"Not well," he said. "The Wainwrights on eighteen, he's the Wainwright of Rogers and Wainwright, the stock brokers. He handles some of our investments. The others, we don't know them very well, enough to say hello if we meet on the elevator or in the lobby. The Barths on twenty are retired, Red-wear cardboard cartons factory in North Carolina. The Coopers on nineteen, you know the Daisy Ice Cream chain in the South?"
"No," said Mac.
"Well, the Cooper family owns them," said Evan, brushing back his hair and looking over his shoulder to see if his wife was coming. "Big family."
"Top floor, penthouse? Louisa Cormier?" asked Mac.
"Our celebrity," said Taft. "She's on the Times Best Seller list again. Nice enough lady. You know, elevators in passing, 'How are you,' that kind of thing. Keeps to herself."
"Yes," said Mac. "Did you hear any noise this morning, probably just before eight?"
"Noise?"
"Like a gunshot," said Mac.
"No, our bedroom is in the back of the apartment. Anything else?"
"No," said Mac.
"Then I'd better go figure out how to tell my wife."
Mac nodded. Taft closed the door.
Mac had no better luck on any of the other floors. Aiden caught up with him on twenty-one, and they went over the foyer together as he had on the lower floors. When they were finished, Aiden vacuumed the floor, as she had every other one, and put the vacuumed contents in a separate marked see-through plastic bag.
Before Mac tapped the shining brass knocker on Louisa Cormier's door, he used an ALS to examine the foyer. There were small but definite traces of blood.
4
DR. SHELDON HAWKES, lean, dark-skinned wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt with the letters CSI across the back, stood between the tables bearing the two corpses. Standing at his side was Stella Bonasera.
The sparse room was large, with blue-tinted light and slightly shadowed corners. The only bright lights were those which shone down from the ceiling, white beams on the two naked and tagged stars of the day, Alberta Spanio, knife still in her neck, and Charles Lutnikov, the two holes in his chest now clearly visible. Both bodies were nude on the steel tables, devoid of jewelry, going out of the world as they had come in with the exception of the autopsy, their eyes closed, their heads on stabilizing blocks.
Hawkes had checked the temperature of both bodies the moment they had arrived and compared them with the rectal temperatures Stella and Aiden had taken. Time of death was never 100 percent accurate unless there happened to be a witness standing there when it happened and you had full trust in the witness and his or her wristwatch. Rigor mortis had not set in on either body, which suggested the deaths were less than eight hours ago. "Suggested" was the operative word since Alberta Spanio's body had been first examined by Stella in a room in which the temperature was 22°F.
Rigor mortis, however, is a highly unreliable predictor of time of death. Rigor mortis is the stiffening and contraction of muscles resulting from chemical reactions in muscle cells. Normally, rigor begins in the face and neck and works down through each muscle till even those in the corpse's toes are affected. Rigor usually begins eighteen to thirty-six hours after death and lasts about two days when the muscles relax and begin to decompose. Heat quickens the process. Hawkes had seen it in bodies which had only been dead for a few hours. Cold slows down the process. Hawkes remembered cases in which rigor did not take place for a week. In thin people it could come on rapidly regardless of temperature. In obese people, the process would be much slower than the norm. And then again it was not unusual for a body to never show signs of rigor.
Hawkes concluded, without beginning his autopsies, that the time of death calculated by the CSI detectives at the site of the killings might be reasonably accurate. Normal body temperature is 98.6°F. At the rate of approximately 1.5°F per hour, the body equilibrates with the temperature of the environment in which the body has been found unless the temperature of the environment is very hot or extremely cold. Given the 72°F temperature in the elevator and the dead man's temperature, it was relatively easy to determine Charles Lutnikov's time of death; it had been harder, much harder, with Alberta Spanio because of the partial freezing which would have dropped her body temperature rapidly. Hawkes could make a better estimate of time of death if he began with her and examined her systems and organs with his own instruments.
He began with the knife sticking out of her neck.
"Downward stroke," he said carefully, removing the knife. "Deep. Someone strong. Also someone lucky or someone who knew just where the carotid artery was. She was asleep. No struggle. No movement. Not even after she was stabbed. Knife is a switchblade right out of The Blackboard Jungle or West Side Story which shows you how up-to-date I am about movies. Cheap, sharp."
Hawkes dropped the bloody knife into a stainless steel pan and handed it to Stella. She would add it to the collection, which included the pill bottle and lid and the glass with alcohol from the hotel room. By the time Hawkes finished, the bathroom window might also be in the lab waiting for her.
Hawkes moved into the routine autopsy procedure which always seemed new and sacred, not the defiling of the dead but the honoring of justice which they and their families deserved.
Hawkes carefully made a Y incision, a cut into the body from shoulder to shoulder, meeting at the sternum and then going straight down the abdomen to the pelvis.
The interior organs were now exposed. Hawkes used a standard tree-branch looper to cut through the ribs and collarbone. He lifted the rib cage away to expose the heart and other soft organs which he took out and weighed. The next step was to take samples of fluid from all the organs, followed by making a slit in the exposed stomach and intestines to examine the contents.
When his examination of the torso was complete, Hawkes moved to Alberta Spanio's head, first probing the eyes for hemorrhages in case the victim was strangled before she was stabbed. Then he carefully made an incision in the scalp behind the head and peeled the skin forward over the face to expose the skull. With a high-speed oscillating power saw, he cut through the skull and opened it with a chisel, prying off the skullcap so he could lift out the brain in order to weigh and examine it without doing it any damage.
As he engaged in each step, he described what he was doing and what he saw. His words were recorded, and the tape labeled as evidence.
"Done," he said finally. "I'll get the samples to the lab."
"Tell them it has to be done quickly," said Stella. "I'll prod them from our end." It was not uncommon in New York for a homicide lab report to drag on for weeks or even months.
Hawkes nodded and moved to the sink in the corner where he took off his bloody gown and gloves, washed, and put on fresh gloves.
Stella felt light-headed, and it must have shown because Hawkes said, "You all right?"
"Fine," she said.
It wasn't the autopsy or the sight of the flayed corpse that was getting to her. It was the damn flu. She cursed the weakness, thanked Hawkes, and headed for the door.
"Now," said Hawkes behind her, "let's have a talk with Mr. Lutnikov."
Fortunately for Stella, Lutnikov was Aiden and Mac's case. She wondered why one of them wasn't there.
Detective Don Flack had checked with the front desk and found out who had been in the rooms a floor up and a floor down from the one in which Alberta Spanio had been murdered. To be sure he also checked who had been in the rooms two floors up and two floors down.
The only potentially promising room turned out to be the one directly over the open bathroom window. It had been occupied by a Wendell Lang who had specifically asked for that room two days before and was told it was occupied. He had taken another room, paid cash, and moved into the one over Alberta Spanio as soon as it was vacated. Mr. Lang had checked out at six this morning.