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you want me to do? Take my clothes off and show you the scars? I’m trying to get it out of my mind, and you’re screwing it in forever!”
    “I’m sorry about that,” Hadley said.
    “If we get them, don’t you see,” Beamis tried, “it can help you get rid of them, get them out of your system.”
    Julie drew a deep breath. “I’m sorry I blew,” she said. “What was it you asked?”
    “You go right ahead and blow all you want,” Hadley said. “You’ve got a right.”
    Beamis resumed the questioning. “Was there anything feminine about them? Swishy?”
    “No.” Then: “I don’t know. The one with the knife giggled every time he dug the knife in. That’s what it sounded like, a kind of falsetto giggle.”
    “Could the knife be a tool of a particular trade?” Russo asked.
    “I don’t think so. A switchblade.”
    “Would you recognize their voices?”
    “I doubt it.”
    “Anything about them to make you think they might live in our neighborhood?”
    This was the reason, of course, that Russo had been rung in on the interrogation. The possibility of locals made Julie even more uncomfortable. She drew a deep breath. “I’ll tell you again everything I can remember about them, and I’ll try, damn it, to get it all up this time.”
    Detective Hadley checked the small tape recorder.
    She told everything she remembered and became aware of adding nuances that were not there before: “the heavy black hairs on the sodomist’s fingers”; she was more sure the shorter man rolled when he walked; she wouldn’t now call it a limp. “He was lighter-complexioned, freckly, with hair on his body like dry dead grass. Their skin was taut. Young. They smelled young. How about that?”
    “Go on.”
    “I felt they knew their way around the whole building project. With that strong smell of machine grease on the hands of the taller one, I figure they could be maintenance men on all that heavy machinery. … Yet his hands were soft and clean … a disinfectant soap maybe.” Her mind went dead on that subject. “What about that person in the lot with the shopping bags? Why can’t you find her?”
    “You’re sure now it was a woman?” Julie hadn’t been sure before.
    “Almost sure. They had no way of knowing I was going to come along from the direction I did. I think they were trying to lure that person into the trailer and I fell into the trap.”
    “That could be the way it happened,” Beamis said, “but the trouble is, he or she has vanished.”
    “Did anybody see her besides me?”
    “Not recently,” Beamis said. “And we’ve pretty well sifted the men on the project payroll. That includes the subcontractors, maintenance and supply. Negative findings all the way.”
    “Does that mean you’ll keep coming back to me to start over?”
    “No, ma’am, it doesn’t mean that,” Detective Hadley said. “It means the case goes on the back burner. There’s a lot of work for us out there, and we don’t get to choose our assignments. We’ll work on this case when we can.”
    She couldn’t possibly know how relieved Julie felt.
    “They sound like klutzes,” Beamis said, running his fingers through his hair. It was a desperate kind of gesture. “So why can’t we nail them? They left stuff all over the place: that doll blanket, the container with grease in it. … They’re fucking lucky, that’s all.”
    Julie picked up on this: “A container of grease?”
    “Speaking of klutzes,” Hadley said, shaking her head at her partner’s gaffe.
    It was Russo who explained: “They collected a small amount of grease. The lab traced it to a used drum in the dumpster.” He went on hurriedly, “Let’s talk about those stocking masks.”
    “Yeah, let’s,” Julie said tightly, having figured out what the grease was used for.
    “Have you ever heard of lisle stockings?” Russo wanted to know. “I guess you’re too young for that. My grandmother wore them. The immigrants coming over, the nuns when I