Defensive Wounds

by Lisa Black

  “Exactly. Fibers aren’t conclusive. You knew you’d never get a jury to convict on them only. This stunt buys you time to find your mystery witness.”

  The judge turned to Theresa. “Are you sure those fibers have been switched?”

  “Positive.”

  “Do you have any photographs of the original fibers?”

  “Um,” Theresa had to say. “No.” Due to budget constraints in the suffering county, she still used an ancient Zeiss comparison scope. It had an inconvenient and balky camera attachment, which required more talent with 35-millimeter film than she possessed. She could have asked the photographers for help, but … “No. However, it’s obvious I wouldn’t have said that the colors were identical when these are so radically different, Your Honor.”

  The judge pondered, seeming to tune out the protestations of the attorneys. Theresa pondered as well, wondering how this could adversely affect her career, how it could affect the trial, and what might resolve it. No solution presented itself.

  Finally the judge declared a mistrial, and Theresa paused in the hallway to give her heartbeat a chance to return to normal.

  The Justice Center in Cleveland loomed twenty-six stories into the sky, and Theresa pretty much despised each one. Not the court system—she had great respect for that—but the design of the building itself. Built to be chock-full of people who had committed crimes and yet shockingly unconcerned with security. Some stairwell doors locked, and others didn’t. Hallways turned and twisted, taking one quickly out of the sight of others. Worst of all, courtrooms were clustered four to a floor, with offices and judges’ chambers placed around the outside of the building. The hallway to the courtrooms ran from the elevator bank to the east wall, where wide windows opened onto a stunning view of the city and the lake—even more stunning on a summer’s day when the window tint only deepened the blue in the sky. But mere mortals could not visit this calm oasis, because the judges’ chambers opened onto the space. People waiting to appear in any one of the four courtrooms, people under stress, worried, upset, traumatized, with small, needing-to-be-entertained children—people who could have benefited from the panoramic scene outside the glass—had to stay corralled in the 1970s modular seating next to the elevator bank, under the weak fluorescent lights.

  Theresa loathed the Justice Center.

  Two weeks later, with no other evidence and the mystery witness still missing, the prosecutor dropped the charges. Marie Corrigan’s client was free to kill again.

  And he did.

  Three weeks later another strangled girl turned up in the same alley. When the police went to pick up the suspect, they found nothing but ants and candy wrappers in his rented room. He had not been seen in Cleveland since, and nationwide BOLOs failed to locate him.

  And now Theresa loathed nothing so much as Marie Corrigan.

  CHAPTER 3

  *

  Theresa gently shooed the two detectives out of the rooms, pulled off the keys hanging around her neck, and slipped them into a pocket, then switched on her twelve-megapixel digital camera. She began to photograph the two double doors leading into the hall and progressed inward, remembering to turn and shoot behind her. The second detective, maybe-Nelson, followed, either curious or just wanting to make sure she didn’t move or discover any item he didn’t already know about. Though he seemed to be most fascinated by the curve of her calves, he proved handy when she continued to ask questions as they occurred to her. “Who was the last person to occupy this room?”

  “The CEO of some aluminum company, but he checked out five days ago. Didn’t know there was that much money in aluminum.”

  Far too long for Marie to have been here all that time. “And the last time someone saw her?”

  “Yesterday’s luncheon. Apparently she stuck in the conference coordinator’s mind, and not in a good way. We haven’t had a chance to talk to anyone else yet, and I’m not willing to turn them over to patrol. I want to do it myself.”

  Theresa took a snapshot of the magazine on the end table, arrested in the process of sliding off after its compatriots. The lamp, however, stood perfectly within its faint circle of non-dust. “Are they going to call off the conference or cut it short?”

  “No reason to. These people’s firms ponied up big bucks so they can party at the Ritz and learn how to keep even more scumbags on the street. They’re lunching at the Muse while John and I scarf down Mickey D’s and pound out reports on ten-year-old computers. I am definitely on the wrong side of the law.”

  Theresa stopped in the process of placing an L-shaped ABFO ruler on the floor next to a footprint-size smudge of blood to glance at him. He flushed, reluctantly, as if his fair skin couldn’t help itself.

  “I’ll bet you think I’m a right bastard for thinking that.”

  “No. I think I’m a right bastard for agreeing.”

  He laughed. “Anyway, the organizers sure as hell don’t want to hand out refunds, and we don’t want anyone to leave. You might say we saw eye to eye on that. So the conference goes on as planned, and we’ll look for the boyfriend among the attendees,” he added more briskly, with the tiniest hint of a lilt to his voice. Plenty of Irish had immigrated to Cleveland, but the accents had long since faded.

  Theresa had moved into the bathroom. The sink and the bathtub were completely dry and without any visible water spots. No one had used them to clean up after the bloody attack—unless he (or she) had dried both his hands and the porcelain when he was done. She counted the apparently untouched bath towels, hand towels, and washcloths—five of each. Nothing missing.

  “Who found the body?” she asked, without raising her voice. The rooms were so well insulated that she and the detective might as well have been in a cocoon.

  “Well, okay. That takes us back to this damn conference.”

  She waited. Was the water in the toilet less than crystal clear?

  “A lawyer from Des Moines. Says he came here to meet a friend. Swears he doesn’t know Marie Corrigan from the devil and has never been to Cleveland before this.”

  Theresa turned, brushed past the detective and over the body of the victim to retrieve a bottle of Hemastix strips from her crime-scene kit. A quick dip in the toilet and the yellow pad on the end of the strip turned a medium blue color.

  “What does that mean?” maybe-Nelson asked.

  “It means the killer washed his hands in the toilet.”

  He made a face.

  “That way he didn’t have to turn on any faucets, risk leaving fingerprints he might not wipe off. He didn’t take a towel to dry them, though. Maybe he wiped them on his pants or used Marie’s clothes. Why not just take a towel, though?”

  Not to mention that she had just trodden all over any latent footprints. She tiptoed back to the door, walking on the periphery. She’d keep everyone off the ceramic tiles until she could get to them with a fingerprint brush.

  Time to move on to the body.

  The body: Marie Corrigan. A woman who had pranced in front of the jury box, berating Theresa for a scratched-out digit on an evidence label. A woman with an enviable figure and even more enviable cheekbones, and the glossy hair and fashion sense to go with both. A woman who seemed composed of sheer energy, so brutal and rapacious it should have rendered her incapable of dying at all, much less being murdered. At least not without a stake through her heart.

  Powell appeared at the other end of the bedroom. “Neil!”

  That’s it, Theresa thought. First name or last name?

  “We got Des Moines back.”

  “He talking?”

  “Won’t stop.”

  Neil followed Powell, and Theresa followed Neil. Sensing her on their heels, they both turned.

  “I want to see him,” she explained. “Has he had any time to clean up between reporting the body and now?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  In the corridor she gave the contamination officer—the uniformed guy guarding the door—strict instructions not to le
t anyone in until she returned. Frank had disappeared.

  “We’ve got no place to talk to him,” Powell explained as he led them up the hallway toward a slouching, youngish man. “The other suite is occupied, and the rest of the floor is the Club Lounge. They have snacks and shoeshines and other stuff for the high-dollar room people, and apparently the Ritz doesn’t feel like kicking them out so we can use it. We get the hallway.”

  They cornered the man at the end of it. He wore an indie-band T-shirt and khakis a bit too small for him. Theresa supposed he got enough of suits and ties at the office.

  “Detective Neil Kelly,” the cop said by way of introduction. “What were you doing in that room?”

  “I shouldn’t speak to you without an attorney present,” the man said, biting one nail.

  “You are an attorney.”

  “I know, but—” He sighed. “I just feel so dumb, doing what I always tell my clients not to do, but … I really don’t know that woman or how she got … in there.”

  “Start from the beginning,” Neil said in a kindly tone, which didn’t fool Theresa for a second, and she doubted it would have any more effect on the lawyer. “Why did you go there?”

  Another sigh, as if a decision had been made. “Okay. This morning I had a small hangover, so I missed my first session on recent Supreme Court decisions. I walked in at the very end, and this guy in the last row said he’d make me a copy of his handouts. My firm is paying for this trip, so I wanted to make good, you know?”

  “Admirable,” Powell said.

  Theresa watched from behind the cops. The man’s hands were clean, and no spatters of blood appeared on the bare arms or the light-colored pants. Of course he’d had plenty of time to change. She believed him about the hangover, picking up the scent of alcohol excreted along with the nervous sweat.

  “He said come to the Presidential Suite during the next break and he’d give me the copies. So as soon as I got out of my ‘Defending Child-Pornography Cases’ seminar, about ten to ten, I came directly here.”

  Both detectives paused at that, but Neil said only, “In the elevator?”

  “You think I’m going to walk fourteen floors? I come to the door, I knock. No Bob.”

  “How’d you get in?”

  “It was open. Not standing open, but ajar, you know? So I push it open and go in—no Bob. I glance in the bedroom, I see her, I pick up the phone and call the hotel.”

  “Which phone?” Theresa asked.

  “Who did you call?” Neil asked.

  “The phone next to the sofa.”

  “In the outer room?”

  “I sure as hell wasn’t going into that bedroom. And I guess I called the front desk, that’s what the little bimbo said when she answered.”

  Theresa bristled.

  “Took a minute to get her to figure out what I was saying, but she did. I waited by the door until about three people showed up. I don’t even know who they were. Managers, I guess.”

  “Where’d you go then?”

  “The lobby bar. I needed a drink.” The lawyer ran a hand over his forehead, flipping one lock of hair out at an angle. “I needed a drink bad.”

  “And you never saw the victim before?”

  “No. I don’t think so. How can I tell? All I saw was blood and black hair.”

  “Her name’s Marie Corrigan. She’s a lawyer, too. You know her?”

  “No,” the man insisted, and kept insisting. He didn’t know a soul in this city except two civil-defense chicks from Michigan he’d been up drinking with the night before—and Bob.

  “You hadn’t arranged to meet Marie here? She was pretty hot. Maybe you guys decided to ditch the child-porn lesson together?”

  “Absolutely not. Didn’t know the woman.”

  As if on cue, the elevator bank gave a ding and a tall, bespectacled man with a skinny tie and skinny lips stepped off to blink in surprise at the cops and the lights. “What’s going on here?”

  “Bob!” the young attorney breathed in relief.

  The fresh arrival confirmed the story, but not the agreed-upon location.

  “You said Presidential Suite,” the attorney from Des Moines insisted.

  “Junior Presidential Suite.” Bob pointed to the door next to them. “Junior.”

  “I never heard ‘Junior.’ You were all ‘I got the best room in the hotel’ this morning. You said you had a presidential expense account to go with the suite!”

  “Junior suite,” Bob said, rapping on the discreetly labeled door for emphasis.

  Neil broke into their bickering to establish that Bob had never seen the door of the senior Presidential Suite open or ajar and had heard nothing from inside it in the two days he’d been at the hotel. He insisted he did not know Marie Corrigan and volunteered that he had not said “Presidential Suite” simply to make himself sound more prestigious. Neil and his partner finally got the appropriate information from both of them and left them to it. Theresa asked the attorney from Des Moines if he had returned to his room between the suite and the lobby bar, but he said he had not, and as they walked away, the two detectives doubted they could get a warrant to search his room.

  All three of them returned to the crime scene, the contamination officer dutifully noting same in his log. Powell and Neil traded theories while Theresa continued to examine the body of Marie Corrigan.

  “I don’t believe him,” Powell said. “I think Corrigan decided to mix business with pleasure. All these out-of-town guys, they can’t come back to haunt her. Locals would use any history to stab her in the back when she poached one of their clients.”

  “True.”

  “They’re power junkies, lawyers.”

  “Then why is she the one tied up?” Neil asked.

  Theresa took a close-up photo of the dead woman’s wrists. She’d been bound with a pair of nylons, probably her own.

  “Because she’s tired of being the powerful one, wants to be dominated for a change.”

  Because women can’t handle power? Theresa’s mind asked, forming one possible conclusion for Powell’s line of thought. She felt, had been feeling, a twinge of gender guilt for letting them disparage the victim. Marie Corrigan had climbed into the arena with a cabal of aggressive, ruthless men and beaten them at their own game. She’d faced belligerence and opposition and the dreaded accusation of not being “feminine” on a daily basis and persevered, something Theresa would never choose to do. Theresa should stick up for Marie Corrigan.

  But she didn’t. Because Marie Corrigan had won not by besting the legal system but by manipulating it for her own ends. Theresa knew that for a fact and would save her championing for a more deserving recipient.

  “That’s a big deal in this S&M crap,” Powell had continued. “This guy from Des Moines shows up for his appointment—maybe he and Bobby were going to do it together—but then dominating isn’t enough. He has to go further. Power junkies.”

  Theresa moved to the heap of clothing located partially under the end table between an armchair and the overturned desk chair. She removed each item, holding it up and snapping a picture—difficult to do with only two hands—and then placed each item in a separate paper bag from her kit. Marie had worn a black pencil skirt, a red satin blouse of exquisite cut, a set of black lace underwear from Victoria’s Secret, and a pair of glossy black pumps by some designer Theresa had never heard of but which probably cost more than the entire contents of Theresa’s dresser drawers. A mirror, or perhaps the antithesis, of Theresa’s courtroom costume: a straight black skirt, ivory blouse, black pumps that were not glossy or towering but had extra cushioning for the instep, nylons from the drugstore, and underwear by Hanes. Sisters they were not, neither under the skin nor over it.

  Only the blouse had a few smears of blood on it. The other items were clean. No purse.

  “Maybe,” Neil said about Powell’s theory. He slumped as if to sit on the edge of the bed, thought better of it, and surprised Theresa by asking her, “What do you t
hink? Is Des Moines lying?”

  “No.”

  Both detectives raised their eyebrows.

  “This room isn’t rented,” she explained. “He could have killed her, shut the door, and left. Her body might not have been discovered for days or weeks. Why alert us?”

  They thought on that. Powell said, “Guilty conscience. Some guys call in the body because they can’t take the stress of waiting for it to be found.”

  “True,” she agreed. “And he could have gone to his room, cleaned up, and changed clothes before he made the call, or afterward when he was supposedly in the bar. But I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe he wanted to be in on the action,” Powell went on, “see the results of his handiwork. Power again. It fits with the … with the way she’s trussed up. Maybe it was his idea in the first place.”

  Neil snorted. “Can you see that dorky little weasel out there talking Marie Corrigan into anything? For that matter, can you see Marie Corrigan wasting one flip of her hair on him? I can’t picture those two people together unless he was the one chained to the wall getting whipped.”

  “There’s that, too,” Theresa said. “I don’t see any bruises or red marks on her wrists.”

  “So she was tied up voluntarily,” Powell said. “Just what I’ve been saying. Besides, you want to hurt someone, you use rope. Nylons are soft and sexy.”

  Neil said, “You know a little too much about this dominatrix stuff, partner.”

  “We worked that case last year, remember?”

  “But,” Theresa told them, “a few things bother me. That bed is pristine, not a hair or a fiber in the sheets, so far as I can see without moving the linens.”

  “Maybe they started on the bed, moved to the floor.”

  “Possibly.” She’d have to use the ALS—alternate light source—on both the bed and the floor to check for semen. A hotel room—no telling what a rainbow of results that might produce. “She has a smudge of blood on her blouse, but nothing else, and obviously the clothes would have to have been removed before she was tied. There’s also a spray of blood spatter on the bindings.”