by Lisa Black
She glanced across the room to where Jack seemed to be studying the edge of Lake Erie visible from the window. At that angle the light slanted over the rough flooring and she could see where they had disturbed the accumulated dust. Around her feet there had been a bustle of activity at some point, with vague imprints crossing and recrossing paths.
“There’s shoeprints here,” she said.
“Really?” Jack came closer. “You can see a—pattern?”
“No. The surface isn’t smooth enough. Just vague outlines of shoes.”
“All the same size?” He crouched as well, about five feet behind her.
“I can’t tell. Fairly big. They’re not from kids.”
Maggie got out her clear packaging tape and sheets of clear acetate. She taped the flooring just as she had taped the victim’s clothing, pressing the tape to the plywood, picking it up and moving it to an area adjacent to the first, and so on until the tape filled up with microscopic debris. Jack and the representative watched in silence, perhaps bored, perhaps studying her bottom as she crawled around in the dust. With the popularity of forensic-themed television shows, however, she had gotten used to doing her job under public scrutiny.
She collected three sheets of tapings before calling it a job sufficiently well done, and returned her attention to the two holes.
“Bullet holes?” Jack asked.
“Possibly.” She got out a magnifying loupe she used for fingerprints and positioned it over one of the holes. It penetrated the plywood and had left a slightly blackened rim that could have been from a bullet—either the wipe-off from the soot and gun oil on the outside of a slug, or the singeing effect from the hot piece of lead.
Then she noticed two red smears about a foot and a half away. After snapping a photograph she pulled a paper strip out of a plastic bottle and wetted the yellow square at the end with distilled water. She touched the very edge of the square to one of the smears and it turned blue. Blood.
Maggie returned her attention to the holes in the floor and said, “We’ll have to take this piece up.”
In the doorway, the representative straightened. “What was that?”
“We’ll have to recover the slugs, if they’re there.”
“Seriously?”
Instead of answering, Maggie opened her other case and got a piece of white filter paper. She soaked it with a clear liquid from a small squirt bottle.
“That smells,” Jack commented.
“Acetic acid.” With gloved hands she laid the paper over the holes on the floor and pressed it down, leaning her upper weight and holding it in place for about half a minute. The room, the building, sat so silently around her that she could hear the small waves sacrificing themselves on the rocks outside. Then she lifted it, held it up with one hand, and sprayed it with the contents of a different bottle than the other.
“And that?” he asked.
“Sodium Rhodizonate.”
“Sure. That’s what I thought.”
“It should give us a little pink ring from the lead, if a bullet passed through here.”
“What if it’s jacketed?”
“Our victims were killed by unjacketed bullets. But it still should react in any case, from the soot of the gun barrel.”
But after close inspection, she had to admit that she couldn’t see a thing.
Maggie returned to the red smears, unwrapping an OBTI test stick and a fresh, disposable scalpel. She used the scalpel to saw off a tiny piece of the bloodied wood and dropped the chip into the reagent bottle that came with the stick. After shaking the vial for a moment or two, she twisted the break-off tip, laid the stick flat on the plywood floor, and dropped the liquid into the receptacle at the end of the stick. It worked like a pregnancy test—once the liquid wicked its way to the other end of the stick it colored one stripe blue to show that the reagents were working correctly. If the other stripe colored as well, that would mean the smear had come from human blood and not animal blood.
While she waited she picked up a tiny, reddish conical item from the floor near the blood smears. A tree bud. A fresh slippery elm bud—they were one of the earliest trees to flower—still smelling of spring. Someone had been in this room, and very recently. She dropped it into an envelope and turned her attention back to the white plastic stick.
But it also did not cooperate. The second stripe did not turn blue.
“It’s not human.”
“Are you sure?” Jack asked.
“It still might be blood, but not from a human. Maybe one of the construction workers used something spiky to kill a mouse or a rat.”
“No mice,” the representative huffed. “Definitely no rats.”
Maggie sawed out a larger sliver of the stained wood, just to be sure, and stored it in a fresh manila envelope. Then she reassured the building representative that they did not need to cut a hole in the flooring since she had come to doubt that the holes had been caused by bullets.
They surveyed the rest of the building, but found no more broken doors or signs of disturbance.
From there Maggie directed Jack to a structure only a half mile up the street. Its owner had intended to convert the old hotel to offices; he had removed the asbestos, all right, as well as the floors, windows, and walls—nothing remained except some concrete and two-by-fours and whatever pipes had not yet been stolen by scrap-metal thieves. With no flooring to speak of they had to hike over the form divisions that sectioned off the dirt foundation. The lake wind whistled through the beams, chilly when the sun disappeared behind heavy clouds. It would be a dark and frigid meeting place in the winter—but on the other hand the openness made for easy access, with just enough structure to hide one from view. And no need to be tidy.
Unfortunately there were no smears of suspected blood or possible bullet holes or broken items to direct Maggie to any particular spot of the foundation. She collected a taping from a form and a patch of dirt here and there, but without much hope that they would tell her what she wanted to hear. She didn’t see a granite countertop anywhere in the vicinity, either.
They didn’t have to worry about checking the upper floors. There were no upper floors.
Plenty of debris littered the area, probably from homeless squatters or kids with nothing better to do than check out a piece of uninhabited real estate. Most of it appeared to predate the murders—at least the murders that Maggie had become aware of. For all she knew there could be dozens more, hidden somewhere in the search engines of the reporting system. And they all could have been slaughtered right at that spot, where the damp elements would slowly wipe clean all trace of the activity.
But on the other hand, she thought as she wandered through the five-thousand-odd square feet, Viktor had only been dead for a day or two. They had not had either very heavy rain or very hot weather that would have caused blood to disappear in that amount of time.
She climbed onto a half-formed wall, partly because disturbances in the soil were sometimes easier to see from a higher viewpoint, and partly because she liked climbing on things. From there she could see most of the foundation. It might not be the most convenient kill site in the city but it would be a good disposal site—about to be covered over with six or seven inches of concrete.
Except her killer hadn’t buried his bodies, he’d left them right on the sidewalk for anyone to find. And she didn’t see any undulations in the dirt that might resemble a recent grave.
“Finding anything?” Jack asked, appearing from, essentially, nowhere. She had thought he was out by the road, but now he was at her feet, having somehow found a blind spot. Perhaps he was good at finding blind spots.
“Not really. Nothing jumps out, but then, how could it—it’s all just dirt and concrete block.”
“Ready to go, then?”
He seemed impatient, but then most cops were. Yet he hadn’t seemed in a particular hurry at the broken-in apartment. Jack Renner bounced all over the board. He was either the moodiest man of her acquaint
ance or he had his own, unannounced agenda. Maggie felt ready to bet on the latter.
Which, she told herself, had to be pure paranoia. There were sixteen hundred police officers and who knew how many non-sworn clerks, bailiffs, judges, and social workers in the criminal justice system. Simply because she had become acquainted with Jack Renner hardly elevated him to the top of the suspect pool.
No matter what her utterly illogical gut instinct might be telling her.
She spoke just to say something, to prompt any sort of response. “I’m sorry to hear about your neighbor’s daughter.”
He shrugged. “She could be perfectly safe somewhere, but—you know. In this line of work, that’s not how young girls usually end up when they run away from home. Like those Ukrainian kids.”
“I thought they were Russian.”
“Yeah, whatever they were. Are. I know my neighbor lies awake nights worrying about his kid winding up in the company of animals. Do you want to get down?” He held out both arms.
She said she was fine but he didn’t move, so when she jumped the short distance to the ground she wound up loosely embraced, with Jack gently gripping both arms to steady her landing, close enough that she could smell his aftershave. Maggie looked up at him, thinking: I could kiss him right now. And then what would happen?
“It’s probably not a good idea to be too sympathetic in this job,” he said. “But I can’t help it. Someone has to take the responsibility for girls like Taisia.”
“I thought her name was Katya.”
He shook his head and stepped back. “You’re right, Taisia was a different case. Are you done here?”
“Do you think Viktor was killed for what he did to Katya?”
His face flushed.
“No,” he said, biting the words off as he spoke. “I think Viktor was killed by a business rival. Or an irate customer. It’s usually one or the other.”
“It usually is,” she agreed. “But we don’t usually have hard-core criminals killed by neat twenty-twos to the back of the head. We don’t usually have the same killer operating in different theaters, from drugs to child porn to human smuggling.”
“Theaters,” Jack said. “I like that. We don’t usually have one criminal helping us out by taking out a few others, either, but sometimes even cops get lucky.”
“Is that what you think this killer is doing? Helping us out?”
“Don’t you?” he snapped.
She opened her mouth to give an answer, then realized she didn’t have one. She thought of the stud marks on poor little Katya’s broken fingers.
Jack stepped away, lifting his foot over a sunken form with an irritated stamp. “Are you done?”
“Just one more taping,” she called after him.
Taping a concrete block in the middle of a sea of concrete blocks might not make a lot of sense, but she was there to get a “representative sample” and so she did. Then, after she placed it on a sheet of acetate, she tore off one last piece of tape, about an inch square, and pressed it to her palm.
Then she picked up her equipment, moving slow as her heart beat quickly for no reason she could discern.
For all her good intentions toward logic and objectivity, she couldn’t be around Jack Renner without wondering about too many myriad details. His story about rushing out of Lola sounded convincing, at first, but why take so long to explain? Why did he seem to watch her intensely at the second building but showed no interest in investigating the third? Why did he never mention any family? Riley couldn’t say four sentences without bringing up his daughters.
Why did he, unlike Patty or Riley, seem strangely unconcerned about the possibility of a serial killer operating in their city?
And why couldn’t she answer his question? How would she feel if the killer had killed all four men not because they had screwed him on a deal, or because they had encroached on his territory or stolen his resources but because they were very bad men who needed to be dealt with?
Focus. She now had two possible scenes, one with evidence that didn’t quite add up to evidence, and another with no apparent evidence at all.
And victims with blue polyester, Kevlar, and handcuff impressions.
“Can I throw this stuff in the trunk?” she asked as they left the shadow of the abandoned building and approached the Grand Marquis.
He didn’t turn, and for a moment she thought her words had been snatched away by the lake breeze. But then he took the last few steps to the car and unlocked the trunk, opening it wide with his hand on the lid as if presenting the space to her with a flourish. His expression had that hard look again. He might have been tired of the chauffeuring duty. He might have been wondering why she seemed so curious about the trunk of a vehicle that didn’t belong to either of them.
She wondered herself.
It was quite clean; it even smelled clean, and surprisingly empty for a cop car. Pool cars tended to have an accumulation of equipment left over from previous tenants, but this had only a plastic crate holding a raincoat, orange plastic cones, crumpled blank forms, and yes, a pair of handcuffs. Just as every other police vehicle would contain. She dropped in her kit and her collection of manila envelopes and shut the lid.
She got into the passenger seat and admitted to Jack that she couldn’t think of anything else to do at either location. But they had only begun to delve into her list. She could hit more buildings tomorrow. It would be Saturday, but Jack said at least one detective would be on duty. Maggie wondered which she would prefer. Jack Renner definitely had issues, but Riley, fine man though he might be, bored her within thirty seconds of each meeting. Whatever. As long as it wasn’t her ex-husband.
Or maybe she should request her ex-husband, if her thoughts kept bringing her back to the idea that the killer had some connection to the police department. She might be able to accuse Rick of many things, but being a serial killer could not be one of them. He didn’t have that kind of attention to detail.
As they spoke she rested her purse on her lap. It might make her look like a prim maiden aunt, but hid her right hand from view as she pulled at the edge of the piece of tape stuck to her palm. Then she slid it slowly over the seat, the blue, upholstered seat, until the adhesive side lay flat against the fibers.
The subterfuge wasn’t necessary, of course. She was a fiber expert. She collected fibers from everywhere. It would hardly startle Jack if she wanted to collect a sample from this pool car. But she kept it to herself anyway, not ready to put her theories into words. She certainly wasn’t ready to suggest to police officers that their killer had used police department equipment. She wouldn’t suggest it until she could prove it, and right now she couldn’t even prove all the victims had the same killer.
So she used the dim environment and the echoing noise of the parking garage to cover the un-sticking sound as she peeled the piece of tape off, folded it adhesive side in, and dropped it into her purse.
Then she thanked Detective Renner for his time, collected her items, and returned to the lab. She thought she could feel his gaze upon her back as she walked away, but, of course, that could have been entirely her illogical, unobjective imagination.
She breathed a deep sigh when she reached the familiar surroundings of the lab.
Apparently the nascent maybe-Angel had changed her mind yet again and Denny had gone to the hospital. Carol, who found all things baby completely irresistible, had promptly followed. Of the two techs Amy was still on personal time and Josh, who found nothing about babies appealing in the least, had taken advantage of everyone’s absence to go home an hour shy of quitting time. The Justice Center emptied as early on Friday afternoons as any other office building and Maggie spread out her tapings in the peace and quiet.
She hadn’t collected anything at the first location, and went straight to the Lakeshore Boulevard tapings. Using the stereomicroscope to screen the hairs and fibers sped up the process. The samples were sandwiched between the clear tape and the clear acetate, and so could ma
ke an impromptu version of a glass slide if she wanted to put them on the transmitted light microscope for a closer look. In this way she found the same white cat hair and asbestos as on the victims. But she couldn’t be positive that these were from the same source. Asbestos were asbestos, and white cat hair was white cat hair . . . even if they all shaded to a slight tan color at the tip . . . but it wasn’t until she found one tiny strand of blue polyester that she let herself believe that she might have found the kill site.
But how to prove it? They could put the blood through DNA testing, though she felt quite confident in the OBTI test. If the plastic stick said the blood was not from a human being, then it was not from a human being. And though the holes certainly looked like bullet holes, how could they not react for lead? The men had been killed by unjacketed slugs. It wouldn’t be that hard to fake bullet holes—just puncture the wood with a screwdriver or something and singe the edges a bit with a match. She should have taken up the flooring anyway, despite the whining of the building representative. If nothing turned up at any of her other targets, she would go back and do so.
The trace evidence definitely connected the victims to the Lakeshore building. Either they had gone there shortly before their deaths, but been killed somewhere else, or they had been killed there but without leaving any real sign. It nearly connected them too much—she found some traces of the granite dust in the tapings, but there hadn’t been granite at the Lakeshore building. Those countertops were laminate . . . of course there could have been more high-end units elsewhere in the building with granite, which the workers could have tracked into the apartment space she had examined. To wit, the problem of trying to fit evidence into a crime—you never knew everything.
The bullets had not exited the bodies, so there wouldn’t necessarily be any bullet holes at the scene. In fact there shouldn’t be unless someone missed. But still it didn’t feel right to her. How could the killer have put three slugs in the back of someone’s head on more than one occasion without spilling a drop of blood on the plywood—that seemed hard to picture. They probably hadn’t bled much, but still.
