“That’s awful. But what did it have to do with you?”
“I saw the crash. That made it my business.”
“Stan will love that story,” Terry said.
“Please don’t tell him,” Matt said.
She looked at him strangely.
“Okay. If you don’t want me to.”
Lieutenant Luther Stecker of the Pennsylvania State Police had obviously just finished shaving when his doorbell rang, for he answered the door in a sleeveless undershirt, with a towel hanging from his neck, and with vestiges of shaving cream under his chin and near his left ear.
He was a small and wiry man who wore what was left of his gray hair in a crew cut.
He waited wordlessly for his caller to announce his purpose.
“Lieutenant Stecker?” Tony Harris asked.
Stecker nodded.
“Sir, I’m Detective Harris from Philadelphia Homicide.” Stecker nodded and waited for Harris to go on.
“I’m working a j
ob, and I really need your help.”
“This is my last day on the job. Why’d you come here?”
“I went by the lab, sir. And saw Lieutenant Mueller.”
And again Stecker waited expressionlessly for him to go on.
“Lieutenant, Dick Candelle said if anybody can come up with enough points from what I’ve got, it’s you.”
“You know Candelle?”
“Yes, sir. We go back a while.”
“And he couldn’t develop enough points from what you’ve got?”
“No, sir. But all he had to work with was a partial, sir. Probably an index finger.”
A plump, pleasant-looking woman appeared behind Stecker.
“What?” she asked.
“This is Detective Harris from Homicide in Philadelphia.”
“Did you tell him this is your last day on the job, and that.. ” She looked at her watch. “… in an hour and ten minutes, you’re having your retirement party at the Penn-Harris? ”
“Tell me about the job,” Stecker said.
“Two black guys held up a Roy Rogers,” Harris said. “They killed a Puerto Rican lady.”
“That’s terrible,” the gray haired lady said, sucking in her breath.
“And then when a uniform-a friend of mine, nice guy, Kenny Charlton, eighteen years on the job, two kids- responded to the robbery in progress, one of the doers-who was wearing the visor hat, cap, I’ve got-stuck a. 38 under his vest and blew him away.”