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earth.
    “Anything new?”
    Klesczewski looked up. “Not yet. Enough people were wandering around last night, but it seems they all had their eyes closed. I called Hillstrom’s office to see if the autopsy had been done yet, but they’re still at it.”
    I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “Who did you talk to?”
    “A secretary, I guess—I got her name here somewhere.” He reached for the note pad near his phone.
    I shook my head to stop him. “It doesn’t matter. I just hoped you hadn’t gotten Hillstrom herself. The last thing we want is to breathe down her neck—nothing pisses her off more. She’ll call us when she’s finished—she always does.”
    Klesczewski’s face reddened, and I realized I shouldn’t have spoken in front of Harriet. Even if she didn’t give a damn, his were the tender feelings of a man in his twenties, quickly stung by criticism.
    “Sorry,” he muttered.
    “Don’t worry about it. You didn’t know. Can you leave that for a minute?”
    His face cleared slightly. “Sure.”
    I crossed over to my office, which occupied a corner of the squad room, and closed the door behind us. All these offices had once been taller than they were wide, in traditional turn-of-the-century style, leading some smart ass to suggest that we nail our desks to the walls to take advantage of the wasted space. The current remodelers had realized that for generations of winters we’d been warming the ceilings while the people below them froze. So now we had false ceilings, which were currently keeping the summer’s heat nice and tight around our heads.
    My office was, nevertheless, aesthetically appealing—ten by twelve, nice paint job, newly installed fluorescent lighting I never used, and three tall, hard-to-open, wire-covered windows that now stretched up to somewhere beyond the Styrofoam grid overhead. I sat behind my battered wooden schoolteacher’s desk and parked my foot in the lower drawer. I motioned to Klesczewski to grab one of the two molded-plastic chairs, noticing as I did so the pink phone-message slip before me. “Call Gail,” it read.
    “So, where’re we at?” I picked up the phone slip and began idly folding and unfolding it.
    Klesczewski cleared his throat. “Nothing obvious in the canvass results, but I’m hoping we can find some inconsistency somewhere—a crack we can pry open maybe.”
    I nodded. It was a good analogy. Canvasses rarely gave us a man holding a bloody knife in one hand and a written confession in the other, but they did supply us with people’s alibis before much thought and refinement had been put into them, a point that often played in our favor if a particular alibi later came under scrutiny.
    Klesczewski continued. “Tyler’s digging through his dirt, along with a couple of people from the afternoon shift. There’ll be overtime filed.”
    “That’s okay.”
    “DeFlorio’s still out there, catching the home-from-work crowd.”
    “That makes me think of something,” I interrupted. “We better look into people from outside the neighborhood who use that route to go to and from work.”
    “Night-shift types?”
    “Yeah. You got late-night grocery stores and restaurants both above and below that section of Canal. It’s conceivable somebody saw something while they were passing through.”
    “They’d have to have been on foot.”
    “Not necessarily. You get a pretty good view from the Elm Street bridge, if you happen to look that way. What’s Martens doing?”
    Sammie, actually Samantha, Martens was the junior-most member of the detective squad, promoted from patrolman after Willy Kunkle lost the use of his arm the year before in a shooting spree with a maniac the local press had dubbed the “Ski-Mask Avenger.” That same case had turned the town on its ear, causing Brandt to leave for a while and putting me in his chair in the interim. It was old news now, but seeing Sammie Martens in plainclothes always reminded me of how out of