Dead of Winter (CSI: NY)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “But she lied,” said Aiden. Mac had a sense about falsehood. Those who worked with him had learned, sometimes the hard way, not to lie to Mac.

  “Everyone lies when they talk to the police,” Mac had once told her.

  “You find anything?” he asked her now.

  As they entered the lobby, Aiden removed a small plastic container from her jacket pocket and handed it to Mac. He held it up to the light to look at the contents.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Six small pieces of paper,” she said. “White, like confetti. Found them in the carpeting outside Louisa Cormier’s door.”

  5

  ON THE TABLE in front of Stella and Flack lay the pill bottle, the bathroom window, and the drinking glass taken from the hotel bedroom where Alberta Spanio was murdered.

  Stella had checked for fingerprints. There were clear ones on the glass and the pill container, all belonging to the dead woman. There were no prints on the bathroom window, but Stella hadn’t had the window removed with any real hope of getting reasonable prints. What she wanted was reasonable answers.

  “That’s the outside of the window. See that hole?” she said to Flack.

  She pointed at something on the window. It was hard to miss. The inch-long gash was shaped like a comet and was the color of untreated wood.

  “I checked the inside of the hole,” she said. “Screw grooves. Something had been screwed into that window and ripped out, leaving that tail-like mark in the wood.” Using an extruder gun, Stella had taken a casting that showed even, minute grooves.

  At that point, Danny Messer, wearing a white lab coat, came in with two microscope slides and handed them to Stella saying, “The scraping I took out of the screw hole in the window.”

  Stella inserted the first slide into the microscope and examined it as Danny said, “Iron oxide. Whatever was screwed in there was iron, almost new.”

  Stella moved to the side to let Flack look at the slide. He did and saw little dark chips in no particular arrangement. When he moved away from the microscope, she inserted the second slide, the one from the room above Alberta Spanio’s. She looked for a few seconds and made room for Flack. More chips, but these looked different from the ones on the other slide.

  “Steel,” said Danny. “Taken from the particles Detective Flack took from the groove in the window above Alberta Spanio’s bathroom. They don’t match the iron in whatever was screwed into the window.”

  “And what do you make of that,” asked Flack.

  “Nothing more than whoever dangled that steel object out the window,” Danny said, “had to have something heavy pulling at him on the other end to make a groove like that in the sill.”

  “A kid?” asked Flack.

  “A kid was lowered to the window, went through, and stabbed Alberta Spanio in the neck?” asked Stella.

  “I’ve known kids on the street who’d do it for a few hundred dollars,” said Flack. “And maybe it was a woman, skinny, maybe wasted from drugs, willing to risk her life for drug money.”

  “How about this?” said Danny. “Someone lowered a chain from the window above Spanio’s bathroom with a hook on the end. The hook fit into another hook or hoop screwed into Spanio’s bathroom window. He pulled the window open and kept pulling till the screwed-in hoop came out, leaving the hole.”

  “And then someone climbed down the chain?” asked Flack.

  “Possible,” said Danny. “Or they were lowered.”

  “Dangerous,” said Flack. “Climbing down a steel chain.”

  “In a snowstorm,” added Danny.

  “And then climbing or swinging through the window,” said Flack. “Hard for a kid or a druggie.”

  Stella felt weak, tired. She wanted to put her head down on the table and get an hour of sleep. Instead she said, “Let’s go take a closer look at that room above Spanio’s bathroom window.”

  Spread out on the stainless steel table in front of Dr. Sheldon Hawkes was the body of Charles Lutnikov. There was a clean long incision from just below the dead man’s neck to just below his stomach. The flap created by the incision was open and deep, dark red surrounding exposed ribs.

  Viscera lay open, chest cavity cracked and open like a large book. The light above the corpse left no shadows, exposed every twist of colon and curve of bone and artery.

  The room felt slightly colder to Mac than usual, for which he was grateful. The aroma of whatever the dead man had eaten that morning or the night before wafted through the room. Mac looked at Hawkes, who had both hands on the table across from Mac.

  “Man had a pizza for breakfast,” said Hawkes. “Meatball, eggplant, and onion.”

  “Interesting,” said Mac.

  “We start with the easy stuff,” said Hawkes. “What do you know about our man?”

  “His fingerprints were matched in the military database,” said Mac. “Lutnikov served four years in the United States Army in the Military Police. Served in the first Gulf War. Purple Heart.”

  Hawkes pointed to a scar on the dead man’s leg, just above the ankle.

  “Probably a land mine,” he said. “Still a few small fragments of shrapnel. Surgeon probably decided not to probe for them and cause more trauma. Probably a good decision.”

  “What about the shot that killed him?”

  Hawkes reached down and closed the left side of the chest cavity like the cover of a book.

  “Wound that killed him came from a handgun, judging from the size of the wound, a small caliber, probably a .22. Bullet went straight into the heart, almost no angle. He was standing in front of the shooter, who either knew what he or she was aiming for, or got lucky.”

  Mac nodded and leaned forward to examine the wound.

  “Aiden ran a blood splatter drop from the floor of the elevator,” said Mac. “Blood from the wound dropped four feet six inches.”

  “Dead man is five ten and a fraction,” said Hawkes.

  “So, since the bullet went straight in, Lutnikov was standing up,” said Mac.

  “And…?” asked Hawkes.

  “If the shooter was standing straight up with the weapon held out…” Mac went on.

  “The shooter was about five foot one or two,” Hawkes continued. “Want to hear about the flight of the bullet?”

  Mac nodded.

  “Bullet went through the heart, took a turn, hit a rib, turned around and came back out a few inches from the entry wound.”

  Hawkes produced a thin metal trajectory rod like a magician and inserted it in the entry wound. “As I said, and your blood-splatter test confirms, it went straight in.”

  Hawkes produced another trajectory rod that he inserted into the exit wound at a sharp angle upward, carefully following the path of the bullet through the chest cavity.

  Hawkes pulled out the rods and said, “You found no bullet?”

  “Not yet,” Mac confirmed. “You find anything else?”

  Hawkes reached under the table and came up with a small see-through plastic zip bag. He handed it to Mac, who held it up and looked at Hawkes.

  “Came from wound one,” said Hawkes. “Small pieces of bloody paper.”

  “Aiden got some of those same fragments at the crime scene,” Mac said. “The bullet must have gone through paper before it hit Lutnikov.”

  “A lot of paper,” said Hawkes. “Assuming some of the paper burned on impact, that still leaves the pieces Aiden found and the ones I’ve been able to dig out so far.”

  “A book?” asked Mac.

  “Your problem,” said Hawkes, reopening the chest flap. “But a few of those fragments have ink on them. Oh, yeah, Lutnikov’s blood and the sample you took in front of the elevator at Louisa Cormier’s apartment. Perfect match.”

  Five minutes later, Mac Taylor’s cell phone rang while he stood over Aiden’s shoulder in the lab where she was looking through a microscope at the bloody paper fragments.

  “Taylor,” he said.

  “Mr. Taylor, this is Wanda Frede
richson again. I’m sorry to bother you, but I talked to Mr. Melvin in the office and he said Monday is impossible. We won’t be able to get a crew in to plow the snow, and the driveways will be…”

  “What if someone dies,” Mac said.

  Aiden looked up from her microscope. Mac stepped away from her and across the room.

  “Pardon?”

  “What do you do if someone dies between now and Monday?” asked Mac.

  “Do you really…?”

  “Yes.”

  “We keep the bodies refrigerated,” she said.

  “What about Jews?” asked Mac.

  “Jews?”

  “They have to bury their dead within a day or two, don’t they,” he said.

  “That’s really a question for our Jewish director, Mr. Greenberg,” she said.

  “I’d like to talk to Mr. Greenberg,” Mac said.

  “Please Mr. Taylor,” Wanda Frederichson said patiently. “I know…”

  “Detective Taylor,” he said. “Do you have a number for Mr. Greenberg?”

  “I can connect you,” she said with a sigh.

  “Thank you,” said Mac, looking at Aiden, who was doing her best not to pay attention.

  There was a double ring and then another double ring and a man’s voice, “Arthur Greenberg, can I help you?”

  Mac explained the situation to him and Greenberg listened quietly.

  “Let me take a look,” Greenberg said. “Take me a few seconds to access my file here on the computer. Normally, I wouldn’t be here on Shabbat, but we had a…Let’s see. We’ve never had…Yes. Mr. Taylor, I’m reading the circumstances in your file. We’ll get it done.”

  Mac gave Greenberg his cell phone number, thanked him, and clicked the phone shut, moving back toward Aiden.

  She looked up at him, showing her curiosity. He ignored it.

  “What’ve we got?” he asked.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “What’ve we got?”

  “What we don’t have is a weapon or a bullet,” she said. “What we do have are pieces of heavy duty, white bond paper A4 size, 80gm/2, acid free non-erasable. They match the paper in Lutnikov’s apartment.”

  “And some of the paper you and Hawkes found in the entry wound had ink on them. What about the paper fragments you found outside Louisa Cormier’s apartment?”

  Aiden nodded and said, “Match. It doesn’t prove she shot him, but it suggests that the shot that killed Lutnikov was fired from just outside Louisa Cormier’s elevator door. But there are lots of ways those six fragments could have gotten onto Louisa Cormier’s foyer carpet. We might even have tracked them in on the bottom of our shoes.”

  “No,” said Mac.

  “No,” Aiden agreed.

  “But,” said Mac. “A good lawyer…”

  “And Louisa Cormier can afford the best,” added Aiden.

  Mac nodded and said, “A good lawyer could give a lot of explanations. See if you can match any of those ink spots with Lutnikov’s typewriter.”

  He stood silently for a few seconds before speaking again.

  “How tall would you say Louisa Cormier is?”

  Aiden looked up, thought for an instant, and said, “Maybe five two. Why?”

  Before he could answer, she said, “The blood splatter.”

  “The blood splatter,” he confirmed, telling her about his conversation with Sheldon Hawkes and Hawkes’s conclusion about the wound.

  “Lutnikov was carrying paper he had typed on when he was shot,” said Mac. “The bullet went through the paper. He was holding it against his chest.”

  “For protection,” said Aiden.

  “Against a bullet?”

  “It was all he had,” she said.

  “Maybe he was trying to protect what he had written,” said Mac. “Maybe he was killed for it.”

  “Then where is whatever he wrote?” she said. “And where’s the bullet…”

  “And the gun,” added Mac. “You know what we do next.”

  Aiden got up.

  “I put on my coat, make my way across the wild north, and come back with a typewriter ribbon.”

  “And…” Mac began.

  “More samples of paper in Lutnikov’s apartment,” she finished. “Samples he typed on.”

  “Take a vacuum,” said Mac. “Go over the floor on every level outside the elevator for trace.”

  “We already did,” she said.

  “But now we know what we’re looking for,” said Mac.

  Aiden nodded knowingly. “The murder weapon, the bullet that killed Lutnikov, whatever he was carrying when he was shot and…”

  “A motive,” said Mac.

  “I’d better get going,” she said.

  6

  THE MAID HAD CONFIRMED that the man who had rented the hotel room for the night had not used the bed, and that she had not touched it at all this morning. Looking at the bed while Danny Messer crawled on his hands and knees on the floor, Stella Bonasera was sure the man had not even sat on the bed.

  The two of them had examined the few pieces of furniture in the room — bed, chair and small desk, cabinet containing three drawers and holding a small color television — the door handle, even the rod and walls in the small closet. They hadn’t found what they were looking for.

  Stella moved to the window.

  Don Flack had interviewed the rest of the hotel staff, including the clerk who had been on duty the day before when Wendell Lang had checked into the room. The man had paid in cash in advance with two hundred dollars extra to cover phone calls or use of the refrigerator/bar. He had made no phone calls, had not used the bar, and had not bothered to pick up his two hundred. He had simply checked out electronically. The clerk hadn’t been able to give a good description of the man.

  “It was storming,” the clerk had told Flack. “He had his hat down and a scarf around his chin. He was big. I can tell you that. Big. At least two hundred and fifty pounds, probably quite a bit more. The other man was small, very small.”

  “Other man?” asked Flack.

  “Yes,” said the clerk. “I think they were together. The other man stood back, hands in his coat pocket. He had his collar turned up and his hat, one of those old Fedora types, was pulled down.”

  “But this Wendell Lang who took the room only signed for himself, one person?” asked Flack.

  “Yes,” said the clerk, “but it didn’t matter. Double and single occupancy cost the same. The room is a single. One bed. They were an odd-looking pair, one huge, one small.”

  One who didn’t weigh much and one who could hold the little man’s weight at the end of a steel link chain, Don had thought. He’d immediately gone back up to the room and related his encounter with the clerk to Stella. She nodded in acknowledgement and kept working.

  Stella examined the window sill from which Don Flack had taken the sliver sample of steel. She dusted the inside of the window and the handle for prints and then opened it. She leaned out into the frozen air and dusted the outside of the window. She pulled the tapes with the prints into the room and closed it.

  “I’ll have to remove the carpet,” Danny said from where he knelt on the floor. Stella turned to him. Danny, white-gloved hands rubbing together, looked as if he were praying.

  “Do it,” she said.

  Danny nodded, got up, moved to the wall near the door with his toolbox, found a hammer, and went to work. Neither he nor Stella expected to find anything under the carpet, but they were looking for something specific or for some evidence that what they were looking for didn’t exist.

  “I’m going back to the lab to check out the fingerprint and see what I can find about whatever made that rut in the window sill. “You want to come?” she asked Flack, who declined, saying he would exhaust all possible leads at the hotel.

  Danny nodded. In his left hand he held a high power-trace, evidence-collection vacuum. In the vacuum was an evidence bag designed for one-time use. The room wasn’t lar
ge. Stella knew that tearing up the carpet should take him no more than an hour if he was lucky. On a normal day, he would probably have time after that to go home and shower, but the snow and slow traffic would mean at least an additional hour.

  As the first strip of carpeting pulled away from the floor revealing an assortment of dead bugs, including a flattened black roach, Stella said, “Call me when you know either way.”

  “Right,” he grunted.

  Aiden and Mac met a very agitated Ann Chen at Whitney’s in the Village. She wasn’t hard to spot, the Asian woman coming into the almost-empty coffee house alone soon after them.

  When she came through the door bringing a rush of frigid air in with her, she looked around and saw the two CSI investigators sitting at a table in the corner, coffee mugs before them. Mac held up a hand, and Ann Chen acknowledged him with a nod of her head. She peeled off her coat and woolen cap revealing an oversized, thick, white turtle-neck woolen sweater underneath. She dropped the coat and hat on the empty seat next to Aiden.

  “Coffee?” asked Mac.

  “Espresso, double,” she said.

  Mac placed the order by calling over to the young man a few feet away behind the counter.

  Ann Chen was thin, about thirty, pretty but not beautiful. She was also clearly nervous, shifting frequently in her chair in a fruitless effort to get comfortable.

  “I usually sleep late on weekends,” she said. “Unless Louisa needs me.”

  “Does she need you a lot on weekends?”

  “Not really,” said Ann. “Mr. Lutnikov is really dead?”

  “You knew him?” asked Aiden.

  Ann shrugged as the young man brought her double espresso. Mac handed him three dollar bills.

  “I saw him around the building,” Ann said, cradling the hot cup in her lean fingers.

  “Did he ever come to Ms. Cormier’s apartment?” asked Mac.

  Ann looked down and said, “I’ve got to tell you I’m uncomfortable with this. Louisa has been so good to me that…I’m not comfortable with this.”

  “Did she call you this morning?” asked Mac.