Dead of Winter

by Stuart Melvin Kaminsky

  On the end table next to the bed were two items of interest. One was an open pill container with two pills left in it. The container was labeled ALEPPO, which Stella knew was a generic name for Sonata. Sheldon Hawkes would tell her how much of the drug was in the dead woman. Stella dusted the container for prints. There was one clear print. She picked up the pill bottle by placing two fingers of her gloved hand inside it, and then she dropped the container and the nearby cap into a plastic bag which she zipped shut and put into her kit on the floor.

  The other item on the table was an eight-ounce clear glass with a small amount of amber liquid at the bottom. Stella leaned over to smell the glass. Alcohol. Hawkes would also tell her how much alcohol the dead woman had consumed. A combination of sleeping pills and alcohol could kill, but the knife in Alberta Spanio's neck probably ruled out that option as cause of death.

  Stella dusted the glass for prints, found three good ones, poured the liquid into a plastic cup with a screw top she retrieved from her kit and then, after putting the cup in her kit, carefully placed the glass into a plastic envelope and sealed it.

  "Want to take a look?" Danny called from the open doorway to the bathroom.

  He had already brushed the door handle inside and out for prints, found some, and carefully lifted them.

  "Coming," Stella said, stepping back from the bed.

  She moved into the bathroom and looked at the open window.

  "When did she die?" asked Danny.

  Stella shrugged.

  "Body's cold, can't be sure, maybe Hawkes can narrow it, but she's not frozen. I'd say the last three hours tops."

  "When did the snow stop?" Danny asked.

  "I don't know," said Stella. "Four, five hours ago. We'll check it out."

  "Killer must have been little," said Danny, looking at the small open window. "Climbed down from above on a ladder or a rope. There's no fire escape out there. Hell of a circus act with the wind and snow."

  Stella moved to the window, took a fresh pair of latex gloves from her pocket, put them on, and reached out and ran her fingers across the lower wooden frame. Then she reached out and felt along the outside frame of the window. The cold burned her cheeks and she eased herself back in.

  "Take the window to the lab," she said.

  "Right," said Danny.

  "Check the toilet, too," she said, suppressing a sniffle.

  "I did," he answered. "Nothing."

  "Then let's both work the other room. I'll check the body, bed, and end table. You do the floor and walls."

  "After I remove the window?" he asked.

  "The window can wait till we're done," she said.

  In the next room, Taxx was saying, "Look for yourself."

  He moved to the window and looked out, Flack at his side. Collier simply stood in the middle of the room, looking toward the open bedroom door, his hands fidgeting.

  "Six floors up," said Taxx to Flack. "No fire escape."

  "None outside the bathroom window?" asked Flack.

  Taxx shook his head. "Brick wall," said Taxx. "See for yourself."

  "I will," said Flack. "And you didn't hear anything from the bedroom all night?"

  "Nothing," said Taxx.

  "Nothing," Collier agreed.

  "When she went to bed… tell me what happened," Flack said.

  The pattern, the two officers agreed, had been the same all three nights. Alberta Spanio brought a drink into the bedroom, took two sleeping pills, said "good night" with drink in hand, dead-bolted the lock, and presumably went to bed. There was a television in the bedroom, but the two men guarding her hadn't heard it, and it wasn't on when they broke down the door. They hadn't heard the bath or shower running either though they knew they would have had Alberta used them. She had showered two nights earlier. Besides, they had seen her take the sleeping pills and a long swallow of Scotch. She should have been asleep about a minute after they left her room.

  "What the hell happened?" Collier asked, looking toward the bedroom and probably imagining the rest of his life in his current grade, if he was lucky.

  Flack didn't give an answer. He knew Collier didn't expect one. He closed his notebook.

  3

  LUTNIKOV'S APARTMENT WAS SMALL- a living room and a small bedroom with an alcove kitchenette.

  The living room was more like a library with books haphazardly filling the floor-to-ceiling cases on three walls. A large wooden desk with a typewriter sat in the middle of the room. The desk, covered with a mess of papers, newspaper clippings, and magazines, faced away from the wide window so the light would come over his shoulder as he worked. The pile on the desk threatened to tumble to the floor, and in fact some of it, three sheets of paper, seemed to have done just that.

  There was a recliner chair not far from the desk with a lamp behind it and a small table piled with books next to it. Across from the recliner was a sofa that was soft, brown, in need of repair, and almost but not quite old enough to qualify as a 1950s nostalgia antique.

  The only other room in the apartment that the building manager had opened for Aiden and Mac was Lutnikov's bedroom. It contained more bookshelves loaded with books and stacked magazines, a dresser, closet, chest of drawers with a white twenty-seven-inch Sony television on top of it, and a double bed that was blanketed and tucked in military style in contrast to the chaos of the rest of the apartment.

  "Kitchen's over there," said the manager, a man named Nathan Gremold, who was in his sixties and well dressed with a wide, bright silvery tie. Gremold was a senior manager for Hopwell and Freed, the third-largest building management company in Manhattan, specializing in upscale apartment buildings. He had been trying not to show his disapproval of Lutnikov's apparent indifference to the high-end dwelling he occupied.

  The area he pointed to was not a kitchen but an alcove and it didn't need pointing out.

  Aiden and Mac moved across the living room, past the desk to the kitchenette a step behind Nathan Gremold. The kitchen alcove was immaculate. It was more than tidy. It was scrubbed clean, its counter clear, nothing on it but matching wooden salt and pepper shakers.

  Mac opened the cupboards. Cartons and cans were neatly aligned. There was one shelf completely devoted to boxes of organic cereal.

  "Man liked his cereal," said Aiden.

  Mac took out a box, examined it briefly, and put it back.

  The refrigerator was well stocked but not overly full. An almost unused carton of vanilla soy milk sat on the top shelf next to a neatly tied half-finished loaf of whole-grain, sprouted bread.

  They moved back into the living room where Nathan Gremold hovered, hands at his sides.

  "We're fine," said Mac. "We'll lock the door when we're finished. Just two questions," said Mac as Aiden moved to the desk and began looking at the stack of papers and the typewriter.

  Gremold hesitated. "Yes," he said.

  "Did Mr. Lutnikov own this apartment?" asked Mac.

  "No," said Gremold. "It's a rental."

  "How much is the rent?"

  "Three thousand a month," Gremold said. "This is one of our few economy apartments."

  "How did he pay?"

  "By check. On the first. Never late."

  "Do you know what he did for a living?"

  "I checked his original application when the police called our office," Gremold said. "If you'd like a copy…"

  "We would," said Mac.

  "On the application, Mr. Lutnikov said he was a writer, a writer of copy, mostly for the catalogues of high-end clothing and furniture companies."

  "Income?" asked Mac.

  "As I recall, he said his earnings were $130,000 per year on average."

  "Did he list references?"

  "I'm sure he did," said Gremold, "but off the top…"

  "Thanks," said Mac, taking out a card and handing it to Gremold. "Please fax a copy of that application to my office."

  "Of course," said Gremold. He took a notebook from his jacket pocket and inserted the card i
nto it.

  When he was gone, Mac turned his attention back to the apartment.

  "Most of this," Aiden said, looking at the pile on the desk, "looks like notes, some typed."

  "What kind of notes?" asked Mac, moving to the bookcase against the wall on his left.

  "Like this one," she said, holding up a sheet.

  The scribbled note on a blue Post-it read: Check on poisons. Any that can't possibly be detected?

  "He should have come to us," said Mac, scanning the shelves.

  "Odd notes for a guy who writes upscale catalogues," she said, looking deeper into the pile.

  "Odd guy," said Mac. "Makes his bed like a marine drill sergeant, keeps his kitchen operating room clean, and works in a mess."

  "It's a mess," said Aiden checking a pile of magazines, "but it's clean. You'd think he'd have a computer."

  "Throwback," Mac said, not looking up.

  He stepped back, looked around, searching for something. There were no file cabinets and he didn't see what he was looking for nearby so he made a slow walk-through of the apartment. About half the books on the shelves were mysteries. The rest were a broad, eclectic spectrum of history, science, geography, and the arts.

  When he walked back into the living room from the bedroom, Aiden was going through the drawers of the desk.

  "Notice anything that shouldn't be here?" he asked.

  She paused, looked around, shook her head, and turned her eyes to him.

  "How about something that should be here but isn't?" he asked.

  She looked again, and then it struck her.

  "He told Gremold he made his living by writing for upscale catalogues," she said.

  "You see any catalogues in this apartment?" he asked.

  She shook her head.

  "Man had no pride in his work," said Aiden.

  "Or he didn't make his living writing catalogues," said Mac.

  * * *

  Using the list the doorman Aaron McGee had given him, Mac started on the fifteenth floor. Using a portable ALS in a flashlight and an amber eye shield, he checked the small hallway in front of the elevator carefully for blood, saliva, drug traces, anything he might use. He also searched for, but didn't really expect to find, the murder weapon or the bullet. The killer had probably removed them both, but stranger things had happened, much stranger. He would repeat the procedure on each floor.

  The residents of each of the upper seven floors of the building, if they were home, would probably have heard gunshots only if they had been fired on their floor. Probably. The apartments were old with thick walls. Mac wondered if the tenants would have heard a gunshot even if they had been standing in front of the elevator. It would depend, he concluded, on how many floors away the shot had been fired.

  Six of the residents, according to the doorman, were wintering in Florida, including the Galleghers on sixteen and the Galleghers on seventeen. The Galleghers on seventeen were the son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren of the Galleghers on sixteen. Mason and Tess Cooper on nineteen were in California, in Palm Springs. Cooper had told McGee more than once that the house he owned in Palm Springs was right next door to the one that had been owned by Danny Thomas.

  That left fifteen, eighteen, twenty, and twenty-one.

  Evan and Faith Taft on fifteen were still asleep when Mac used the brass knocker on their door. Evan, in his fifties, blue robe failing to hide a paunch, tousled brown hair, answered the door, and blinked when Mac showed him his badge.

  "What's wrong?" asked Taft.

  "Someone was killed in your elevator, Mr. Taft," said Mac.

  "In our elevator?"

  "Did you hear any shots or unusual noises this morning?"

  "Someone was shot in this building? In our elevator?"

  "Yes," said Mac. "Did you hear anything?"

  "No," said Taft. "I'm going to have to tell my wife. Oh, shit, she's got a heart problem. We'll probably have to sell the apartment and move. She won't want to go on that elevator again. You know what the housing market's like in this city?"

  Mac waited while Evan Taft sighed and continued.

  "Maybe we'll stay at our place on the Island. If we can get to it with all this snow."

  "Do you know Charles Lutnikov, who lives in this building?" asked Mac.

  "Name doesn't… Did he kill someone?"

  "No, he was the victim."

  "What floor is he on?"

  "Three. Heavy-set man, slightly balding, maybe a little unkempt."

  "I don't know, maybe," said Taft. "Sounds familiar but…"

  "I'll have someone come by with a photograph of him later," said Mac. "How well do you know the rest of your neighbors, the ones who use this elevator?"

  "Not well," he said. "The Wainwrights on eighteen, he's the Wainwright of Rogers and Wainwright, the stock brokers. He handles some of our investments. The others, we don't know them very well, enough to say hello if we meet on the elevator or in the lobby. The Barths on twenty are retired, Red-wear cardboard cartons factory in North Carolina. The Coopers on nineteen, you know the Daisy Ice Cream chain in the South?"

  "No," said Mac.

  "Well, the Cooper family owns them," said Evan, brushing back his hair and looking over his shoulder to see if his wife was coming. "Big family."

  "Top floor, penthouse? Louisa Cormier?" asked Mac.

  "Our celebrity," said Taft. "She's on the Times Best Seller list again. Nice enough lady. You know, elevators in passing, 'How are you,' that kind of thing. Keeps to herself."

  "Yes," said Mac. "Did you hear any noise this morning, probably just before eight?"

  "Noise?"

  "Like a gunshot," said Mac.

  "No, our bedroom is in the back of the apartment. Anything else?"

  "No," said Mac.

  "Then I'd better go figure out how to tell my wife."

  Mac nodded. Taft closed the door.

  Mac had no better luck on any of the other floors. Aiden caught up with him on twenty-one, and they went over the foyer together as he had on the lower floors. When they were finished, Aiden vacuumed the floor, as she had every other one, and put the vacuumed contents in a separate marked see-through plastic bag.

  Before Mac tapped the shining brass knocker on Louisa Cormier's door, he used an ALS to examine the foyer. There were small but definite traces of blood.

  4

  DR. SHELDON HAWKES, lean, dark-skinned wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt with the letters CSI across the back, stood between the tables bearing the two corpses. Standing at his side was Stella Bonasera.

  The sparse room was large, with blue-tinted light and slightly shadowed corners. The only bright lights were those which shone down from the ceiling, white beams on the two naked and tagged stars of the day, Alberta Spanio, knife still in her neck, and Charles Lutnikov, the two holes in his chest now clearly visible. Both bodies were nude on the steel tables, devoid of jewelry, going out of the world as they had come in with the exception of the autopsy, their eyes closed, their heads on stabilizing blocks.

  Hawkes had checked the temperature of both bodies the moment they had arrived and compared them with the rectal temperatures Stella and Aiden had taken. Time of death was never 100 percent accurate unless there happened to be a witness standing there when it happened and you had full trust in the witness and his or her wristwatch. Rigor mortis had not set in on either body, which suggested the deaths were less than eight hours ago. "Suggested" was the operative word since Alberta Spanio's body had been first examined by Stella in a room in which the temperature was 22°F.

  Rigor mortis, however, is a highly unreliable predictor of time of death. Rigor mortis is the stiffening and contraction of muscles resulting from chemical reactions in muscle cells. Normally, rigor begins in the face and neck and works down through each muscle till even those in the corpse's toes are affected. Rigor usually begins eighteen to thirty-six hours after death and lasts about two days when the muscles relax and begin to decompose. Heat quickens the p
rocess. Hawkes had seen it in bodies which had only been dead for a few hours. Cold slows down the process. Hawkes remembered cases in which rigor did not take place for a week. In thin people it could come on rapidly regardless of temperature. In obese people, the process would be much slower than the norm. And then again it was not unusual for a body to never show signs of rigor.

  Hawkes concluded, without beginning his autopsies, that the time of death calculated by the CSI detectives at the site of the killings might be reasonably accurate. Normal body temperature is 98.6°F. At the rate of approximately 1.5°F per hour, the body equilibrates with the temperature of the environment in which the body has been found unless the temperature of the environment is very hot or extremely cold. Given the 72°F temperature in the elevator and the dead man's temperature, it was relatively easy to determine Charles Lutnikov's time of death; it had been harder, much harder, with Alberta Spanio because of the partial freezing which would have dropped her body temperature rapidly. Hawkes could make a better estimate of time of death if he began with her and examined her systems and organs with his own instruments.

  He began with the knife sticking out of her neck.

  "Downward stroke," he said carefully, removing the knife. "Deep. Someone strong. Also someone lucky or someone who knew just where the carotid artery was. She was asleep. No struggle. No movement. Not even after she was stabbed. Knife is a switchblade right out of The Blackboard Jungle or West Side Story which shows you how up-to-date I am about movies. Cheap, sharp."

  Hawkes dropped the bloody knife into a stainless steel pan and handed it to Stella. She would add it to the collection, which included the pill bottle and lid and the glass with alcohol from the hotel room. By the time Hawkes finished, the bathroom window might also be in the lab waiting for her.

  Hawkes moved into the routine autopsy procedure which always seemed new and sacred, not the defiling of the dead but the honoring of justice which they and their families deserved.