Dark Heart (5 page)

“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 across 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?”

He sniffed. “Yeah? So? Smells like Chinese food.”

“Think about it, Mac.”

“Think about what? So he liked Chinese food.”

“Did he? Does it look like it?” She waved at the pizza boxes on the floor.

McKenzie shrugged. “Okay. Maybe not. Why?”

“The archive at the university smelled the same way.”

His forehead wrinkled again. “Yeah, you’re right. It did.”

He thought some more. “So what’s that mean?”

“Could mean nothing. Could mean something. But it’s another similarity.”

As the techs lifted the bag with Madrone inside, Sandra saw something. She moved closer and knelt by the stain on the floor that had been hidden by his body.

“Hey, Mac,” she said, “what do you make of this?”

McKenzie made his way over and crouched next to her. Imprinted in the carpet, barely defined in the bloody fibers, was a strange depression about sixteen inches in length, roughly half that in width.

“What is that?” McKenzie cocked his head to the side. “Footprint?”

The print was an elongated star shape. Three prongs pointing toward the wall, one long prong opposing them, facing the other way.

Sandra leaned down and sniffed the print. “Yeah. Looks like it. Grab one of the forensics techs.”

She waited until Mac found another photographer. The first was still busy getting pics of the scratches on the brick wall.

As he stepped back and light bloomed from his flash, she shook her head again.

“Great. Fucking great, Mac. What we got is Bigfoot, who’s a Chinese food–eating, rock-climbing, frustrated heart surgeon. Our case reports are starting to read like some kind of
Star Wars
movie.”

McKenzie chuckled.

But the thing
did
look like a footprint, though like no footprint she’d ever seen. For some reason she felt a sudden, chilly breeze along her spine.

“This case is developing a very big suck factor, Mac,” she said.

“What kind of shoes do those really crazy climbers wear?” McKenzie asked.

“That’s a good question. I haven’t got a clue,” she admitted.

“I’ll look into it,” he said.

One of the crime scene boys was dusting the door handle, lifting prints, and taking photos before he washed the blood off it into a sample vial. Sandra tapped him on the shoulder.

“I want a preliminary report, along with fiber and DNA data as soon as you get it.”

The techie nodded. “Sure, Detective McCormick.”

“You know me?” Sandra asked.

“Detective Sandra McCormick,” the techie replied in a flat, noncommittal tone of voice.

“Good. So have somebody give me a call when the preliminary results come in. I’ll come get the report.”

“Sure.” The tech had as little enthusiasm in his voice as before. He went back to dusting the doorknob.

Sandra moved away and let the tech do his job. She looked at McKenzie. “What about Madrone’s partner?”

“I don’t know,” McKenzie said. “Dunno if he even had one. I’ll check it out.”

“Okay.” She sighed and stretched, looked around the room once again. “We’ll keep the tapes up, keep this place off-limits. Mac, can you put out a bulletin to the hospitals? We’ll want immediate notification of any gunshot wounds. Maybe Madrone managed to pop this guy after all. We can hope anyway.”

“Sure, Bruce.”

She rubbed hard at her face. Her skin felt like dough, flat and without elasticity. She yawned.

“I’m gonna go home and get some sleep. You should do the same.”

“You watch yourself, Bruce. Whoever it is, they’re taking down cops now.”

She nodded. “You do the same, Mac.”

He stared at her somber expression. “I want this guy,” he said.

“So do I, Mac. So do I. So we’ll get him. Right?”

He nodded grimly. “Yeah, right.”

On the way home, rolling through the silent city, she thought about it. Most times, she’d walk into a crime scene and find some stupid hairball crying that he’d never meant to kill her, he just wanted to show her who was boss. Or that she was asking for it. Or there’d be some scumbag ranting that if he couldn’t have her, nobody could. Or there’d be gangs or drugs or some other obvious indication of means, motive, opportunity.

But it always made her a little jittery when she had to run over the possibilities without a clear picture in her head of what had happened, some kind of familiar framework within which to set her ideas. Like a puzzle board. But when the puzzle clicked, when the identity of the killer became clear to her, it was an amazing feeling, one of the reasons she’d chosen this career in the first place.

Twenty minutes of driving through rain falling on empty city streets brought her to her condominium. The sky was still dark. Not even the first gray glimmerings of false dawn lit the horizon.

She turned left off Lakeshore Drive into the quaint gentrified area east of Michigan Avenue, between the Miracle Mile and the lake itself. After parking curbside, she checked the seat of her car to make sure she hadn’t left anything to attract the smash-and-grab artists, got out, locked up, and walked to the front gate of her building, an old warehouse converted to condos for urban dwellers. A man was walking toward her. She marked him with her peripheral vision as she punched in her security code.

He passed her by, his footfalls loud on the sidewalk. Once his steps faded into the distance, she opened the gate, went in, and closed the gate behind her. She looked at the elevator, and then decided to take the stairs.

She took the steps at a quick pace, running to the beat of a rhythm in her mind. Her legs weren’t burning even after eight flights, and her breathing had returned to normal by the time she reached her door. Martial arts training didn’t buy you big muscles, especially if you were a woman, but you got endurance like crazy.
And that’s something,
she thought, pleased.
I endure.

She liked the thought.

No sooner had she entered than she heard the creak of a wheelchair. A man’s silhouette blocked the light coming from down the hall. He paused a moment there, then wheeled himself toward her. Loose sweat-pants hid his thin, wasted legs. A tank top covered his well-muscled torso. His shoulders and arms were ripped with muscle, carved like marble from the effort of moving his wheelchair all over the city.

In the half-light, the scars on her brother’s face weren’t too noticeable, but the part of his nose that was missing looked more grotesque than usual. He ran a hand through his blonde hair, scratched the side of his head, and adjusted his glasses, a fairly typical gesture for him. He smiled at her.

“Working late? Or did you have a date?” he asked.

She moved past him into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, suddenly stricken with the urge to rustle up something to eat. “You know where I was, Benny. And if you don’t quit teasing me, I’ll never go out with anybody. Just to piss you off.”

He deftly spun his chair about. He’d always been well-coordinated. She winced inwardly every time she thought about how much he’d lost in that motorcycle accident. It had been more than four years ago, and the tragedy still haunted her. She could only imagine how bad it was for him.

Four years ago, he’d received a full scholarship to Cal Tech. He’d jumped on his motorcycle and raced off to his girlfriend’s to celebrate. It was rainy and cold that day. Typical Chicago fall weather. He’d lost the bike on an icy curve, broken his back, and left a good chunk of his face on the pavement. His helmet had kept him from cracking his skull open and killing himself, and at the time he’d regretted wearing it. He’d felt, in the first few months after the accident, that death would have been preferable. He seemed to Sandra to have revised that opinion, but she never asked him if that was so. He’d tell her what he felt she wanted to hear.

The physical and emotional costs of that accident weren’t the only ones Benny paid. His college plans had fallen apart and so had the relationship with the girlfriend. He spent six months in the hospital.

In Sandra’s opinion, the whole situation wasn’t fair. But she also knew that her opinion didn’t change anything. The world was never fair, never had been. Sandra had known that for a long time now.

“But I don’t know where you were. So tell me. A hot date with a hot prospect? Give me some details here, feed my fantasies….” Benny said.

“The man in question had a hole in his chest and was rapidly cooling before we spent time together.”

“You know, sis, you never go out with anybody living these days,” Benny said.

Sandra looked up. “See, here we go again,” she told the ceiling.

“Not all guys are assholes,” Benny said. “Just because you married one asshole guy once upon a time doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen to you again.”

Sandra shook her head. “You never give up, do you, Benny?” She took out a jug of milk and poured herself a glass. As she drank, she leaned back against the counter and relaxed. “I can pretty well guarantee that dead guys aren’t assholes, at least not anymore.”