After the quick tour of the lower floor, he turned out the lights, stepped back in the hallway, and used the flashlight to climb the stairs to the second floor. The second floor was a trash heap: a line of single rooms that had apparently last been used as a flophouse, each with a wrecked cot or a stained mattress, various pieces of mostly broken furniture. More rats: he never saw one, but he could hear them.
Nothing for him there.
He went back down to the studio, closed the door, turned the lights on, went to look at the cellar door again. No way to open it: it was impossible. He pounded on it a few times and listened, heard nothing. What they really needed, he thought, was behind that door, and he had no way to get there.
He’d been inside for five or six minutes, and time was wearing on him.
He took a plastic bag out of his pocket, and from the bag, several more Ziploc-style bags, each with a white spongelike pad in it. Lincoln’s instructions had been simple enough: press the pad into anything you’d like to pick up, then put the pad back in the plastic bag, and seal it. Lucas worked his way through the studio, doing just that: sampling bronze filings from the floor, off a workbench, and out of the teeth of a metal file. Moving to the welding area, he found a selection of welding rods, and stuck one of each kind in his pocket, and, from a trash bin, several used rods.
He sampled several stains that might possibly have been blood, but there were enough stains around the place, oil and lubricants, that he had his doubts. He was taking a sample when he saw, in a small niche off the main working space, a half dozen crucifixes on neck chains, along with a necklace of cheap aqua-colored stones, a thin string of seed pearls, a ring on a chain, and three sets of earrings, all pinned to the wall with tacks. And he thought, Trophies? If they were, there were twelve of them. There was nothing else like them in the room: he took a half dozen photos with his cell phone.
Time to leave. On his way out, he looked at each of the bronze sculptures, and a clay maquette for another, and noticed that each of the women portrayed in the sculptures was wearing a single piece of jewelry of some kind, apparently to emphasize her nakedness. Was it possible that the jewelry collection did not represent trophies, but was for use with models?
He was thinking about that when Lily called. “He’s moving.”
“And I’m gone,” Lucas said. And he thought, Not for models. They were trophies, and there were twelve of them.
“You believe it?” Lucas Davenport said, walking into the town house. He held up the plastic bags. “This shit fell out the window when I was walking by Verlaine’s apartment.”
Lincoln spun the motorized wheelchair around, noting eagerly — almost hungrily — the evidence in the Minnesotan’s hand.
“Sometimes you catch a break. Anything obvious?”
“No piles of bones or bloody shackles. There’s a steel door leads somewhere — the cellar, I think. Love to see what’s behind that.” He explained that the lock rake wasn’t up to the task, though. They’d need a warrant and a sledgehammer.
Lincoln turned his attention to the evidence.
Lucas dropped down into one of the wicker chairs near one of the large high-definition monitors that glowed like a billboard in Times Square.
“Lucas?” Thom Reston, Lincoln’s aide, stood in the doorway. He was a slim, young man, dressed in a lavender shirt, dark tie, and beige slacks. “Tempt you? Beer? Anything else?”
“Later, thanks.”
Lincoln said, “Whiskey for me.”
“You’ve had two already,” Thom countered.
“I’m so pleased at your sterling memory. Could I have a whiskey? Please and thank you?”
“No.”
“Get me—” But he was speaking to an empty doorway. He grimaced. “All right. Let’s get to work. Mel, what’s in the haul?”
Mel Cooper looked like a geek, which he probably was since he was the Mr. Wizard of forensic science on the East Coast, if not the country. The man was pale and trim and had thin hair and Harry Potter glasses that invariably slid down his nose.
Pulling on gloves, a surgeon’s cap, and a disposable jacket, Cooper took the bag and set the contents out on an examination pad — large sheets of sterile newsprint.
“Good job,” he mused, looking at the carefully sealed bags. “You worked crime scene before?”
“Naw,” Lucas said. “But I lost a rape-murder conviction once ’cause some rookie tripped and dropped the perp’s shoe into Medicine Lake. It was the only evidence we had that would’ve nailed the prick and I had a very uncircumstantial-minded jury. The prick walked.”
“That hurts,” Lincoln said.
“Course, he went after another vic a month later. He didn’t pick well. She kept a five-five Redhawk under her mattress. Just a three fifty-seven, not a forty-four. But it did the trick.”
“Was there anything left of the guy?”
“Not much above the neck. Justice got done, but it would’ve been a whole lot cleaner if the CS kid had held on to the evidence. Taught me to treat it like gold.”
First, Cooper and Lincoln did a visual of the splinters and curlicues of bronze and other metals.
Using an optical microscope on low power, Lincoln compared them with the scraps found in the backs of the women victims. He was looking at the shape of the scraps, along with the indentations from the tools that had trimmed them off a large piece of metal — presumably one of the sculptures. “Tool marks look real close to me,” Lincoln said.
Lucas walked over to the high-def monitor plugged into the microscope via an HDMI cable. “Yeah, I agree.”
They next had to compare the chemical composition of the metal from the crime scenes with that of the scraps Lucas had found at the studio. Cooper went to work analyzing each one, using the glow discharge spectrometer, the gas chromatograph, and the scanning electron microscope.
“While we’re waiting,” Lucas said, pointing to a bag. “Possible blood stains. From the floor near his bedroom.”
Cooper tested with luminol and alternative light sources.
“Yep, we’ve got blood.”
A reagent test confirmed it was human, and the tech typed it. The sample, however, didn’t match the types of the women victims from the earlier scenes.
They tested concrete samples that Lucas had collected, too, and compared them with the concrete particles found in the women’s backs. “Close,” Cooper assessed. “No cigar.”
“Hell.” Lincoln then glanced at the doorway; he’d heard the nearly undetectable sound of the key in the lock. A moment later the female detectives walked into the parlor.
“How’d it go?” Lily asked Lucas.
He shrugged. “Some evidence fell off the truck.” He nodded to the equipment, merrily analyzing away. He glanced at Amelia’s outfit. “Damn, you need to go undercover more often.”
Lily hit him on the arm. “Behave.”
Lucas then asked the women, “What was Verlaine like?”
“Dangerous,” Amelia said.
Lily filled in, “He looks at you like you’re naked and he can’t decide what to lick first.”