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talk about this to anyone. Only a few souls know any details of tonight. Start talking and you’re liable to draw attention to yourself. Reporters first, but then, perhaps, from the fiend who did this.” Grey arched his eyebrows in warning.
    The watchman nodded mutely before gathering up his things and bumbling out the door.
    “You believe him?” Lean asked.
    “He never had a hand on the girl, in any event.” Grey waved his hand at the small room. “No hint of her perfume when we entered. Nor do I think he was complicit in the break-in.”
    “A bit of fragrance wouldn’t do him any harm.” Lean flipped through a small stack of loose papers on the desk. “If he’d been in on it, he could have broken that window to hide using his keys.”
    “If the killer had the watchman’s assistance, he wouldn’t have needed that elaborate distraction with the dead bird.”
    “You’re certain our killer planted the dead bird?” Lean asked.
    “Birds don’t fly into streetlights at night, Deputy. Our killer was prepared. He needed to ensure that the watchman was not awake during the crime. But the killer couldn’t dope the watchman’s beer until after the bottle was opened. That would happen only after completing his first circuit. And he wouldn’t leave his shack to make another inspection until almost sunrise.”
    “So the bird and thebroken lamp were bait,” Lean said. “The killer needed to draw him out for a few minutes after he completed his first walk.”
    “Precisely. Busting the lamp darkened the pathway and got the watchman’s attention. He came to investigate. And while he did, the killer sprinted around the back of the building, slipped unseen into the shack, and drugged the bottle.”
    “Rather elaborate scheme,” Lean said.
    “And, therefore, it provides several important clues. Not the least of which is that our killer was very familiar with the immediate area and with the watchman’s routine. He must have been lingering nearby for several nights at least.”
    “Or else he invented the distraction on the spot. And he’s the sort who always carries a dead pigeon for just such an occasion,” Lean said with a smirk.
    “A troubling development in either case.”
    Lean glanced at his pocketwatch. “We should be on our way. Dr. Steig’s probably started his examination without us.”

5

    T he cab carrying Lean and Grey hurtled along Congress Street, with only splashes of light from the streetlamps to reveal the scene. This was Portland’s principal avenue, the only one that ran the entire three-mile length of the Neck, as the peninsula was called. It was a city of slopes, curves, and dips carved by glaciers and now crisscrossed by a network of angled streets and blocks, unfettered by any sense of regularity and uniformity. Portland’s maze of cobbled roads was the result of two and a half centuries of fishermen and merchants driven by immediate necessity and that economy of steps that occurs naturally in a place where winters often lasted five months out of the year. Lean enjoyed the view at this hour: the public façade that met the commercial and social needs of the world stripped bare to reveal the city in dark repose. It was a scene reserved for those restless souls who were still awake, whether by choice, duty, or desperation.
    Lean returned hisattention to his notes from the crime scene. Fatigue was setting in, and he worried that his attention was fading; perhaps he’d failed to record some crucial fact. He glanced at Grey, whose closed eyes and serene countenance betrayed no hint of the same concerns that plagued Lean.
    “Tell me something, Grey. It seems impossible that you could have known it was a prostitute that had been murdered. The mayor’s worried. Thinks we have stumbled upon the very man we seek.”
    Grey chuckled. “‘Stumbled’ would be an apt description.”
    Lean sat, awaiting an explanation.
    “Oh, it’s all quite simple. Your presence could only mean that a crime