The Blue Nowhere

tooth marks from the comb very clearly in the heavily sprayed strands. The cop glanced through the file but said nothing. He handed the thin stack of papers to Shelton, tucked his shirt in once more then leaned against the wall.
    The chunky cop opened the file, read for a few moments then looked up. “Witnesses report the perpetrator was a white male, medium build and medium height, white slacks, a light blue shirt, tie with a cartooncharacter of some kind on it. Late twenties, early thirties. Looked like every techie in there, the bartender said.” The cop walked to the white-board and began to write down these clues. He continued, “ID card he was wearing said Xerox Palo Alto Research Center but we’re sure that was fake. There were no hard leads to anybody there. He had a mustache and goatee. Blond hair. Also there were several frayed blue denim fibers on the victim that didn’t match her clothes or anything in her closet at home. Might’ve come from the perp. The murder weapon was probably a military Ka-bar knife with a serrated top.”
    Tony Mott asked, “How’d you know that?”
    “The wounds’re consistent with that type of weapon.” Shelton turned back to the file. “The victim was killed elsewhere and dumped by the highway.”
    Mott interrupted. “How could they tell that? ”
    Shelton frowned slightly, apparently not wishing to digress. “Quantity of her blood found at the scene.” The young cop’s lengthy blond hair danced as he nodded and seemed to record this information for future reference.
    Shelton resumed. “Nobody near the body drop site saw anything.” A sour glance at the others. “Like they ever do. . . . Now, we’re trying to trace the doer’s car—he and Lara left the bar together and were seen walking toward the back parking lot but nobody got a look at his wheels. Crime scene was lucky; the bartender remembered that the perp wrapped his beer bottle in a napkin and one of the techs found it in the trash. But we printed both the bottle and the napkin and came up with zip. The lab lifted some kind of adhesive off the lip of the bottle but we can’t tell what it is. It’s nontoxic. That’s all they know. It doesn’t match anything in the lab database.”
    Frank Bishop finally spoke. “A costume store.”
    “Costume?” Anderson asked.
    The cop said, “Maybe he needed some help to look like this Will Randolph guy he was impersonating. Might be glue for a fake mustache or beard.”
    Gillette agreed. “A good social engineer always dresses for the con. I have friends who’ve sewed together complete Pac Bell linemen uniforms.”
    “That’s good,” Tony Mott said to Bishop, adding more data to his continuing education file.
    Anderson nodded his approval of this suggestion. Shelton called homicide headquarters in San Jose and arranged to have some troopers check the adhesive against samples of theatrical glue.
    Frank Bishop took off his wrinkled suit jacket and hung it carefully on the back of a chair. He stared at the photo and the white-board, arms crossed. His shirt was already billowing out again. He wore boots with pointed toes. When Gillette was a college student he and some friends at Berkeley had rented a skin flick for a party—a stag film from the fifties or sixties. One of the actors had looked and dressed just like Bishop.
    Lifting the crime scene file away from Shelton, Bishop flipped through it. Then he looked up. “The bartender said that the victim had a martini and the killer had a light beer. The killer paid. If we can get ahold of the check we might lift a fingerprint.”
    “How’re you going to do that?” It was bulky Stephen Miller who asked this. “The bartender probably pitched them out last night—with a thousand others.”
    Bishop nodded at Gillette. “We’ll have some troopers do what he mentioned—Dumpster diving.” To Shelton he said, “Have them look through the bar’s trash bins for a receipt for a martini and a light beer, time-stamped about seven-thirty P.M. ”
    “That’ll take forever,” Miller said. But Bishop ignored him and nodded to Shelton, who made the call to follow up on his suggestion.
    Gillette then realized that nobody had been standing close to him. He eyed everyone else’s clean clothes, shampooed hair, grime-free fingernails. He asked Anderson, “If we’ve got a few minutes before that computer’s ready . . . I don’t suppose you have a shower ’round here?”
    Anderson tugged at the lobe that