Letting the camera rest against her stomach, Lindsay slipped on her own rubber gloves and started taking a closer look at the body. Gently touching the neck and chest, she could feel that the hyoid bone felt out of place, which, along with the hemorrhaging, indicated strangulation. It could have happened right there-the position the victim was in was one she could have easily fallen into if she died standing up behind the counter.
She also saw a stray fiber on the victim's neck. Picking up the camera, Lindsay zoomed in and took a picture of that before pulling out her own set of tweezers and grabbing one of Stella's evidence bags. "It's a black fiber," she said to Stella as she plucked it off the victim's neck. "Doesn't match anything she's wearing."
"Any hand or finger indentations?"
Lindsay shook her head. "It was chilly last night-the killer could've been wearing long sleeves and wrapped his arm around her neck."
Stella nodded as she got down on all fours and pulled something out from under the display unit. Lindsay didn't want to know what it was. "When the ME gets her on the table, we'll have a better idea how it was done. Just keep collecting for now."
"Right." She checked the victim's arms and hands, hoping to find evidence of defensive wounds of some sort.
Sure enough, one of her fingernails was missing. The right forefinger's nail had been half ripped off, possibly while trying to grab at the arm around her neck. To Stella, she said, "If you see a fingernail with purple nail polish on it, let me know."
"Okay."
Lindsay looked more closely at the victim's fingers. There was material of some sort under the fingernails she had left. If she had scratched her attacker, the attacker's DNA might still be under her nails, so Lindsay grabbed another envelope and used one of the tweezer prongs to scrape it all out.
Then she turned the hands over and found abrasions on the victim's knuckles. They were only slightly discolored, and the blood was not completely dry. If she had been killed around closing time last night, eight hours earlier, this bruising was consistent with her putting up a fight.
Lindsay wasn't completely sure, though, so she took several pictures of the bruises. The ME would be able to determine whether Lindsay's suspicions were correct.
Lindsay checked over the rest of the body and found only two other abrasions of any sort: a cut on one arm that was too far along in the healing process to have happened eight hours earlier, and a minor bit of abrasion on the back of the neck that was indicative of something rubbing against the skin. She shot them both in close-up, as they could have been involved in the murder somehow. The cut could have been from some previous incident that had only now escalated into murder, and Lindsay had seen similar neck abrasions before on murder victims who wore necklaces. The abrasion came from the clasp being pushed against the neck. Robberies often went hand in hand with murder, which was why the LAPD, for example, had merged their robbery and homicide divisions into a single unit. The fact that Maria had worn a necklace long enough to form that abrasion but didn't have it on her body now meant that the theft of that necklace might have had something to do with her murder.
If it was a murder. You weren't supposed to jump to conclusions. Until the manner of death was pronounced by the medical examiner, it wasn't officially a homicide. Not that it was easy for someone to strangle herself, but it was within the realm of possibility.
Pursuant to that, Lindsay, having satisfied herself that she'd checked as much of the body as she could at the scene and recorded everything she'd need, started searching near the body for evidence of anything that could've been used for self-strangulation-or, for that matter, as a murder weapon. Of course, even the most brain-dead murderer was unlikely to leave behind the murder weapon, but it didn't hurt to look. Some murderers really were that stupid, especially if murder hadn't been the intent. She had seen it before: a fight would get out of hand, one person wound up dead, and when the adrenaline wore off, the perp ran like hell, leaving all kinds of evidence behind.
She didn't find anything, though-nothing except that single black fiber.
"Wanna give me a hand down here in the ick?" Stella asked from the floor.
Lindsay turned and smiled down at her. "Sure, why not?"
"I cannot believe this. You know, they shut us down two weeks ago? I remember, you people came and you did your inspection, and the man, he was very rude to my Maria."
Angell pursed her lips, her patience thinning with each digression Salvatore Belluso made. "Actually, the health inspectors aren't 'my' people, Mr. Belluso. Completely different department."
"Apf," Belluso said with a wave of his hand. "It's all the government. He was rude to my Maria, and she was rude right back to him like he deserves. Ask anybody, he deserved it, but then he shut my store down. Next day a different inspector come, and he says we pass with flying colors. I bet it was that rude man who did it."
Maybe not a digression, then. Angell made notes accordingly, though the health inspectors she knew weren't really the murdering type-unless the ability to bore you to death counted as a lethal weapon. "I'll need a copy of both inspections." He obviously had copies, as there was a photocopy of the thing on the front window, with the relevant parts of the inspection form circled with a Sharpie. Angell had thought that odd at first, but at least now it made sense. And it was a lead, however flimsy.
"When was the last time you saw Ms. Campagna, Mr. Belluso?"
"I was not here yesterday," he said. "I was at the Arthur Avenue store, making sure my girls there are okay. There were some robberies over the weekend, and I wanted to make sure all security was good." He shook his head and started twisting the wedding ring on his left hand. "Is crazy, no? So last time I see my Maria was Saturday when I brought by my wife to check on her and my Jeanie."
Idly, as she took notes, Angell wondered how the young women who worked here felt about being referred to as his all the time. She also wondered about an old man who only hired attractive young women. He had already provided a full list of his employees and, except for the man he hired to clean the place, they were all women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five.
Belluso waved his hand again. "Apf, it had to be the inspector. He was very very rude to my Maria!"
"Thank you, Mr. Belluso, we'll look into that." She nodded to O'Malley. "Officer O'Malley will take you upstairs now. I may have more questions later. Officer, could you bring Ms. Wolfowitz down?"
Smirking obnoxiously, O'Malley said, "Sure thing, Detective."
Vowing to kill him later, she waited while he followed her instructions. As often happened when she was left alone, her brain started pinballing. If she mouthed off enough at a health inspector to get them shut down, she must've really sucked at customer service. My range scores are fine, and I can shoot that smirk right off Deej's face. Dealt with four older brothers, I can deal with him. Nothing was stolen, so not a robbery of the store. Gotta ask Stella whether anything was stolen off Campagna. Looks like I'll be doing OT on this one, so no going to the Raccoon Lodge for me tonight. Christ, I hope I can get OT, they're getting all budget-conscious again, and right in time for the heat wave that always means a bump in violent crimes. Wonder why Wolfowitz didn't close with her. I really need to get my bangs trimmed.