“My God,” Stembler said. He crushed the cigarette in an ashtray and sat down. “Why? What happened?”
“He was murdered in his apartment sometime between midnight and six this morning. We don’t think he was robbed, nothing seems to have been taken.”
“How?” Stembler said, his voice turning hoarse.
Cody hesitated for a moment. “Somebody cut his throat,” he said.
“Why? Why would somebody do such a thing?” Then he added, “Please sit down.”
“We were hoping you might give us some help with that.”
“I don’t know anyone who had any reason to kill Raymond. Oh my God.” He wiped his face with the silk handkerchief. “I have no idea. Maybe he caught someone breaking in, maybe…”
“I don’t think that’s an option.”
“Not an option? How can you be so sure?”
“The circumstances indicate he was killed by somebody he knew.”
“There was a fight, then.” It was a statement.
“I really can’t give you any more details. We’re not sure of anything until after the autopsy.”
“My God, an autopsy.”
“It’s the law,” Kate said. “Any time someone dies violently…” She let the sentence dangle.
“Could it be business-connected?” Cody asked.
He quickly shook his head. “Absolutely not.”
Stembler’s mind was now racing to other things. Telling his daughter and his wife. Wedding plans to be canceled. Dealing with the press.
“He has no family that I know of. Just us. My daughter. My wife, Elizabeth. His associates here at the office.”
Cody looked at Kate and she nodded.
“We need an official ID on him,” Cody said. “Are you up to that, sir?”
“ID? Oh, yes. Where? When? What can I tell my daughter? Linda’s going to be devastated.”
“We’re trying to keep a lid on this, Mister Stembler,” Kate said. “My suggestion is that we wait until you officially ID him, then we can release his body to the funeral home. That way the cosmetician can do some work on him before she gets here.”
The talk of a funeral jolted him. Stembler looked like he was going into shock.
“Is there someone you can talk to here?” Kate said. “You look like you could use a shoulder to lean on.”
“I’ll be alright,” he said. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. “Have to make a list. So much to do.”
“I’ll talk to our coroner about the ID. Perhaps after lunch would be convenient.”
“Sooner the better. I’ll have to alert our pilot. I have to get back to Boston and tell Linda.”
“I have to ask this, Mister Stembler,” Cody said. “Is there anyone in your company who would have anything to gain by Raymond’s death?”
“Nobody,” he said, still staring at the ceiling. “Everyone knew Raymond was irreplaceable.”
Cody nodded.
“One request,” Stembler added, giving Cody a piercing look. “Leave my daughter out of this. She’s very fragile… She doesn’t handle emotion very well.”?
The elevator was empty on the way down. Cody didn’t say anything for the first few floors.
“I could use a cup of coffee,” Kate said.
“Me too. There’s a coffee shop on the corner.”
“I’ve never had to do that before.”
“There’s no easy way to do it, you know,” he said. “All that pomp and circumstance. And you know you’re going to pull the rug out from under him. A man with everything and with two words you turn triumph into tragedy. You just have to throw it on the table and let it play out.”
He was silent until they hit the main floor.
“All of a sudden there’s a face on the dead man,” Kate said. “It’s nice to know someone loved him. It kind of balances the way he died.”
“Yeah, it’s nice to think so. You’ve had a tough first day and it isn’t even lunch time.”
“Comes with the territory, right?”
“Dog work,” he answered.
“Are you going to interview Linda Stembler?”
“Only if I need to,” Cody replied. “She didn’t kill him. She knew nothing about his moonlighting activities.”
“How can you be sure?” Kate asked.
As they left the building they heard a screech above them and looking up saw a peregrine falcon swoop between the buildings. It dove low and circled over Cody’s head and then swept back up and darted away. He stared at it hypnotically.
“It’s that falcon that nests uptown,” Kate said excitedly. “Have you seen it before?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes.”
As the bird dove behind a building, a chill streaked through him. He shook it off.
“You okay?” Kate asked.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I was thinking about options.”
“Options?”
“Yeah. Like ruling them out, narrowing the field. Take Stembler. When I mentioned options he just phased out. He was so busy worrying about the consequences of Handley’s death suddenly he didn’t care who killed Raymond or why.”
“The hauteur of the successful business man,” Kate said.
“Right. What happened to Raymond no longer has any validity in his world.”
They reached the door to the coffee shop and he looked up as he held the door open for her, his eyes tracing the arc of the falcon as it swept through the spires of Wall Street.
“Maybe he wasn’t a specific target.”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose his murder was nothing personal. Suppose his addiction put him in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“You mean an accident?”
“No. Maybe Raymond was picked at random. Maybe he was the victim of some perverse, unthinkable kind of rage.”
12
In the autopsy lab, Wolfsheim and Annie Rothschild had completed their work and replaced the parts of Handley’s body they had removed for analysis. Annie Rothschild, who had some medical experience before becoming a police officer, had been working as Wolfsheim’s denier, his assistant, when he performed autopsies.
A petite brunette in her early thirties, Rothschild had all the rigid criteria for a spot on the squad but it was Wolfsheim who had recommended her after watching her at trial during a difficult cross examination by a high profile defense attorney. She had lured the lawyer with simple “yes” and “no” answers on some details of a particularly brutal homicide. Thinking he could make a fool of her on the stand, he had thrown some intricate pathology questions at her.
To his chagrin, she not only had acquitted herself admirably with her keen knowledge of forensics but had led the lawyer into uncharted waters. Watching her dismantle the lawyer’s defense, Wolfsheim realized that Rothschild had carefully orchestrated her performance as a witness to make the lawyer look like a fool. His client was convicted and Annie had become a prime candidate for the TAZ.
While they were completing their work they had both listened through earphones to the initial debriefing Cody was conducting in the HQ so both of them knew what had been accomplished thus far. They washed up and crossed the hallway.
Wolf entered the room rumpled and enervated like a sigh waiting to be uttered, his eyes temporarily atrophic from the demands of minute scrutiny, his fingers gnarled by restless and constant exploration, his shoulders bowed by the relentless probing and dismemberment of what had once been Raymond Handley.
As always, his psyche was momentarily askew. He performed each autopsy compassionately. They were constant reminders of the finite line between life and death, between the human body and a corpse without a soul.
And there had been the physical demands: cutting open the body and dictating his findings into the microphone that hung just over his head; looking for signs of mischief in the intricate collaboration of veins, capillaries, and arteries that stitched together the pulpy organs that had supplied and supported life to the now smelly, inanimate mess that lay before him; collecting blood and fluids and slicing sections of bones; examining the lifeless eyes and slicing open the skull to reveal what secrets the brain might reveal; weighing heart, liver, lungs, kidneys and the myriad other elements of the once miraculous human machine that he was dissecting in his quest for whatever explicitly had destroyed it.