Defensive Wounds

by Lisa Black

  “Oh,” Neil said, getting it. “You think someone clocked her with the chair, then removed her clothes and tied her up, then finished the job on her skull.”

  “I think it’s a possibility.”

  “So the whole sex angle is to throw us off? Can you tell if she actually had sex?”

  “We’ll take swabs at autopsy.”

  Theresa focused her camera on Marie Corrigan’s battered scalp. She could see at least four distinct tears where some blunt object had split the skin—obviously the wooden, straight-back chair meant for use with the cherry desk near the doorway. Red stained the rear left leg, and dots appeared on the other legs. The top of the back remained clean. The killer’s hands had not been bloody when he swung it up and over, onto the head of his victim. “Then again, he used a weapon of opportunity, not one he’d brought with him, so maybe it wasn’t planned and you’re right, it was a sex act that got out of control. Maybe the clothes were already off but he got blood on the blouse when he picked it up and moved it. Except I found it partially under the skirt, and the clothes appear to have been tossed, not piled or folded in any particular way. If the tying-up was voluntary, it would explain why there’s no bruising, why she wasn’t straining against the bounds. Heck”—she took another look—“the knots aren’t even that tight, and nylons are stretchy. She probably could have slipped out of them but cooperated up until the first blow. Then she didn’t struggle because she wasn’t conscious. But it still doesn’t answer how either of them got into this room.”

  “Bribed a maid,” Powell said. “Place like this has a huge staff, and half of them make minimum wage. How hard could it be?”

  “Harder than it used to be,” Theresa said. “Hotels use electronic swipe cards now.”

  “Those can be faked. You can get blank cards or really use any card with a magnetic strip and write them yourself. I learned that during a stint in white-collar.”

  Neil said, “But the killer would still need the codes from the hotel here—and the right code. Those cards can be programmed to let staff in only where they need to be. The hotel might limit staff access to these expensive suites.”

  Powell sighed. “I’ll go track down their IT guy.”

  “Cheer up. Maybe they’re so sophisticated that they can tell you exactly whose card—or whose card clone—last opened that door.”

  “ ’Scuse me if I don’t hold my breath.”

  CHAPTER 4

  *

  Theresa had photographed every part of Marie Corrigan’s body, her clothing, and the bloodied wooden chair. Now came the nerve-racking part. She would have to start moving stuff. Cut off the bindings, roll over the victim, have the body snatchers come in and take it away. And, as always, risk the possibility that she might miss something, that some tiny fragment of significant clue lay just under her hands, waiting to be lost in translation.

  But it couldn’t be helped.

  She got out a magnifying glass.

  Neil breathed out a phuff of air. He’d been watching carefully, which she didn’t enjoy—who ever likes to have someone else watching over her shoulder?—but she didn’t particularly mind it either. “You’re thorough.”

  “This is a hotel. Strangers go in and out of this room almost every day, shedding their hairs, their fibers, their skin cells. Even if I find a thread or a drop of saliva that matches our suspect, he might have a dozen reasonable excuses for how it got here. But finding something right on the body, that’s a lot harder to explain.”

  She started at one set of pedicured toes and moved upward. Two long black hairs, almost certainly Marie’s, two short whitish hairs, a brown hair, and something that looked like a hazel-colored fiber.

  She turned her attention to the nylons. They had been looped around each wrist and then tied in a double square knot. Something, a fiber or a hair not dark enough to be Marie’s, had been caught in the knot. Theresa diagrammed, marked each end with a colored twist tie—red for toward the victim’s left side, green for toward the right, like lights on a ship—and cut it. The victim’s limbs relaxed slightly, pulling a few inches out from each other. Theresa tugged on one arm, then pushed the body away from her, just enough to glance at the stomach. No injuries, just a deep cherry lividity that did not change when she pressed her index finger against the stomach. The blood pooled at the body’s lowest points and then coagulated. “Lividity is completely fixed, and so is rigor. It’s nice and cool in here, so that would keep the process slow.”

  “How long, then?”

  “The pathologist can be a lot more specific, but I’m guessing she’s been here all night.”

  Theresa moved some of the black locks, stiffened with blood, off the victim’s face. Her eyes were open, the irises a deep brown, already clouding. Marie Corrigan had an elfin chin and perfectly groomed eyebrows. Glossy mauve lipstick had smeared over the edge of one full lip and onto the fawn carpet. Her front tooth had chipped, the loose piece of enamel caught in the rug fibers below.

  Neil looked thoughtful. “So maybe it was a date. Conference is over for the day, let’s have a few drinks—”

  “Except they didn’t. No glasses, not even wet spots on the nightstand.”

  “He was smart enough to clean up, take all that stuff with him.”

  “Maybe. And be smart enough to take a complete set of towels—bath towel, hand towel, and washcloth—so that it would seem that all sets are present.”

  “What about the bath mat? Is that there?”

  “Good thought. But yes, it’s there.” The pristine bed still bugged her. She’d made enough beds in her life to tell the difference between one with the covers turned back and one that had been occupied, with its tiny crumpled wrinkles. And as a female, she firmly believed that she could tell the difference between clean and spotless. The room wasn’t merely clean—it was spotless. As if Marie and her killer had walked in, the murder had taken place, and the killer had walked out. But why? If there hadn’t been some wild sex romp, why did he kill her? And if he planned to kill her, why had Marie gone so easily to her own slaughter? She must have walked in under her own steam—no killer would trot around an expensive hotel with a fully grown dead weight.

  Maybe she had trusted him.

  Theresa reined her mind in from running down endless alleys of what-if and took a closer look at the carpeting. What had first appeared to be footprints were only smudges, about a half inch by a quarter inch, randomly distributed. By lowering her face to the floor as far as she could without actually laying her cheek on the carpet, she could tell that the two smudges between Marie and the bathroom door coincided with indentations in the plush fawn surface. The killer had gotten a drop of blood on his foot and walked around with it. But the indentations didn’t have the smooth, firm edges of a shoe print. Perhaps the killer had been barefoot? He’d shed his clothes as Marie did the same, preparing to take the edge off after a day of lectures? Theresa used a sterile, disposable scalpel to saw off the stained carpet fibers and drop them into a manila envelope.

  The hotel around her seemed to press in like a force against her skin, and she finally figured out what oppressed her: the silence. The only sound in the room came from the faint creak of Neil Kelly’s shoes as he shifted his weight. The scalpel droned against each twisted strand of carpeting. The building’s walls had been insulated and soundproofed until she could crouch in one room in the middle of the day and not hear the slightest evidence of another human being above, around, or below, as if the room had been hermetically sealed. Marie Corrigan could have screamed, and no one would have heard her.

  “So how do you know Marie Corrigan?” Neil asked, probably bored with all the watching and no doing.

  Theresa sealed the envelope with red tape, aware of the detective’s observation. “The first case I had with her was before we got our SEM—our scanning electron microscope—so we were still doing gunshot residue with atomic absorption. Of course, that only indicates gunshot residue, doesn’t prove it, and gunshot residue
only indicates that someone was in the vicinity when a gun was fired.”

  In her peripheral vision, Neil nodded.

  “She’d obviously been watching too much CSI and expected me to say that the GSR proved that her client had pulled the trigger. I didn’t, but she already had her line of questioning prepared, so she spent ten minutes having me read texts aloud to establish how I couldn’t say what I hadn’t said. It confused the jury and irritated the judge. She was never real fond of me after that.”

  “That explains why she wasn’t fond of you. But why weren’t you fond of her?”

  Ms. MacLean, do you recognize the envelope I just handed you?

  “Long story. What’s yours?”

  “She wanted a partner of mine back in organized crime prosecuted for police brutality because her client had a bruise on his forehead in the booking photo. His girlfriend had given it to him, not my partner, but Corrigan talked it all the way to an IA investigation. I don’t know who I wanted to kill more—her or the idiots in our chain of command that opened the file.”

  Now Theresa observed him. Not tall, not bulked up, but when he moved, a layer of muscle like steel glimmered under his skin.

  “It was four years ago. I’m over it.”

  “Okay.” Theresa took her fingerprint kit to the bathroom floor.

  “Maid’s not going to be happy about that,” Neil observed as she brushed the fine black powder over the tiles.

  “The hotel should count their blessings. If she hadn’t been found until she started to decompose, they’d have to replace all the carpeting and maybe any other upholstery in the bedroom. This way they can do a steam cleaning with a little bleach and their wealthy patrons will never know.” Two distinct patterns appeared on the cream-colored tiles, superimposed on the swirling marks of the maid’s cleaning rag. The faint set of smooth-soled triangular shapes belonged to Theresa. The other—“Let me see your shoes.”

  Neil picked one up, balancing on the other foot.

  “Not yours.”

  “Shouldn’t be, I never went in there. Just poked my head. I’ll bet it belongs to John.”

  Theresa collected it anyway before proceeding to the other side of the room, her knees protesting a bit at having to crawl over the hard tile. No other patterns revealed themselves.

  Powell returned and confirmed that they were his prints—he’d wanted to make sure the place was properly “cleared,” that the killer wasn’t hiding in the shower—and his shoe had a piece of old gum stuck in the left tread that matched the pattern.

  “Odd,” Theresa said. “He didn’t fly over to the toilet, but he didn’t leave any shoe prints or footprints. I suppose he could have had freshly washed feet, or very dry skin, or new shoes without a rubber tread.”

  “Or he wiped up the floor after himself,” Neil supposed.

  “Without using the towels or leaving water marks in the sink or tub,” Theresa said. “Toilet again, I suppose.”

  “What’s the deal with the toilet?”

  “You don’t have to touch anything to turn the water on. It’s already there.”

  “Come on,” Powell said to his partner. “I’ve got the hotel security chief out here. And he used to be one of ours.”

  “What’s his name?” Neil asked quietly.

  “Marcus Dean. Tall black guy. Narcotics, a few years in Persons. I didn’t know him. You?”

  “Hell yeah,” Neil said, obviously surprised. “When I was in Vice. We were partners for a while. He’s good people. What’s he doing here?”

  They went into the next room, their voices clearly audible. Theresa had never heard of Marcus Dean, but his voice rolled past the others’, deep and firm. After the two ex-partners spent a few minutes catching up, Powell asked him if they would have any record of who had last entered the Presidential Suite.

  “No such luck.”

  “A place like this, you don’t have that kind of technology?”

  “Door keys are there to restrict access. They aren’t some kind of a Big Brother, always-knowing-who’s-where—slash—payroll system,” the unseen Marcus Dean explained.

  “So who had access?”

  “To this room? More than—Look, a regular guest room, no one needs to get in there except the guests and the maids, and the maids can only get into rooms on the floors that they’re supposed to be working on. And then, for cases of emergency, me and the manager on duty. Then there’s places like the Club Lounge, restricted to only the people who work in there. The guests can leave jewelry and cash lying around all the time, never gets touched, but the liquor supply, that’s a whole ’nother stretch of road in some staff members’ minds. That ain’t really stealin’ to them. So access to most places is limited by that little magnetic strip on the back of their ID card.

  “But the suites,” he went on, “these people pay for some serious pampering. They want facials and massages in the privacy of their own home-away-from-home. People send them flowers. They go out shopping and have the stores deliver their packages here so they don’t have to be bothered carryin’ those big bags along the sidewalk. They have guests and clients, to be ushered up. They want room service and chilled anniversary-day champagne waiting for them when they get back from the theater. Then all this stuff has to be taken away afterward, and we don’t want them putting their dirty dishes out in the hall. Looks tacky. Busboys, waitstaff, spa staff, porters. Practically everybody needs to get into these rooms.”

  “Our suspect pool is the entire staff, then?”

  “Minus only the maids who don’t work on this floor. But everybody else, yeah.”

  “Got any cards missing?”

  “Checking now. Nothing’s turned up so far. Staff are pretty careful with those cards, let me tell you. They get in huge trouble if they lose one, and even huger if they don’t tell us about it right away. I put the fear of God into them on their first day about that. We don’t have lapses in security here. This is the Ritz, not a Super 8.”

  The conversation lapsed for a moment. Theresa finished dusting the bathroom floor, then heard Powell ask something about Narcotics.

  “Yeah, seven years, two with Neil here,” Dean said. “A few years in Persons before that, and five on the street before that.”

  “You left before you had twenty in?”

  “My wife couldn’t take those hours anymore. That and she wanted to start a family, kept nagging how she’d be raising these theoretical children all by herself if I took a bullet. Gotta make choices, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  The body snatchers arrived with their white plastic bag. Theresa supervised the removal of Marie Corrigan’s body, then pressed adhesive tape to where she’d lain to collect any trace evidence trapped there.

  The bloodstain hadn’t spread out too far from underneath the head, but it had soaked the carpet pretty good. Perhaps Theresa had been wrong about the steam cleaning.

  Neil Kelly and Powell apparently finished with Marcus Dean and reentered the bedroom. “Whoa,” Neil said, looking at her squat, square-shaped machine with a flexible cable protruding from its front. “What’s that?”

  “ALS. Alternate light source.”

  “Like a black light?”

  “Like a black light.”

  “Whoa,” he said again, grimly. “This is going to be interesting.”

  Using a black light in a hotel room, along with reading the health department’s report on your favorite restaurant, fell into the category of Things You’d Rather Not Know. The detectives drew the curtains, and Theresa switched off the bathroom light. She passed out orange goggles and turned the machine on. After churning through a few different wavelengths, she settled on one around four hundred nanometers. This would excite certain enzymes and proteins in bodily fluids—particularly semen—and cause them to emit a bluish fluorescence. Then she picked up the small machine, warning the detectives not to trip over the cord. The room was dim, certainly, but wearing the goggles made it even darker.

&nbs
p; She passed the light, slowly, over the open bed, weaving from side to side, trying to cover every inch of the exposed white sheets.

  Powell let out a breath he must have been holding. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Me either,” she agreed. Nothing. Not a fiber, not a spot, and certainly not the glowing blob of semen she’d expected to see.

  “So wherever they did it—if they did it—it wasn’t in the bed,” Neil surmised.

  Theresa threw the covers back into place so she could see the surface of the comforter. A splotch burst into a faintly yellowish glow as the light passed over it. And another. And another.

  “Yuck,” Neil Kelly said.

  Powell, at her elbow: “What did they say about that expensive suite Mike Tyson was in? They found how many different semen samples?”

  “You would think it would show up better on these white comforters and they’d have to wash them more often,” Theresa said. “Only five here. Not as bad as the Tyson suite.”

  “You going to collect them all?” Neil asked.

  “Have to. Don’s not going to be happy,” she added, referring to the lab’s DNA analyst. She moved the light to the floor.

  “Yuck,” Neil said again.

  “Eww,” Powell added. “Look, it goes up the wall. I don’t know whether to be disgusted or jealous.”

  “The bed, people,” Neil instructed the phantom guests. “That’s what the bed is for.”

  “Most of this is probably urine,” Theresa assured them. “Someone may have been incontinent or have some very odd habits. Most likely they smuggled a pet into the room. They may even allow pets in this room.”

  Neil said, “Probably. The Paris Hiltons of the world have to be indulged.”

  Theresa followed the glowing splashes around the bed, to the bathroom, to the desk, and out the door, debating on what to collect and what not to. She didn’t want to overload Don or rip up more of the Ritz’s property than she had to, but at the same time there was never a good way to explain why she hadn’t collected a piece of potential evidence. She decided to gather a swab or two from the wall between the bed and bath, take the entire comforter, and clip a few carpet fibers around the body’s resting place. Trying to find the swabs, break open the package, locate the tiny disposable plastic vial of sterile water (were those things a godsend or what?) to wet the swab, rub it on the wall, get out the swab boxes and fold them into the correct shape without setting the swabs down, and then label the boxes, all in the near dark, severely tested her dexterity. But she didn’t want to mark up the walls with a Sharpie marker, or the hotel would have to repaint for sure and then think about billing her for the cost. She began to clip carpet fibers, the ALS head propped on her shoulder and held in place with her chin, cutting only a few here and there so the damage wouldn’t show before the huge bloodstain reminded her that they’d have to replace the carpeting anyway. She took a scalpel and began to cut three-inch-square pieces of carpet to test, along with one clean piece as a control sample. Who knew what kind of cleaners or stain blockers they might have used on the carpet? On rare occasions these could affect the DNA sample.