Chapter 35

So we went back to where we'd started nearly three months earlier – talking to street people. It was Valentine's Day, but that didn't matter much to people who didn't have calendars or clocks or watches ... not that many people today wear a watch anymore. I still see one occasionally, and I wear one, but most people nowadays check the time on their cell phones. The people we were talking to didn't have those either, of course.

We carried pictures and descriptions on us, with a bunch more in the Blazer – we've both got individually enough money to pay for boxes of xeroxes, and our joint money could do it just as easily. It was no burden to take things to Kinko's – except now it's FedEx Office – and have 'em print copies by the bundle. What we wound up not using could become scratch paper.

The problem was that we got nowhere. We were on the street by 7 AM, Cecelia starting at Wyoming and working west, while I went on and parked downtown and worked east, and with the radios that we'd clipped onto our belts this time we could confer easily – and neither of us was getting any joy. No one recognized the picture. The description of the man in the picture, and of his vehicle, got us nowhere. When we broke for lunch – I was in the park by Longfellow Elementary School by then, with the white tower of the Loveless Medical Center looming above me, while Cecelia had worked her way over to Valencia, just west of San Pedro – neither of us had gotten any sort of hit. It took us about 15 seconds to agree on that, and then we fell silent, eating. Rather than bring backpacks we'd both bought lunch – mine from the McDonald's at Lomas and Broadway, and Cecelia's possibly from the Sonic on Central just west of the State Fairgrounds, that being handy to where she was.

Of course nowadays they call the Fairgrounds Expo New Mexico – at least that's the official name, but no real person has ever used that name in my hearing. And the hospital that I was facing as I ate I still call St. Joseph's downtown, which was what it had been when I came to Albuquerque. Then it became the Albuquerque Regional Medical Center when a company from Tennessee had bought the hospital off of some Catholic outfit the name of which I couldn't remember just then. And then that company had bought out Lovelace, which along with Presbyterian had been the other big hospitals in town, and what had been the St. Joseph's hospitals became Sandia Lovelace. And now apparently it was all Lovelace – which people in Albuquerque pronounce loveless – leaving the city with just two hospital organizations.

All this name changing sometimes left me disoriented. I'm a country boy, and to me the little ramshackle, abandoned, falling down house at the base of the Vontrigger Hills in Fenner Valley is still John Fraze's place, though he'd moved from there back in the 70s. That's a country custom – three families may have moved in and out over the years, but it'll still be "the old Johnson place." To me that big white building over there was still "St. Joseph's downtown," and probably always will be.

I finished my Big Mac, and went to work on the fries. They tell me that junk food and fast food will kill me deader than a hammer – however dead a hammer may be – but I've been eating it all my life nearly, and it hasn't wrecked me yet. I refuse to panic every time someone on TV tells me to. I remember when oat bran was gong to keep us all alive and healthy forever, and 15 minutes later no one had ever heard of oat bran. Health fads come and go just as often as fads in clothing, and have about as much meaning, at least as far as I can tell. The people who live to be 110 years old got most of their age before all this modern health frenzy got going, which means that they weren't eating according to what the modern health frenetics tell us we have to do if we don't want to die at 12. It's certainly true that we've got a lot more grotesquely fat people than we used to, kids and adults both, but it seems to me that the cause isn't so much what people are eating, as what they're doing before and after they eat. Few people these days labor for a living – they may work, but it's not strenuous physical labor. If these people grew up hoeing a garden or mucking out stalls, and then went to work digging ditches by hand or bucking hay bales or physically building cars, they'd have a lot less fat on 'em and a lot more muscle. You don't, after all, see fat guys on a ladder nailing a house together; it's the people sitting at a desk in a suit who have to play squash or jog or whatever and still have an exceedingly well fed look.

Of course none of that helped me find a psychopath who enjoyed putting a knife into people multiple times. So far, nothing was helping me do that. I'd been on the case – well, Cecelia and I had – since November, and the police had been working it longer than that, and so far the sum total of our evidence was very near the square root of absolutely nothing.

And again, thoughts of odd mathematical numbers weren't getting me nearer to solving the case. I knew what was happening – my mind was so frustrated and sickened and angered by what the murderer was doing, and my inability to do anything about it, that it was skittering off into any other topic at all rather than stay where it couldn't get any purchase. I'd been working this case longer than 99% of the cases I've handled over the years, and gotten nowhere. I've only had one other case where I got so little return for my efforts, and that was back before I met Cecelia – well, part of it was, anyway. I'd met her while I was still trying to find the runaway wife, whom I did in fact locate after we got married.