Free Speak for the Dead by Rex Burns

it. The suspect would need an alibi for that time. And a key. That damned key. The victim knew someone who had a key. And a place. Wherever the killing and cutting took place, there would be a hell of a lot of blood. A place to leave the body stretched out until it was bagged and toted to the junkyard. An assault without a struggle, a little butchering without interruption, time to clean up, then transporting the victim at night, and no one asking for her. Hell, Wager almost smiled at himself for wasting time: it added up to a whore making a house call in an apartment with a bathtub. And there were only half a million such places in the city. But the living green and the dead junk; head in one, body in the other. That, too, was a key—and a puzzle.
    Still, without a witness, without knowing the victim’s name, Wager felt his mind sketch in things about the killer. But slowly, slowly; “ Quien anda al reves, anda el camino dos veces .” He could still hear his grandfather warning him when he was anxious and bouncing to be turned loose on some half-baked project, and was answering, “Yes, sir; yes, sir, I understand,” and not hearing a word of the instructions. Wager had long since learned that it was no pleasure to walk the same road twice.
    And he did feel something solid forming from the web of his thoughts.
    The telephone’s ring pulled him back to the brown box of the homicide office. Gargan was asking what else had been found.
    “The tissue test matches the head and torso,” answered Wager.
    “Any identification of the victim?”
    “Nothing yet.”
    “Anything in the coroner’s report about dope or sex?”
    “The body was too decayed to be conclusive.”
    “Thanks heaps.”
    “Anytime,” Wager said.
    After he got rid of Gargan, he tried missing persons again. That was something that bothered him as much as the key—no one seemed to know that the person was missing.
    “We haven’t had any listing like her, Detective Wager. I really will call you as soon as we do.” The female voice clicked off.
    Thanks heaps to you, too. Wager felt a sour grin in the back of his mind: a bad word always comes back. He drained his almost cold coffee and scraped the papers and envelopes into the manila cover of the Jane Doe file. Maybe Ross and Devereaux were right; maybe it was better just to let the case wait and start working it when the identification came in. If it came in. Maybe. But Wager knew that he had something more than air in his hands. He couldn’t yet call it a profile of the killer, but he did sense something about the suspect’s mind.
    He slammed shut the file drawer and was pulling on his jacket when the telephone called him back to his desk. It was Baird.
    “The dental records just came through—we got an identification!”
    “Let’s have it.”
    “Rebecca Jean Crowell. She had a lot of orthodontist work done in … let’s see, 1973 to 1974. The dentist is a local one … Albert Miller. His office is down near the Cherry Creek shopping center, 105 Milwaukee Street.”
    “Any address for the victim?”
    “As of May, 1974, she listed 2418 Tremont, Apartment 3. No—wait—that was the last office call. Let’s see … she made the last payment by mail in November, 1974, apparently from the same address. She had a follow-up visit in June, 1975, but there’s no indication of another address. She apparently paid cash for that instead of being billed.”
    Wager carefully scratched out the “Jane Doe” on the file’s lip and penned in “ CROWELL, REBECCA JEAN.” “Any other Crowells in the dentist’s records?”
    “We didn’t ask. That’s your job. This just came through in the evening mail.”
    “It’s enough to move on. Thanks a lot, Fred.”
    The Tremont address was less than a mile from the homicide office; Wager had just pulled in to a cross town street empty of everything except blinking traffic lights when his radio called for “any homicide detective.”
    This shift had only