Defensive Wounds

by Lisa Black

  Maybe.

  She turned to Neil, but he had not stopped staring at Sonia Battle’s blood-soaked face.

  “One more down,” he said, without looking at her. “This keeps up, this planet might actually become livable again.”

  Theresa blinked in the strong wind. “What?”

  Now he did glance at her, with an odd smile as if they were sharing a joke, as if this were just another day on the job and they hadn’t been dry-humping each other on the deck of his boat the night before. “Another scumbag defense attorney knocked off her filthy little perch. I’m really starting to like this guy.”

  A gust of wind struck Theresa, and she felt as if it sucked all the oxygen away in its path, leaving her gasping to say, “Don’t talk like that about her. She was my friend!”

  “Then I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, without sounding sorry at all. “But it’s not a loss to anyone else, and I can’t pretend it is. She put bad people back on the street. That was all she did, and she’d tear us down to do it.”

  Theresa extended a hand to steady herself on the outer wall’s edge but stopped herself in time. Fingerprints. “No, she wouldn’t. She did what she could for her client, but she never pulled any dirty tricks.”

  “Maybe not on you. I can tell you from personal experience that she wasn’t so delicate with the rest of us.” His voice faded toward the end, as if his brain had engaged; he immediately backpedaled. “Look, I’m sorry. I forgot you actually liked her. But you have to admit, Theresa, you were doing the Electric Slide on Marie Corrigan’s grave along with the rest of us. Don’t go getting on a high horse now.”

  She said nothing, because of course he spoke the complete truth, and it made her want to push him over the side. She had convinced herself that Marie Corrigan and Bruce Raffel didn’t deserve the slightest consideration, didn’t deserve even a fare-thee-well on their trip to the afterlife. But was that really true? And did she react so strongly to losing Sonia because she cared for the woman, or did she simply feel guilty?

  She forced herself to put all this aside for the moment. The only thing she knew was that Sonia’s death made her want to scream with grief and frustration, and she would find out who had caused it no matter how long it took.

  She could throttle Neil Kelly later.

  He’d grown tired of waiting for a response and went to step over the body. She put out a hand to stop him, splaying her fingers across that same chest she had so eagerly felt up the night before. “Don’t.”

  “I just wanted to check out the rest of—”

  “No. The path from the door to here is already shot with everyone walking on it, but the rest of it hasn’t been touched. With all this glossy paint on everything, I’m going to check for fibers, shoe prints, fingerprints—everything I can think of. And,” she added with a determination that startled her in its violence, “you’re going to help me.”

  CHAPTER 34

  *

  Two hours later she remained nauseous and had to fight the urge to call Rachael every four minutes to make sure she still toiled at the front desk, in full view of witnesses, and hadn’t snuck off for another tête-à-tête with William. She and Neil Kelly had barely said five words to each other, not when she used his foot as a sandbag to steady her camera tripod in the strong wind, not when he held the snaking orange extension cord above Sonia’s body so that Theresa could mince along as close to the wall as possible and vacuum the curving, bowl-like observation deck and its small scaffold (the unupholstered surface did not lend itself to taping), not when she spent forty minutes constructing a miniature greenhouse of stakes and clear plastic to form a superglue chamber over the dead woman. As the cyanoacrylate esters in the superglue permeated the nearly airtight space, they would bond to the amino acids left by the killer’s fingers and, with luck, leave her a plasticized impression of his prints.

  In theory anyway. It rarely worked.

  First she had photographed and then cut off the tie holding Sonia’s wrists and ankles—a charcoal gray polyester thing with understated pinstriping. Not a designer job in imported silk, but cheap and generic and therefore much more difficult to trace. Oh, for the days when people all sent their laundry out and detectives could find something called laundry marks on clothing. The killer wouldn’t have used his own tie; most likely he bought one for the occasion. It could also belong to Sonia herself. It would go along with the black skirt, not to mention Sonia’s personal style.

  Either way it could still hold skin cells sloughed off the killer’s hands when he pulled it tight around his victim’s limbs. Theresa stowed the tie in a paper bag, clearing the way for the supergluing process.

  “Wow.”

  Don Delgado appeared, having been summoned from the lab to bring extra equipment and a friendlier extra hand. She allowed him to step, very carefully, over the body to hold the tent structure steady.

  “This is extreme,” he observed.

  “The circumstances are good for it. The … body … is fresh, the killer had to touch her bare skin to get her positioned, and we’re outside so we don’t have to worry about asphyxiating ourselves with cyanoacrylate fumes,” she said, answering a question no one had asked—why they hadn’t tried supergluing either of the other two victims’ bodies.

  “If we get one, photographing it’s going to be a bitch,” he warned. Usually light was their friend, the more the better, but not when it came to taking a picture that required good contrast to see the pattern.

  Theresa ignored him, frustrated by the stubborn HotShot superglue container. The canisters were the size of tomato-paste cans, and since she used them only once in a blue moon, they tended to dry up sitting in the back of her car. If this one had, she’d have to send Don back to the lab for a mug warmer and some foil tubs to hold the liquid superglue over a heat source, the same thing that these canisters did in one handy package. But she got it open and placed it under the tent, laying a wooden stake along the bottom of the hanging plastic sheet to seal it (as much as possible) to the uneven flooring, once again using Neil Kelly’s foot as a weight to hold it down.

  “How long is this going to take?” he asked.

  “About forty-five minutes. First we fume. Then I take the superglue out but leave the chamber closed up so it can polymerize.”

  “You want me to stand here for forty-five minutes. Correct that, another forty-five minutes?”

  “It’s necessary,” she said, now trapped between the body and the scaffold.

  “It’s not so bad,” Don said, almost certainly having noticed the tension and trying to help. “Great view.”

  Neil said, “I’ve been staring at it for the past two hours. I’m kind of over the view. And I think I’m getting windburned.”

  Angela appeared. She had pulled her raven hair back into a hasty braid and clutched a sheaf of papers against her chest to keep them together. “Her car is in the garage, locked, no signs of disturbance, though it’s hard to tell for sure. It’s a rolling office, all scattered files and old coffee cups. A porter saw her in the lobby at about eight-fifteen this morning talking to two men. She seemed to be trying to talk them out of leaving, or berating them for leaving. The men weren’t having any of it and got into the elevator, wheeling their suitcases behind them. Then the porter went on break, and no one else admits seeing her after that.”

  “Until Rachael finds her a little after ten-thirty,” Theresa said.

  “Why did she come up here?” Angela asked. “She didn’t smoke, and you said she didn’t seem crazy about heights.”

  Maybe it wasn’t heights, Theresa thought. Maybe she wasn’t crazy about seeing William Rosedale when we visited this deck the first time, but I’m not going to bring that up just yet, even though Sonia’s former client had been all but convicted of a very similar murder years before. Keeping this information to herself might be construed by some as obstruction of justice, and it could turn out that if Theresa had revealed William’s history earlier in the investigation, Sonia
might still be alive. If that were true, then Theresa had sentenced Sonia to death merely in order to stay on her daughter’s good side.

  This hit her in the face more strongly than any gust of wind.

  But she couldn’t let remorse paralyze her, and besides, Neil Kelly knew William’s story, and it was his investigation. He could figure out what to do about it. She would have to tell him about Bruce Raffel’s connection to William’s trial. But why would William murder the three people who’d set him free? That made no sense at all. Unless it was some sort of guilt-induced legal suicide—he had decided that his own acquittal was a travesty of justice—and if he were really that unbalanced, then he deserved a Motion Picture Academy lifetime achievement award.

  “She was disturbed about the conference falling apart, came up here to be alone,” Neil Kelly guessed, looking at Angela, but Theresa got the feeling he wanted to include her. Maybe he wanted to apologize for his boorish behavior. Maybe he wanted to let her know he forgave her for her boorish behavior. Maybe he thought there was still a chance of getting in her pants, and—this was the real hell of it—there was.

  “Or,” he went on, “she came here to meet somebody.”

  “Or she came with somebody,” Theresa said. “There’s no bruising to her face or her arms, no hunks of hair torn out. She came willingly, with someone she trusted.”

  “Maybe he put a gun in her back,” Neil said. “Just because he didn’t use it to kill her doesn’t mean he didn’t have one.”

  “So they come up here. Then what?” Angela asked Theresa.

  “Then Sonia either didn’t notice that he picked up a murder weapon when they passed through the inside observation deck below or she couldn’t do much about it by that point. She turns away, to check out the view—or to run—and he brings the two-by-four down on the back of her head.” Theresa pointed out a spray of blood on the chest-high outer wall. The elliptical drops downward, toward the floor of the deck. “She falls, he strikes her again, giving us this impact pattern halfway along this wall, two feet to the west of the first. She’s trying to get away. She lands here, where we find her. I think, from the relatively small amount of blood on her blouse, that he undressed her then, trussed her up. Then he hit her again at least once, most likely twice, spattering blood along the platform here and up her bound arms to the tie around her wrists.”

  “She’s already incapacitated, and still he caves her head in?” Angela asked.

  “He wants to make sure she’s dead,” Theresa stated. “This isn’t sick, out-of-control impulses. He came here to kill her, and he wanted to make sure he finished the job.”

  With the body enclosed in the superglue chamber, Theresa pulled on a set of coveralls and got out the black fingerprint powder. She began just past the body, hoping the preserved area might have kept some clues about Sonia’s murderer. She balanced on the balls of her feet, hovering so close to Don’s legs that she brushed his calves.

  “You’re not going to get fresh down there, are you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Darn.” The lab tech didn’t move but continued to hold the upper edge of the superglue tent to keep it from either collapsing or blowing away. They had worked in close quarters before.

  Sonia had a horizontal gash to the back of her skull, and given the artistic spray of blood along the floor of the deck at the same location, Theresa figured the blow had come when Sonia was already down. It would make more sense to have the attacker standing behind Sonia, between her and the stairwell, but this gash would be more easily administered from a position between her and the scaffold. The two-by-four had been dropped between Sonia and the scaffold, though the killer could easily have tossed it from the other side. It wasn’t positive proof, but it was safe to assume that once Sonia was trussed up with her feet and wrists in the air, she fairly effectively blocked access. The killer might have turned and gone the other way, over the scaffold. Unless it was someone who was really afraid of heights, and this killer must like them. Otherwise he would have killed Sonia in the lower observation rooms, where the windows would have obscured the view from surrounding offices. No, either this killer didn’t know that the staff used the deck as a smoking lounge and figured that no one would find the body for weeks or he wanted to maximize his visuals. He was all about the drama.

  The scene cut Theresa a break on this one point: The glossy white paint created about the most ideal surface she’d ever found in an outdoor scene. Unfortunately, that wasn’t saying much. It had already been coated with the residue of the city, hoisted aloft by the winds. Aside from the normal dust, dirt, and grime, there was overspray from the roiling lake, factory emissions, and the exhaust of twice-daily rush hour. As she brushed the fine black powder onto the two walls, the floor, and the scaffold of the U-shaped trench, all that came into view seemed to be smudges, layers of dirt, ancient bird droppings, and streaks of rain.

  The floor of the deck and the scaffold platform did give up some shoe prints, partial and sometimes indistinct patches of various soles. No sign of the smooth triangle of Sonia’s pumps, but pieces of rubber-soled shoes like boots or athletic trainers. She found traces of her own Reeboks, trailing along the inner edge where she’d carried the vacuum. She also found a smallish-looking Nike and the simple straight-line tread of a cheap canvas sneaker.

  Each decently distinct pattern was then covered with three-inch-wide tape, which Theresa pressed and massaged until it was well and truly stuck and then removed to a glossy five-by-seven card, which she labeled and stored before inching forward to the next section of deck. A slow process, to put it mildly, and producing pieces of evidence that could be of extremely limited use. Who knew how many people in the building might have found their way to the observation deck at some point? Their shoe prints did not necessarily implicate them in murder. The killer had managed to avoid stepping in the victim’s blood, and without that obvious timeline a shoe print could be explained away. But still she toiled.

  Behind her the two men facing each other over the weak construction of wood strips and plastic were silent except when Angela returned on occasion to report some new development: The search warrant for Sonia’s home had been written and now waited on a judge’s reading and signature. One had been made up for her car as well. The murder weapon had almost definitely come from the enclosed observation rooms below; specks of white paint across the wood were similar to specks left across others. Co-workers at the public defender’s office had expressed shock and grief but got predictably less voluble when asked about the victim’s current casework, reporting that they either did not know anything about her present clients or were not aware of any extreme behavior among them. The more forthcoming attorneys insisted that Sonia hadn’t complained of any threats and hadn’t seemed to fear any one of her clients. But then, they invariably added, she wouldn’t.

  Angela intended to speak with the convention organizers and to find out if Sonia had had any particular plans for the day’s schedule before the convention wound up unexpectedly canceled. Frank, she said, was still at the courthouse, a slave to Dennis Britton’s whims.

  Theresa continued to process for latent prints, beyond both the body and the platform now. A set of two fingerprints showed up on the outside wall, just under the upper edge and facing eastward and slightly downward, as if someone had been moving toward the body and put his left hand on the wall to steady himself. She set the edge of the tape down on one side of the prints, smoothed it over the black marks, and only then tore the other edge off the roll. That kept the wind from catching the tape and flapping its ends.

  The sun pricked sweat from her glands, buried beneath a layer of clothes plus the heavy cotton overalls. The overalls had become covered with the powder, since she had to crawl through the already processed area to reach the next unprocessed area, but the overalls were designed for this purpose and washable, and the point here was not to stay clean. Using powder in the wind became a much bigger concern. The stuff was so fine a
s to be nearly invisible in the air, and she had no doubt that she would look like a Navy SEAL trying to breach some foreign shore by the time she had finished. The black powder would coat her face and her wrists, get caught in her hair, and turn up for the next day or two in her eyes, nose, and ears. It couldn’t be wiped off; wiping would simply make it smear even more. The only solution would be a full-scale scrub-down in a sink with plenty of soap and water, removing all her makeup along with the powder. She didn’t even want to think about the insides of her lungs.

  Another print materialized, more shoe prints. At forty-five minutes she had completed nearly half the circular deck area and returned to the tent to remove the HotShot from underneath the plastic sheeting.

  “Are we done?” Neil asked.

  “No.” She sealed the small canister into a Ziploc bag, just to keep the fumes from bothering the men until she could discard it. “Another half hour.”

  Don, bless his little heart, continued his attempt to make pleasant conversation. “How high are we?”