Unknown Means (13 page)

“He’s got a key to her apartment?”

“He’s got a passkey to every apartment. Unlike the other place, this building is about old money, not high security. Tenants have regular old keys, the elevator stops at every floor, and people use the fire escape as a patio. But the rent’s probably higher. Go figure.”

The doors opened to spill them into a richly carpeted hallway.

Two uniformed Lakewood officers and a man in plainclothes ex-changed a joke, cutting it off when they saw her. Perhaps they took her for a grieving family member. She must have looked even worse than she felt.

“I’m Evelyn James,” she announced to the group. “Medical Examiner’s Office.” She ran a hand through her hair, wishing she’d taken a few minutes to put on some makeup.

One of the uniformed guys wrote her name on a clipboard. The officer in plainclothes, a wiry type with thin, graying hair cut short, extended his arm.

“I’m Ian Womack, Lakewood Homicide. Thanks for coming out.”

I don’t have a choice, she always wanted to say when officers thanked her. This is what they pay me for. This time, however, she didn’t feel that way. “Thanks for picking up on the MO. This same guy attacked a friend of mine, and I really want to get him.”

“That’s what Riley said.” He walked with her to the doorway of Frances Duarte’s apartment, then paused to let her get an overview.

And adjust to the smell.

Unlike the clean white lines of the Markham apartment, Frances’s home seemed to be composed entirely of wood. Hardwood floors, walnut furniture, two walls of built-in shelves, all polished to a soft gleam. Oriental rugs and velvety upholstery blended together with the heavy draperies and the massive ironwork fireplace. Then Evelyn’s eye went to the souvenirs, the statues, African masks, displayed jewelry, and ancient books that Frances Duarte must have spent a lifetime traveling the world to collect.

But the most arresting item in the room was now Frances

Duarte’s body, tied to a deeply cushioned armchair as if she’d been watching the lifeless TV set.

“I can’t help but wish he’d stayed in Cleveland,” Womack told her, though he didn’t sound too regretful. His eyes sparkled with points of adrenaline, and he seemed ridiculously awake for the middle of the night. The beginning of an investigation, she thought. He’s jazzed.

I, on the other hand, want to curl up and die. Who the hell is this maniac? And how are we going to catch him?

David emerged from the kitchen. “I hope you have a mask. Your throat hurt?”

“Hardly at all. My knee is worse. How are you doing?”

“All the windows, including the one over the fire escape, are locked from the inside. There’s no sign of damage to the door—”

“No. I meant how are you doing? You look worse than I feel.”

A dimple appeared but didn’t stay. “I’m trying to convince myself that sleep is overrated.”

“Any success?”

“No.”

Womack went on. “We’ve got her friend coming over—a guy she listed as next of kin on her lease. Apparently she doesn’t have any family, but they’ve been friends forever, he says. I don’t know what that means, maybe a boyfriend, maybe not. He’s the only other one with a key, and it’s still in his possession. Obviously we’ll take a real good look at him, even though he says he’s never heard of Grace Markham.”

David stirred. “You asked him that?”

“Yeah.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to do that in person? When you can observe his reaction? Maybe it could give us a clue.” His voice grew more strident with every word.

“So we’ll ask him again.” Womack’s thin chest seemed to expand.

“I’m going to get started,” Evelyn said, not to interrupt the growing conflict but because she didn’t care about the growing conflict. David would have to sort out the investigative approach; she

had work to do. She left them in the doorway and moved into the apartment.

With another glance at what had been Frances Duarte, she pulled out her secret weapon—a pair of swimmer’s noseclips. They kept her nostrils closed to the heavy scent of decomposing flesh; over her now-open mouth she stretched a paper mask. Latex gloves covered her sore hands. Then she switched on the heavy Olympus and began to photograph the scene before the investigators moved in and began to examine things. None of them would touch the body, so it could wait.

The apartment spanned half the floor, with six bedrooms, three baths, and a formal living room in addition to the more casual space Frances now rested in. The temperature in each area hovered around seventy-one degrees. Her vast collection of items seemed undisturbed. Evelyn observed the area through the camera lens, her mind overflowing with questions. The apartment, though cluttered, seemed as clean as Grace’s. No signs of another person’s presence—one used cup in the sink, one toothbrush next to the medicine cabinet, no clothing that wouldn’t belong to a forty-five-year-old woman. An automatic food and water dispenser and a self-cleaning litter box in one of the bathrooms took care of the cat. In her roomy office, old newspapers lay neatly in a recycling bin, and her mail had been sorted at a rolltop desk.

“Didn’t her mail accumulate at the door?” she asked David.

“In her box downstairs, but she had mentioned going up to the lake, so the manager didn’t think anything of it.”

She turned to the shelves. “Who dusts all this?”

“She does. Did.” He poked at a carved, stylized elephant. “She didn’t go for the highfalutin lifestyle, according to the building manager. She didn’t have a maid or a cook. She drove a low-end Cadillac.

To judge from her clothes, she shopped at JCPenney. His words.”

“Where’s Womack?”

“Downstairs with Riley, waiting for this friend to show up,

probably bouncing up and down with excitement. I couldn’t deal with him anymore. We’d end up with two strangled bodies in this place.”

“Hey, we might be excited too if we weren’t about to die from lack of sleep.”

“We would have had the sense not to let our entire unit troop through the place so they could get a good look.” He ran a palm over his face. “You might as well not bother vacuuming. I’m not sure we’ll ever know how many people have been in or out of here tonight.”

“I notice the carpet is dirtier from the door to the chair. Did we do that, or is it just a high-traffic area?” She lowered herself to one knee, the injured one protesting with stiff creaks, and clipped carpet fibers into a manila envelope.

“Don’t know. Why did our guy move to Lakewood from the Flats?”

Evelyn turned to the corpse. Decomposed bodies were the absolute worst. To get through them, she had to focus on what needed to be done, and then work quickly and efficiently until she could turn away and strip off the gloves and mask and breathe normally again. No room remained for revulsion, or sympathy.

The woman’s body had turned completely black, the skin of the shoulders and waist bulging past the mesh fabric straps. The skin had peeled off in places, and the fingertips had begun to shrink. Fat cells had broken down, oozing a lemon yellow oil. The clothes—what had been a sky blue knit shirt and navy polyester slacks—were soaked by decomposition fluid to a uniform bluish black. Her head hung forward, its blond curls now lank and matted. “I’d guess she’s been dead about a week, so she beats Grace by four or five days. The question becomes why did he move to the Flats from Lakewood, not vice versa. When was the last time anyone saw her?”

“The desk clerk said last Thursday, six days ago. But she often took the staircase down to the parking lot, so he didn’t think that

too odd. I don’t know what the friend’s going to say. I guess Womack was too eager to tell him about Grace Markham to ask that.”

Evelyn moved in closer, photographing the woman’s body in sections—knees to shoes, thighs and hips. “It’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? What ties Grace Markham to Frances Duarte?”

“They’re both rich. That’s all I’ve got.”

“Odd that there aren’t any maggots. This place doesn’t look it, but it must be as clean and well-sealed as Grace’s. Did the killer rob the place?”

David stood beside her as she photographed, pale, as if the camera flash had washed him out. “Not that we can tell. Her jewelry box seems undisturbed, and there’s no wall safe. We haven’t looked in that purse next to her yet. We found her closet door open. The rest of the place is neat and buttoned down, but a lot of people get lazy about closet doors. Do you always shut yours?”

She clicked the shutter at a large diamond ring on Frances Duarte’s right hand. “Always.”

“You’re kind of strict about that sort of thing, aren’t you? I guess I’ll have to shape up if we’re ever going to cohabit.”

She took another picture.

“Are we ever going to cohabit?” He dropped to a crouch, lowering his voice to keep it from carrying into the hallway, where the two patrol officers kept moving farther away from the smell. The Lakewood crime scene officer had disappeared into the bedroom.

“Look, I know whispering across a decaying woman’s shins is not the right place to have this conversation, but it’s late and I’m really tired and it seems like we’ve been debating this for two months. Do you want me to move in with you, or not?”

Suddenly she was very, very awake. So awake that her blood pounded through her veins like a flash flood, making her head ache and stars appear in front of her eyes. “David, I love you. I’m crazy

about you. But I have a daughter and a mother and a household. It just isn’t that simple for me.”

“And you think, what, they don’t know we’re sleeping together?”

“Knowing and living with are two different things. My mother’s very old-fashioned. Little things like marriage are important to her.”

Her voice sounded nasally harsh, perhaps from the noseclips. “But it’s Angel, really. I don’t want her thinking that because something is okay for a mature divorceé, it’s okay for her.”

“You think she’s still a—”

“Don’t,” she ordered, and for a moment her voice didn’t sound weary at all. “Don’t even go there. What I think is that I’m the mom. If I have to give up something I want because I think it’s best for my daughter, I’ll do it.”

“Give up me?”

“No. That’s not what I mean— I don’t even know what the hell I mean. I just need more time to think about it, and I can barely remember my own name at the moment. It’s different for you. It’s just a matter of packing your suitcase and your dog and hopping in the car.”

“So you’re assuming the bigger risk, is that it?”

She examined that while taking a picture of Frances’s purse, a small clutch bag resting under her right hand. “Yes, that’s it. I am assuming the larger risk.”

“And it’s not a risk to give up my space and let the whole world know how I feel about you when you could up and change your mind one day and toss me into the middle of the street?”

She would not back down. “The worst thing that could happen to you would be a little humiliation. The worst thing that could happen to me is seeing my daughter drop out of school to have a baby because she was trying to keep up with Mom. It’s not the same thing. I don’t care if I’m being overprotective and reactionary.

Guess what, I’m a parent. I’m allowed to be.”

“Angel is a convenient reason, Evelyn, but I’m not buying it.

You have your house to yourself now and you don’t want to share it, that’s all. I’m good enough to sleep with, but after that I should be careful not to let the door hit me in the ass on the way out.”

“That’s not true.” Or was it? Had she gotten so good at keeping her feelings at arm’s length that she automatically kept the rest of the world there too? “I am not saying no to you, David, I am not. I am saying, for the moment, that you’re right—over some decaying woman’s shins is not the place for this conversation. You’re just going to have to wait.”

Then he spoke as if he were biting his lip at the same time. “All right. I’ll wait.”

“Thank you.” The harshness in her voice had nothing to do with the noseclips.

“But not forever.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

He stood up without another word and left the apartment. She straightened. The Lakewood crime scene officer stood next to the kitchen table, Asian-shaped eyes large over his mask. “Um . . . find anything interesting?” he asked.

Only that I’m old and tired and suddenly want to kill everyone in the entire world. Especially the guy who did this.

C H A P T E R

11

THE ARMCHAIR IN WHICH SHE RESTED HAD ABSORBED

most of the fluid oozing from Frances Duarte’s body, so that the floor around her remained clean. Evelyn and the Lakewood tech, Bobby Ito, sat on their legs like students at a teacher’s feet.

Evelyn slid the purse from under Frances Duarte’s hand, and they skimmed its contents—money, credit cards, a pocket calendar, coupons, et cetera. It seemed as tightly packed as the apartment.

The straps around the corpse had been tied with firm square knots, which Evelyn left in place. Once the straps came off, the body would collapse. She tilted the head back. Swelling from the fluids gave Frances Duarte’s face a badly beaten appearance, but in fact, no injuries appeared. Evelyn found no lacerations or large bruising on the head at all.

The indentation around the neck had bloated and shifted like the rest of her epidermis, but in two drier patches toward the back of the neck—the fluids under the skin had answered the call of gravity and moved forward—the mesh fabric pattern appeared.

The victim wore a bra and panties underneath her clothing.

Swollen feet strained against tightly laced Rockport walking shoes.

“Kind of strange. There’s no sign of a struggle.” Evelyn glanced

toward the door. “She has a peephole, a chain, and a dead bolt that would still be here after a nuclear attack. The guy didn’t break in.