I fielded some unanswerable questions, then turned as I heard my name and the sound of footsteps coming from behind me. Jacobi’s new partner, Inspector Rich Conklin, was heading down the ramp to meet us.

I’d liked Conklin from the moment I’d met him a few years back, when he was a smart and dogged uniformed officer. Bravery in the line of duty and an impressive number of collars had earned him his recent promotion to Homicide at the ripe young age of twenty-nine.

Conklin had also attracted a lot of attention from the women working in the Hall once he’d traded in his uniform for a gold shield.

At just over six foot one, Conklin was buffed to a T, with brown eyes, light-brown hair, and the wholesome good looks of a college baseball player crossed with a Navy SEAL.

Not that I’d noticed any of this.

“What have we got?” I asked Conklin.

He hit me with his clear brown eyes. Very serious, but respectful. “The vic is a Caucasian female, Lieutenant, approximately twenty-one or twenty-two. Looks to me like a ligature mark around her neck.”

“Any witnesses so far?”

“Nope, we’re not that lucky. The guy over there,” Conklin said, hooking a thumb toward the scraggly, long-haired ticket-taker in the booth, “name of Angel Cortez, was on duty all night, didn’t see anything unusual, of course. He was on the phone with his girlfriend when a customer came screaming down the ramp.

“Customer’s name is” — Conklin flipped open his notebook — “Angela Spinogatti. Her car was parked overnight, and she saw the body inside the Caddy this morning. That’s about all she had for us.”

“You ID’d the Caddy’s plates?” Jacobi asked.

Conklin nodded his head once, turned a page in his notebook. “The car belongs to a Lawrence P. Guttman, DDS. No sheet, no warrants. We’ve got calls into him now.”

I thanked Conklin and asked him to collect the parking-garage tickets and the surveillance tapes.