TWO
“Maybe the White House ought to find POTUS another place to stay,” I said, refilling my cup with strong black coffee and sitting back on a yellow flocked love seat, flanked by a pair of cops in deep-blue uniforms.
“Every president since Herbert Hoover has been put up at the Waldorf Towers. The whole entourage. Secret Service and NYPD make the run from here to the UN like clockwork, and they’ve got every inch of this place figured out,” Rocco said. “Besides, Scully’s dep checked with all the major hotels in the zone. Mid-August? Every tourist and convention has a lock on all the acceptable places in town.”
“But you won’t even be done processing this one, will you?”
“Crime Scene was here by five thirty tonight. Did a thorough job on the two rooms but-”
“Find anything?”
“It’s a hotel suite, Alex. You know how many frigging fingerprint overlays they got? Hundreds of ’em. Not a clean lift in the place. Not even a partial in blood. Nothing on the porcelain surfaces in the bathroom. It all suggests a total pro.” Rocco put his coffee down and started for the door. “Forget your impulsive rapist.”
“Don’t blow me off like that.” There were detectives and supervisors who welcomed the insights of my senior colleagues, men and women who had worked the toughest cases shoulder to shoulder with their NYPD counterparts for many years. Rocco wanted to pick my brain about the sex crimes aspect of this case, but he didn’t care for guidance in his hunt for a murderer.
“You interrupted me,” he said sharply. “What did the guys find in the room, you want to know? No prints of value. Some trace evidence to be analyzed, probably from the maid service or a recent guest. Blood on the bed and on the floor-most likely the killer had spatter on his clothes. Didn’t stop here to wash up, though. Got away somehow, and may have left with the deceased’s belongings, too. Cool character. Maybe two of them.”
“Crime Scene must have a ton more work in the building,” I said, leaning forward.
“Second team was pulled in from the Bronx. The hotel is like an anthill full of cops. You know how many people-guests, visitors, employees, deliverymen-have pressed elevator buttons for the forty-fifth floor in the last two days? They’re dusting and scraping and looking for specks of blood, but it’s crazy, Alex. Give me a perv who likes to do his business in a small walk-up or a tiny boutique hotel or even a flophouse on the Bowery.”
“Not so many flophouses left down there, Loo.”
“Yeah, well, this killer could have targeted the Surrey or the Carlyle, some fancy digs farther uptown in Manhattan North. He had to do this on my watch?”
“Peterson doesn’t need another headache,” I said.
The city’s last high-profile homicide had taken place in Central Park, almost two months earlier, in June. It left me shattered for several weeks and resulted in Mike Chapman being suspended without pay for twenty-one days. He’d been burned by the embarrassment of his punishment for a personal transgression, then added a month of vacation to the rip imposed by the department to visit family in Ireland.
“Like you do?” Rocco said. “Kiss your weekend plans good-bye. No jaunting up to Martha’s Vineyard on Friday.”
“Guess not.” But I had already ditched plans to fly up to my house, even though August was high season and many of the friends I didn’t get to see all year spent part of this month at the beach.
Mike was coming home at the end of this week, and he had asked me to have dinner with him on Saturday night. Our ten-year friendship, marked by an intense professional partnership that had circled around the prospect of personal intimacy for so long, had taken a slight turn on a June night, in the middle of Central Park. Mike’s suspension, and his European travels, had given me far too much time to think about what might be next. My anxiety level was high.
“You got anything from Mercer?”
“Sorry? What did you ask me?”
“Don’t zone out on me, Alex. The night is young.”
I checked for a text. “He’ll be up here within the hour. Before nine o’clock.”
In between that last murder investigation in Central Park and this one, the sweltering summer heat had added to the volatility of feuds. Drug gangs in Brooklyn were responsible for three shootings in July, the usual domestics left six women dead citywide, and an array of road rage, drunk drivers, deranged psych patients for whom there was no place in mental facilities had spiked the murder rate. The Manhattan District Attorney’s aggressive and creative crime strategies had taken the figures to a dramatic new low, but the recent blip in numbers had everyone questioning whether the cycle was trending up again or if the brutal weather patterns had simply ignited violent tempers.
A detective appeared in the doorway. “Excuse me, Loo. The medical examiner’s on his way up, and I just got a call from the housekeeper over in the ER. She’s stable, and they’re sending her home.”
“What’s wrong with her?” I got to my feet and walked toward Rocco.
“Palpitations. Totally freaked out by finding the body,” Rocco said. “Thought she was having a heart attack. Two of the men from the Seventeenth Precinct who got to the scene early took a good statement from her. We did elimination prints and swabbed her mouth for DNA.”
He turned back to the detective. “Tell the housekeeper we might need her to be available for a reinterview tomorrow. See if her memory improves once she calms down.”
“Memory problems?” I asked.
“I’ll show you the notes. Saw nothing, heard nothing. I’m not sure she was so clueless, or that she just doesn’t want to be involved. You can take a run at her when you’re ready.”
I slipped past the detective and let Rocco give the man his next orders. I paced the hallway in front of the elevator bank, waiting for Johnny Mayes to step off. At forty-five, he had established a solid reputation as a brilliant pathologist who worked well with the senior prosecutorial staff. Once he finished his site exam, the young woman’s body would be removed to the chief medical examiner’s office, where Mayes would perform the autopsy, probably tomorrow.
“Johnny,” I said, greeting him as he stepped off the elevator, wheeling his equipment bag behind him.
“Alexandra Cooper,” he said, bowing at the waist. “Did they shoot you out of a cannon? Have I kept you terribly long?”
He was about the same height as I-five feet ten-but his stout build was a distinct contrast to my slim frame. Mayes was a wine enthusiast whose refined tastes and interests seemed to lift him out of the dark world in which he spent an inordinate amount of his time.
“Not at all.” I pointed the way to the suite, and we walked the long corridor together. “I’m waiting for Mercer to come back up here so we can make a plan, and everyone’s terribly curious to hear what you have to say. The manager brought up fresh coffee if you need a jump start.”
“I’ll take it,” he said. “Who’ve we got? Rocco?”
“And Pug.”
Johnny smirked as he turned his head to me. “Seriously? And who’ll do damage control for his mouth?”
“That falls to me, I’d guess.”
“You have thoughts on this yet?”
“Waiting for your observations, Doc.”
Mayes unzipped his bag and reached in for a gown to wear over his long-sleeved shirt. He turned so that I could tie the strips behind his back. He leaned on my shoulder while he covered his brown leather shoes with booties, then fitted himself into a pair of gloves.
“Lots of blood, I understand.”
“Understatement.”
“You game for a forensic adventure, Alex?”
My office had pioneered the courtroom introduction of some of the most advanced scientific techniques since we first attempted to use DNA technology-unsuccessfully-in a 1986 homicide. Paul Battaglia, the longtime district attorney, had thrown his support behind unconventional approaches to solving crime. Biologists at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner’s lab gave us groundbreaking tools, from familial searches of genetic matches via blood relatives of a suspect to my recent Frye hearing on the use of an FST-Forensic Statistical Tool-to evaluate evidentiary material with low mixtures, rather than complete profiles, determining the probability the substance contained the perp’s DNA.