Shallow Graves

the walking.“
    Okay. “Anything from forensics?“
    “The party animals, they pretty well wrecked the body position and all trying to bring the girl back to life.“ Holt skipped ahead again to a photo envelope. “Here’s a couple of pictures you might like to see.“
    He spun them to me like a man dealing poker. Both we: eight-by-tens. The first showed part of a necklace against a hardwood floor background, peeking out from under the edge of a print futon couch. A large purple pendant and some purple stones above it, all set in what looked like gold. The gold appeared to lead to a more elaborate, but missing, neckpiece.
    The second photo was of an Amerasian woman, taken from her feet back up toward the face. The hair on her head seemed stringy, maybe from being wet. The robe she was wearing was open, no panties or bra. Her skin tone was golden and perfectly consistent, no tan lines or blemishes. The only problem was the abrasions down toward the throat, where a smudgy blue spoiled the skin. Her eyes were only half-closed, the irises glazed in the giving over of vision from life to death.
    Holt said, “Notice anything?“
    “The medical examiner say whether these were cuts on the throat?“
    “Yeah. M.E. thinks the perp had the necklace in his ham when he choked her. Notice anything else?“
    “No sexual abuse.“
    “No.“
    Holt sounded impatient, like I was getting colder rather than warmer. It was hard to tell from the photos, but the application had listed her eye color.
    I said, “They’re the same.“
    Holt sat back again and smiled. “Spooky, isn’t it? Her eyes and the necklace there, the same color.“
    The telephone company keeps track of all calls, even local ones, made from any address. “You have her phone records yet?“
    “They’re being sent.“
    “Ten days, you don’t have them?“
    Holt came forward, reaching across the desk to reclaim the ! photos. “What do you think, our boy stopped to call his momma, see if she needed anything from the store on the way j home? We got no eyewitnesses on the perp and no hope of turning one. We find somebody dirty with the necklace, he’s a done guy. Or, somebody pops a name at us, gives up the killer, we can lock it in with maybe a little pressure and a couple of statements. But otherwise, this one’s a dream you can’t remember once you wake up.“
    “I’d think you’d be showing a little more enthusiasm for a glamour killing like this.“
    “Cuddy, we’ve logged over fifty homicides in the city since January one, and we’re not into May yet. Used to be, we’d have maybe a hundred in the whole Commonwealth the whole year. Enthusiasm’s kind of tough to come by, these days.“
    Holt tipped back in his chair again. “Besides, now that you’re on this, we can relax and watch you bring it home for us.“
    I thanked him and got up. He told me to be sure and have a nice day, now.

    I went up the hall and around the corner to another office. Inside, I could see Robert Murphy wading through a file that had two inches on the Manhattan Yellow Pages. Black, burly, and blunt, he’d been promoted to lieutenant and assigned to Homicide some years ago when a biased city councillor mistook an Irish name for an Irish cop.
    Murphy wore a long-sleeved blue shirt with a collar stay under a blue silk tie. Two fingers held his place at two different points in the file. “Gotcha.“
    “Lieutenant?“
    Murphy looked up and down again. “Cuddy. Take a seat.“
    I closed the door and angled a chair toward him. “Am I interrupting anything?“
    “Minor victory. One of maybe ten suspects in a drive-by tells the uniforms he was with a homeboy named Jomo when the shooting started. Only problem is, Jomo was enjoying the county’s hospitality on Nassau Street at the time.“
    The new jail near the Registry of Motor Vehicles. “I haven’t been there yet.“
    “You saw it, you wouldn’t believe it. They got something like 450 cells with computerized doors. The cells’re in color coded units for different kinds of offenders, with different colored jump suits to match.“
    “ Alice Through the Looking Glass.“
    “Compared to Charles Street , anyway. New facility’s got twenty beds for women, no more ‘Susan-Saxe’ cells in the bowels of the courthouse. Windows, recreation decks...“
    “Jacuzzis.“
    “Next budget.“
    “Save me the trip to Florida for Spring Break.“
    Murphy stuck a couple of yellow Post-Its into the file as bookmarks. “You