Brooke noticed the room was still a crime scene. Chalk, tape and numbered cards populated the area around the massive bloodstain just beyond the front door. She bent down and examined the bloodstain closely, concluding the amount and pattern was consistent with a severed carotid artery of a large man. She walked over to the couch and noted there was some slight blood splatter. She went into the bathroom. The towels were unused, the maid’s fold was still the finishing touch on the new toilet paper roll, the soap was unopened, and none of the liquid amenities were touched. Most johns would wash after a tryst with a hooker. She looked one more time and noticed that, although the bath towels were folded and neat, there seemed to be one missing. She walked out and looked around again. She walked to the window and raised the shade but it snapped up all the way and spun on its roller. Outside the window was a fire escape ladder. A spot of blood was on the sill. Since the bed was made, she reasoned that Abrim didn’t die after having sex. Therefore, the argument must have happened before, in the negotiation phase. Brooke left the room, shutting the door.
Back at the club she approached the bar. There was a bartender in a Bruce Springsteen shirt, so she figured she could ask in English, “Is the boss in?”
“Are you meaning this boss? Or my boss?”
“Yours.”
“Over there by the DJ,” the bartender said.
Brooke approached the DJ booth and saw a man in a leather jacket who was barking orders at the DJ. “Excuse me! Do you speak English?”
“A little; how may I satisfy you?”
“Yes, you do only speak a little. I want to see your security tapes from the night of the Saudi murder three weeks ago.”
Then a voice came from behind her, “He doesn’t have them, we do.”
Brooke turned saying, “Who are…” but stopped when she saw Lustig. “Captain, I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Yet I fully expected to find you. Let’s get out of here.”
Back at FedPol H.Q., Captain Lustig had a technician cue up the surveillance tape from the club. The tech looked at the index sheet wrapped around the tape case and fast-forwarded to 11:23 p.m. on the time-code window, then hit play.
Lustig narrated the scene, “The first we see of Abrim is here, when he approaches the woman on the dance floor. It is obvious he is inviting her over to where he is sitting and from the look of it, she declines his invitation.” He put his hand on the machine operator’s shoulder and instructed, “Now go to the next time.”
The tech checked the next time noted on the sheet and shuttled in fast speed to that number.
“Here it’s a little hard to see because they are at a table in the upper part of the screen, but he comes to her while she is alone at the table and again she turns him down. Then we never see him again.”
The tech stops the tape. It freezes on the woman at the table. Brooke walks over to the screen. “What about her; you think this is the hooker?”
“Can’t say for sure. No one knows her; she is not a regular working girl. We think maybe she was the girlfriend of the geeky guy she was dancing with. They may be nothing more than tourists. Maybe when Abrim struck out with her, it was only then that he sought the company of a woman of the evening.”
“Maybe. Could you play the tape from here?”
“Abrim is gone. There’s nothing more,” Lustig said, his voice showing a tint of futility.
“Indulge me.” Brooke watched as the woman sat until the geeky guy returned with two drinks. A few seconds later she reached down into his lap and the geek reacted. Then they left.
“Let me see the dancing again.”
The tech rewound and ran the part of the tape where the girl and the geek were dancing. Brooke watched intently. She recognized the signs of the game; the geek was trying to impress her. She was ignoring him. To Brooke, the girl’s hair hung like a wig. She also noticed the geek’s eyes couldn’t be pried from the woman’s chest. “These two are not a couple; they aren’t on a date. This guy is strutting his stuff for her and she is ignoring him. He can’t keep his eyes off her chest. That’s not a couple who have had sex before. Plus, with the wig, I’m guessing she’s a hooker. She may not be our hooker, but she is definitely working this poor schmuck.”
“Are there any other angles? Outside the club?”
“No. This is all there is.”
“Do you have the testimony of all the witnesses?”
“Yes, transcripts.”
“May I see them?”
Lustig’s eyes got big. “All of them?”
“I have all night.”
Three hours later, Lustig yawned and came into the room where Brooke was poring over the transcripts with a Swiss policewoman, who really didn’t want to be there this late, translating.
“Read that back to me again,” Brooke said.
“About a minute later the big guy left. He went east on foot.”
“Okay and now go back up a few lines. What did the bouncer say about the couple?”
The policewoman yawned and flipped back through the sheets bound across the top. “‘Er…I had just let two guys in and then a blonde and a skinny guy walked out.’ Then the officer asks, ‘Did you see their faces?’ The doorman replies, ‘No they walked away from me.’”
Brooke slapped the table.
“What?” Lustig asked from the doorway as he was just entering the room.
“She may be our hooker. The way this reads, Abrim followed them out of the club, down the street to the hotel.”
“But the bouncer, as you called him, says he didn’t see their faces.” Lustig pointed at the transcript in the policewoman’s hand.
“Last night the doorman had a stanchion with a proof light and stamp pad to the left of the door. If he had just let someone in, he was behind that little podium and facing east with his back to the west like he was last night. So they went east as well, same direction as Abrim did a minute later, and for my money, right to the same hotel.”
“Are you saying the geek killed Abrim?”
“That skinny malink? He could never get the drop on a two-hundred-eighty-pound security guard, much less jam a broken bottle into his throat.”
“So what you are saying, Agent Burrell, is that Abrim follows them, has sex with both of them? Then doesn’t want to pay for the extras, so she calls her pimp, and he and Abrim get into a fight?”
“No that’s not it; the bed was untouched. No one had sex. It all came down before anything else happened. Did forensics match the blood on the couch and the blood on the sill?”
Lustig sighed. “Hold on; I can’t believe I am not home right now,” he muttered as he rifled through the reports looking for the blood-splatter analysis. “Here it is. The blood on the carpet and on the table legs was that of the victim. The blood on the couch was diluted with saliva and was not the victim’s, but matched the spot on the sill.”
“Okay, last question. Crime scene photos?”
Lustig pulled out the jacket on the bottom of the pile. He spread out the photos from the crime scene. Brooke scanned each one. She tapped the one where the towel was shown on the side of the couch. She then found a different angle from another photo.
“Do you have the towel in evidence?”
“Of course; and yes I have the forensics,” he said, anticipating her next request as he rifled through the paperwork and finally found the pages on the towel. “The bath towel was standard from the hotel laundry and was in the room when it was occupied. It was rolled up and did not have any blood on it, so it was deemed not to be crucial to the investigation.”
“Can we get that towel to the lab? I want a skin cell analysis.”
“First off, you are not a Swiss police officer. Second, it is eleven o’clock, and third, what is your suspicion?”
“The towel ended up behind the couch so it was protected from blood spray, but somehow it got rolled up and into the room. There was no sex, and as far as I can tell there was no use of the sink or bathroom, since it remained as housekeeping left it prior to the occupant’s entry, and the murder. So why the rolled towel?”