over the site, while technicians dusted for latent prints, while the position of the body was marked, and while the body was transported into the waiting meat wagon, while the area was carefully scrutinized for footprints or tire tracks—the man stood like an artist doing a picture of a farmer’s barn on Cape Cod.
He said hello to the detectives who occasionally stopped to chat with him. He seemed unmindful of the activity that erupted everywhere around him.
Quietly, efficiently, carefully, methodically, he sketched the scene of the crime. Then he packed up and went to his office, where, working from the preliminary sketches, he made a more detailed drawing. The drawing was printed up and, together with the detailed photos taken at the site, sent to the many departments interested in solving the mugger murder.
Sam Grossman’s interest was definitely turned in that direction, and so a copy of the drawing reached his desk. Since color, or the lack of color, played no important part in this particular homicide, the drawing was in black and white.
Grossman studied it with the dispassionate scrutiny an art dealer gives a potentially fake van Gogh.
The girl had been found at the base of a fifteen-foot drop, one of the shelflike levels that sloped down in a cliff to the riverbed. A footpath led through evergreens and maples from an emergency repairs turnoff to the highest point of the cliff, some thirty feet above the River Harb.
The repairs cutoff was plainly visible from the River Highway, which swung around in a wide arc under the Hamilton Bridge approach. The footpath, however, was screened from the highway by trees and shrubs, as were the actual sloping sides of the cliff itself.
A good set of tire tracks had been found in a thin layer of earth caked on the river side of the repairs cutoff. A pair of sunglasses had been found alongside the dead girl’s body.
That was all.
Unfortunately, the sides of the cliff sloped upward in igneous formidability. The path wound its way over solid prehistoric rock. Neither the girl nor her murderer had left any footprints for the lab boys to play with.
Unfortunately, too, though the path was screened by bushes and trees, none of the plant life encroached upon the path’s right to meander to the top of the cliff. In short, there was no fabric, leather, feathers, or telltale dust caught upon twigs or resting upon leaves.
It was a reasonable assumption that the girl had been driven to the spot of her death. There were no signs of any repairs having been made in the cutoff. If the auto had pulled in with a flat tire, the jack would have left marks on the pavement, and the tools might have left grease stains or metal scrapings. There was the possibility, of course, that the car had suffered an engine failure, in which case the hood would have been lifted and the mechanism studied. But the caked earth spread in an arc that covered the corners and sides of the cutoff. Anyone standing at the front of the car to lift the hood would surely have left footprints. There were none, nor were there any signs of prints having been brushed away.
The police assumed, therefore, that the girl and her murderer had been driving west on the River Highway, had pulled into the emergency repairs cutoff, and had then proceeded on foot to the top of the cliff.
The girl had been killed at the top of the cliff.
She had been alive up to then. There were no bloodstains along the path leading upward. With a head wound such as she had suffered, her blood would have soaked the rocks on the path if she had been killed earlier and then carried from the car.
The instrument used to split her skull and her face had been heavy and blunt. The girl had undoubtedly reached for her killer’s face, snatching off the sunglasses. She had then gone over the cliff, and the sunglasses had left her hand.
It would have been easy to assume that the lens of the glasses had shattered upon contact with the ground. This was not the case. The technicians could find not a scrap, not a sliver of glass, on the ground. The sunglasses, then, had been shattered before they went over the side of the cliff. Nor had they been shattered anywhere in the area. The lab boys searched in vain for glass. The notion of a man wearing sunglasses with one ruptured