“Not ‘and Mike,’ Duke. Just Mike. Mike stands alone.” Sanchez slouched over to the bookcase and leaned against it to demonstrate standing alone. He was in a bad mood about the unknown Lieutenant and Sergeant Joyce, who was too busy with her own sulks to tell him what was going on.
“Oh, God, man, I’m sorry.” Ducci crossed himself. “May she rest in peace. When did it happen?”
April turned to Mike. “What’s he talking about?”
Mike scowled. “Damned if I know.”
“Huh? She don’t know?” Ducci wagged a finger at Mike. “You didn’t tell her?”
“What’s going on?” April looked from one to the other. She thought the problem was Lieutenant Braun sitting at his desk. That’s what Mike had been grumbling about in the car on the way over.
Mike shook his head at Ducci, his eyes closed in disgust.
Ducci cocked his bushy eyebrows at April. “If he doesn’t want to tell you, it’s not my place to.”
“Damn right.”
April leaned against the corner of the desk because Ducci’s other chair was occupied by a lot of files, books, and a skull with crooked teeth and a hole in its cranium. She chewed her lip. What was this all about?
Ducci shrugged apologetically. “Hey, sorry. I thought you two talked.”
Mike’s face faded to gray under his tan. “We talk. We talk plenty. We came here to talk about the Maggie Wheeler case, okay?”
April had never seen him angry like this. She turned to him questioningly. “Uh, Mike. You want me to leave?”
He shook his head, scowling. “Stay where you are.”
“Yeah, stay. Here, have a candy bar.” Ducci dipped into his stash in the middle drawer, came out with a Mars bar, and offered it to her, stretching his trademark, the impeccable blue-shirted arm with its starched white cuff, across his desk.
“No thanks, not for me,” April murmured.
“What about you?” He turned to Mike.
“In yours.”
“Hey, man, you should tell her. Women are good at this kind of thing.” Ducci gave up on the candy bar, dropped it back in the drawer. “What can I do for you?”
“Other than throwing yourself off a bridge—?”
“We came about the Maggie Wheeler case,” April interrupted. “You want to tell us about that?”
“Yeah, yeah. I know what you came for. I put a lot of work into it. Overtime.”
“Good. What’ve you got?”
Ducci pulled his case file. Across his desk he laid out two series of glossy color photos on Maggie Wheeler: the first from the crime scene, of her hanging from the chandelier in the storeroom, with and without the tape measure showing the distances from the ceiling to the floor. The second were twelve angles of Maggie naked on the metal autopsy table—with and without the ruler placed beside the ugly marks on her shoulders, on her neck, on her arms. Glossies of her hands showed short fingernails and no signs of a fight. One of her feet showed the ID tag attached to a big toe. In the photos with the makeup cleaned off, she looked pretty bad. He put the autopsy report to one side.
“Okay, this is what I can tell you. See these bruises?” He pointed with the tip of a pencil to the marks on the arms.
Mike pushed off the wall for a closer look. “Yeah?”
“Old.”
“Old?” Mike repeated.
“Yeah, like antique. See, they’re already healing. They don’t mean nothing.”
He moved his pencil to the smudges on the victim’s neck. “See these bruises?”
“Yeah?” Mike leaned closer.
“New.”
“Shit.” Mike slammed the desk with the palm of his hand.
April pressed her lips together in annoyance. Duke was playing with them, and Sanchez was seething. What was it with these two? She thought they were friends.
“Come on, Duke. Don’t jerk us around. We haven’t got all year,” Mike shot out.
“All right, all right. Just trying to cheer you guys up. You look worse than she does.”
“If you tell us something we don’t know, we’ll cheer up, okay?” April said.
“Okay, okay. Here, take that stuff off the chair. Just put it on the floor. Sit. Go on, sit down so I can look at you. I don’t like to talk up, know what I mean? You”—Ducci lifted his chin at Mike—”pull up Bryan’s chair. He won’t mind. He’s on vacation.”
April moved the books, the files, and the skull with the hole in the cranium to the floor. She shifted the chair over so Mike had room to sit beside her. There was so much tension in his body, she could feel him vibrating. She shot him a questioning look. What’s going on with you? He shook his head.
“All right, so the straight line across the neck indicates the victim was murdered. The bruising would curve up under her ears if she had hung herself. And the rope she was hanging from was not the one that killed her. Too thick to match the bruises. Look how the bruises are below the rope. Also, we can see from the pictures that there was nothing for her to jump off. No ladder, no chair. There’s a stepladder in the corner, but she sure wasn’t the one to put it back.
“Now, these marks on the shoulders indicate the guy took hold of her like this, face-to-face, and maybe shook her.” Duke put his hands out and mimed the shaking. “Maybe the person was real mad and kinda lost it. I’m just speculating here.” He looked like he didn’t think he was speculating. He lifted his shoulders modestly as if waiting for applause, then let them drop. Nothing he told them so far was within his area of expertise. It didn’t seem to bother him a bit.
“Perp was someone quite a bit taller than her. Stand up, April. I’ll show you.” Ducci shoved back his chair noisily and made his way through the clutter to the other side of his desk. “What are you—five four, five five?”
“Five five.” April faced him in the crowded space. Ducci’s paunch stood between them like a ship’s prow.
“I’m five eight.” He grinned. “You smell good. What’re you wearing?”
“Hell you are,” Mike protested. “I’m five nine and you’re at least three inches shorter than me. And I thought you were a hair and fiber man.”
“Shut up.” Ducci raised his hands to April’s shoulders. “I’m working.”
“Yeah, well, don’t work too close.”
“Pay attention. Here’s five five and five eight. The guy held her like this, the thumbs in front, the rest of the fingers over the top. Got it?”
“So?”
“So, I’m off balance like this, not tall enough. If I want to shake April, I’m going to grab her here, with my hands on her arms, or the sides of her shoulders. I’m not going to reach over the top of her shoulders.”
“You can take your hands off her now and tell us something we don’t know.”
“Yeah.” Ducci dropped his arms and headed back to his chair.
“Maggie was barely five feet,” April muttered, thinking of Block.
“Yeah, you’re looking for a guy between five nine and six foot with hands—glove size about eight and a half, maybe nine.”
“But what about the damn fibers?”
“Well, these neck ligatures were made by a thin braided cord with a fiber fill of some sort. What kind I don’t know. We don’t have any references to match, but half a dozen fibers from the fill were embedded in the neck wound. Could be the kind of cord that’s in the hood of a wind-breaker. Anything like that in the store?”
“We’ll check it out.”
“What it looks like is he shook her up and then grabbed her from behind.”
“Why behind?” April asked.
“See how the marks are thicker here. The cord was crossed over double here and pulled the other way back around her neck. Looks like the guy had some trouble. There’s bruising from the hand at the back of the neck, and the victim’s hyoid bone was fractured and so was the thyroid cartilage. That suggests the victim struggled, the perp couldn’t hold on that way, and had to resort to manual strangulation.”