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killer was this? Cleaned the floor, put oversize clothes on the corpse, and messed up her face. April had the strange feeling she was trapped in the shop with a crazy person who wouldn’t speak. What had happened here? What was the message?
    Until they had started going over it and dusting the place with gray powder, the tiny boutique had looked incredibly tidy. It looked as if someone had wiped it clean and carefully vacuumed up after the murder. But there wasn’t a vacuum cleaner in the place. April shook her head. She had forgotten to ask the owner who cleaned, and when.
    “How do you kill somebody, change their clothes, put makeup all over the face, and get out without leaving any traces? Whose makeup and where is it?” she muttered.
    “I just collect,” Igor said.
    “And where are her own clothes?”
    Igor didn’t bother to answer. If her clothes weren’t there, whoever killed her took them away.
    April crossed to the front door and looked at it again. No signs of forced entry.
    “Did you find anything here?”
    Igor carefully pulled some fibers out of the rug and put them in a plastic bag that he neatly labeled with the location the sample came from as well as its source. He moved across the floor to do the same in front of the door.
    “Not on the outside. There’s a partial on the inside, and of course a ton of prints in here. Lot of them probably hers.”
    He spoke with a trace of an accent from one of the Slavic countries that didn’t exist anymore. April liked him more than the other crime-scene people she had met uptown. Igor was a small person with a large head covered by a rarely mowed field of wheaty hair. He had big jaw, wide set, arresting blue eyes, and a slight list to one side from an injury he had received several years before in the line of duty.
    “Don’t touch,” he said again as he got to his feet. He picked up a hemplike piece of fiber with his tweezers and studied it.
    “I’m not touching,” April said. He was almost finished anyway.
    There was a thin film of sticky powder all over the place.
    “Did you see the fluff on the ring?” she asked.
    “I saw it.”
    “What about the fingernails?”
    Igor bagged the girl’s hands with brown paper bags. His partner had already photographed everything, both with and without measuring tapes to show distances and heights. They never knew what they were going to need in court when they got the guy who did it. As well as photographing, he also sketched everything, including views of the building, the sidewalk, and the trees in front.
    “You know I don’t touch the body,” Igor told her.
    “You took a look, didn’t you?”
    “Yeah, I
looked
, but that doesn’t mean I can tell you anything. That’s for the M.E., you know that.”
    “Can I sit here?”
    She indicated the stool by the money drawer. Polished wood. It had already been dusted and still had a fine layer of gray grit on it. Lots of prints, as Igor had said.
    Igor glanced up. “Yeah.”
    April sat on the stool. This was where the girl must have spent her free time, where she wrote up the sales slips. A stool with no back. From her first encounter with Mrs. Manganaro, April gathered Elsbeth was the kind of boss who wouldn’t want her salesgirls comfortable. There was no way anyone could catnap on this stool without falling off. Nice.
    Two ambulance people wheeled in the gurney. It was an awkward maneuver in the small shop. Five or six people were crowded in the back room, including someone from the M.E.’s office who had arrived to pronounce the body dead. April could hear a discussion going while the girl was finally taken down from the chandelier.
    April had asked Mrs. Manganaro if the door was kept locked during the day. She told April there had been some trouble a few years before with high school kids. Now the door had an automatic latch. It appeared the girl had let in her own killer. April looked out at the street.
    With the ambulance, a number of unmarked cars, and