Brazen Virtue

having tasted his coffee. “I’m staying at the Hotel Washington if you need to contact me.”
    “I won’t.”
    He lifted a brow at the venom in her voice. As sisters, he’d never seen the least resemblance between Kathleen and Grace. “You never could stand the sight of me, could you, Grace?”
    “Barely. It hardly matters how you and I feel about each other at this point. I would like to say one thing.” She dug the last cigarette out of her pack and lit it without a tremor. Loathing brought out a strength she could only be grateful for. “Kevin is my nephew. I’ll expect to be able to see him whenever I’m in California.”
    “Naturally.”
    “And my parents.” She pressed her lips together a moment. “Kevin is all they have left of Kathleen. They’re going to need regular contact.”
    “It goes without saying. I’ve always felt my relationship with your parents was reasonable.”
    “You consider yourself a reasonable man?” The bitterness slipped out, surprising her. Just for an instant, she’d sounded like Kathleen. “Did you think it reasonable to take Kevin away from his mother?”
    He said nothing at first. Though his face was bland, she could almost hear the workings of his mind. When he spoke, it was brief and without expression. “Yes. I’ll let myself out.”
    She cursed him. Swinging around to lean on the counter, she cursed him until she was empty.

    ♦  ♦  ♦
    E D PUSHED HIS FACE into a sink filled with cold water and held his breath. Five seconds, then ten, and he could feel the fatigue draining. A ten-hour day wasn’t unusual. A ten-hour day on two hours’ sleep wasn’t unusual. But the worry was. He was discovering that it sapped energy more completely than a fifth of gin.
    What was he supposed to tell her? He lifted his head so that water ran down his beard. They didn’t have the first lead. Not a glimmer. She was smart enough to know that if the trail cooled during the first twenty-four hours, it got dead cold fast.
    They had a batty old woman who may or may not have seen a car that may or may not have followed her sister’s car sometime or other. They had a barking dog. Kathleen Breezewood had no close friends or associates, no one closer than Grace herself. If she was telling everything she knew, the trail led to suspect unknown. Someone who had seen Kathleen on her way to work, at the market, in the yard. The city had its share of violence, provoked and otherwise. At this point, it looked as though she had simply been one more random victim.
    They’d questioned a couple of rejects that morning. Two parolees whose lawyers had bargained them back on the streets after separate assaults on women. Gathering evidence and making a clean arrest didn’t mean a conviction, just as the law didn’t mean justice. They hadn’t had enough to hold either one of them, and though Ed knew that sooner or later they’d probably rape some other woman, they hadn’t done Kathleen Breezewood.

    It wasn’t good enough. He grabbed a towel from a closet. The lattice doors he’d chosen for it were tilted against a wall downstairs, waiting for sanding. He’d planned to work on them tonight for an hour or two so they’d be ready for hanging on his day off. Somehow he didn’t think working with his hands would make his mind easy this time.
    He buried his face in the towel and thought about calling her. To say what? He’d made certain she’d been notified that the body would be released to her in the morning. The medical examiner’s report had been on his desk when he’d checked into the station at six.
    It wasn’t any use giving her the details. Sexual assault, death by strangulation. Death between 9:00 and 10:00 P.M. Coffee and valium in the system and little else. Blood type O positive. Which meant that the perp’s blood type was A positive. Kathleen hadn’t let him get away clean.
    She’d taken some skin and some hair with the blood, so they knew he was white. And he was young, under thirty.
    They’d even lifted a couple of partial prints off the phone cord, which made Ed figure the killer had either been stupid or the murder unpremeditated. But prints only worked if they could be matched. So far, the computer hadn’t come up with anything.
    If they brought him down, they had enough circumstantial evidence to bring him to trial. Maybe enough to convict him. If they brought him down.
    It wasn’t enough.
    He tossed the towel over the lip of the sink. Was he edgy