was the noise that first attracted him, the sound of shrill voices raised in protest, speculation, and wonder. And then his eyes were assailed with what seemed like an overly patriotic display, a parade for the dead-and-gone Fourth of July. The squadroom was bursting with red, white, and blue. Hawes blinked. Crowding the slatted-rail divider, lined up against the desks and the file cabinets and the windows and the bulletin boards, slouched into every conceivable corner of the room, were at least 8,000 kids in blue dungarees and red-and-white-striped T-shirts.

  “Shut up!” Lieutenant Byrnes shouted. “Now, just knock off all this chatter!”

  The room modulated slowly into silence.

  “Welcome to the Grover Park Nursery School,” Carella said to Hawes, smiling.

  “Jesus,” Hawes said, “we sure as hell have an efficient bunch of patrolmen in this precinct.”

  The efficient bunch of patrolmen had followed their orders to the letter, rounding up every ten-year-old kid wearing dungarees and a red-striped shirt. They had not asked for birth certificates, and so the kids ranged from seven to thirteen. The T-shirts, too, were not all T-shirts. Some of them sported collars and buttons. But the patrolmen had done their job, and a hasty count of the kids revised Hawes’s earlier estimate of 8,000. There were only 7,000. Well, at least three dozen, anyway. Apparently there had been a run on red-striped T-shirts in the neighborhood. Either that, or a new street gang was forming and they had decided upon this as their uniform.

  “Which of you kids delivered a letter to this precinct this morning?” Byrnes asked.

  “What kinda letter?” one asked.

  “What difference does it make? Did you deliver it?”

  “Naw,” the kid answered.

  “Then shut up. Which one of you delivered it?”

  Nobody answered.

  “Come on, come on, speak up,” Byrnes said.

  An eight-year-old kid, obviously impressed by the Hollywood effort, piped, “I wanna call my lawyer.”

  The other kids all laughed.

  “Shut up!” Byrnes roared. “Now, listen, you’re not in any trouble. We’re only trying to locate the man who gave you that letter, that’s all. So if you delivered it, speak up.”

  “What’d he do, this guy?” a twelve-year-old asked.

  “Did you deliver the letter?”

  “No. I just wanna know what he done, this guy.”

  “Any of you deliver the letter?” Byrnes asked again. The boys were all shaking their heads. Byrnes turned to Murchison. “How about it, Dave? Recognize one of them?”

  “Hard to say,” Murchison said. “One thing for sure, he was a blond kid. You can let all the dark-haired kids go. We’ve got a couple of redheads in there, too. They’re no good. This kid was blond.”

  “Steve, keep only the blonds,” Byrnes said, and Carella began walking through the room, tapping boys, telling them to go home. When he’d finished the culling process, the room had thinned down to four blond boys. The other boys idled on the other side of the slatted-rail divider, watching.

  “Beat it,” Hawes said. “Go home.”

  The boys left reluctantly.

  Of the four blonds remaining, two were at least twelve years old.

  “They’re too old,” Murchison said.

  “You two can go,” Byrnes told them, and the boys drifted out. Byrnes turned to one of the remaining two.

  “How old are you, sonny?” he asked.

  “Eight.”

  “What do you say, Dave?”

  “He’s not the kid.”

  “How about the other one?”

  “Him neither.”

  “Well, that’s—” Byrnes seemed suddenly stabbed with pain. “Hawes, stop those other kids before they get past the desk. Get their names, for Christ’s sake. We’ll put them on the radio. Otherwise we’ll be getting the same damn kids in here all day long. Hurry up!”

  Hawes went through the railing and sprinted for the steps. He stopped some of the kids in the muster room, rounded up the rest on the sidewalk and sent them all back into the precinct. One kid sighed reluctantly and patted a huge German shepherd on the head.

  “You wait, Prince,” he said. “I gotta handle this again,” and then he walked into the building.

  Hawes looked at the dog. The idea clicked into his mind. He ran into the building, climbed the steps, and rushed into the squadroom.

  “A dog!” he said. “Suppose it’s a dog!”

  “Huh?” Byrnes asked. “Did you stop those kids?”

  “Yes, but it could be a dog!”

  “What could be a dog?”

  “Lady! The Lady!”

  Carella spoke instantly. “He could be right, Pete. How many dogs named Lady do you suppose there are in the precinct?”

  “I don’t know,” Byrnes said. “You think the nut who wrote that letter…?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “All right, get on the phone. Meyer! Meyer!”

  “Yah, Pete?”

  “Start taking these kids’ names. Jesus, this place is turning into a madhouse!”

  Turning, Byrnes stamped into his office.

  Carella’s call to the Bureau of Licenses revealed that there were thirty-one licensed dogs named Lady within the precinct territory. God alone knew how many unlicensed dogs of the same name there were.

  He reported his information to Byrnes.

  Byrnes told him that if a man wanted to kill a goddamn lady dog, that was his business and Byrnes wasn’t going to upset his whole damn squad tracking down every bitch in the precinct. They’d find out about it the minute the dog was killed, anyway, and then they might or might not try to find the canine killer.

  He suggested that in the meantime Hawes call Eastern Shipping in an attempt to find out whether or not any shops in the precinct carried the paper the letter was pasted on.

  “And close the goddamn door!” he shouted as Carella left.

  It was 11:32 A.M.

  The sun was climbing steadily into the sky and now was almost at its zenith, its rays baking the asphalt and the concrete, sending shimmering waves of heat up from the pavements.

  There was no breeze in the park.

  The man with the binoculars sat atop a high outcropping of rock, but it was no cooler there than it was on the paths that wound through the park. The man wore blue-gabardine trousers and a cotton-mesh short-sleeved sports shirt. He sat in cross- legged Indian fashion, his elbows resting on his knees, the binoculars trained on the police precinct across the street.

  There was an amused smile on the man’s face.

  He watched the kids streaming out of the police station, and the smile widened. His letter was bringing results. His letter had set the precinct machinery in motion, and he watched the results of that motion now, and there was a strange pulsing excitement within him as he wondered if he would be caught.

  They won’t catch me, he thought.

  But maybe they will.

  The excitement within him was contradictory. He wanted to elude them, but at the same time he relished the idea of a chase, a desperate gun battle, the culminating scene of a carefully planned murder. Tonight he would kill. Yes. There was no backing away from that. Yes. He had to kill, he knew that, there was no other way, that was it, yes. Tonight. They could not stop him, but maybe they would. They could not stop him.

  A man was leaving the precinct, coming down the stone steps.

  He focused the binoculars tightly on the man’s face. A detective, surely. On business his letter had provoked? His grin widened.

  The detective had red hair. The hair caught the rays of the brilliant sun. There was a white streak over one temple. He followed the detective with his binoculars. The detective got into an automobile, an unmarked police car, undoubtedly. The car pulled away from the curb quickly.

  They’re in a hurry, the man thought, lowering the binoculars. He looked at his wristwatch.

  11:35.

  They haven’t got much time, he thought. They haven’t got much time to stop me.

  The bookshop was unusual for the 87th Precinct neighborhood. You did not expect to find a store selling books in such a neighborhood. You expected all the reading matter to be in drugstore racks, and you expected sadistic mysteries like I, the Hangman, historical novels like See My Bosom, dramas of the Old West like Sagebrush Sixgun.

  The shop was called Books, Incorporated. It huddled in one of the side streets between two tenements, below street level. You passed through an old iron gate, walked down five steps, and were face to face with the plateglass window of the shop and its display of books. A sign in the window said, “We Stock Spanish-language books.” Another sign said, “Aquí habla Español.”

  In the right-hand corner of the window, lettered onto the glass in gold gilt, were the words CHRISTINE MAXWELL, PROP.

  Hawes walked down the steps and opened the screen door of the shop. A bell over the door tinkled. The shop instantly touched something deep in his memory. He felt he had been here before, had seen the dusty racks and shelves, had sniffed of the musty bookbindings, the intimate smell of stored knowledge. Had he browsed in such a shop on a rainy day in the side streets fringing The Quarter downtown? Was this The Haunted Bookshop come to life, a stationary “Parnassus on Wheels”? He remembered the Morley books from his youth, and he wished he had time to browse, wished that time were not so important right now. There was a friendliness and warmth to the shop, and he wanted to soak it up, sponge it into his bones, and he wished his visit were not such an urgent one, wished he had come for information that had nothing to do with sudden death.

  “Yes?” the voice said.

  He broke off his thoughts abruptly. The voice was gentle, a voice that belonged in the shop. He turned.

  The girl stood before the shelves of brown-backed books, stood in an almost mist-like radiance, fragile, tender, gentle, against the musty cracked brown. Her hair was blonde, whisper- like tendrils softly cradling the oval of her face. Her eyes were blue and wide, the soft blue of a spring sky, the delicate blue of a lilac. There was a tentative smile on her full mouth, a mouth kissed by the seasons. And because she was a human being, and because it was a hot day in July, there was a thin film of perspiration on her upper lip. And because she was a human being and not a memory and not a dream and not a maiden from some legendary Camelot, Hawes fell in love with her instantly.

  “Hello,” he said. There was surprise in his voice, but it was not a wise guy’s “Hell-lo!” It was more an awed whisper, and the girl looked at him and again said, “Yes?”