Unknown Means (5 page)

Try to kill my fiancée, he must have been about to say but couldn’t make himself form the words. Evelyn patted his arm. “I’m going to need her clothing.”

They slipped back into the room, both tiptoeing as if Marissa could be awakened by mere footfalls. Robert pulled a plastic bag with the blue hospital logo on it from the wardrobe cabinet and handed it to her. With a last, pained look at her friend, Evelyn returned to the hallway and motioned for Robert to follow.

He wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his lab coat. “Is there anything else? I want to stay with her.”

She pulled a form from her camera bag. “I need to give you an evidence receipt for the clothing.”

“Oh, hell, I don’t care. I trust you.”

“No, Robert, it’s important. It’s to maintain the chain of custody, so that if it becomes an exhibit at trial, I can document exactly when and where I collected it.” She fumbled for a pen. “Of course, EMS and ER staff have already handled it, cut it and jum-bled it all together here in plastic, but—” She glanced up at Robert and broke off. He looked ghastly, and impossibly young, as if the cold routine of procedure had finally brought it home to him: His love had been felled not by an accident or an illness but by a de-praved and violent human being.

EXCEPT FOR a nice coat of paint, the parking garage of the Riviere did not share in the luxury of the building it adjoined. Nor did it enjoy its tight security.

“There’s a million ways into this place,” Evelyn griped. “Open spots all over.”

“It’s a parking garage, ma’am. It has to be airy. Otherwise the carbon monoxide kills people,” Frank, the building manager, explained in what he probably thought was a patient tone. He had several things to be unhappy about and had listed them earlier: getting dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, how upset the rest of the tenants would be about a second attack on the property in twenty-four hours, how upset he, personally, felt over what had happened to poor Miss Gonzalez, and that an article in the Plain Dealer had already dubbed Grace Markham’s killer “the Riviera Rapist.”

He could only hope the public would prove unable to discern the obvious difference between the names Riviera—a cheap motel on Pearl Road—and Riviere.

“I thought security was the selling point of this place.”

“It is.”

“Then why isn’t our attacker on the video?” They stood in front of the ground-floor entrance from the parking garage to the lobby.

Overhead, a camera recorded the span of flawless automobiles. If the man had attacked Marissa at her car, his grainy black-and-white image would have been recorded. But he had waited until she stepped just underneath the camera itself, a dead zone along the interior wall. The video caught part of his shoe, and that was all. “He had to know about your camera.”

“Maybe he just got lucky,” Frank suggested.

“Nobody’s that lucky.”

“You can have the video. Maybe you can blow that shoe up and get a brand or a size.”

“Thank you. We’ll try, but almost certainly we’ll be left with the dark shape of a shoe. Video enhancement isn’t like you see on TV

shows. If we magnify, all we’ll get is blobs of pixels.” She didn’t bother adding that his system, state-of-the-art only five years before, used an average-quality recorder taping average-quality VHS tapes,

rerecording on the same ten cassettes over and over. She wouldn’t have recognized Marissa, strolling toward the lobby after parking her car, if the time stamp hadn’t directed them to the right sequence.

“Isn’t there some program that can take each pixel and fill in around it? I saw that on the Discovery Channel.”

“There is, but we don’t have it, and it’s more for film that has been damaged. It can’t create resolution that wasn’t there to begin with.” She opened the door to the lobby, which gave her an unencumbered view of the front desk. “He did take a risk, right next to the lobby like this. You have a twenty-four-hour doorman.”

“Exactly!”

“But once he got that strap around her throat good and tight, she wouldn’t be able to scream. If he outweighed her and he could keep her from moving, she wouldn’t be able to reach the door to kick it and attract attention. And at one a.m. on a weeknight, he had a slim chance of interruption.”

She let the door close and traced the guy’s escape route, skulking along the wall to the open, carbon-monoxide-releasing space at the street, the southwest corner of the garage. A piece of loose chain-link mesh had been pushed aside.

The building manager followed miserably. “Do you think it’s the same person who killed Mrs. Markham?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she lied. She did not know what the police did or did not want released, or how chatty Frank might prove if asked the same question. She used a flashlight to examine the open edge of the mesh, noting some dark fibers caught in one loop of metal. Behind her, she heard the lobby door open.

“Evelyn!”

She turned, and David’s arms were around her. For a moment she forgot camera angles and fibers and questions about their future together and let herself melt into his strength, smell the damp leather of his coat, feel his fingers on the nape of her neck.

“Is she all right?”

Evelyn cleared her throat. “So far.”

He turned to Frank. “Excuse us a minute, okay?” When the building manager had gone, he asked, “Is it the same guy?”

“I think so.” She told him why as she collected the dark fibers from the wire loop in a small manila envelope. Then she brushed the low concrete wall with black powder, hoping for a shoeprint made as the man pushed past the mesh, but nothing showed up.

“So we have some kind of homicidal maniac at work in this building.” He sighed. “And we have no idea what he wants, who he’s after, or how he gets in and out. He probably knows the place, maybe lives here. I can imagine how the high-tax-paying citizens of La Riviere are going to react to that.”

“They have to be warned.”

“Oh, I know. At first light, Riley and I are going to visit every person on every floor, find out anything they might know. They’ll feel plenty warned by the time we get done. Hell, for all I know, there could be someone else up there strapped to their kitchen chair.”

“I hope not. You know, it bothers me that Marissa and Grace Markham look a lot alike. At first glance, I mean.”

David thought on that for a moment. “You think Marissa was his original target? He got the wrong floor?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make much sense. He’s smart enough to get into Grace Markham’s airtight apartment, so we have to assume he’s smart enough to pick the right target.”

“Why didn’t he attack Marissa in her apartment? Why the parking garage?”

Evelyn thought out loud. “Because he didn’t know which apartment is hers? She hasn’t lived here that long, and it’s under Robert’s name. Plus, Robert works irregular hours—who knows when he might come home?—and the parking garage has multiple escape routes in case he’s surprised. The apartment doesn’t.” She sat on the edge of the

concrete wall, weariness flooding her body. “But these are just guesses, and we need answers. And I know where to get some.”

“Hey.”

She looked up. He took her face in both hands. “You’re not going to say, ‘To the Batcave, Robin!’ are you?”

She laughed, its sound echoing weakly from the concrete walls.

C H A P T E R

4

HER WORKPLACE HAD BEEN TITLED THE TRACE EVIdence Department for a reason. A single fiber or drop of liquid could provide the most important clue, assuming that a scientist could translate an item’s analyses into facts, after being lucky enough to find it in the first place. Sometimes, though, a tiny piece of debris turned out to be a tiny piece of debris, with no significance at all. Evelyn hoped her collection from Grace Markham’s apartment would yield more of the former than the latter.

She dropped her purse into the bottom drawer of her desk, a battered hand-me-down from Records, and pushed aside the case reports piled on the calendar blotter to check the day and make sure she hadn’t forgotten about a scheduled court case or deposition.

These were canceled or postponed so often that they were easy to forget, risking a contempt of court charge.

Her desk decor consisted of a black kitten Beanie Baby, a picture of Angel from her most recent school dance, and the framed words “News flash—life ain’t fair!”

The clock read 6:30. She hadn’t bothered going back to bed.

She had called her boss, Tony, from the hospital but saw no need to wait for him. She knew what had to be done and wanted to get

started before Tony, the ME, the cops, and one or two assistant county prosecutors massed in the conference room.

She poured liquid nitrogen through a funnel into the infrared spectrometer with great care. Evelyn couldn’t help but feel uneasy around the stuff, as if her fingers might freeze to a shatterable brittleness if they got too close. Closing the lid, she let the computer warm up while the detector cooled down. She pulled out her sealed envelope containing a swab of the smudge on Grace Markham’s arm and opened the pasted bottom of the envelope, preserving the original red seal.

Only the hum of the lab equipment kept her company; the sensible people of the world were still in bed or at the breakfast table.

She would need some caffeine soon, preferably intravenously.

She rubbed the tip of the swab onto a gold-plated microscope slide. Infrared radiation, just like visible light, travels in waves, with specific frequencies and wavelengths. The beam of infrared light from the Fourier transform infrared spectrometer pierced the sample material, bounced off the gold plate underneath, and returned to the detector. The molecules of the sample interacted with the light, absorbing particular frequencies depending on which groups of elements it contained—a COOH bond would absorb radiation at a different frequency than an OH bond. The computer charted all these frequencies as a spectrum, which appeared as a jagged line above a ruled scale of absorption versus wavelength. Each spectrum glowed in its own specific color—the reason she had the only color printer in the lab.

A wide peak at 1000 probably meant silicone, but since silicone was the most common metal on earth, she didn’t read too much into it. She saw a small amount of barium, found in most gunshot primers. The main ingredient, by far, was petroleum. Grease.

What had Grace Markham’s killer been doing before he murdered her? He certainly hadn’t accumulated any grease in her penthouse . . .

unless he had picked the dead-bolt lock, getting himself oily in the

process but without leaving a scratch on the lock and without setting off the warning light in the building manager’s office? No. That left the elevator. He could have touched the doors—perhaps forced them open.

Tony’s substantial bulk materialized between her and the window, blotting out the light. “How long is she going to be out?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long do you think?”

Evelyn glared at her boss. “I don’t know. Hell, Tony, we don’t even know if she’s going to live.”

“Stop crying.”

“I’m not crying.”

Tony didn’t handle emotions well, especially other people’s.

With his eyes firmly fixed elsewhere, he insisted, “I hate to break it to you, but yes, you are. And stop using the Kimwipes as Kleenex.

Those things are five dollars a box.”

She sniffled into a microscope lens wipe, thinner than facial tissue but always available in the lab. “The worst part will be listening to the ME tell me how determined he is to bring Marissa’s attacker to justice, when the only thing he’s ever noticed about Marissa is her breasts.”

“Stone’s not that bad a guy.” Tony collapsed onto a tall bench chair, spilling a few drops of coffee as the chair’s wheels slid underneath him. Outside, the morning’s rush-hour traffic slowly began to mass under a dark sky, and the reflection of her boss in the window made Evelyn pause. One Tony was more than enough. “And the prosecutor’s office will do anything to keep him happy, including leaning on the police department to put every available guy on it.

Which they’ll probably do anyway. Her breasts have a lot of fans there too.”

“Please don’t make me have to hurt you.”

“Relax. There will be a meeting at nine to map out the investigation and what we’re going to tell the press—not only about

Marissa but about the Markham murder. Did you see the news last night? Grace Markham led on every channel. There’s nothing that gets ratings like a rich dead chick. So let’s get hopping, missy. With Marissa out, you’re going to have to take over DNA.”

“I don’t think so! I have Grace Markham’s clothes to examine, two bags of vacuumings, and then Marissa’s clothes. Besides, I’m not DNA-certified anymore, remember? You made us choose a specialty a few years back. It’s written in the SOP. I’m not even supposed to enter the DNA lab according to you.”

“The SOPs are guidelines, not rules.” He scowled at her. It had no effect. “We wouldn’t be in this jam if Sayid hadn’t left to join a terrorist cell.”

Evelyn rested her chin on her fist, afraid that if she sat still for even a moment she’d fall asleep. “He’s teaching at A&M, as you very well know. And Sayid’s family has been in Ohio longer than yours! They have a farm outside Westerville.”

“Then he shouldn’t be so damn snooty. All right, I’ll run your DNA. I do still remember how, you know.”

She had her doubts, but kept them to herself and threw him a carrot. “That’s great, Tony. I’m sure the ME will notice your extra effort.”

That cheered him. “Yeah. So what was that rich broad’s apartment like?”

“Beautiful. Great view of the Flats, and so high up she probably couldn’t hear the partiers . . . if there are any these days. The glow of the Flats faded with this new millennium.”