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D’Amata smiled at Officer Hastings, touched his arm, and went into the house.
“Hey, Joe,” Sergeant Manning said. “How are you?”
Again D’Amata recognized the face of the Sergeant but could not recall his name.
“Underpaid and overworked,” D’Amata said with a smile. “How are you, pal?”
“Underpaid, my ass!” the Sergeant snorted.
D’Amata squatted by Kellog’s body long enough to determine that there were two entrance wounds in the back of his skull, then carefully stepped over it and the pool of blood around the head, and went into the kitchen.
The kitchen door was open. There were signs of forced entry.
Which might mean that someone had forced the door. Or might mean that someone who had a key to the house—an estranged wife, for example—wanted the police to think that someone had broken in.
Without consciously doing so, he put We Know For Sure Fact #1 into his mental case file: Officer Jerome H. Kellog was intentionally killed, by someone who fired two shots into his skull at close range.
He looked around the kitchen. The telephone, mounted on the wall, caught his eye. There were extra wires coming from the wall plate. He walked over for a closer look.
The wires led to a cabinet above the sink.
D’Amata took a pencil from his pocket and used it to pull on the cabinet latch. Inside the cabinet was a cassette tape recorder. He stood on his toes to get a better look. The door of the machine was open. There was no cassette inside. There was another machine beside the tape recorder, and a small carton that had once held an Economy-Pak of a half-dozen Radio Shack ninety-minute cassette tapes. It was empty.
He couldn’t be sure, of course, and he didn’t want to touch it to get a better look until the Mobile Crime Lab guys went over it for prints, but he had a pretty good idea that the second machine was one of those clever gadgets you saw in Radio Shack and places like that that would turn the recorder on whenever the telephone was picked up.
There were no tapes in the cabinet, nor, when he carefully opened the drawers of the lower cabinets, in any of them, either. He noticed that, instead of being plugged into a wall outlet, the tape recorder had been wired to it.
Probably to make sure nobody knocked the plug out of the wall.
But where the hell are the tapes?
What the hell was on the tapes?
“Joe?” a male voice called. “You in here?”
“In the kitchen,” D’Amata replied.
“Jesus, who did this?” the voice asked. There were hints of repugnance in the voice, which D’Amata now recognized as that of a civilian police photographer from the Mobile Crime Lab.
“Somebody who didn’t like him,” D’Amata said.
“What is that supposed to be, humor?”
“There’s a tape recorder in the kitchen cabinet. I want some shots of that, and the cabinets,” D’Amata said. “And make sure they dust it for prints.”
“Any other instructions, Detective?” the photographer, a very tall, very thin man, asked sarcastically.
“What have I done, hurt your delicate feelings again?”
“I do this for a living. Sometimes you forget that.”
“And you wanted to be a concert pianist, right?”
“Oh, fuck you, Joe,” the photographer said with a smile. “Get out of my way.”
“Narcotics, Sergeant Dolan,” Dolan, a stocky, ruddy-faced man in his late forties, answered the telephone.“This is Captain Samuels, of the Twenty-fifth District. Is Captain Talley around? He doesn’t answer his phone.”
“I think he’s probably in the can,” Sergeant Dolan said. “Just a second, here he comes.”
