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painstaking, frustrating area and door-to-door
canvassing of the big apartment blocks overlooking the beach where Muller’s body had been found. There still, as usual, remained a considerable number of residences for detectives to return
to, perhaps repeatedly, until they found the occupants at home; and being Miami Beach, more than a few apartments might have been occupied by summer visitors, who had now departed.
    Add to that the fact that those few people likely to have been wandering along the beach at that time of night might be reluctant to come forward, either because they had been up to no good, or
out of it on drink or drugs, or maybe there might have been kids who’d sneaked out of hotels or apartments without their parents’ permission. Not to mention that most people in their
bedrooms in August would have been unlikely to have heard any unusual noise, most having their air conditioners switched on, windows and balcony doors closed, televisions turned on or just plain,
old-fashioned asleep.
    Muller’s brother and mother had arrived from Pennsylvania on Thursday, both shattered, neither having been in close enough contact lately with the murdered man to be able to offer much
insight; and neither his friends – mostly members of the Harding Avenue Gym, where he was a regular – nor his co-workers at Trent had been able to supply any information about enemies
or serious problems in Muller’s life.
    ‘No bad stuff going on in Mrs Sanchez’s life, either,’ Sam said as he mulled over things again with Martinez in the office.
    ‘That supposed to be a big coincidence?’ Martinez was in a negative mood.
    ‘And we still got the weird screams.’ Sam ignored the grouchiness. ‘In both killings.’
    Martinez shrugged, his personal belief that the sounds had come from the victims.
    ‘ “Like an animal,” ’ Sam quoted again.
    ‘You still think it was the perp screaming?’
    ‘Why not?’ Sam said.
    ‘Because it would have been like a fucking commercial for what he was doing.’
    ‘Plenty of crazy people,’ Sam said.
    ‘We’re getting no place, man,’ Martinez said.
    ‘No place at all,’ Sam agreed.
    ‘I can’t get past this thing with Sam,’ Terri said to Saul on Saturday evening as they waited for their Middle Eastern platter at the News Café.
    Saul, just raising his glass of white wine, put it down.
    ‘Don’t get all ticked off,’ Terri said. ‘You know it’s true.’
    ‘It is completely
un
true,’ Saul said, ‘and if I am ticked off, it’s just because I thought we’d already dealt with all that.’
    They’d argued about it last night. Terri had concluded, after Sam’s response to her probing about the two homicides, that he hated her. Saul had told her she was exaggerating, that
she might have had cause to be a little put out, but it had only been a moment, had been
nothing.
Teté had told him it had most definitely not been nothing, that she had felt
humiliated and that only someone who really disliked another person would do that to them.
    ‘Sam does not dislike you,’ he’d told her. ‘He thinks you’re beautiful and smart.’
    ‘He hates that you’re dating a cop,’ she had said.
    Saul had found that harder to deny, and then Terri had told him that Sam made it impossible for her to feel comfortable around his family, and after that it had got out of hand and Saul
hated
fighting with Teté or, even worse, finding himself caught between the woman and brother he adored.
    Sex had saved the night, and to say that Teresa Suarez was still the best lover Saul had known would have been the understatement of the decade. The fact was, he would have done just about
anything for her, found it endlessly amazing that a girl like Terri should want him, but she most unarguably did, and Saul was deeply grateful for it.
    ‘Why shouldn’t she want you?’ his friend Hal Liebmann had once asked him. ‘You’re a decent looking guy, and you’re going to be a