Dreams in the Key of Blue by John Philpin Page A

smoking. Listen, you’ve already got some of our people rethinking this thing. A couple of us went back to Crescent Street. I think I know what you’re getting at. The rear door wasn’t disturbed. The windows don’t work for a quiet entry. Too noisy and too difficult to manage. Wewent over every inch of the front door, removed the lock and examined it, and found nothing. So the killer used a key and let himself in.”
    Jaworski consulted his notes. “Let’s see. Martin International owns the building. College maintenance has three copies of the key on campus. They keep all keys to all buildings in a locked cabinet. None are missing. The head of maintenance, Nelson Kiner, has his own set that he keeps at his house in the village. His cabinet isn’t locked, but we’ve accounted for all of those.”
    “You might want to check on previous tenants, find out when the locks were changed last.”
    Jaworski smiled for the first time since I met him. “We’re doing that. I told you, I read your book. Now, when we first got to the scene, no lights were on. When we were down there an hour ago, we took a closer look at the switchplates. I think we’ve got a smudge, blood, on the plate in the double room. Like he had the light on, then switched it off on his way out.”
    You shot from light into darkness, from what you could see, into the forehead of a moving shadow.
    “He’s a crack shot,” I said.
    “Looks that way,” Jaworski agreed. “But lots of folks around here hunt, target shoot. His skill doesn’t make the pool much smaller. Your question about blood mixture will take a while. I have to get the lab people to come back and take more samples. We should have an answer on the fabric sometime tomorrow. So, what else have you got?”
    “Nothing right now,” I said.
    “I know you do this stuff kind of step-wise. Put the crime together first, then figure out the sort of killer who fits it. I just wondered if you had any notions that I could work with.”
    I understood Jaworski’s impatience. “I have somevague ideas,” I told him, “but I don’t want to set you running in the wrong direction. Two physical details suggested by the scene are that he’s between five-six and five-nine, and left-handed.”
    The chief nodded. “I watched you work those smears and measure your hand.”
    “As far as what goes on in his head, I need more time.”
    “I remember you had a piece in your book about Stanley Markham. You worked that case.”
    Stanley Markham was a slice of violence from the past. Markham took his early victims to clearings in remote, wooded areas. Each time, eleven that we knew of, a young woman walked with him to the place where he ended her life.
    Then he escalated.
    “I worked Markham,” I said warily. “Why?”
    “That’s right. I forgot. You definitely need to get a TV in this place. Markham escaped.”
    The fucking orange.
    I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.
    “He’s been on the run for ten days. The U.S. Marshals said he’d head back to the Boston area. That ain’t far from us.”
    Stanley Markham was not as bright as some of his brothers in carnage, but he was every bit as destructive, maybe more. After his eleventh victim, Markham killed weekly, and cruised more frequently than that. Risk was irrelevant to him. He exploded into homes, waltzed into schools at noon, breezed through malls at any hour seeking his prey.
    And he always signed in at his kills. As he studied his work, he peeled and ate a piece of fruit and neatly piled the rind and seeds.
    Now he was free.
    According to Jaworski, Markham used a ploy thatmust have come out of a 1940s James Cagney movie. Assigned to sort laundry, he hid in one of the huge dirty-linen hampers. The laundry service wheeled him from the medium-security institution for the criminally insane.
    Medium security. It boggles the mind.
    “The last I knew, Markham’s sister lived on Boston’s North Shore,” I said. “The two of them were close.