Cold Hit by Stephen J. Cannell Page B

get hunches, it's how we solve cases." "Okay, I'll start with Russia."
    "You also might try all of the countries in the old Soviet Union," I suggested. "Georgia. The Ukraine."
    "Okay." He picked up a sheet of paper from his out basket and handed to me. "I scanned your lens last night," he said. "That's the condition it was correcting."
    I studied the sheet. Bell graphs and squiggly line drawings with a column of numbers.
    "That prescription corrects an eye disease called Keratoconus, or KC. It only occurs in a fraction of one percent of the world population, so it's extremely rare. It usually occurs when a person's in their mid-twenties and can progress for ten to twenty years. The name refers to a condition in which the cornea grows into a cone shape and bulges forward. To correct KC, you need one of these rigid gas-permeable lenses."
    "This is good," I said. "Anything else?"
    "Historically, degeneration of an eye with KC slows around age forty or fifty. According to this prescription, the dead man in the wash was significantly sight-impaired and probably past middle age. Without his contacts, it would have been impossible for him to even drive."
    "How expensive are these to get made?"
    "My eye expert says hundreds of dollars. They hav e t o be fitted several times to make them wearable."
    I sat for a minute holding the printout, thinking no t m any bums are walking around with expensive contact lenses. "Since this is a rare eye condition, if we can find the lab in Europe that made the lens, we've got a damn good chance of finding out who he is."
    "Yep," Brandon said. "'Bout the way the donut crumbles." Then he took another Krispy Kreme.

    Chapter 10
    You have the transcripts from the cassettes we made at the first three murder scenes?" I asked Zack. "They aren't in the murder book."
    He was wearing yesterday's clothes and was slumped in his wooden swivel chair across from me in our cubicle, scowling down at the reorganized murder book, thumbing through the pages. He must have gone to a doctor because his nose was now encased in a metal splint and heavily bandaged. He seemed sober, but then it was only 10 A . M .
    "I put them in there. In the flap leaf," he said, pointing at the binder. "Somebody musta removed 'em." Since I was the only other person with access to the book, the implication was that I had done it, forgetting for the moment, that he'd left the damn thing unattended in the Xerox room. But so what? I stand accused. Our troubled partnership wallowed on.
    Then a look of momentary clarity spread across his discolored face and he snapped his fingers, tilted forward, and started rummaging around in his bottom des k d rawer. After a minute, he sat up with an apologetic grin and handed me some Xeroxed pages.
    Accused and exonerated. Swift justice.
    "I threw 'em in there," he explained. "Was gonna put 'em in the book later . . . forgot." He shrugged as if to say, hey, I'm only human.
    I took the blue LAPD murder book out of his hand and started to tape the Xeroxed transcripts for Woody, Van, and Cole onto a fresh page in each of their sections.
    "You really wants take this dumb-ass, new theory of yours to Calloway?" Zack said, leaning back and looking down his nose, studying me across a pound of medical adhesive.
    Since Cal had demanded a theory that tied all the unaligned facts together on Forrest's murder, I'd been trying to find one. I'd come up with a promising idea this morning. The more I'd thought about it, the more I liked it. I bounced my copycat theory off Zack as soon as I got in to see how it played. It had been met with stony silence. Now I ran down my new idea. After I finished, Zack glowered at me.
    "The skipper's gonna say two things," he complained. "He's gonna call this a hunch and tell us that Homicide Special dicks operate on evidence, not hunches. Then he's gonna say, you ain't got nothin' but bullshit here. Which of course, is exactly what it is."
    "He'll listen to reason."
    "If you're five and a