The Axeman's Jazz

time, not blood, and it wasn’t scarlet, it was a sort of bluish-pink.
    She had been strangled, but not with hands. A striped cotton scarf, in shades of fuchsia and rose, had been wound about Jerilyn’s thin neck.
    The girl looked about sixteen. She had short brown hair and her limbs were honey-colored, though her face was engorged and purplish now, marred by darker purple hemorrhages. She was wearing a pair of white shorts, a blue T-shirt, and sandals. “Straight-A student,” said Cappello, and that was all Skip needed. She was blinking back tears before she could stop herself, turning away so the others couldn’t see. Never since she’d been in Homicide had she experienced anything like this hopelessness, this feeling that she could have done better, she could have stopped it. This feeling of involvement.
    The coroner hadn’t yet arrived and they had no estimate of time of death.
    Abe hadn’t been able to give much of a statement so far, saying only that he came in, found her, panicked, ran straight to his kids’ room, found them okay, hustled them out the back, and drove them to his wife’s house before calling the police. Officers had been dispatched to both addresses and Abe had been taken to police headquarters for further questioning.
    “Is anyone doing the neighbors?” asked Skip.
    Cappello shook her head, looked grateful. “Not yet. You want to?”
    Skip nodded.
    “Jerilyn’s parents live next door. They know. They came over when they saw the first car that got here—wouldn’t you if you knew your kid was here and a police car drove up?”
    “Oh, shit.”
    “It was grim. Anyway, they said she came over about six-thirty and they never heard a peep till they saw our guys. They were watching television. They said she sat for Abe now and then, liked the kids, didn’t mind him. That’s about it. You can talk to them again if you like.”
    Skip intended to. No matter how much it hurt to sit through an interview with two people who had just lost their daughter, she was going to do it. She was going to talk to everyone on the block, and do it now, even if they cursed her up and down and threatened to sue the city.
    But when she had done it, and had interviewed the other neighbors, she was no further ahead than before. Everyone loved Jerilyn, most thought Abe was okay, and no one had seen or heard anything except one woman who heard a car door slam at around ten or ten-thirty, maybe eleven, and a ten-year-old boy who wasn’t sure. He’d gotten up to go the bathroom and maybe had seen a car leave the Morrisons’. But maybe it had “just been going down the street.” He didn’t know what time that was, but he’d gone to bed at ten-thirty, so it had to have been after that. He couldn’t describe the car.
    Everyone was scared shitless, and most of them, those who had known Jerilyn, were heartbroken as well, their faces drawn with the pain of a child’s death and the urban-crime fear the city lived with. The bogeyman had come to their block in his nastiest, cruelest form.

TWENTY-FOUR
    THE ENTIRE AXEMAN task force had been called in, Cindy Lou included, but they weren’t yet all there. Those who were were drinking coffee, comparing notes, trying to reconstruct who sat where at the inner-child meeting, trying to remember every face, every name, to make sure no one slipped through the cracks. It had been a fairly large group, about forty people—though four of them were cops and one was Cindy Lou.
    Abe was waiting for her, disheveled, pasty, and sweaty, hair standing on end as if he’d run his hands through it over and over.
    “Skip. What are you doing here?”
    “Didn’t they tell you I’d be here?”
    “Detective Langdon. They said Detective Langdon.”
    “Well, that’s me.”
    ”I didn’t know.” He seemed disoriented. “You’re a cop.”
    She smiled sweetly, sat down across from him. “And you’re the Axeman.”
    She wouldn’t have thought he could lose more color, look any more distressed, but he seemed to shrink suddenly, a balloon stuck with a pin. “I could have lost my daughters,” he said.
    She was just thinking she’d never seen a lawyer act less like one when he rallied. “Did I hear you right?” he said. “Did you accuse me of being the Axeman?”
    “Are you?”
    “Am I in custody?” Skip gave up any thoughts of calling in the paramedics. He was going to be fine.
    She shook her head. “What happened after I left PJ’s?”
    “Am I a suspect?”
    “Not