"Last thing, Mike. You make any progress on Tiffany Gatts?"
"She won't be arraigned before morning. There was a labor demonstration over in the garment district, and the backup cause of all the extra arrests for dis con is cramming the system. Have Mercer walk you to your car. Mama Gatts'll be looking for blood."
"Thanks for the reminder."
"We may have a lead on the mink. Found an open squeal in the Seventeenth Precinct. UN delegate from France named du Rosier. Reported a theft six months back. He and his wife thought it was an inside job. His chauffeur had access to the apartment, even when the couple was back in Europe. A bunch of jewelry, two furs, and some pricey antique silver service."
"Any description?"
"The du Rosiers are traveling at the moment. I'll try and get something more detailed from their insurance company tomorrow. Speak to you then."
Mercer waited while I closed up and we headed out the door together. My car was parked near the intersection of Centre Street and Hogan Place, at the corner of the courthouse. The laminated NYPD plate displayed in the windshield was one of the privileges of rank in the office, and I was pleased that no one had double-parked me in place, as often happened when cops delivered prisoners to the courthouse.
The dump sticker from the town of Chilmark, where my home on Martha's Vineyard was located, and the Squibnocket beach pass on the rear window, were the only things that personalized my winter-green SUV. It was even more heartwarming to see that the Vineyard stickers had not seemed to draw the attention or wrath of Etta Gatts, who might have noticed the Vineyard posters in my office. The windows were intact.
I stepped off the curb at the rear of the car, keys in hand. Mercer went around in front to open the door for me.
"Looks like I'm your transportation for the evening," he said, taking the keys out of my hand. "Your car's in dry dock, Alex. Someone slashed your two front tires."
8
There is a cruel invasion of privacy that attends a death by violence.
Mercer and I sat in a small cubicle adjacent to the autopsy theater in the office of the chief medical examiner, Chet Kirschner. The brilliant pathologist had finished his work for the day, and was taking us through the Queenie Ransome homicide findings.
The strong odor of formalin was exaggerated by the closeness of the room. I coughed to clear my dry throat, listening to Kirschner's voice, which was so oddly comforting in these starkly clinical circumstances.
I stared at close-ups of the nude corpse, taken in her home by a Crime Scene Unit detective, shuffling them around on the table in front of me.
"There are two different scenarios you want to think about here," he told us, after describing what McQueen Ransome's body had revealed to him. "You remember the old Park Plaza cases?"
Both Mercer and I recognized the name. The building had been a flophouse on the West Side of Manhattan, a dilapidated single-room-occupancy hotel that was home to dozens of senior citizens living on welfare. Throughout a two-year period, several of the octogenarians had died without any suspicion of foul play.
"The first five women had no relatives in the city to raise any concerns, no property of any value, and histories of illness that allowed their physicians to certify their deaths as occurring from natural causes."
"They weren't even autopsied?" I asked.
Kirschner shook his head. "The sixth one was slightly different. Mildred Vargas. She owned a television set, and it was missing from her room when her body was found. We did a postmortem, even though there were no signs of a struggle, and we wound up with unexpected evidence that there had been a sexual assault."
"What killed her?" Mercer wanted to know.
"She was suffocated. Smothered with a pillow."
Exactly what Mike said had happened to Queenie.
"I got an order to exhume the other bodies and autopsy them," Kirschner said.
Mercer remembered the outcome. "All five had been raped."
"And smothered. No external signs of injury. Just the internal bruising, and the minute petechial hemorrhages in their eyes that the physicians missed in each case."
Hallmarks of an asphyxial death, the tiny red pinpoint markers were quiet indicators of strangulation and suffocation, blood vessels bursting in eyes as they were deprived of oxygen.
Kirschner straightened his lean body and rested an elbow atop a file cabinet. "That killer made a specialty of getting in and out of apartments with no visible signs of forced entry. He even took the time to re-dress three of his victims, so the sexual assault was not the least bit obvious. Chapman's looking to link McQueen Ransome's death to those cases."
"Do you have DNA in any of those?"
"In all of them, actually. Our own databank linked them to each other after the exhumation and examination."
"Has the profile been uploaded to Albany and CODIS?"
The medical examiner's local databank could match unsolved cases to each other because of evidence taken from a crime scene or victim's body. The profile would be sent on to Albany, and a computer would scan the results against convicted offenders in the New York State databank, who were mandated, according to category of criminal offense, to submit blood or saliva samples for the profiling of their DNA. CODIS, the Combined DNA Identification System, was capable of linking unsolved cases in one jurisdiction to a burglar, rapist, or killer anywhere in the entire country.
"Four months ago. We're still waiting for a cold hit."
"But there's no DNA in this case?"
"Not on the body. I told Chapman to go back and swab the doorknobs and some of the surfaces the killer may have touched."
The technology of this science had become so sophisticated that a serologist could develop a genetic fingerprint from the mere sloughing off of skin cells onto most objects that had been handled during the crime, called touch evidence.
"But you don't think this is your senior citizen serial killer?"
"Too many distinctions, Alex. The pillow was undoubtedly the weapon. That's certainly a similarity. We'll work it up for amylase," Kirschner said, referring to an enzyme found in saliva that might tell us whether the fabric had been held over Ransome's mouth to kill her.
"You're bothered by the fact there's no sexual assault, I guess," Mercer said. "What if he was interrupted? What if he meant to do that, but got distracted because, unlike the others, there really were so many possessions here that he ransacked the place. Maybe he thought someone heard noise and was coming to check on Queenie."
Kirschner removed a pipe from his rear pants pocket and raised it to his mouth.
He tamped tobacco in, lit the match, and filled the tiny room with the welcome aroma of a sweet, smooth blend that temporarily masked the smell of death.
"Possible, of course," he said. "But all the other crime scenes were in such perfect order. Chapman left these here for you two to study. Look again. Take your time."
The eight-by-ten color crime scene shots of the Ransome apartment had been developed immediately and hand-delivered to Kirschner.
"You've really got juice," I said. "I'd be lucky to get these in a week."
"Don't be jealous. It's not a full set. I just get a few body shots to get me started."
There was McQueen Ransome, lying on her back on the bed. Her housecoat was pulled up to expose her genitals, with panties and what appeared to be thick support hose rolled up in a ball beside her. Her head was turned to the side, faded hazel eyes fixed in a vacant gaze.
"Somebody sure wants to make the point about the sexual aspect of this," Mercer said. "Nothing like this in the Park Plaza cases?"
Kirschner shook his head. "No. Unless your killer read about the exhumations in the tabloids and decided to change his signature."