Chapter 33

And that was all for a while. The murderer had reduced the interval between bodies to nine days, and then came a period of two weeks where nothing happened on the case, and nothing much happened in real life either. Mama and Daddy flew back to Leanna on the 21^st, and Darlia of course was involved in school, and Cecelia was busy not only helping me sift through our own case records for whatever we could find, but also cooking, sewing, lifting weights almost every day, helping out at the shelter, doing books for two or three churches in town, and various other things some of which I didn't know exactly what they were. We both take the admonition about the left hand not knowing what the right hand's doing so seriously that not only do we not broadcast our actions to the world, but some of them we don't even tell each other about. It might seem like an odd way to run a family, and it probably wouldn't work for most couples, but for us it works very well.

Then came the last day of the month. The cold swept in on a bitter wind, and the snow fell horizontally. We never get as much snow in Hoffmantown as they do up near Tijeras Canyon, around the intersection of Central and Tramway, but what we got drifted. With the wind blowing so fiercely there were great sweeps where the grass was almost completely bare, but wherever the snow piled up, it piled – there were drifts three or four inches high. I suppose someone from Canada's Northwest Territories would think nothing of that, but in all my years in Albuquerque it was the first time I'd seen anything like it. Nor had I seen such things in Oklahoma or Texas – there might be times when the northern sky makes it obvious why they call it a blue norther, and ice storms are a common thing, but drifting snow isn't, at least not in the areas where I'd lived. The news reports made it clear, though, that Oklahoma and Texas weren't having a typical winter – the weather there apparently was more like what you'd expect in Minnesota or Michigan.

I was glad that we'd decided to review our case files. Getting out in the cold that lingered after the storm wasn't a pleasant thing, and however stultifying paperwork is, at least we could do it inside, with a temperature comfortably above zero rather than 20 degrees or so below it. And I would have hated to try to work a crime scene in those conditions – cold is bad enough, but when the wind blows it sucks the heat right out of you and feels even colder, and I don't do cold well. And trying to track someone in snow that melted slightly each day in the sun and then froze solid every night would have been impossible.

But the case review wasn't going anywhere that we could see. A week to the day after the storm struck Cecelia and I were sitting in the conference room surrounded by paperwork. I decided to try to summarize things, and began scribbling on my pad. When I was done I tossed my pen on the table and leaned back. "We ain't got nothin'," I said.

Cecelia raised her head. She'd used her gold hair clip that day to hold her ponytail, and it contrasted wonderfully with her black hair and milk chocolate skin. Blacks have known for centuries that gold looks good on them, and Cecelia is no exception. Her shirt was black with white butterflies that she'd embroidered herself – with her industrial sewing machine she's taken to doing some things that she never tackled when she used a needle and thimble – and I knew that she was wearing a gray skirt that brushed the floor when she walked, though I couldn't see it just then. "Would you please clarify that remark?" she said.

"Sure." I lifted the pad and let it drop. "We know and can prove – as opposed to the profile, which we know but can't prove, at least not yet – we know and can prove that this guy nabs street people, that he kills them with multiple stab wounds front and back, that sometimes he bashes 'em in the head and may do it all the time without always leaving an obvious wound, we know that he dumps the bodies in semi-public places where someone'll find 'em before too long, and we know that on at least one occasion he's used a travois to transport the body from his vehicle to the dump site. Oh, and we know he's got at least three throwaway cell phones."