WHILE RICKY MALCOLM SLEPT in a holding cell on the tenth floor at 850 Bryant, I opened the door to his second-floor, one-bedroom apartment over the Shanghai China restaurant on Mission. Then Conklin, McNeil, Chi, and I stepped inside. A faint stink of decomposing flesh hit me as soon as I crossed the threshold.

  “Smell that?” I said to Cappy McNeil. Cappy had been on the force for twenty-five years and had seen more than his share of dead.

  He nodded. “Think he left one of those bags of body parts behind?”

  “Or maybe he just kept a souvenir. A finger. Or an ear.”

  McNeil and his partner, the lean and resourceful Paul Chi, headed for the kitchen while Conklin and I took the bedroom.

  There was a pull-shade in the one window. I gave it a yank and it rolled up with a bang, throwing Ricky Malcolm’s boudoir into a dim morning light. The room was a study in filth. The sheets were bunched to one side of the stained mattress, and cigarette butts floated inside a Coffee mug on the nightstand. Dinner plates balanced on the dresser and the television set, forks congealed in the remains of whatever Malcolm had eaten in the last week or two.

  I opened the drawer in the nightstand, found a couple of joints, assorted pharmaceuticals, a strip of Rough Riders. McNeil came into the room, looked around, said, “I like what he’s done with the place.”

  “Find anything?”

  “No. And unless Ricky dismembered Campion with a four-inch paring knife, the blade’s not in the kitchen. By the way, the smell is stronger in here.”

  Conklin opened the closet, searched pockets and shoes, then went to the dresser. He tossed out T-shirts and porn magazines, but I was the one who found the dead mouse under a steel-toed work boot behind the door.

  “Whoaaa. I think I found it.”

  “Nice door prize,” McNeil cracked.

  Four hours went by, and after turning over every stinking thing in Malcolm’s apartment, Conklin sighed his disappointment.

  “There’s no weapon here.”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “I guess we’re done.”

  We stepped out into the street as the flatbed truck pulled up to the curb. CSIs hooked up Malcolm’s ’97 Ford pickup, and we stood by as the truck rattled noisily up the hill on the way to the crime lab. McNeil and Chi took off in their squad car, and Conklin and I got into ours.

  Conklin said, “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks, or dinner - your choice, Lindsay -”

  I laughed at his girl-magnet smile.

  “I’ll bet you Michael Campion’s DNA is somewhere inside the bed of that truck.”

  “I don’t want to bet,” I said. “I want you to be right.”

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