Unknown Means (14 page)

He had a key, or she let him in, or maybe he attacked her at the door and dragged her in.”

Ito nodded. “All this stuff she had, but nothing’s knocked over.

It’s almost like she was sitting here watching TV and he came up behind her.”

“It takes a while to strangle somebody. She would have struggled.”

“There’s nothing to hit here if she kicked out with her feet. We can ask the neighbors if they heard any thuds or stomping.”

“That would mean he got into the apartment earlier, and waited for her.” She felt a chill, not from the cool air or the late hour. She pictured Frances Duarte sitting at leisure in her own cozy home, surrounded by things she loved, items that represented a life of interests and energy. The last place in the world she should feel afraid. Then a sound behind her, a scrape of a shoe, and something around her neck, closing off her breath. Did she see him, turn at the last moment? Look into her killer’s eyes?

Did she ask why? Why her?

Evelyn moved into the kitchen, gazed back at the TV to see her own reflection appearing as a silhouette against the overhead light.

But the light might have been out, and depending on what had been on the TV at the time, a dark scene or a bright one, Frances might not have seen a reflection. She could have been dozing in her chair as he approached but would have woken up pretty damn fast once she felt that strap around her neck.

She might not have been watching TV—and why turn it off if she had? In Evelyn’s experience, criminals didn’t usually tidy up a scene afterward, locking doors or turning out lights. But this guy was not usual. In such close spaces, surely something had been moved in the few minutes Frances would have had to fight for her life. By now a week’s coating of dust had covered the tracks of any item that had been moved so that no clue would remain to tell them

where the killer had first encountered his victim. Without that information, she could not guess how he got inside.

“Are you going to scrape under her nails?” the tech asked.

“Yeah. I don’t have much confidence, since she probably scratched her own neck trying to get air, and her nails are soaked with her own juices, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Let’s hope so.”

They cut the straps and released the body, and called in the ambulance crew to load her onto a gurney. The back of the body and the armchair were consistently soaked with decomp fluid. Evelyn taped the chair, though the damp surface tended to cling to its fibers rather than yield them to the adhesive.

“I’m going to start printing,” Ito told her. Officially, it was his scene, and she remained there only by invitation.

“Need any help?”

“Sure.” He sighed. “Look at this place—no clue where the guy was or what he did while he was here. We’re going to have to do every inch unless the cops come up with some ideas. And if it turns out to be someone she knew, any prints we find aren’t going to mean a thing anyway.”

“Why don’t we stick to this room, the kitchen, and the master bedroom suite?” she suggested. “There’s no reason to think he touched the rest of the place—unless he’s brilliant at covering his tracks, he didn’t seem to have any goal here other than to kill Frances Duarte.

I’m going to walk through again anyway, take another look.”

“Have a ball.”

Three of the six bedrooms were used for storage, stack after stack of cardboard boxes, all labeled and arranged alphabetically.

The remaining two were guest rooms, neither of which appeared to have hosted a recent visitor. Frances had stocked the guest bath with soap and shampoo, but no personal items rested there, no water rings or rumpled towels.

Frances’s office consisted of a full wall of filing cabinets and an

elaborate cherry computer desk arrangement, of which Evelyn felt particularly envious. She pulled on gloves and slid into the leather desk chair, bumping her sore knee, to thumb through the desk calendar and the in-box. The room seemed undisturbed, utterly normal except for that preternatural stillness that affects crime scenes, as if the inanimate objects knew their owner would not return.

A fat tabby sprawled on a futon. It fastened one eye on Evelyn, calculated her threat level as minimal, and went back to sleep. Evelyn wondered if it had come into contact with the corpse, but its paws seemed clean. A photo of the same tabby with a woman sat on the desk. This, Evelyn assumed, was Frances Duarte. She held herself with a classic elegance; she might not have had Grace Markham’s glamour or size 4 clothes, but her skin had remained smooth into her forties, and the dark blond hair fell to her shoulders in thick waves.

The pinching caused by the noseclips finally got to be too much, and Evelyn pulled them off. Away from the family room, the odor permeated but did not overpower.

“That friend of hers, Aimes, hasn’t seen her since last Thursday, March twenty-seventh.” David stepped into the room, rubbing one eye. Either he had decided to shelve their conflict until they finished the crime scene or he was too tired to think about it. “That’s nearly a week. He said she mentioned her cabin on Johnson’s Island, so when she didn’t answer her phone, he assumed she’d gone to the lake for a few days.”

“In April?”

“He says she didn’t mind the chill. The cabin doesn’t have a phone—probably the main attraction, if she’s got this guy dialing her up all the time. He left four of the ten messages on her machine.”

“A boyfriend?”

“I don’t think so. I get the feeling he worked on that for a lot of years, then finally gave up and settled for ‘friend.’ I think he’s one of those, like how Markham described Joey—a hanger-on. He liked being around Frances, rich and too nice to tell him to get lost. Or

she was lonely, who the hell knows? She’s got one sister, never married, no kids.”

“There’s a box of toys in the closet there.”

“She has two small great-nieces in Tucson. They visit once in a while. No kids of her own.”

Evelyn turned the desk calendar so he could see it. “She had plenty of appointments. Things to do, places to go at least every other day. She missed a dentist appointment and—look, here. ‘Butterfly Com Bd,’ eight o’clock yesterday. Butterfly Babies and Children’s.”

“That clipping that Marissa had in her purse.”

“Exactly. Frances Duarte made a large donation to help open a wing. How that would be related to her death, I can’t begin to guess.”

“It involves money, and that’s always a good start. Apparently Frances gives out plenty of it—the Cod submarine museum, Case Western Reserve, the Rock and Roll Hall. Her parents left her an estate simply bulging with cash and a case of noblesse oblige.”

“Grace did a lot of charity and community work.”

“True. But they all do, in this set—it seems to come with being rich. According to the friend, Aimes. Beldon Aimes.”

“Sounds pretty old-money himself.”

“Yeah, well, his driver’s license says Buford, so I’m taking Beldon with a grain of salt.”

“He called four times but never came over here?”

David shrugged. “He figured she was out of town.”

“No enemies? No disputes?”

“A few.”

She dropped a bundle of letters, apparently from a pen pal in Africa. “You’re kidding. This woman had enemies?”

“Believe it or don’t. Apparently Frances, though sweet and loving and terribly generous, et cetera et cetera, had no qualms about speaking her mind, and she watched Daddy’s money—that’s what she called it, Daddy’s, never hers—as closely as he would have wanted her to.

Her estate makes a substantial donation to the art museum every year

but always finds out what they want to do with it first. This year one of the directors is pushing for a small auditorium for performance art.”

“Frances doesn’t care for performance art?”

“She loathes it. Described it—to the director’s face—as charades by people who desperately want to be artists but have no talent whatsoever. She planned to withhold her contribution. She and the director had a fight about it last week.”

“A fight meaning—”

“A verbal argument. Right in the lobby of the BP building, no less, next to the piano player.”

“So Frances wasn’t the pushover Grace seemed to be.”

“Even Beldon/Buford thinks she went a little overboard with that one.”

“What about Butterfly?”

“Never mentioned it, according to him. He’s not surprised she made the donation, though.”

Evelyn mused over that for a moment. “I meant to ask Marissa’s fiancé about Butterfly Babies, but I didn’t see him at the hospital.

Butterfly is a stone’s throw from the ME’s back door—”

“Evelyn. Don’t even think about investigating on your own, not this case. I’ll check it out, I promise.”

She smiled but committed to nothing. “Did the neighbors hear anything?”

“We’ll check the floors above and below tomorrow morning. She had this floor to herself.”

“This place isn’t that big.”

“Her place spans half the floor. The other half, across the hall, is divided into two suites. One has been empty since the owner died four months ago, and the couple in the other have been in Europe for six weeks.”

“How’d the owner die?”

“In a hospital, from a laundry list of illnesses. The kids are

squabbling over the apartment, that’s why it’s still empty. Find anything in here?”

“No threatening letters. I can’t find a PDA, a Rolodex, or even an old-fashioned address book. It might be on the computer, and I’ll leave that for the experts.”

“Unless the killer took the address book with him, though why he’d want that—”

Her heart gave a peculiar skip. “To get Grace’s address. I doubt she’s in the white pages.”

“We don’t know that these two women even knew each other,”

David pointed out, but his young wrinkles flexed with worry. “Still, I’d like to know who else might be listed.”

She stood up, straightening her stiff knee. “Me too. I’m going to start with the processing—I’ve put it off long enough. I hope he didn’t wear gloves.”

They returned to the family room. The body had taken some of the more pungent odors with it but not all. Evelyn retrieved her fingerprint kit and put on a fresh cloth mask.

“I’ll take the kitchen,” she told Bobby Ito.

“Help yourself.”

Kitchens were not areas conducive to fingerprints. The highly re-fined carbon stuck to the water and oils left by the ridges of human skin to develop a latent print, but it also stuck to any other source of oil or water, and cooking areas tended to retain both. Greasy vapors coated ranges and walls, refrigerators gave off too much moisture.

But it seemed that Frances used her kitchen only as a convenient place to keep the phone and her very healthy collection of wine. The refrigerator held condiments, some wilting fruit, and little else. A layer of dust topped the cans in the cupboard. Take-out menus cluttered the bulletin board under a child’s drawing—probably done by one of her great-nieces. The stick figures had been sketched with the same fluorescent pink and green as the drawing in Grace’s kitchen,

but with some matte primary shades as well. Evelyn wondered if Grace ever had children around, perhaps used her friends’ kids as practice for her own future clan. She also wondered if Frances ate any ethnic cuisine except Chinese—she must have had a menu from every Chinese restaurant on the West Side.

“David.”

He swayed slightly, as if he’d fallen asleep on his feet. “Yeah?”

“The Markhams ate out a lot. I wonder if they ordered in a lot too.”

He followed her gaze to the menus. “We can get phone records for both places, that should lead us to the most recent deliveries. But at this building someone without a key has to come through the lobby—they can’t get in through the parking lot door. I’ll get with the clerk.”

“All he’d have to do is wait until a tenant opened the outside door, then grab it before it closed. Or if he had his hands full, they might have held it for him.”

“Riley and I can ask when we interview the tenants tomorrow.

Later today, I mean. It wouldn’t explain Grace, though. A delivery person couldn’t have gotten to her penthouse unless she came down and got him, and the doorman would have had to call up to her. Besides, there were no delivery people on the video.”

She brushed black powder over the range, producing a few smudges along the edge. “Anyone with a package?”

“I think so. One or two, maybe. But Grace didn’t give the code to her personal friends, so she certainly wouldn’t have handed it out to a kid with pizza.”

Evelyn sneezed black powder into her sleeve. “What did Beldon say about Frances? Would she have opened her door to someone she didn’t know?”

“He said she’s a friendly person and not particularly security-conscious. She would forget to lock her car half the time because she didn’t think it important.”

“So she might have opened up to any stranger with a good excuse. The door was locked when the manager found her?”

“Just the knob, so the killer only had to turn the latch and pull it shut when he left.”

Evelyn gazed again at the chair, now missing its occupant. “I can’t help feeling that she had been sitting in that chair while he came up behind her, as if he had waited inside the apartment for her. Did anyone see her after Thursday morning?”

“The doorman says no. She came back after lunch—apparently the one she had with friend Buford—and no one recalls seeing her after that.”

“He could have been waiting for her then.”

“If he had a key. Or if he’s a hell of a locksmith and could pick both the knob and the dead bolt without leaving a single scratch on either.”

Evelyn rubbed her face with a forearm, avoiding the dirty gloves.

“Now you have a black streak on your forehead, you know.”