Washington Deceased (18 page)

“Reenactment,” Michaelson told him. “We have the warden's kind cooperation. All right. We are now at the point we had reached on the afternoon of the killing, when Warden Stevens learned for the first time that something might be wrong. Why don't we run the Supply Room tape back and see what we have.”

“We already know what the Supply Room tape for that afternoon shows,” Grissom protested.

“I'm not talking about that tape,” Michaelson said. “I'm talking about the tape that's been running for the last several minutes, while we've been talking.”

Stevens nodded toward the guard sitting at the portable console and monitor. After a few key punches, the monitor screen filled with an image. Everyone in the area strained to look at it.

On the screen appeared a head, shoulders and chest shot of Desmond Gardner, face to face with the viewer. After two to three seconds, a toy dart flew into the picture. Its suction cup struck Gardner in the center of the forehead. He began to pitch forward. Snow abruptly replaced the image on the screen.

“Well,” Michaelson said, “it would appear that there's something in the Supply Room that would bear investigation.”

Stevens led the group a few steps to the door. Smith opened it. Looking into the room, the assemblage saw Desmond Gardner lying in the far corner of the room, diagonally across from the door and the corner where the surveillance camera was. He lay in front of the cream-colored tarpaulin draped over what they all knew to be the mirror taken from Smith's office. In the middle of the room lay a child's black plastic dart gun, a pair of work gloves and a second dart.

“The second dart represents the shell casing, of course,” Michaelson said. “The analogy is a bit inexact, but it was the best we could do.”

“Of course,” Stevens said sarcastically.

“Hmm,” Grissom said.

“Can we agree,” Michaelson asked then, “that in its essentials this scene duplicates the one Officer Smith described and that, for that matter, the rest of us eventually saw that afternoon?”

“I don't see anything wrong with it,” Smith said.

“Nor do I,” Stevens agreed.

“Okay,” Grissom shrugged.

“Very well. Can we also agree that there is no one else in this room at the moment, and that no one has come out of it during the period that all of us have had it under surveillance?”

This question drew three affirmatives.

“Clearly, moreover, the dart could have been a bullet. If you accept my representation that this tape segment didn't begin running until some point well after our discussion down here began, it follows, doesn't it, that former Senator Gardner today—and therefore Mr. Martinelli earlier this week—could have been killed by someone who wasn't in the room with him?”

“It does,” Grissom admitted. “But I don't see how. Unless there was a trap gun or something….”

“In the case of this reenactment, fortunately, we have another tape taking a somewhat longer view of the event, in both senses of the term.” Michaelson glanced up at the surveillance camera. The others followed his look, and saw that a twin camera was mounted next to it. “Let's go review that one, shall we? Oh, and inasmuch as we have exhausted the possibilities of former Senator Gardner's thespian contributions, perhaps he could be allowed to join us.”

They walked back to the portable monitor, joined this time by Gardner. The guard attending the monitor punched some more buttons and presently the screen again filled with an image.

The screen once more showed Desmond Gardner's head, shoulders and chest, face on, against a neutral background. Once more a dart flew into the picture, and once more it struck him in the forehead. Again, he pitched forward. This time the image didn't stop.

They saw Gardner fall all the way to the floor, sprawled on his stomach. Then they saw the body moving toward the camera.

“What the hell?” Grissom muttered.

The body continued to move toward the camera, as if on a conveyor belt. Then, as it progressed, the neutral background suddenly dropped from the top of the screen to the bottom, revealing cinder blocks that looked dark gray on the black-and-white picture.

“This couldn't get any nuttier,” Grissom said.

Which, however, it immediately did. A second image of the body appeared on the screen, on an apparent collision course with the first. The second body was lying with its head away from the camera. As it moved, it went farther from the camera while the first body continued to come closer to the camera.

“It's a mirror!” Grissom said. “But….”

“Keep watching,” Michaelson said.

It was now quite clear that they were watching an image recorded by a camera shooting into a mirror. The bodies lay head to head, the nearer one with its feet toward the camera and the farther with its feet away. Then the first body disappeared for a moment and the second body seemed to be lifted partly into the air. A whitish blur moved behind and beneath it. The body flopped and then settled back to the floor, now facing more or less toward the camera. It was now feet to feet with its mirror image.

“But four different people at least saw….”

“Keep watching.”

A plastic tube came into the picture. A fine spray came out of the tube for several seconds, directed at the mirror. When the spraying ended, an opaque blotch marred the upper third of the mirror.

The tube withdrew. There was another whitish blur and the mirror disappeared behind a tarpaulin draped over it. Now the camera saw only one simulated corpse, lying in front of a neutral background. The last important things the camera picked up were the dart gun, dart and gloves dropping onto the floor of the Supply Room.

“Theory,” Michaelson said. “Martinelli came into the Supply Room in anticipation of meeting the Honor Cottage's supplier of contraband pharmaceuticals there. Naturally, he didn't stand in full view of the camera but, on the contrary, directly underneath the camera, where he expected to be out of the camera's range. He was surprised to see the mirror uncovered and unblotched but, before he could appreciate the implications of this situation he was even more surprised to see a pistol being pointed at him from the other side of the bars on the window—that is, from outside the Honor Cottage. The killer, who was at the window outside the room, instantly shot Martinelli. The killer then shot the camera lens, which prevented the camera from recording any more images but didn't prevent it from continuing to transmit the electronic noise it was recording to the video-taperecorder in the Administration Building.”

“Why didn't anyone else in the prison hear this fusillade?” Billikin asked.

CO-2 Wesson Smith shook his head condescendingly at the desk jockey's ignorance.

“A .22 pistol makes a noise a bit louder than a cap gun, but anyone whose idea of a gunshot is the racket you get with a .38 or a .45 wouldn't associate the sounds this peashooter made with gunshots.”

“Especially,” Michaelson added, “if much of the noise had wide open spaces to escape into instead of four stone walls to bounce off of.”

“Why did the Supply Room camera only pick up the image in the mirror, instead of picking up the frame and the area beside and behind the mirror as well?” Stevens asked.

“Because the killer adjusted the camera lens beforehand so that its field of vision was limited to the reflective surface of the mirror,” Michaelson said.

“And why didn't the crack scene-of-crime team spot that rather unusual adjustment—something you'd hardly expect in a surveillance camera?”

“Because they were looking at a camera that had had a bullet shot through its lens. The bullet would represent an at least superficially plausible explanation for anything else about the lens that seemed unusual.”

“All right,” Grissom scowled. “Go on then.”

“Very well,” Michaelson said. “In preparation for the murder, the killer had taken the tarpaulin off the mirror and tucked one edge of it behind the camera mount bracket, stretching the rest of the tarpaulin down the wall and along the floor. He had attached monofilament fishing line—very nearly invisible to the naked eye, much less on videotape—to the grommets in the tarpaulin and to the transmission jack. Once Martinelli was dead and the camera lens shattered by gunfire, the killer pulled the tarpaulin along the floor. This pulled Martinelli's body along with it. When the killer had gotten Martinelli all the way across the floor, he pulled the tarpaulin up, dumping Martinelli's body off of it and reorienting it.”

“You see?” Billikin said to Grissom. “You should've been looking for someone whose hands were cut to ribbons by pulling a 180-pound weight with monofilament fishing line.”

“The gentleman was wearing gloves,” Michaelson commented mildly.

“Anyway,” Wendy said, “if he did it the way I did, he didn't pull it hand over hand. He wrapped the line around a plywood two by four and just turned the board over and over.”

“The next part's the one I wanna hear,” Grissom said.

“The next part is pretty much as you saw. The killer stuck a fertilizer spritzer tube through the window and sprayed potassium phosphate and calcium, a fairly common liquid fertilizer, on the mirror. This created the opaque blotch that we all saw. The killer then threw the tarp back over the mirror, threw the gun, shell casings and work gloves into the middle of the room, and went on about his business.”

“Wait a minute,” Smith said. “Your theory doesn't explain how the gun got into the Honor Cottage without activating the metal detector, any more than the other theory does. All openings to the outside are equipped with a metal detector tied to the alarm, including that window.”

“An excellent point,” Michaelson conceded. “The answer is that the killer waited until the alarm had already been activated by inmate Banich's attempt to enter through the front door with a bolt in his pocket—a bolt that I expect the killer
found
and gave to Ganich to bring back in, counting on Banich's carelessness about the metal detector to result in Banich's effort triggering the alarm. As soon as the killer heard that alarm ringing, he tossed the gun and shell casings into the room, and the consequent alarm was covered by the one Banich inadvertently activated. Metaphorically as well as literally, in other words, the killer did it with mirrors.”

“That gets the gun and bullets inside B-4,” Smith conceded. “How did they get inside the facility as a whole?”

“How does cocaine get in? How does contraband of any kind get in? No prison on earth is airtight. Besides, we know that, somehow or other, the gun and bullets got into the prison. They're here. The pertinent question is
when
they got inside Honor Cottage B-4. I think that the explanation I'm suggesting is the most plausible.”

“Except for one thing,” Grissom said. “At least four people saw the blotch on the mirror before the killing. The mirror had to be perfectly clean at the time of the killing in order for your theory to work. Otherwise, the blotch would have shown up on the image recorded by the camera.”

“Exactly right. And the mirror was clean at the time of the killing, because between the time Officer Smith and the others saw the blotch and the time of the murder, the killer cleaned the blotch off.”

“Hold it,” Smith interjected. “I tried to rub that blotch off myself the first time I saw it and couldn't do it. And Stepanski told me that stain on the mirror was between the glass and the silver and could only be cleaned by disassembling the mirror to clean behind the glass.”

“He did indeed tell you that,” Michaelson said. “But the fact is that while potassium phosphate and calcium in solution can't just be rubbed off once it has dried, it can be cleaned off with ammonia and muscle. Much as I hate to cast aspersions on someone who's not here to defend himself, I'm very much afraid that, in addition to murdering Sweet Tony Martinelli, inmate Stepanski deliberately misled you when he made the statement you allude to.”

“Stepanski?” the FBI agent and Smith said at once.

“I don't really see any way around it,” Michaelson said. “He was the one with the access to the Supply Room required to make all of the elaborate preparations—the mirror, the tarpaulin, the fishing line and so forth. He's the one we know was outside at the time of the killing. I'm very much afraid that he's the one who murdered Martinelli.”

“But why?” Grissom demanded. “We have a motive for Gardner, a motive for Squires, maybe even a motive for Lanier if we assume he and Martinelli had some kind of dispute on a drug deal. Stepanski was buddies with everybody. What conceivable motive did he have?”

“Let's take that question one step at a time,” Michaelson said. “First, why was Martinelli, a violent, vicious criminal, assigned to an honor cottage in a minimum security facility?”

“No comment,” Stevens said. Billikin and Grissom murmured assents.

“My theory on that is that Martinelli had made a deal. His role in arranging a fraudulent sugar import scam had come to light in the course of an investigation stimulated by sources we won't go into.”

“I thought you said Martinelli was a violent criminal,” Grissom objected.

“He was. A violent criminal from Miami. As such, he was in touch with the Miami criminal underground, many of whose members are Cuban. So is the Castro government, many of whose members are also Cuban. When the Cuban government had occasion to do business with a New Orleans gangster named Gunderson, the natural way to do so was therefore through his principal Miami employee, who I suspect was Martinelli.”

“Why do you suspect that?” Stevens asked.

“Because the photograph found in Martinelli's room suggests that he had information tying him to Gunderson. But we digress. That Martinelli was exposed in the course of this investigation is a matter of public record. I have hypothesized a deal: that he would do short and easy time at a place like this, and in exchange would give the United States the evidence necessary to nail Gunderson. This bargain was particularly appealing from the government's viewpoint, because housing Martinelli in these quarters seemed a cheap way to keep him safe.”