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heard it in his own voice.
    His mother had called the other night to say that the woman was seeing an old friend from college and they seemed made for each other.
    Harry shrugged. Such was the life of a busy cop—especially a dedicated one.
    He glanced at the clock on the glossy burled-walnut dashboard of the Jag. If he put his foot down, he might have time to take a shower and change before he went back to the hospital for the autopsy.

7
    A FEW DAYS LATER , at seven thirty in the morning, Harry was in the squad room, his hands clasped behind his head, his feet propped on the desk, his eyes closed. He was thinking about Summer Young.
    He and Rossetti had just emerged from a grueling meeting with the irate police chief. He had said the mayor was getting restless, he had to answer to the public. Was there a serial killer on the loose in his city? If so, what were the police doing about it?
    “What does he
think
we’re doing? Sitting on our butts? Just letting the guy get away with it?” Rossetti demanded indignantly.
    Harry sympathized. They were both feeling the pressure. “We’re doing everything we can,” he had told the chief. “We’re doing our best to catch the bastard.” He would never forget that “bastard” was what Summer had called her killer just before she died.
    “Yeah.” The chief was upset. “Well, Harry, your best is just gonna have to get better. And fast. The mayor wants this killer caught. Boston is famous for its colleges and he needs their image kept clean. He doesn’t want college girls raped and slashed and dead. Besides, he has a girl of his own at Northeastern. He has a personal concern, you might say. He wants action, Harry. Now.”
    Harry swung his legs off the desk and switched on his PC, summoning up his list of evidence.
    The local crime-scene officers had done a thorough job. They had found kneeprints in the sand where the killer had crouched over his victim. From them they had been able to deduce he was a short, stocky man, possibly five foot seven or eight.
    They had also found traces of skid marks where the killer had gunned the car in his escape, but the area was too sandy to leave much impression. The crime lab was analyzing the minute particles of rubber that had been scraped from the road, but they didn’t hold out much hope for matching tires from them. As for the parking lot near the college, it too had shown a dusty scuffle of unidentifiable tire marks.
    But Summer’s car told a whole other story. They knew that the killer had hidden in the back of the Miata. He had taken her by surprise with a karate-type blow, evidenced, the police surgeon told them, by the purple bruises on her neck over the carotid artery and on her forehead, where she had fallen forward and struck her head on the steering wheel.
    Forensics was leaving no stone unturned. The whole basis of forensic science was that a criminal
always
leaves something of himself at the scene of the crime. And that he
always
takes something from there, on his clothing or on his body: minute particles of skin or dust, a thread, a hair, a flake of paint. Forensics looked for evidence in impossible places.
    They had hoped to raise a footprint in the Miata, using an electronic mat. They placed a sheet of foil between two sheets of black acetate and ran a weak electrical current through. The electricity would attract the dust particles to the surface in the shape of a footprint, if there was one. They were unlucky—there was no print—but they collected the dust anyway and took it away to be analyzed.
    They had also found a tiny black fiber on the backseat of the Miata, and a couple of hairs that didn’t match thevictim’s had been removed from her clothing. The crime lab was running tests and Harry expected to hear the results soon. Of course the tests would prove nothing by themselves but Harry had learned to respect such evidence. Forensics was the modern-day equivalent of Sherlock Holmes. If the butler did it, they