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.“Back to front, but out through the rib cage—not the belly.Somebody used a very heavy gun on her.Do you want a print? You could paste it up in your locker.”“Oh, hell no!” The man glanced down the corridor and came back to the sergeant.“I heard the coroner say it was a professional job; only the pro’s are crazy enough to tote guns anymore.The risk and everything.”“I suppose so; I haven’t heard of an amateur carrying one for years.That mandatory jail sentence for possession scares the hell out of them.” Tabbot shifted the magazines to his other hand to keep them away from his bad knee going down the stairs.The street was bright with sunlight—the kind of brilliant scene which Sergeant Tabbot wanted everything to happen in for better results.Given a bright sun he could reproduce images a little better than grainy shadows, right up to that fourteen-hour stopping point.His truck was the only police vehicle parked at the curb.Tabbot climbed into the back and closed the door behind him.He switched on the developing and drying machine in total darkness, and began feeding the film from the first magazine down into the tanks.When the tail of that film slipped out of the magazine and vanished, the leader of the second film was fed into the slot.The third followed when its time came.The sergeant sat down on a stool, waiting in the darkness until the developer and dryer had completed their cycles and delivered the nylon negatives into his hands.After a while he reached out to switch on the printer, and then did nothing more than sit and wait.The woman’s exploded breast hung before his eyes; it was more vivid in the darkness of the truck than in bright daylight.This time his stomach failed to churn, and he supposed he was getting used to the memory.Or the sight-memory was safely in his past.A few of the coming printscould resurrect that nightmare image.The coroner believed some hood had murdered the woman who made Christmas dolls—some professional thug who paid as little heed to the gun law as he did to a hundred and one other laws.Perhaps—and perhaps not.Discharged servicemen were still smuggling weapons into the country, when coming in from overseas posts; he’d heard of that happening often enough, and he’d seen a few of the foolhardy characters in jails.For some reason he didn’t understand, ex-Marines who’d served in China were the most flagrant offenders: they outnumbered smugglers from the other services three or four to one and the harsh penalties spelled out in the Dean Act didn’t deterthem worth a damn.Congress in its wisdom had proclaimed that only peace officers, and military personnel on active duty, had the privilege of carrying firearms; all other weapons must under the law be surrendered and destroyed.Tabbot didn’t own a gun; he had no use for one.That patrolman on the third floor carried a weapon, and the Lieutenant, and the plainclothesman—but he didn’t think the coroner would have one.Nor the basket men.The Dean Act made stiff prison sentences mandatory for possession among the citizenry, but the Marines kept on carrying them and now and then some civilian died under gunfire.Like the woman who made Christmas dolls.A soft buzzer signaled the end of the developer’s job.Tabbot removed the three reels of nylon negative from the drying rack and fed them through the printer.The waiting time was appreciably shorter.Three long strips of printed pictures rolled out of the printer into his hands.Tabbot didn’t waste time cutting the prints into individual frames.Draping two of the strips over a shoulder, he carried the third to the door of the truck and flung it open.Bright sunlight made him squint, causing his eyes to water.Aloud: “Oh, what the hell! What went wrong?”The prints were dark, much darker than they had any right to be.Heknew without rechecking the figures in his notebook that the exposures had been made after sunrise, but still the prints were dark.Tabbot stared up the front of the building, trying to pick out the proper window, then brought his puzzled gaze back to the strip prints.The bedroom-living room was dark.Peering closer, squinting against the bright light of the sun: four timed exposures of the front door, with the dim figures of the janitor and another man standing open-mouth on the third exposure.Ten minutes after nine.The fifth frame: a bright clear picture of the plain-clothesman sitting on the sofa, talking up to Tabbot.The sixth frame and onward: dark images of the sofa opened out into a bed—coffee table missing—the kitchen doorway barely discernible, the overstuffed chair (and there was the coffee table beside it), the window— He stared with dismay at the window.The goddam drapes were drawn, shutting out the early light!Tabbot hurriedly checked the second strip hanging on his shoulder: equally dark.The floor lamp and the ceiling light were both unlit.The drapes had been closed all night and the room was in cloudy darkness.He could just identify the radiator, the vase of flowers, the bookcase, the smaller chair, and numerous exposures of the closed door.The floor frames were nearly black
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