Fatal Reaction

it out of the building unnoticed,” I said.
    “I bet it gave him a heart attack when Freelig asked him to hold the elevator,” observed Elliott.
    “True, but I’m still not sure where all of this gets us.”
    “For one thing it gives us a physical description of who we’re looking for.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Now we know that whoever was with Danny was close enough in size and build to wear Danny’s clothes and to be mistaken for him—at least at a distance. I’d say we’re probably looking for a white man about five foot ten, one hundred sixty pounds, between twenty and fifty years old.”
    “That narrows it down to a couple million guys,” I said dubiously.
    “There’s also a chance the security camera in the lobby might have picked up something. I’ve got someone tracking down the tape, but the company that has the security contract on that building isn’t open on the weekend so we won’t know until tomorrow at the earliest.”
    “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
    “I also had a pair of operatives showing Wohl’s picture around last night. I sent them out to all the bars and restaurants that showed up on his American Express bill for the past two months.”
    “What did they turn up? Anything?”
    “Couple places remember him, especially where there were gay waiters. Apparently he used to spend a lot of time at a Japanese place in his neighborhood called Kamehachi.”
    “Sure,” I said, “it’s a sushi bar on Wells, just down the street from his apartment.”
    “He ate there at least once a week.”
    “By himself?”
    “Sometimes. Sometimes with another man.”
    “Always the same one?”
    “It sounds that way.”
    “Description?”
    “Six feet tall, dark hair, brown eyes, good-looking, but not in the same league as your friend Stephen.”
    “Age?”
    “Between thirty and forty.”
    “That’s not exactly pinning it down.”
    “There’s more. According to what the waiters overheard they weren’t sure that it was all romance.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “The consensus was the two men must have worked together.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “Because all they talked about was work. The waiters said every time they overheard them they were talking about the problems the company was having with some new drug.”
     
    Elliott was supposed to meet Joe Blades at ten-thirty. Joe had promised to show him the medical examiner’s autopsy notes and the items of evidence that had been taken from Danny’s apartment. Elliott asked if I wanted to come along. With Claudia’s words ringing in my ears I agreed to go along for the ride.
    When we arrived at police headquarters a scuffed and acrid-smelling elevator carried us to the sixth floor where the special detail investigating the Sarrek murders had set up camp. We found Joe behind a government-issue metal desk, one of twenty in the open area in the middle of the room. Phones rang and keyboards clacked while the guys with rank went about their business in partitioned areas along the back wall.
    Blades looked terrible. Since the last time I’d seen him his skin seemed to have become almost transparent from fatigue. At the sight of us he rose to his feet and offered up what was meant as a smile. On the wall behind him was an enormous ceiling-to-floor chart that was divided by black rules into lines. Each line was marked with the heading Jane Doe #1 , Jane Doe #2, and on through the full complement of Stanley Sarrek’s sixty-three victims. Some of the lines were filled with physical descriptions— hair color, height, and weight—as well as a shorthand of what, at even the briefest glance, seemed horrific injuries. There were places for other information to be filled in: real names, addresses, next of kin. These were also blank.
    No wonder Blades seemed pleased to see us. Compared to the painstaking task of filling in the details of tragedy for each of the murder victims on that wall of grief, anything having to do with Danny’s death must have seemed like a relief.
    “So how’s it going?” asked Elliott as Blades led us behind a partition that had been erected to form a kind of conference area. We took seats around a chipped rectangular table of wood-grain Formica. On the portable blackboard someone had drawn a diagram in chalk. Shaped like a spider, it looked to be some kind of organizational chart.
    “This whole case is a jurisdictional nightmare. I swear, if we spent half as much time following leads as we did arguing about who’s