“The one in her mouth was obscured with blood. Same with the eyes. He never took the gloves off.”
“Mrs. Leeds was a good-looking woman,” Graham said. “You’ve seen the family pictures, right? I’d want to touch her skin in an intimate situation, wouldn’t you?”
“Intimate?” Distaste sounded in Crawford’s voice before he could stop it. Suddenly he was busy rummaging in his pockets for change.
“Intimate—they had privacy. Everybody else was dead. He could have their eyes open or shut, however he liked.”
“Any way he liked,” Crawford said. “They tried her skin for prints, of course. Nothing. They did get a hand spread off her neck.”
“The report didn’t say anything about dusting nails.”
“I expect her fingernails were smudged when they took scrapings. The scrapings were just where she cut her palms with them. She never scratched him.”
“She had pretty feet,” Graham said.
“Umm-hmm. Let’s head upstairs,” Crawford said. “The troops are about to muster.”
Jimmy Price had a lot of equipment—two heavy cases plus his camera bag and tripod. He made a clatter coming through the front door of the Lombard Funeral Home in Atlanta. He was a frail old man and his humor had not been improved by a long taxi ride from the airport in the morning rush.
An officious young fellow with styled hair hustled him into an office decorated in apricot and cream. The desk was bare except for a sculpture called The Praying Hands.
Price was examining the fingertips of the praying hands when Mr. Lombard himself came in. Lombard checked Price’s credentials with extreme care.
“Your Atlanta office or agency or whatever called me, of course, Mr. Price. But last night we had to get the police to remove an obnoxious fellow who was trying to take pictures for The National Tattler, so I’m being very careful. I’m sure you understand. Mr. Price, the bodies were only released to us about one o’clock this morning, and the funeral is this afternoon at five. We simply can’t delay it.”
“This won’t take a lot of time,” Price said. “I need one reasonably intelligent assistant, if you have one. Have you touched the bodies, Mr. Lombard?”
“No.”
“Find out who has. I’ll have to print them all.”
The morning briefing of police detectives on the Leeds case was concerned mostly with teeth.
Atlanta Chief of Detectives R. J. (Buddy) Springfield, a burly man in shirtsleeves, stood by the door with Dr. Dominic Princi as the twenty-three detectives filed in.
“All right, boys, let’s have the big grin as you come by,” Springfield said. “Show Dr. Princi your teeth. That’s right, let’s see ’em all. Christ, Sparks, is that your tongue or are you swallowing a squirrel? Keep moving.”
A large frontal view of a set of teeth, upper and lower, was tacked to the bulletin board at the front of the squad room. It reminded Graham of the celluloid strip of printed teeth in a dime-store jack-o’-lantern. He and Crawford sat down at the back of the room while the detectives took their
places at schoolroom desks.
Atlanta Public Safety Commissioner Gilbert Lewis and his public-relations officer sat apart from them in folding chairs. Lewis had to face a news conference in an hour.
Chief of Detectives Springfield took charge.
“All right. Let’s cease fire with the bullshit. If you read up this morning, you saw zero progress.
“House-to-house interviews will continue for a radius of four additional blocks around the scene. R & I has loaned us two clerks to help cross-matching airline reservations and car rentals in Birmingham and Atlanta.
“Airport and hotel details will make the rounds again today. Yes, again today. Catch every maid and attendant as well as the desk people. He had to clean up somewhere and he may have left a mess. If you find somebody who cleaned up a mess, roust out whoever’s in the room, seal it, and get on the horn to the laundry double quick. This time we’ve got something for you to show around. Dr. Princi?”
Dr. Dominic Princi, chief medical examiner for Fulton County, walked to the front and stood under the drawing of the teeth. He held up a dental cast.
“Gentlemen, this is what the subject’s teeth look like. The Smithsonian in Washington reconstructed them from the impressions we took of bite marks on Mrs. Leeds and a clear bite mark in a piece of cheese from the Leedses’ refrigerator,” Princi said.
“As you can see, he has pegged lateral incisors—the teeth here and here.” Princi pointed to the cast in his hand, then to the chart above him. “The teeth are crooked in alignment and a corner is missing from this central incisor. The other incisor is grooved, here. It looks like a ‘tailor’s notch,’ the kind of wear you get biting thread.”
“Snaggletoothed son of a bitch,” somebody mumbled.