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Sarah said. “She told me she only did outcalls, mostly hotel rooms.”
    “Yeah, but these mirrors…” he began.
    She sighed. “Who knows? She did have a personal life. But a sex life , outside of work? I don’t know. A lot of these girls hate sex. What about her little black book?”
    “Nothing. A date book, that’s all. Purse, wallet, cigarettes. A fucking arsenal of makeup in the bathroom. Some Valium and a couple of tabs of speed. A Port-a-Print. But no little black book.”
    “A what?”
    “Port-a-Print. One of those things they use in department stores or whatever to imprint your credit card, you know? I guess she took Visa, MasterCard, and Discover.”
    “Most call girls do these days. Though they still prefer cash.”
    “Bad form to have the wife doing the bills and discover a Discover Card charge for a blow job.”
    “Which is why you used to pay cash, right?”
    “Touché,” Peter replied, unperturbed.

 
    CHAPTER SIX
    A Latent Prints technician sat on the floor of the dark bathroom wearing foolish-looking orange plastic goggles. An eerie orange light emanated from the Polilight, a heavy, compact gray-and-blue box attached to a flexible metal tube that, using liquid optical technology, emits light in various hues: white, red, yellow, orange. Shone obliquely, it is used to check for fingerprints on walls and other hard-to-inspect areas.
    “Anything?” Sarah asked.
    Startled, the tech said: “Oh. Uh … no, nothing.” He got to his feet and switched on the light.
    More mirrors here, Sarah noted: the medicine cabinet above the sink, and another one, strangely placed, low and directly across from the toilet. Newly, and maladroitly, installed. Both mirrors were dusted with splotches of the gray pulverized charcoal and volcanic ash used to lift prints. In a few places, the gray was overlaid with smudges of Red Wop powder to bring out more ridge detail.
    She watched him dust an area of one of the mirrors. “You know,” she said, “a little Windex’ll get those real clean.”
    The tech turned around, confused, not getting her joke, but at that moment a voice boomed from just outside the bathroom threshold: Frank Herlihy.
    “Is that the famous twenty-thousand-dollar paperweight I keep hearing about?”
    “This is it, sir,” the tech said gamely, patting the Polilight as if it were a buddy.
    “Oh, Ms. Cahill again. Can we help you with anything?” His tone professed sincerity, but his beefy red face betrayed no desire to help.
    “I’m fine,” Sarah said.
    “Hey, Carlos, what’s up?” Herlihy said bluffly. “Fuming tank explode on you again?”
    The tech laughed and shook his head. “No, sir, but I was up all night charting prints, and then at six this morning the prick pled.”
    Herlihy laughed gutturally, malevolently. “You know, Carlos, I’d be careful with that Polilight, there. Semen fluoresces, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t want the little lady here to see how much you jerk off.”
    Carlos snorted, and Sarah excused herself, her attention suddenly distracted. She stood outside the bathroom and looked in. Her eyes narrowed. “The mirror,” she said, returning slowly to the bathroom.
    “Huh?” asked Carlos.
    “It’s that mirror,” she said. More to herself than to Herlihy or Carlos, she murmured: “It’s in a weird place, isn’t it? I mean, if you’re sitting on the toilet, you can see yourself in it. That’s odd. Why would you…”
    “Thanks so much, Ms. Cahill,” the homicide captain said with a nasty inflection. “Any other observations I can pass on to the deceased’s interior decorator?”
    She flashed the captain a contemptuous look and went on, aloud but to herself: “Most women wouldn’t want to look at themselves sitting on the toilet. Two medicine cabinets…” Sarah approached the mirror. Carefully grasping the mirror’s edges with her gloved fingers, she pulled at it. It popped off, as she expected it would. Behind it was a crude plywood compartment, in