Free Cold Shoulder by Lynda La Plante Page B

Summers’s wife interjected that she had thought it was a lie, because when they offered to call the police or for some assistance the woman had refused, insisting that she was all right.
    Rooney asked for a more detailed description of the woman. Summers was hesitant, but his wife wasn’t, recalling the thin, wispy, badly cut blonde hair, that the woman was about five feet eight inches tall, but exceptionally thin and sickly-looking. She remembered remarking to her husband that the woman might be a prostitute.
    ‘What made you think that?’ Rooney asked.
    Mrs Summers bit her lip. ‘I don’t know, just something about her, a toughness. She was very rough-looking, sort of desperate — and, of course, she was covered in blood.’
    ‘That doesn’t mean she’s a whore,’ said Rooney.
    Don Summers glanced at his wife. ‘Maybe she wasn’t. All I can say, and I got a closer look than my wife, was that the woman was terrified — and she was really hurt, blood all over her dress.’
    Rooney showed them the shoe found in Hastings’s car and they confirmed that the woman had been wearing only one.
    ‘We need to find our Cinderella,’ Rooney joked, but the Summerses didn’t find his comment amusing. They were overawed by the massive new Pasadena police station, a high-tech palace, the holding cells below computerized.
    The building was so spacious that Rooney himself felt uncomfortable. He wasn’t used to so many corridors, rooms and sections, so many clerks. The old days, when a guy could pass a pal in the narrow, paint-peeling corridors, have a chat, smoke a cigarette, were over. Nearly every office had no-smoking signs; some officers had even stuck them on their computers. Only Captain Rooney continued to work in a haze of cigarette or cigar smoke. If the truth was told, he didn’t quite fit the new high flyers who surrounded him, but retirement was looming shortly. He reckoned the Hastings murder would be his last case and he hoped to crack it fast, get a good retirement bonus and then be put out to pasture. The prospect made him uneasy, but then so did the new station. He was unsure about life outside the police, which had been the only world he had known since he was eighteen.
    By the time Rooney returned to his office there had been another call in connection with the Hastings homicide. This time the caller was anonymous and refused repeated requests to divulge her name. She did, however, give a detailed description of the man she thought was driving the car belonging to the deceased: around a hundred and eighty pounds, possibly about five feet ten, though she wasn’t sure, blue eyes, rimless gold-framed pink-toned glasses, a straight nose, thick-lipped mouth, wearing a linen jacket and shirt. She described a bite wound in his neck that would be visible above shirt collar level, close to his jugular. It would be deeply inflamed as the teeth had broken the skin and drawn blood. Furthermore, the man was in possession of a claw hammer, which he kept in the glove compartment.
    Rooney looked at the duty sergeant’s notes. ‘She said all this over the fucking phone?’
    ‘Yes, Captain. Then she hung up.’
    ‘So, you get a trace on it? Shouldn’t take more’n a second with all this new-fangled equipment.’
    The call had not been traced, partly because it was felt to be a ‘joke’ call, and when it had been deemed genuine, she had already hung up. Rooney plodded back into his office. He waved the anonymous statement at his lieutenant, Josh Bean. ‘You fuckin’ read this? Whoever she is she wants him caught — she’s even described the weapon. What’s odd, though, is that the only thing she seems unsure of is the guy’s exact height. Everything else, clothes, hair, glasses, mouth, even his weight, she gives it all. But not her name! And the stupid sons-of-bitches didn’t trace the call.’
    Bean took a look at the statement. She hadn’t given the car registration number, he mused, as Rooney deposited