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beneath his chin, and left the tent.
     
     
    Quinn and Pearl followed Renz and breathed in fresh morning air.
    The CSU guy in charge was still standing outside the tent, smoking a cigarette. Quinn almost said something to him about fouling a crime scene and then saw that it was one of those battery-operated cigarettes that look like the real thing.
    He was a short man, built like a miniature bull, with a thick neck and sloping shoulders. Quinn had worked with him before. His name was Bronsky. He waited with patient brown eyes for what Quinn had to say.
    “What’ve we got so far?” Quinn asked, thinking that after Renz it would be a pleasure talking with somebody like Bronsky. Crime Scene Unit types were almost always all business and no bullshit.
    “Looks like the killer wore rubber gloves, so we might as well forget about fingerprints,” Bronsky said. “So far, he didn’t leave much if anything behind. We might pick up more on him from the victim herself, try for some of his DNA.” He pulled a cell phone from his pocket and held it up for Quinn to see. “I just got off this,” he said. “We got her address from her purse, and we’re going through her apartment.”
    “Great,” Quinn said, wondering again why Renz wanted this one in the worst way.
    “There are signs of the killer washing up some in the bathroom, but still with the gloves on. Plenty of smudgy prints here and there throughout the apartment, some bloody. He musta gone there after the murder.”
    “He was letting us know that,” Quinn said.
    “We did lift other prints from the apartment, but they’re probably what you’d expect—the victim’s, neighbors’, former tenants’, the super’s ...”
    Quinn waited until Bronsky finished with the list. All the prints would have to be matched with the people who’d made them. The prints that couldn’t be matched would be placed in a separate file, in the faint hope that someday they’d help to convict the killer. Tedious work, but necessary.
    “The bloody prints. Could you say if they were a man’s or a woman’s?”
    “No way to tell. Because of the gloves.”
    Quinn sighed. “So maybe the lab will come up with something.”
    “Maybe. We’ll get the usual hair samples from the carpet. A few nail clippings from the bedroom. But my guess is they probably won’t amount to anything useful.” He rotated his head on his thick neck. “Not as much blood here, or in her apartment, as you’d think.”
    “M.E. said she probably went into deep shock when she saw what he’d done to her. Her heart must have stopped shortly after that.”
    Bronsky pulled a face that made him resemble Edward G. Robinson in an old tough-guy movie. “Jesus! Not a nice man.”
    “The M.E. or the killer?”
    “Killer. I already know the M.E. is a prick. You going in now to look over the apartment?” The question sounded almost like a warning about what was waiting inside.
    “I was about to,” Quinn said.
    Bronsky took a drag on his cigarette that meant nothing. “Two bedrooms with two twin beds in each. I heard somebody say the victim shared the place with three other students. The roommates all went home for the summer. What if they’d been here, though? All four girls?”
    “Richard Speck,” Quinn said.
    “That’s what I was thinking. Would this creep have killed all of them?”
    “Why not?” Quinn said.
    “Those other girls should know that,” Bronsky said. “Realize how lucky they are to be young and still alive. They might be more careful the rest of their lives. More appreciative.”
    “It’ll give them something to talk about,” Quinn said. “Then in a few days or a few weeks they’ll go back to being themselves.”
    Bronsky made his Edward G. Robinson face again. “Why do you figure that is?”
    “We’re all who we are,” Quinn said.
    “Yeah, I guess we have to live with that.”
    “And die with it,” Quinn said.
    He left Bronsky, who continued puffing on his faux cigarette, blowing