“Yes, sir.” The beat cop began pushing people away from Madrone’s apartment door.
Sandra ducked under the yellow tape, crossed the threshold, and looked around. Something immediately struck her as familiar, but she couldn’t pinpoint it.
She was still a little groggy. It was always a pain to wake up, get dressed, and leave a warm bed to come look at a dead body at this god-awful hour. But the captain had called her personally. It looked, he told her, like her man had struck again. One glance at the corpse confirmed why he thought so. Hole in the chest, heart on the floor. That pretty much said it all. Same as her prime-time case of the moment, the campus security guard, Baxter.
Crouching down, she examined the wound. She pulled a pen out of her purse and used it to peel back the bloody edges of the dead man’s torn shirt. The edge of the wound was marked by several sharp incisions. Where the marks intersected there was a hole about five inches in diameter, straight through the rib cage. Fragments of Madrone’s shattered ribs were visible below the skin and in the pool of congealing blood at the bottom of the hole, like bits of white teeth peeping from diseased gums.
Same thing as Baxter, she thought, same exact thing. She could only hope they could keep the circumstances of this murder as quiet as they’d kept Baxter’s death. She could imagine the headlines if the story got out. Not one, but two now. A serial killer with a taste for blunt heart surgery. The media would go nuts.
But Jack Madrone had been a cop. That made it hot, hot and juicy, and somebody would drop a dime to a tame news hound. Somebody, somewhere. There wasn’t a prayer of keeping it under wraps, even though the department would keep the actual details as confidential as it could. But stuff like this was so sensational, sooner or later somebody would leak even the most intimate trivia, let alone a hole the size of a baseball in a dead homicide cop’s chest. And his heart like a lump of liver ten feet from the body…
She sighed and stood up. The crime scene forensics guys were still crawling all over the place like nearsighted, intense cockroaches. Most stuff was bagged and tagged, though the evidence was still in place. A flicker of light from the direction of the kitchen told her the shutterbugs were still hard at work, taking digital pictures of everything even remotely interesting.
Madrone’s gun was lying some distance from the body, as though it had been thrown there by Madrone or the killer. Madrone’s right hand was bruised, several of the fingers broken and swollen. It appeared there had been a struggle for control of the weapon.
And Madrone lost, she thought, an ugly quiver growing in her belly. She saw a lot of death, but a cop was different. Part of the clan. It could have been her.
A single bullet casing gleamed on the floor a few feet from Jack’s body.
“It looks like Jack got a shot off. Anybody find the bullet?” Sandra raised her head, looking for blood spatter patterns or anything else to indicate the killer had been hit.
One of the forensics techs glanced up. “We think it was buried in the wall by the window. There’s a hole there consistent with the angle of fire from where Madrone was standing. It looks like someone gouged something out of there.” He shrugged. “We don’t have any idea what kind of tool was used. Not yet.”
McKenzie pointed at an ugly hole in the plaster wall, a very recent one, judging by the lack of dust and dirt in it.
“Somebody took the bullet? The killer? Damn, that’s weird.”
If the bullet was embedded in the wall, it had most likely missed its intended target. Why would a killer take it? What would he think the cops could learn from an expended bullet? Unless he knew about DNA, and he’d been hit…But the blood on the carpet, judging by its position, all appeared to be Jack’s.
“Speaking of weirdness,” McKenzie replied, “the heart’s over here.” He pointed at a plastic bag resting on the carpet. The inside of the bag was smeared with dark, congealed blood. “At least the nut case didn’t eat it.”
He grinned, his expression cynical. “Nice way to start the week, huh, Bruce? You just gotta love Mondays…”
Because Sandra had trained to black belt level in two different martial arts, McKenzie had taken to calling her Bruce, in mockery of Bruce Lee. “What’cha think?”
She shrugged. “Don’t think much, yet. We got two now, and that’s a real problem. One of them a cop, and that’s a bigger problem.”
“I can hear it now. Hole-in-the-chest cop killer stalks Chicago. Pictures at eleven.”
McKenzie’s many-lined brow wrinkled under his receding hairline as he paused, thoughtful. “I know it’s a stupid question, but what the hell. It’s the same killer, right?”
She nodded and stood up, though she never took her eyes from the gaping wound on Jack Madrone’s body. “Yeah. It’s the same.”
“Chicago. That toddling town…”
“All over the place, Mac.” She walked out into the living room. Old pizza boxes, wrinkled Tribunes, crumpled Bud cans, and a few dishes crusted with old food littered the coffee table and the floor. Some of the stuff was bagged. All of it had been dusted.
Sandra removed a cloth-covered elastic loop from her pocket, scooped her long hair into a controlled handful, and bound her mass of curls out of the way. She hadn’t known Jack Madrone that well. She’d seen him around the Twenty-third District station on Halstead from time to time, talked to him once or twice. He always had a five o’clock shadow, always smelled of stale sweat, and always seemed to be mentally undressing her when she spoke with him. From what she gathered, he hadn’t been very popular, but he had been a good detective. And nobody ever said you had to be a saint to be a good cop.
“You seen his jackets yet?” she asked McKenzie, who had followed her into the room.
“I called Twenty-three Homicide. He wasn’t working nothing real big or nasty. But he did have one high profile. The Carlton Wheeler thing,” McKenzie said.
“That lawyer. The rich crusader.”
“That’s the one.” McKenzie squinched his eyes, trying to remember. “And another weird one, though not like—” He waved vaguely in the general direction of Madrone’s corpse. “—Like ours,” he finished. “Guy got scragged behind all the locked doors in the world, twenty-one floors up a ritzy Lincoln Park high-rise.”
She nodded. “Yeah, now I remember. I heard Wheeler was actually a decent guy. Probably the only lawyer with a conscience in the entire city and somebody clips him.”
“You gettin’ philosophical, Bruce?”
Her lips curved in a small smile. “Not yet, Mac.”
He grinned. “Just checking.”
“Any similarities between Wheeler’s case and this?”
“Yeah. They were both murdered.”
She frowned at him. “Not funny.”
He shrugged, ran a hand through the thin strands of what was left of his salt-and-pepper hair. “No similarities that I know of. Wheeler took a bullet in the brain. Nothing Hollywood—not like this.”
“Was Madrone close to the killer?”
“Who, Wheeler’s? What’s the connection? Wheeler got his ass shot. Our guys get partly disemboweled.”
She turned and stared thoughtfully at the doorway. “Maybe one similarity. There’s an alarm on that door there. And we’re fourteen stories up. You think Madrone was stupid enough to bring somebody home to rip his heart out?”
“Vampyra the hooker, maybe?” McKenzie asked. “Naw. He was an old hand.”
“So how did the killer get past the doorman downstairs, past all these security cameras, through a dead-bolted door with an alarm system? Wasn’t it something like that with Wheeler?”
McKenzie looked as if he’d suddenly developed a bad case of gas. “Don’t say that, Bruce. Isn’t it bad enough already without crap like that?”
She wandered toward the picture window, paused, peered out and down.
“Was Madrone getting anywhere with the Wheeler thing?”
McKenzie pawed at his hair. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think
it was lookin’ like one of those jackets that was going to stay open until the next Ice Age. I remember hearing something about it. Real smooth shoot. Ya never know, though. Maybe Madrone knew different. Maybe he was on to something.”
“Maybe he uncovered something that made somebody nervous,” Sandra said.
“I don’t know, Bruce. Hell of a stretch. We’ll have to go through his entire caseload. But we already got our gold-plated, Sherlock Holmes clue, right? That mini bomb crater in his chest. We seen that before already, and not with Carlton frigging Wheeler.”
Sandra nodded. “So how did he get in?”
McKenzie got that pained look again. “There’s no sign of forced entry on the door, but he went out that way. There’s blood on the inside knob.”
Sandra leaned over to examine the inside of the windowsill. The picture window was one of the old-fashioned kind that opened by sliding on a pivot. She saw water on the inside of the windowsill, reached into her bag, wrapped a hanky around her fingertips, and pushed the window. It slid open easily, and the space was more than enough to admit a man.
Baxter’s murderer had also come in by an upper-story window.
“Mac?”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s check on the Wheeler thing, see where the killer gained entrance. If they know.”
“It’s still a reach, Bruce.”
“So, humor me. Woman’s intuition, right?”
Mac grinned. “You believe in that like I believe in hitting the lottery, Bruce. Woman’s intuition. Sure…”
“I think we got an acrobat, Mac,” she said slowly. “Baxter was kinda like this, too. Hard to get at. What floor was that museum archive window on at U of C? Four, right? High enough, anyway.”
“Not fourteen, though. Or twenty-one.” McKenzie glanced around, his expression discomfited. He went to the window and looked out for himself. A gust of dank, cool air blew into the room. He pulled back in and shook his head.
“Had to come in the door, Bruce. There ain’t no other way.”
“There wasn’t one with Wheeler, either,” she replied. Wheeler, Baxter, now Madrone. And a killer or killers who specialized in impossible, invisible entry and exit.
“The S.W.A.T. guys said something about maybe a ninja. Spiderman right up the wall. Like in the movies.” She rolled her eyes.
McKenzie snorted. “Those S.W.A.T. guys eat too many vitamins.”
There was a piece missing from the archive room Baxter was guarding, but it had no great financial value, and the thief had left other nearly priceless pieces behind, including many that would be easier to fence.
She sighed. None of it made any sense. And neither did this. Madrone was a street guy, knew how to handle himself. He might have been an old timer, but his alarm system looked up-to-date. So did he know his killer? Did he open the door? Or was the killer waiting for him when he got home?
She didn’t know which was harder to believe, Madrone letting down his guard so completely, or the killer wiggling through a window fourteen stories up.
“Madrone was a cop,” Mac said slowly. “And Baxter was a security guard. Kind of a cop…”
Sandra rubbed her neck. “Yeah. That, too. So we got what, three similarities now? MO of the actual murders, problems with entry and exit, and maybe cops.”
“Something like that,” Mac agreed.
“Our Baxter guy snagged himself a souvenir,” she said, moving out of the living room toward the kitchen.
“And maybe something like that happened here?”
“It’s a thought.”
“Let it pass, Bruce. Look at this place. You could probably move the fridge out and it would be hard to tell. Well, not the fridge, but—” Mac gestured toward the debris littering the living room. “I don’t think Madrone was the kinda guy who kept an inventory of his empty beer cans and used newspapers. And that’s about all there is in this dump.”
Sandra wandered back to the window. Something about it was stuck in the back of her mind, like a tiny burr. She pushed her head out and looked down. Squinted.
Turned back into the room. “Hey! Anybody got a flashlight?”
A tech grunted, reached into his bag, and handed her one. A long-handled Maglite.
“Thanks.” She adjusted the focus of the lens for wide-angle, then leaned out and aimed the beam at the brick skin of the building beneath the window frame.
There they were, just like the ones on the college building where Baxter had been killed. Those strange marks on the windowsill, the scratches in the brick.
“Hey, Mac,” she said softly. “Take a look.”
She moved aside as he pushed his bulk at the window, then poked his head out. He stared silently for a moment. “Jesus,” he said. “Those look like—”
“Yeah. The same as the ones under Baxter’s window.”
They eyed each other.
“Look fresh, too. Like Baxter’s,” he said.
“Climbing equipment?” Sandra said. “Some kind of hooks or claws?”
“We checked that with Baxter and came up pretty much empty, Bruce.”
“Yeah, yeah. So we check this, too. First thing we check is if they’re the same kind of scratches.” She turned back and faced the room.
“I got some stuff on the exterior wall I want checked,” she announced.
The tech who’d given her the flashlight stood up and ambled over. “Yeah? Like what?”
Her voice went brisk. “There’s scratches or marks out there, under the window. They look fresh. I want photos and casts. And then I want somebody to compare them with the same stuff we got from the Baxter scene.”
The tech raised an eyebrow. “Baxter? Oh, yeah. I remember.”
She nodded. “Check the whole building. Make sure it isn’t something from the window cleaners or whatever.”
“Right.” The tech leaned out and looked. “I did the Baxter scene,” he remarked.
“Yeah, I remember you.”
“These look like the same kind of thing. Not identical, you know? But the same kind…”
“Well, let’s get it checked out.”
The tech rubbed the side of his nose. “Maybe some kind of climbing equipment.” He thought about it. “I dunno, though. Fourteen floors up? That’d be a hell of a production. Even after dark, somebody would have to notice.”
Sandra shrugged. “Just get it all into the record. We’ll figure it out later.”
The tech nodded, then headed for the kitchen where the photographers were still flashing away.
Sandra turned, went back to Madrone’s corpse, and stared down. His face looked old, older than she’d remembered him, and his features were twisted in an expression of terror. Terror frozen by death.
She squatted on her haunches and stared at the wound in his chest.
“Man, I wish I knew what the asshole used on him,” she murmured.
Behind her, Mac grunted. “If ya know too much, Bruce, it takes all the fun out of it.”
“Coroner said maybe like a steel pipe, with sharp, jagged edges. Something metal and hollow, rammed into him like a pile driver.” She leaned forward. “But a clean incision, just like this one.”
“Yeah, Bruce. But we figure that already, right? I mean, how many MOs are we gonna see where we get a hole in the chest and a heart on the floor? Maybe when somebody spills this one we see some kind of copycat thing, but nobody knows about it yet.”
“I know, I know. Man! ” She stood up, shaking her head, her features somber. “Hell of a way to go out, Mac.”
“They all are, Bruce. They all are.”
She glanced over and saw a couple of white-jackets from the coroner’s office unrolling a body bag. They both looked incredibly young to her.
One of them came up. “Can we bag and tag him yet?”
“Yeah, I’m done. Listen, tell your boss I want full wound comparisons done between this one and the murder wound in the Baxter case.”
The tech stared at her, a cynical grin playing acr
oss his youthful features. “I didn’t do the pickup, but it’s not exactly a secret around the office there’s another one like this. I think you can count on a comparison.”
She refused to take his bait. It was too late, and she was too tired, to play mind games with a baby-faced body hauler.
“Go ahead, cowboy. Get him out of here.”
As she watched the two techs fit the body bag around Madrone’s corpse, she felt that prickly little mind-buzz again. Something more, something that she’d missed. She tried to trace the thread through her mind.
“What—” McKenzie started to ask but she cut him off with a motion of her hand. Her subconscious was trying to tell her something subtle, and she had to take a moment to listen.
What was it? The room? The window? The scrapes in the outside wall? All were similar to the Baxter murder, but that wasn’t it. It was…
She sniffed.
The smell. It was the smell. She walked over to the window, sniffing the air all along the way. No doubt about it. It was there, ever so slight but highly distinctive, that oily burnt smell. She’d smelled that same scent, like hot sesame seed oil, in the room where Baxter had bought it. And that was odd. For one thing, the room in which Baxter was murdered had no food in it that night.
It was a museum archive, for Christ’s sake. And now the same distinctive smell here. But this wasn’t a museum archive. Food would be—
She headed for the kitchen. She opened the cupboards, then the fridge. No spices, no oils, nothing like that. Big Man TV dinners, boxes of generic mac and cheese, a couple of frozen pepperoni pizzas. Some salt and pepper, and that was in a drawer in the little paper packages takeout restaurants gave away. Sesame oil was a Chinese seasoning. But there weren’t any Chinese takeout containers in the trash or in the fridge or anywhere else. In the living room, either.
McKenzie followed her. “What? What is it?”
“The smell. You smell that?”
Dark Heart Page 4
