Defensive Wounds

by Lisa Black

  Neil said, “I think it’s about seven hundred feet. No witnesses up here except a pigeon or two.”

  “What about the BP Building? Isn’t it taller?”

  “Nope.”

  “I thought they argued that this could still be the tallest building west of Ontario and it wouldn’t really be going against the Van Sweringens’ wishes to let something east of Ontario be taller.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Neil said. “Before my time.”

  Theresa rechecked the weights along the edges of her makeshift tent. “They did argue. They lost, and the BP Building is shorter by about fifty feet.”

  “Key Bank is taller, though.”

  “Yeah, by over two hundred feet. Commerce finally triumphed over tradition.”

  “So maybe some early-rising executive looked out his window this morning.”

  Neil said, “Both buildings are at least five hundred feet away. That’s a good distance to be able to see a person on a rooftop.”

  Theresa sneezed, then rubbed her nose with the back of her right hand. Since she’d removed her gloves, this made it the only clean spot on her body, but it didn’t matter. She could tell from Don’s expression that the powder that had settled on her face was now smeared into a thick black swipe. “Not only that, but after the first blow or two she would have gone down. The rest of their activity—removing the clothes, the bludgeoning—would have been hidden by the wall to anything except a plane.” She paused, looked Neil in the face. “But you’ll canvass anyway, won’t you? All the upper floors of those two buildings?”

  “No stone unturned,” he promised. “Theresa?”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She wasn’t ready to respond, and didn’t, instead went back to processing the outside deck of the observation level, leaving out the quarter section of it where the kids and now the cops milled.

  A half hour later, she finally put the powder and brush aside and secured her lifted latent prints in a manila envelope. Then she released the two men, wishing she’d had a reason to send them away before and pulling up the plastic tent. Uncovering Sonia’s naked body felt as if she were exposing her friend to a new round of indignity. At least the wave of superglue fumes released from underneath the plastic reared up and made them turn away for a few seconds. Then the lake breeze cleared the air, and they stood and stared anew at the pasty flesh and bloodied skull.

  Theresa had only superglued a body twice before, both times without positive results, but those victims hadn’t been as fresh as Sonia. Don held the stiffening limbs for her while she brushed powder, ever so lightly, over the dead woman’s skin. She paid special attention to the wrists and ankles, where the killer would have had to grasp and pull the limbs in order to wrap them up with the tie. Prints appeared, although as a mishmash of smears, overlapping and sliding. Theresa examined them with a magnifying glass but couldn’t find a usable pattern in the lot.

  Then, in the middle of Sonia’s back, Theresa found the impression of three distinct fingers. They looked to be from a right hand placed on the left side of Sonia’s back, angled downward. The killer had held Sonia’s body in place while he pulled off her blouse; they seemed too thin to be Sonia’s, assuming she could wrap her own hand around herself to that extent. This also made them too thin to be William’s, Theresa thought with a distinct relief, picturing the tall boy’s large hands. Perhaps Rachael was right about William. Perhaps Theresa had not been directly responsible for Sonia’s death.

  Theresa photographed, then lifted them as best she could, noting that most of the patterns were smudged. This did not surprise her. Finding a print on human skin could be considered a miracle as it was. Recovering one of comparable quality would give her the basis for an article in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

  Then she took a closer look. The prints weren’t merely smudged, they had no discernible ridges at all. Instead they had an irregular, bubbly look to them—as if someone had been wearing latex gloves.

  Terrific.

  It made sense. No one who had ever watched Discovery would set out to commit a crime without wearing gloves.

  Theresa said nothing to the two men who had just spent over an hour holding a tent in place so she could find fingerprints on the corpse. Besides, after latex gloves are worn for a while, they begin to conform to the fingers. A faint pattern might still be visible once she got the lifted prints under a magnifier. And thought happy thoughts. And prayed hard.

  The killer, she reminded herself, had wanted to make sure Sonia was dead. A miracle recovery would greatly endanger him. Theresa examined her friend’s neck. Sure enough, there were two heavy blotches right over the carotid artery. He had felt for a pulse. These, too, were nothing but a deep smudge.

  The killer had thought to bring gloves, but not a murder weapon? Unlikely. He must already have noticed the pile of two-by-fours in the observation rooms. He had checked out the scene beforehand, made sure the observation deck would be relatively unobservable.

  Or he simply walked around with latex gloves in his pocket, waiting for an opportunity to present itself. This was not as crazy as it sounded. According to the Boston Strangler, he never had a plan in mind. Until a potential victim opened her door, he never knew what he was going to say to her to get her to let him into the apartment. Then inspiration would strike, and so would he.

  And eventually Theresa could not think of another single thing she could possibly collect from this area, but, as always, she hesitated. She could never walk away from even the simplest crime scene without worrying that she had missed something, forgotten something, trampled something.

  But it had to be done. She and Don helped the body snatchers load Sonia Battle into a vinyl body bag with carrying handles, since the regular gurney would be impossible to maneuver along the curving outer deck and down the narrow steps to the inside rooms. They gathered up the paper bags and manila envelopes holding the murder weapon, Sonia’s clothing, and the various vacuumings and lifted prints. They would secure this evidence in their vehicles first, then come back for the equipment.

  Neil Kelly waited off to the side, pacing a bit, looking as if he needed a cigarette, even though she’d never seen him smoke. He said nothing as they left, but when they returned, he had just clicked off his phone.

  “I called Powell,” he told them, looking at Theresa. “He’s in Atlanta going through Raffel’s apartment and office. His co-workers are a lot more cooperative than Marie’s. They figure a murder in Cleveland won’t have anything to do with them or their clients, so they opened their doors. He said to tell you that Raffel had a cat. Gray. Came as a surprise to his landlord.”

  “Persian?”

  “Don’t know. Is it important? I can call him back.”

  “If he could get some of its fur—just pet the thing and then brush his hand into an envelope, yes, that might be helpful. Thank you,” Theresa forced herself to add, unsure of whether she meant it.

  His behavior wasn’t okay. But neither was hers.

  She took one last look at the spot where her friend Sonia had lost her life, then turned to disappear into the gloom of the observation deck’s stairwell. She said nothing more to Neil Kelly.

  Theresa found Rachael at the front desk, obediently remaining in the public eye and looking more pale and exhausted than Theresa had seen her since finals week. “Hi, Mom. How’s it going?”

  “I’m finished up there. Look, I need to head back to the lab and go through this boatload of stuff I just collected. I’d like you to come with me. I can work a lot better if I know you’re right there—don’t shake your head—”

  “I want to finish out the day,” Rachael said with a calm finality. “I owe Karla that much. After that, I’m done. I quit. I already told her. So did William.”

  “Good.” Theresa sighed. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear that.”

  “You don’t have to. I can see it. So go work. I promise I won’t go anywhere alone, I’ll text you
every five minutes, and I’ll take the bus home. Go work your magical microscopes and catch this guy.”

  “But—”

  “He isn’t going to kill me, Mom. He’s killing lawyers—and only lawyers.”

  This was true. Rachael was perfectly safe, provided William Rosedale was not their killer.

  Provided.

  CHAPTER 35

  *

  Theresa returned to the lab and called in favors, something she did only on the rarest of occasions. Unapologetically sweeping her current work out of the way, she sat down with the collected hairs and fibers and picked through each one, quickly but thoroughly. She talked Christine into doing the autopsy but did not attend. She doubted there could be much it would tell her beyond the obvious: that Sonia had been bludgeoned to death. She turned the clothing over to Don for taping, examination, and photography, and after that he could test the swabs Christine sent up for sperm, which Theresa doubted he’d find—not as a reflection on Sonia’s personal life but because they hadn’t found any fresh fluids on the other two victims. This could still all come back to sex, but if so, someone suffered from a failure to launch. She also gave him the buccal swabs of Marcus Dean, who had allowed her to collect them without further argument. She didn’t know how Neil had reassured him enough to give up the samples, and she hadn’t asked.

  Theresa skipped lunch, consisting of cups of strong coffee that Leo brewed up. He stayed out of her way, did not protest the undemocratic use of her time, and sprayed the two-by-four with ninhydrin in an unsuccessful attempt to develop fingerprints. Leo could exhibit a shred of compassion in rare moments. Or maybe he just knew not to kick a dog when it was down. It might turn on you.

  By late afternoon she had established several things.

  Three fibers had been found on Sonia’s body: a gray acrylic fiber, consistent with the tie used to bind her, a piece of fluffy pink cotton, and a yellow nylon fiber. Another tuft of similar pink cotton had been found on the murder weapon, but neither matched the pink fibers found on Marie Corrigan’s body. Theresa didn’t know what to make of the yellow.

  A few hairs had been found. They all appeared to belong to Sonia except for one, short and blond. Its root looked elongated, stretched out of shape, which meant it had been from its scalp untimely ripped. It also meant it had a nice amount of skin cells attached to it. She turned the hair over to Don for DNA testing.

  The prints she had collected from the walls were entered into the database and were now doing their cyberspace crawl through possible matches. The print on Sonia’s back refused to give up even one discernible ridge. All Theresa could surmise from the superglue experiment was that the killer had worn latex or rubber gloves and apparently had slender fingers—unless they were large fingers that touched the skin lightly and so left only part of their surface impression behind … though Sonia had not been tiny. It would take some force to shift her body.

  Fibers from these gloves had also been caught in the wood of the two-by-four. The chairs used in the first two murders had been smooth and varnished, but the rough fibers of the wood plank had ripped at the material, retaining tufts of polyester, spandex, and one tiny shred of leather.

  The vacuumings gave her, along with a great amount of dirt, more hairs and fibers than she knew what to do with. None stood out as particularly significant in a cursory exam, and none seemed to match any prior findings of hers. She needed the killer’s wardrobe to compare them to. Ditto the shoe prints.

  After Don had examined, taped, and photographed Sonia’s clothing, he could not report anything that she didn’t already know. No fingerprints on the patent-leather pumps. The blouse had been torn open and removed promptly after the attack, or else the quickly pooling blood under Sonia’s head would have seeped into the cloth. This tearing could indicate a struggle, or it might have been the fastest way for the killer to remove the clothing from the portly Sonia. The skirt had been unzipped and pulled off and the nylons turned inside out, then dumped into a pile with her sensible pumps. A few stray blood droplets had landed on the back of the blouse and skirt, indicating, again, that Sonia had fallen onto her chest after the first or second blow and remained there to be finished off.

  The tapings gave up a few more gray acrylic fibers, more pink cotton, hair that apparently belonged to Sonia, brown cat hair in various hues. Theresa compared them to the cat hairs found on Marie Corrigan. Different animal entirely. Did Sonia have a cat? I might have to be adopting more orphaned animals soon, Theresa thought absently, and wondered how Harry and Nefertiti would react … Harry would be fine. Nefertiti would first have to be coaxed off the ceiling and would never, ever forgive the usurpation of her territory. Adapting to Harry’s presence had been bad enough, but after all he was of a lesser species and easily overlooked. The dog was a hangnail, but another cat would be a bullet to the brain.

  A few odd, light-colored, ramrod-straight fibers caught her eye. Glass. She moved her lenses to the highest magnification, but that only gave her a better view: fiberglass with some sort of coating adhering to its surface. She mounted it on her FTIR’s gold plate. The FTIR couldn’t tell her anything about the glass itself, which fell outside the parameters of the instrument, but it might be able to determine the adherent. She moved the stage slowly, trying not to breathe on the minuscule piece of evidence, started up the computer program, lined up the transmission beam—and all the while her heart sank further, because this would almost certainly prove to be a waste of time. The observation deck was a construction zone. The fiberglass could have come from anywhere. The coating of the deck itself might be made out of fiberglass—light, durable, and extremely weather-resistant. She could spend the rest of the month locked in her lab and never get one step closer to finding Sonia’s killer.

  But such was the nature of the job. She let the machine hum, waited for the spectrum to pop up as a jagged line against an X-Y graph, a taller and more erratic version of an EKG. It showed several familiar peaks—carbon, epoxide groups—and something new. A little research proved it to be triethylenetetramine. Not so helpful. She couldn’t even pronounce it, much less identify its uses. She printed the spectrum, labeled the peaks, and went across the hall to the toxicology department.

  Oliver sat at his bench, closed off into its own little corner by a row of compressed-gas tanks and the large mass spectrometer. “I found some fiberglass on the body, with this adherent—probably epoxy, with something called triethylenetetramine,” she told him. “What would that be?”

  “Anything.”

  “Oliver, I need help.” Sometimes that worked.

  “I don’t care.” Sometimes it didn’t.

  “A good friend of mine has been brutally murdered.”

  “A lawyer,” Oliver pointed out, and turned a page. “Excuse me if I don’t break out the hankies. Besides, my answer is accurate. Anything. Triethylenetetramine is just a hardener for the epoxy, and the epoxy is there to hold the fiberglass together so it can form boats, cars, insulation, sports equipment, surfboards, sound-absorption panels. Where was she found again?”

  “In the middle of a construction zone.”

  He shrugged, the heavy shoulders quaking as the muscles within rolled. “There you go.”

  She couldn’t think of anything else to ask. Her brain already threatened to buckle under the weight of facts that refused to line up into anything resembling a pattern. “Thanks, Oliver.”

  “Just doing my underpaid and ultimately hopeless best for the betterment of humanity and the integrity of the criminal-justice system, not necessarily in that order. Now, go away and leave me alone. I mean it.”

  “Your dedication does you proud,” she told him. “As does your compassion.”

  Don came around the corner, past the compressed-gas tanks, a grim cast to his face. “I have some results.”

  “Okay. Wait. Oliver—cars?”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “What kind of cars?”

  “Sporty little things drive
n by sporty little people who think they’re immortal and therefore not concerned that the frame will shatter like an eggshell should it come into contact with a larger object, like a tractor-trailer or a wall.”

  “Cars like a 1963 split-window Corvette coupe that sells for over a hundred K?”

  Don raised one brow. The toxicologist’s eyes glazed a bit. Cars were not his thing, and he professed great disdain for those shallow enough to make them theirs.

  “I have two suspects who have a connection to all three attorneys. The first is Coral Simone.”

  “Who?” Oliver asked.

  “All three worked on her daughter’s murder case. But Sonia’s involvement was so brief that I don’t know how Coral would even know about it, and I can’t see any of our three attorneys turning their backs on her long enough for her to cave their heads in. Why would Marie meet with her in an empty hotel suite? Why would Bruce let her into his room? But they wouldn’t have had any qualms about opening the door to Dennis Britton.”

  “Britton?” Oliver asked. He didn’t have to ask who that was; he had tangled with Britton over the years as well. “He’s your suspect number two? Why? Aside from the fact that he’s a flaming asshole.”

  “Because he likes expensive sports cars, enough to do his own repairs. We’ve got fiberglass on both Marie’s and Sonia’s bodies and wax on Marie—car wax.”

  “I said wax,” Oliver clarified. “You said car wax.”

  “True, but let’s go with it for the sake of argument. The detectives said she barely kept gas in her SUV, so it wasn’t from her own car. Britton has a cat—I plucked a cat hair off his jacket myself. Not the same gray Persian I found on Marie and Bruce, but people who have one cat often have two. He would know to distract us with the S&M sex angle. He couldn’t stand to see a jerk like Bruce Raffel steal something from him again. With Sonia gone, the ethics complaint she filed against him will go away. And I think he killed his wife.”

  Don frowned. “Killed his wife? I remember the case, but—”

  “I know it was investigated out the wazoo, but I still can’t see how she could have struck the steering wheel hard enough to crack her skull and not do more damage to the car. Dr. Banachek might have thought of that, but I don’t think he ever looked at the car himself. I suspect they argued, Britton hit her in the head with a fireplace poker or one of his golf clubs—something thin and straight—then staged the accident. In his early days, he specialized in DUI accident-with-injury cases, so he not only knows all about cars, he knows all about car accidents. He’d know just what we would look for—the position of the driver’s seat, lights on or off. Everything.”