A Clean Kill (29 page)

Talked to Remy today about her request for a raise—-too soon, not a proven entity yet.

Eloise counted them and found, to her surprise, that the file contained more than forty comments about every aspect of Remy's conduct. Jo Ellen was concerned abut the amount of food Remy consumed at the house, her hours, her demeanor, her personal habits, the amount of money she spent while running errands. Jo Ellen had mounting doubts about Remy's viability as a domestic.

Half an hour after Eloise started, Charlie came into her office. "This is worse than one of our files," he said. "This girl sounds like a nightmare. She was fired from her former job. Jo Ellen was giving her a second chance. At this job she was accused of stealing a diamond bracelet, but nothing could be proved. There were other people in the house at the time. What about yours?" he asked.

"No accusations of theft, but that Anderson woman seems to be something of a nightmare herself."

The phone rang, and Eloise picked up. "Sergeant Gelo."

"Hey, I'm at the lab. What did you find out?"

"Hello, Lieutenant. We paid a visit to the Anderson Agency."

"How did that go?"

"It went well. We got the files. It seems Lynn was fired from her former job. Perkins was her last chance at Anderson. She may have stolen a diamond bracelet from Alison. Remy was too cozy with Wayne Wilson and had an attitude problem. The two girls were closer than Anderson liked. The Anderson woman seems to be unusually intrusive for a placement person."

"Okay, what about the warrant check?"

Eloise smiled at Charlie. "Charlie's working on that now," she said. "Are you coming in?"

"Maybe later, I'll let you know," Woo replied.

"Okay."

"Anything else?" Woo asked.

"Yes, in a few minutes, we're meeting the stripper from Spirit who gave the drugs to Peret."

. "I wish I were there," Woo said.

"How do you want us to handle it?" "You have her number in his cell phone and her message from that night in his voice mail, right? We can put her away for dealing if we need to."

"What if she has no priors?" Eloise asked.

"Hang on to her for a while, and give her a little taste of the law. She'll tattle on her boss and everyone else she knows."

"Will do."

"And keep in touch," were Woo's last words.

forty

A
pril hung up with Eloise and went downstairs to the Crime Scene unit. She found Woody talking to Chad, who looked as if he had all the time in -the world. Although she and Igor went way back, Chad and Mark were pretty new to the unit and she'd never worked with them before. Chad Westerman was a skinny guy with a round shaved head and pale blue eyes—a real white ghost. Mark wasn't around. At the task force headquarters in the Seventeenth Precinct there was an electric atmosphere of urgency. Here, it didn't look as if much was happening.

The lab was where the engineers of crime brought the hundreds of tagged items taken from every crime scene to be analyzed. Here was the nuts-and-bolts world of forensic science. The CSU worked with the specialists and were the ones who stayed on task day and night, making models—of rooms, buildings, sometimes whole areas. They prepared the charts, graphs, and computerized reen-actments of homicides, and tested the tools of death for a match. In a multiple-stabbing case like that of Maddy Wilson, they would find or create something that closely resembled human tissue and bone and use a variety of sharp instruments on it to try to find patterns consistent with Maddy's wounds. Ingenuity was the name of the game. The two detectives idly watched her hurry toward them through the maze of desks.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"I filled him in on Perkins," Woody said.

Chad looked pensive. "Maybe this is some kind of mission killer," he said.

That was someone who had a sick purpose for his crimes, who wanted to punish a particular type of person like nurses, prostitutes—or young mothers. Nobody had used the term before, and April swallowed the feeling of panic that had been building in her all morning. Maddy's murder had looked like a single tragic, but isolated, event. Alison's murder was unexpected and raised the serial-killer specter. The FBI would come on the scene and the case would mushroom in the press. But beyond that, the killing itself was a frightening escalation that didn't fit with any serial killer's profile she'd ever seen. At the onset, the need to kill and kill again usually developed over time. The perpetrator had to become confident that he was smarter than everyone else and could get away with murder before he tried attacking again. It was a head game as well as a craving. Usually, this kind of killer would relish a violent act in his fantasies for months, or even years, before striking again. It took a lot of energy to plan and carry out a face-to-face killing.

Even in those violent crimes that occurred in remote places where a killer took advantage of a passerby's vulnerable moment, it was not so easy to design a murder and carry it off. Every step was stressful and required preparation. New York City was a busy place. Even in quiet neighborhoods, people were on the- streets, walking their dogs and going to work, and somebody always knew something. April imagined an arrogant individual walking down the street, getting into those two town houses in the early morning hours, surprising Maddy and Alison, and killing them. That person had been comfortable enough to spend time there afterward, arranging the bodies and washing them up. In Alison's case the killer had touched her clothes, tidied her bedroom and possibly taken her rings. It was ghoulish and upsetting, and had ritual elements about it. Then the killer had walked out of that house—or stayed to "discover" the bodies. He (or she) would know that an army of experts would be in there, searching for traces he'd left behind. Every step had to be intensely stressful.

It was not like shooting a gun from across the street. It would be more like running the Kentucky Derby, performing in the Super Bowl—hot and furious and deeply personal. What kind of person could summon that kind of energy, that kind of killing passion, twice in two days? April shook her head over their list of suspects. The trainer, who milked the victims for cash and knew their habits, hadn't left his apartment since last night when he got home from his police interview. He had to be ruled out for both murders. The disgruntled nannies who had just been fired—each acting alone or in concert with two husbands fed up with trophy wives—seemed unlikely murderers. But a mission killer? She'd been over it and over it, and prayed

that it wasn't someone off the police radar screen, hiding in the shadows, and waiting until tomorrow to kill again.

"I went upstairs. Ducci doesn't have anything. Rick doesn't have anything. What's holding things up?" April didn't have all year.

"We're going good on it. We're still processing." Chad glanced quickly at Woody.

• "When are you getting started? I need a time frame here."

"We are started," he replied coolly. "What do you need?"

"Cooperation. We're looking at the two homicides as connected. There are similarities in the crime scenes. You have to get with Igor."

"No problem."

"How far did you go in the Wilson house?"

"We did the usual."

"What about blood? Did you find any?"

Chad shrugged. "Not much. There were traces in the grout. Marble tiles, you know, are set much closer together than porcelain, but there were traces in the grout in the walls and floor."

"What about the drain?"

"She must have washed her hair in that shower. There was a lot of hair in the drain."

"Blood?"

He nodded. "In the hair."

"Anything else?"

"What are you looking for?"

"I'm not sure. Fibers from the killer's clothes. Hair from the head of the killer, or his body if he was naked in there with her."

"Was she sexually assaulted?" Woody asked.

"Damn." April had forgotten to ask the ME.

"Is that a yes?"

"We don't have a prelim yet," April said. "I don't know."

"So, what's the rush?" Chad scratched the side of his face. He had his own time frame.

April ignored the question. "What about mops, towels, cleaning things?" she asked.

"There was a bucket in the garage. It's filled with cleaning utensils, including a mop that had recently been used."

"Blood?"

"We haven't tested anything yet, but it did have a piece of plastic stuck to it."

April frowned. "What kind of plastic?"

"I'm guessing the kind they use for fold-up travel raincoats, or to cover outdoor furniture. It looks dried out, old. We'll check it out. I'd guess raincoat, though," he added, as if he were a raincoat connoisseur.

"Interesting," April murmured. "What about the knives?"

"We haven't started on that. As I said, we're still processing."

"Okay, thanks. We'll be in touch. Woody, meet me at the car in five minutes."

Deep in thought, April went upstairs to see Duke. He didn't turn around when her heels announced her presence. He was busy with his equipment.

"How are you doing?" she asked.

He pulled away from the hair he was studying and checked his watch for time. "I told you an hour. It hasn't been an hour yet," he complained.

"I can't wait. I have suspects to talk to," she said.

He softened. "Okay, pretty one, anything for you," he said with an indulgent smile.

"Here's what I can tell you now. The hair probably comes from a female. It's been dyed a number of times, probably every month, six weeks. You can see the stripes of color. As you know, hair grows at the rate of about a quarter inch a month and no matter how carefully the roots are done, there's always a color change. Type of hair, coarse, and I'd say it's probably dyed to cover gray. I can't tell you what brand of hair dye was used yet, but I'll work on it. Happily, there's a follicle on this one— enough to do DNA down the road, if you need it. But the provenance on this is not good since you lifted it from the scene." He shook his head.

"I told you CSU had another." April ignored the rebuke and considered the information. If the hair came from a gray-haired female, she had to be over thirty. It might be the cleaning lady or a guest from some time ago. If that was the case, it wouldn't help them.

"Anything else?" he asked.

"Yes, what color is it?"

He took out his color spectrum and showed her. While the single hair in the envelope had appeared to be light, like a blond or strawberry blond, or even ginger, the Duke made the head at unmistakably dark red.

"Are you sure?" she asked, disappointed.

"Yes, I'm sure. Are you okay?"

"Of course. Thanks, you've been a big help," she told him even though she hadn't learned a thing.

"You're welcome, and don't wait so long to come back next time," he said as she left in a hurry.

When April met Woody at the car a few minutes later, she was ready to search his photos for a redheaded woman, but she was not at all hopeful about finding one.

forty-one

R
emy was on the sofa in the living room of Wayne's suite on the tenth floor at the Plaza Hotel when two detectives knocked on the door. Her backpack was beside her, ready to go, and she was watching the news about Alison's murder. The day before when she was questioned for hours by the police, her thoughts had been all over the place. Whenever things had gone badly for her in the past, she'd hit the road and taken off. A pretty girl with some college education and a way with food, she'd always' been able to get a job cooking somewhere.

Experience had taught her long ago that most people weren't very good, or at least weren't good for long—like her dad promising to stay off the bottle. So when things soured, she just moved on. She liked to think of herself as an actor in a movie, waiting for her real life to begin. Now the wish for a bus was strong, but she couldn't run away with so many people watching. She jumped at the knock on the door.

"Police, open up."

She pulled herself off the sofa and went to the door. Two overweight men she hadn't seen before were standing outside. They looked bloated from too many french fries and doughnuts and might have a stroke if they had to run after her. The thought that she could beat them in a race didn't comfort her.

"Remy Banks?" one queried.

"Yes. Could I see your identification?" she said with more determination than she felt.

She looked down the long empty hall behind them and considered bolting as they reached for their gold shields. She wondered if they would shoot her in the Plaza. Too late, the shields appeared, and they blocked her escape route as she studied them. "No one's here," she said meekly, as if there were the slightest chance they hadn't come for her.

"That's okay, little lady. We're going for a ride."