Stiegel shook his head. A curl of smoke from the half extinguished cigarette wrapped his face like a veil.
"You know how it is, Lieutenant-you luck into something couple of times, all of a sudden you're the Department expert.', "Sure, I know how that goes."
"Thing is, I got maybe seventy, eighty open cases, of which less than a dozen are bad-girl deals. A caseload like that, I can't worry too much about guys let themselves get rolled." Stiegel leaned forward. His eyes turned canny. "Still, I put it together. The victims give different descriptions but the MO's always the same. I figure there's a ring of '.
' girls,' I call '." He laughed. "Not bad, huh?"
Janek glanced over at Sue; she rolled her eyes. Stiegel, Janek knew, was just the sort of third-rate detective she most despised.
"So, who are these bad girls?" Janek asked.
"Beats me, Lieutenant."
Sue tightened her lips to show disgust. "Just let the cases pile up, that it, Detective?"
Stiegel shrugged. "What else can I do? I send the victims over to the artists unit. Makes ' feel better. Helps ' get it off their chests. Not the writing, but the shame."
"You must have found out something," Janek said. "What about the body writing? What'd you make of it?"
"That's the best part, isn't it?" The canny eyes again. "See, most of the marks are married and from out of town. I think the girls're only interested in out-of-town married guys. Then, after they take them down, they write on ' like you said. I've seen some weird stuff since I started taking these complaints. There's this one Oriental girl, she writes on the guys in Chinese. The others write in English, but they end up saying the same stuff."
"Which is?"
"Insults-'Asshole,' ' face,' ',' like that. There was this one mark, the girl wrote on him, ' cock's so small I couldn't find the worthless thing."
" Stiegel laughed. "Surprised the guy had the guts to file a complaint, but he was so mad he was willing to take the ridicule.
Anyway, that's when I figured out why they write on them the way they do." "Which is-?" Sue asked.
"To make the mark think twice about reporting it. Way I figure, he's got enough to do getting the writing off. The girls use indelible ink.
You got to scrub yourself raw to get it out. And then I asked myself, how does a guy explain something like that? Does he say to the wife:
"Gee, honey, I was up in my hotel room having a little drinky-poo with this whore when she dosed me out and wrote this awful thing around my nipples'?" Stiegel shook his head. "I don't think so. Do you, Lieutenant?"
"Seems unlikely," Janek agreed.
"That's why they do it. Keeps the guys quiet. I figure they maybe do a hundred, two hundred jobs for every one gets reported.
Stiegel, Janek felt, had propounded a perfectly reasonable theory. It explained the skin writing, though not the use of mirror-reverse.
"Any other cases where the girl used mirror writing?"
"Just Carlson. Except for the blonde who took him, and the Oriental girl, the rest of them write their insults straight."
"And you never got close to anything?"
Stiegel shook his head.
"A dozen cases-there must have been something," Sue said.
Stiegel finished off his drink, signaled the waiter for another, then stared into Sue's eyes.
"There was this girl, a year ago… maybe two." His voice turned vague.
"What about her?"
"It was at Roosevelt Hospital. She stumbled into the ER, her face cut up real bad. What brought me into it was what she told the triage nurse.
She said she'd been sliced up by some guy in a hotel room when she tried to dope his drink."
"You interviewed her?"
"Tried to. But she wouldn't talk. Maybe I could have pushed it, but the way her face was messed up, I just let it go. I got my own way of doing this job that you people probably wouldn't approve. If someone doesn't want to talk to me, I forget about '."
Sue gaped, as if she couldn't believe what Stiegel had just said. Janek brought out Capiello's sketch of the redhead. Stiegel squinted at it.
"No, that's not her." He looked up. "Looks a little like the one took down Carlson, doesn't she? But, I don't know, different somehow."
"This girl at Roosevelt-did you take notes?"
Stiegel shook his head. "I'm not too big on notes."
"Try and remember. What time of year was it?"
"Let's see." He scratched his head. "I remember it was cold."
"Last winter?"
"Maybe the winter before. February, March, something like that."
Janek nodded at Sue and she nodded back, their shared acknowledgment that they'd gotten about all Stiegel had to offer. As they stood to leave, Sue turned back. Stiegel was staring at the wall.
"Keep up the good work, Detective," she said. Her sarcasm was unmistakable, but Stiegel didn't notice.
Outside the bar, Sue vented her anger: "Couple more bozos like him and we can turn the city over to the felons."
"I've seen worse," Janek said. "His theory about the writing wasn't bad." They began to walk back toward the One-seven.
Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out." she paused.
"When I meet a guy like that, I'm ashamed to be in the same outfit."
"Worn-out detectives come and go. Don't hate him, pity him. Remember:
"There but for the grace of God… ' "