Absolute Power (15 page)

Small-caliber contact wounds, those fired muzzle to flesh, and near-contact wounds fired from a distance of less than two inches from the target, could duplicate the types of entry wounds present on the victim. But there would be powder residue deep in the tissues along the bullet track if they were looking at a contact wound. The autopsy would definitively answer that question.

Next Frank looked at the contusion on the left side of her jaw. It was partially hidden by the natural blistering of the body as it decomposed but Frank had seen enough corpses to tell the difference. The surface of the skin there was a curious amalgamation of green, brown and black. A big blow had done that. A man? That was confusing. He called Stu over to take pictures of the area with a color scale. Then he laid the head back down with the reverence the deceased deserved even under the largely clinical circumstances.

The medico-legal autopsy to follow would not be so deferential.

Frank slowly lifted the skin. Underwear intact. The autopsy protocol would answer the obvious question.

Frank moved around the room as the CU members continued their work. One thing about living in a rich, although largely rural county, the tax base was more than enough to support a first-rate if relatively small crime scene unit complete with all the latest technology and devices that theoretically made catching bad people easier.

The victim had fallen on her left side, away from the door. Knees tucked partially under her, left arm stretched out, the other against her right hip. Her face was pointed east, perpendicular with the right side of the bed; she was almost in a fetal position. Frank rubbed his nose. From beginning to end, back to the beginning. Nobody ever knew how they were going to eventually exit this old world, did they?

With Simon’s help he did the triangulation of the body’s location; the tape measure made a screeching sound as it unwound. It sounded somehow unholy in this room of death. He looked at the doorway and the position of the body. He and Simon performed a preliminary trajectory path of the shots. That indicated the shots most probably came from the doorway, which with a burglary you’d expect the other way around if the perp was caught in the act. However, there was another piece of evidence that would pretty much confirm which way the slugs had traveled.

Frank again kneeled next to the body. There were no drag marks across the carpet and the bloodstains and spray patterns indicated the deceased was shot at the spot she had fallen. Frank carefully turned to the body, again lifting up the skirt. Postmortem, blood settles to the lowest portions of the body, a condition called livor mortis. After four to six hours, the livor mortis remains fixed in position. Consequently, movement of the body does not lead to a change in distribution of blood. Frank laid the body back down. All indications were strong that Christine Sullivan had died right here.

The spray patterns also reinforced the conclusion that the deceased was probably facing toward the bed when she met her end. If so, what the hell had she been looking at? Normally a person about to be shot would look in the direction of the assailant, pleading for their life. Christine Sullivan would have begged, Frank was certain of that. The detective looked at the opulent surroundings. She had a lot to live for.

He eyed the carpet carefully, his face barely inches from its surface. The spray patterns were irregularly distributed as though something had been lying in front of or to the side of the deceased. That could prove to be important later on. Much had been written about spray patterns. Frank respected their usefulness, but tried not to read too much into them. But if something had partially shielded the carpet from the blood, he would want to know what that something was. Also the absence of spotting on her dress puzzled him. He would catalogue that one away; it might mean something too.

Simon opened her rape kit and with Frank’s assistance swabbed the deceased’s vagina. Next they combed through both the hair on her head and her pubic hair with nothing readily apparent in the way of foreign substances. Next they bagged the victim’s clothing.

Frank looked over the body minutely. He glanced at Simon. She read his mind.

“There’s not going to be any, Seth.”

“Indulge me, Laurie.”

Simon dutifully lugged her print kit over and applied powder to the corpse’s wrists, breasts, neck and inside upper arms. After a few seconds she looked at Frank and slowly shook her head. She bagged what they did find.

He watched as the body was wrapped in a white sheet, deposited in a body pouch and taken outside where a silent ambulance would transport Christine Sullivan to a place everyone prayed they would never have to go.

He next viewed the vault, noted the chair and remote. Dust patterns on the floor of the vault had been disturbed. Simon had already covered the area. There was a smudge of dust on the chair seat. The vault had been forced though; the door and wall were heavily marked where the lock had been broken. They would cut out the levered piece of evidence, see if they could get a tool print. Frank looked back through the vault door and shook his head. One-way mirror. That was real nice. In the bedroom too. He couldn’t wait to meet the man of the house.

He went back into the room, looked down at the picture on the nightstand. He looked over at Simon.

“I’ve already got it, Seth,” she said. He nodded and picked up the picture. Nice-looking woman, he thought to himself, real nice-looking in a come-fuck-me kind of way. The photo had been taken in this very room, the recently departed seated in the chair next to the bed. Then he noticed the mark on the wall. The place had real plaster walls instead of the usual drywall, but the mark was still deep. Frank noted the nightstand had been moved slightly; the thick carpet betrayed its original position. He turned to Magruder.

“Looks like somebody slammed into this.”

“Probably during the struggle.”

“Probably.”

“Find the slug yet?”

“One’s still in her, Seth.”

“I mean the other one, Sam.” Frank impatiently shook his head. Magruder pointed to the wall beside the bed where a small hole was barely visible.

Frank nodded. “Cut the section and let the lab boys pull it out. Don’t screw with it yourself.” Twice in the last year ballistics had been rendered useless because an overzealous uniform had scraped a bullet out of a wall, ruining the striations.

“Any brass?”

Magruder shook his head. “If the murder weapon ejected any spent shells, they’ve been picked up.”

He turned to Simon. “Any treasures from the E-vac?” The evidence vacuum was a highly powerful machine that, utilizing a series of filters, was used to comb the carpet and other materials for fibers, hairs and other small objects that more often than not turned out big dividends because if the perps couldn’t see ’em, they weren’t going to try to remove ’em.

Magruder tried to joke. “My carpet should be that clean.”

Frank looked at his CU team. “Did we find any trace, peo ple?” They all looked at one another not knowing if Frank was kidding or not. They were still wondering when he walked out of the room and went downstairs.

A representative from the alarm company was talking with a uniformed officer at the front door. A CU member was packing the plate and wires in plastic evidence bags. Frank was shown where the paint had been slightly chipped and an almost microscopic metal shard indicated that the panel had been removed. On the wiring were small toothlike indentations. The security rep looked admiringly at the lawbreaker’s handiwork. Magruder joined them, his color slowly returning.

The rep was nodding his head. “Yep, they probably used a counter. Looks that way anyway.”

Seth looked at him. “What’s that?”

“Computer-assisted method of ramming massive numbers of combinations into the system’s recognition bank until they hit the right combo. You know, like they do to bust the ATMs.”

Frank looked at the gutted panel and then back at the man. “I’m surprised a place like this wouldn’t have a more sophisticated system.”

“It is a sophisticated system.” The rep sounded defensive.

“Lotta crooks using computers these days.”

“Yeah, but the thing is, this baby has a fifteen-digit base, not a ten, and a forty-three-second delay. You don’t hit it, the gate comes crashing down.”

Frank rubbed his nose. He would have to go home and shower. The stench of death warmed over several days in a hot room left its indelible mark on your clothes, hair and skin. And sinuses.

“So?” Frank asked.

“So, the portable models you’d most likely have to use on a job like this can’t crunch enough combos through in thirty seconds or so. Shit, based on a fifteen-digit configuration you’re looking at over a trillion-three in possibles. It’s not like the guy’s gonna be lugging around a PC.”

The OIC piped in. “Why thirty seconds?”

Frank answered. “They needed some time to get the plate off, Sam.” He turned back to the security man. “So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that if he knocked this system over with a numbers cruncher then he had already eliminated some of the possible digits from the process. Maybe half, maybe more. I mean maybe you got a system that’ll do it all right, or they might’ve rigged something up that could pop this cage. But you’re not talking cheap hardware and you’re not talking some bozos off the street that walked into a Radio Shack and came out with a calculator. I mean they’re making computers faster and smaller every day but you gotta realize that the speed of
your
hardware doesn’t solve the problem. You gotta factor in how fast the security system’s computer will respond back to all the combos flowing in. It’s probably gonna be a lot slower than your equipment. And then you gotta big problem. Bottom line if I were these guys I’d want a nice comfort zone, you know what I’m saying? In their line of work, you don’t get second chances.”

Frank looked at the man’s uniform and then back at the panel. If the guy was right he knew what that meant. His line of thinking had already moved in that direction by virtue of the fact that the front door had not been forced or even nominally tampered with.

The security company rep continued, “I mean we could eliminate the possibility entirely. We have systems that refuse to react to massive combos being forced down their throat. Computers would be jackshit useless. Problem is those systems are so sensitive to interference they were also routinely slamming down on owners who couldn’t seem to remember their numbers on the first or second try. Hell, we were getting hit with so many false alarms the police departments were starting to fine us. Go fucking figure.”

Frank thanked him and then moved through the rest of the house. Whoever had committed these crimes knew what they were doing. This was not going to be a quick one. Good pre crime planning usually meant equally good post-planning. But they probably hadn’t counted on blowing away the lady of the house.

Frank suddenly leaned against a doorway and pondered the word used by his friend the Medical Examiner:
wounds.

CHAPTER EIGHT

J
ACK WAS EARLY
. H
IS WATCH SHOWED ONE-THIRTY-FIVE
. H
E
had taken the day off, spending much of it deciding what to wear; something he had never concerned himself with before, but which now seemed vitally important.

He pulled at his gray tweed jacket, fingered a button on his white cotton shirt and adjusted the knot in his tie for the tenth time.

He walked down to the dock and watched the deck hands clean the
Cherry Blossom
, a tour ship built to resemble an old Mississippi riverboat. He and Kate had gone on it their first year in D.C. during a rare afternoon off from work. They had tried to hit all the touristy attractions. It had been a warm day like today, but clearer. Gray clouds were now rolling in from the west; afternoon thunderstorms were almost a given this time of year.

He sat on the weathered bench near the dockmaster’s small hut and followed the lazy drift of the sea gulls across the choppy water. The Capitol was visible from his vantage point. Lady Liberty, minus the collective filth of over a hundred and thirty years of residing outdoors thanks to a recent cleaning, stood imperiously on top of the famous dome. People in this town were encased in grime over time, Jack thought to himself, it just came with the territory.

Jack’s musings turned to Sandy Lord, the firm’s most prolific rainmaker, and the biggest ego Patton, Shaw had ever seen. Sandy was close to being an institution in the legal and political circles of D.C. The other partners dropped his name as though he had just that moment stepped down from Mount Sinai with his own version of the Ten Commandments, which would have commenced with “Thou Shalt Make Patton, Shaw and LORD Partners As Much Money As Possible.”

Ironically, Sandy Lord was part of the attraction when Ransome Baldwin had mentioned the firm. Lord was one of the best, if not the best example of a power lawyer the city had to offer, and it had dozens in that league. The possibilities were limitless for Jack. Whether those possibilities included his personal happiness, he was far from certain.

He was also not certain what he expected from this lunch. What he was sure about was that he wanted to see Kate Whitney. He wanted that very much. It seemed as though the closer his marriage came, the more he was emotionally retreating. And where more likely a spot to retreat than to the woman he had asked to marry him over four years ago? He shuddered as that memory engulfed him. He was terrified of marrying Jennifer Baldwin. Terrified that his life would soon become unrecognizable to him.

Something made him turn, he wasn’t sure what exactly. But she was standing there, at the edge of the pier, watching him. The wind whipped her long skirt around her legs, the sun battled the darkening clouds, but still provided enough light to sparkle across her face as she moved the long strands of hair from her eyes. The calves and ankles were summer brown. The loose blouse bared her shoulders, showing off the freckles, and the tiny half-moon birthmark Jack had the habit of tracing after they had finished making love, she asleep and he watching her.