Defensive Wounds (13 page)

Bruce Raffel's body was cold, Theresa observed, the purplish lividity on his dorsal surface fixed. She guessed he'd been dead since the evening before. The bed appeared to have been slept in, covers rumpled and shoved completely to the opposite side; half of the heavy comforter rested on the floor. Theresa could see a few dark hairs—possibly the victim's—scattered on the snow-white sheets. Small blotches of dried blood, the castoff of several blows, traveled upward across the side of the bed. The weapon of choice, again, was the desk chair, a straight-backed wooden job with a seat cushioned in beige tapestry-look canvas. Perhaps Bruce Raffel had not been as hardheaded as Marie Corrigan, or maybe the killer grew weary—Theresa could see only three distinct gashes in the man's scalp. The black hair had already begun to thin; in another few years he would have worried about how to hide his bald spot from the jury. With his head turned slightly toward the window, Theresa could see that he had small brown eyes, fleshy cheeks, and did not go in for the five-o'clock shadow currently considered fashionable. He had shaved closely enough to nick his chin in two places.

His limbs had been bound by a pair of socks, she could now see—one had been knotted around his wrists and then the other looped through it to truss up the ankles. He wore no rings, only nails bitten to the quick and a few ink stains. Bruce Raffel had been taking notes in the past day or two, trying to get the most out of the conference.

Theresa straightened and looked around. Raffel had used the desk as a luggage rack, and clothes spilled out of the leather bag. One of the water glasses had been used and still had water in it—she would swab that for DNA. The plastic laundry bag sat on the floor next to the desk but seemed to hold only two pairs of socks and two pairs of cotton boxers, size XL, with the logo of some sports team Theresa didn't recognize. Not surprising, of course—there were only a few team logos she
would
recognize, all of them based in Cleveland.

Next to the bed, a man's watch and wallet and forty-two cents in change had been left on top of a
Cleveland
magazine, the watch carefully on its back, strap stretched out. Next to it sat a framed picture of two young boys, one behind the other on the back of a Jet Ski too big for them. One trail of cast-off blood had gone by the photo, and the blue water and sky were speckled with tiny red dots. Theresa's gaze lingered over the two small children who were never going to see their father again. She hoped their mother would invent some more palatable story to explain Bruce Raffel's death—a car accident, a heart attack—anything but hog-tied and bludgeoned in a cold hotel room in a strange city, anything but an S&M lark gone badly awry. Considering her line of work, Theresa did not have the horror of lies that perhaps she should. Sometimes the only humane option was to tell anything but the truth.

The picture on its nightstand, the suitcase—nothing showed any sign of a struggle. The desk chair with its one bloody appendage remained the only overturned item in the room. Bruce Raffel had died without the benefit of a pitched battle. A pair of pants, a striped dress shirt, and a pair of satin boxer shorts had been laid over the edge of the armchair next to the window, not left in a heap on the floor the way Marie Corrigan's were. Did that mean he had taken them off voluntarily?

The room had that same hermetic quality of the Presidential Suite but a more used smell of old cleaner, dusty carpet, and Bruce Raffel's aftershave.

Neil Kelly watched her in complete silence, either letting her draw her own conclusions or lost in his own thoughts. She asked him if they had any sort of timeline.

“Powell's working on it. The hotel's got nothing. This room was last cleaned around eleven o'clock yesterday, same maid, who swears she saw nothing unusual—no contraband, meaning drugs or cigarettes (they take the no-smoking policy
very
seriously here)—and none of what she called ‘kinky stuff.' Aside from that, no room service, no requests for extra pillows, no phone messages, nothing.”

Theresa had returned to the dead man's side. “They have a record of phone calls?”

“No, only messages. They can't have guests insisting a desk clerk didn't deliver a message. But phone calls from inside or outside the hotel, there's no record of that.”

Theresa began to photograph, starting from the door and working through the room before reaching the body. The body, she could be certain, would remain unmolested; the separation of the crime scene—the body belonged to the M.E.'s office, everything else to the police department—had been ingrained over decades. But at any moment, Powell and other police officers could show up and begin a thorough search, and the scene would never again be as it had been when she first arrived. Though that had not been a problem with the first murder.

Now she noticed a piece of paper underneath the pants on the armchair. It belonged to a spiral-bound notebook, the kind every schoolkid in America uses, down to the chewed-up ballpoint pen jammed into the spiral. It had been left folded over to a blank sheet with
“M”
and a phone number scrawled at an angle.

Neil read over her shoulder, his breath tickling her ear. “Could be Marie.”

“Yeah.” It could also be Mark, or Mickey, or Marissa.

Without another word he took out his phone and dialed the digits. Even with the phone pressed to his ear, Theresa could overhear those three tones designed for maximum obnoxiousness, along with the message that the number could not be completed as dialed.

“Not this area code,” Neil guessed.

“Probably Atlanta.”

Theresa turned the book over. Half of the opposite page had been covered with notes, written in a meandering hand that seemed identical to the
M
notation. She paged back one more sheet and found where the conscientious defense attorney had labeled the top of the paper with the date and
“ ‘Litigating Postconviction Innocence Cases Without DNA,' 3 pm.”

“So he was alive to attend this session yesterday afternoon at least. That fits with the condition of the body.”

“Provided that's his notebook.”

Theresa had a sudden vision of the killer setting it down before sweetly removing Bruce Raffel's clothing and then forgetting about the book afterward. She flipped to the front, her fingers stumbling on the pages, Neil Kelly hanging close enough to press his chest to her shoulder, both of them caught in a frenzy of
Could it really be that easy?

Answer: no. Bruce Raffel, a good student to the last, had printed his name and phone number in Sharpie marker, right over the Mead logo. The exchange, she noticed, did not match the number next to the initial
M
. Theresa turned back to the page with the phone number and left the notebook on the chair. With nothing else to look at in the bedroom, she went into the bathroom. Neil Kelly called someone to request the Atlanta area codes.

She dusted the bathroom floor, again finding no shoe prints except ones identical to the sneakers under Raffel's suitcase. Setting down some empty paper bags to stand on—no sense tracking black powder onto the light-colored carpeting, even if it would have to be replaced—Theresa examined the contents of the room. Making the most of the available counter space, the attorney had spread deodorant, a bottle of Lectric Shave, toothbrush and paste, comb, Nexxus hair gel, a bottle of generic aspirin, brush-style hair dryer, and a bottle of Centrum vitamins, its label worn enough to make Theresa suspect that it had been pressed into use as a pill case and now contained something other than Centrum vitamins. A quick peek revealed a variety of pills, none of which appeared familiar to her. She would have to take that along, let Toxicology work on identification.

She touched a few areas of the sink and the toilet with Hemastix. No reaction. If the killer had gotten blood on his hands and cleaned up in the bathroom, he had rinsed away all evidence of same. Three of each kind of towel plus a bath mat remained present, all apparently clean except for a hand towel on the sink. Bruce Raffel had not done much in the room since the maid had cleaned the previous day.

Theresa reentered the bedroom just as Neil Kelly pulled a small brown bag, the size of a kid's lunch, from Raffel's suitcase.

“What's that?” she asked.

“He had it shoved under his boxers and next to his bottle of Airborne. I'm not sure I want to touch it.”

She laughed. “You're wearing gloves.”

“Sometimes gloves aren't enough.” He set the bag down, reached in, and pulled out a thin black leather belt. It had a perpendicular strap containing a ring and further on a wider patch with some sort of embedded object.

“What is that?”

He got that goofy twelve-year-old-boy smirk that men got at any mention of sex. “You don't know?”

“I could probably figure it out, but I don't think I want to.”

Powell appeared in the doorway. The lines in his face had deepened with lack of sleep, and the strands of his comb-over had gone astray. “I finished up at the esteemed firm of Goldman & Jackson. What's that?”

Neil held up the belt. “The Lawyers Gone Wild theory just caught some traction.”

“You're telling me. Wait until you see what I found in that bitch's office.”

“I don't know,” Theresa said once the two men finished giggling over their respective finds: Bruce had packed not only the belt getup but a small leather whip and a set of buckled leather cuffs with matching covered cords, apparently to attach the cuffs to bedposts or other furniture without scratching their finish. Marie had kept a bland-looking metal file box at the bottom of her desk drawer with an industrial-size box of condoms (half full) and four different kinds of lubricating gel.

“It's okay not to understand it.” Powell held the whip with two fingers and said, with either kindness or sarcasm, “It probably means you're normal.”

Theresa applied a strip of clear packaging tape to the carpeting next to Bruce Raffel's thigh, determined to find even the tiniest hair or fiber or flake of skin. In the absence of bodily fluids—and she didn't see any—they would have to grasp at any straw of physical evidence. She intended to use magnetic powder on his skin, on the off chance they might find a print. Theresa couldn't escape the sinking feeling that the killer had come, killed, and left without dropping any handy clues in his—or her—wake. “He's got three faint marks on his back that could be old whip scars, but no one's been using a whip on Marie's perfect skin. At least not recently.”

“Of course not. She probably used it on others.”

Theresa went on, ticking off her other objections. “If this guy died because some sex game got out of control, then why were his toys still in a bag at the bottom of his suitcase? Why did the killer use his socks when he had these leather cuffs handy—not to mention a couple of neckties?”

“Raffel didn't need to get out his toys because the killer brought his own?” Neil Kelly guessed.

“But used the victim's socks?”

“Couldn't leave his own stuff behind.”

“Again, no fresh marks, no chafing on the wrists, and no one struck him with anything other than this chair. If this is all about sex, why are Bruce's toys out of reach and Marie's supplies are back in her office instead of the Presidential Suite?”

“Are you always on a first-name basis with your victims?” Neil asked her. He seemed to find this curious.

“I find it less confusing than ‘Vic 1' and ‘Vic 2.' And how would Bruce Raffel and Marie Corrigan know people in common? Unless there's some sort of nationwide sex club and they get together at every convention or know how to contact the local members in any city—”

“Kind of like the Masons,” Neil said.

“But the meetings are a lot more fun,” Powell put in. “Besides, I've got an answer to that. I spoke with Bruce Raffel's office manager—he, Raffel, has only lived in Atlanta for the past year. Before that, he lived here.”

“In Cleveland?” Neil asked. “Please tell me he worked for the illustrious firm of Goldman & Jackson.”

“No such luck. Hernandez, O'Malley & Ferrari, five years. Started at the public defender's office but jumped ship as soon as he had enough time on his résumé. Well, I think they
all
start at the public defender's office—Corrigan, too. Only the die-hard bleeding hearts stay there.”

“Like the prosecutor's office,” Neil mused. “Only the power junkies and the true believers stay there. Anyone who wants to turn a decent buck goes into private practice.”

“Did the two of them work at the PD at the same time?” Theresa asked. She finished with the back of the victim's body and now turned him, stiff with rigor, to one side. His face and chest were a mottled purple from the blood pooled there, his nose squashed into an unnatural shape from having been driven into the carpet and left there as the cells began to break down. His brown eyes stared, beginning to cloud, his mouth open in a silent scream.

Powell said, “I have Corrigan's résumé, but not his yet. See anything interesting?”

Theresa intended to discuss the state of rigor but surprised herself by saying, “I don't think he wanted to die.” Then, at the odd looks from the two detectives, she added, “No injuries to the face. It's all to the back of the head. No defensive bruises or cuts on the hands. He didn't get into a fight. I'd say rigor is beginning to fade, so I'd guess time of death—and it's little more than a guess, you'll have to get a more accurate estimation from the pathologist—would be yesterday evening. After the conference ended for the day, but not into the wee hours.”