Defensive Wounds (24 page)

Frank said, “I don't think so. There's nothing that says counsels can't be friends—very good friends. And both defendants did pretty well, so
they've
got nothing to complain about.”

“But the victim does,” his partner pointed out. “Did she have a husband? Family?”

“Don't know.”

“Look at the penalty phase,” she suggested. “The prosecution would have called them.”

Frank scanned a few more pages. Witnesses called for the trial phase had to have something specific and relevant to say about the crime. During the sentencing phase, witnesses could be called merely to tug at heartstrings. “Here. I—Uh …” This was one of those cats that, once out of the bag, would never go back in without severe scratching and blood loss. “Penalty-phase witness list for the prosecution. Third from the top.”

“Yeah?”

“Marcus Dean. Brother of the victim.”

A silence ensued, until Neil Kelly leaped into it. “No, no, no,” he said. “Don't even think it.”

“You knew,” Frank said. Another reason not to let his cousin date this guy.

“Of course. Didn't you?” If Neil wasn't genuinely surprised at Frank's ignorance of this fact, then he deserved an Academy Award.

“I remember the victim's brother being a cop,” Angela said. “I didn't realize it was him.”

Frank mentally nodded. He had never met Dean then, so the name hadn't stuck. But surely his ex-partner would have followed the case more closely, known who the lawyers were. “It didn't occur to you that the two lawyers in your ex-partner's sister's murder case dying on two consecutive days might not be coincidence?”

“I didn't attend the trial, so I didn't know about Corrigan.”

“And when Raffel turns up dead on Dean's own job site, that didn't strike you as, oh, suspicious?”

“He's a
cop,
” Neil hissed.

“Cops can kill. I don't like the idea any more than you do, but—”

Neil leaned over the table, gaze furious but voice tight and controlled. “I said he's a
cop,
meaning that if he was going to come back on someone, he'd have the guy shanked in jail, not bash in the head of the guy's attorney. And even if he
would
do that, it's been over a year. He waits all that time and then kills them in the one spot in the city immediately connected to him? Come on. He'd have to be a raging lunatic.”

Frank did not move. “It might not be the most sensible plan, but people aren't always sensible. I can't believe you knew of a connection between both victims and the friggin' head of Ritz-Carlton security.”

“I can't believe you
didn't,
” Neil shot back.

Theresa spent the afternoon engaging in the somewhat-less-than-boisterous process of putting two glass slides on the side-by-side stages of the comparison microscope to check the colors, sizes, cross-sectional shapes, pigmentation, and other characteristics of the hairs and fibers found on and around the two victims. This process always wound up taking longer than expected and, in this situation, still could not positively establish that the two lawyers had been killed by the same person.

Marie had one foreign hair found with her body, caught in the knot binding her wrists: a four-inch-long auburn strand with no root and a coating of product. Analysis of this product with the FTIR gave her a myriad of strange peaks corresponding to the inorganic chemistry of the product, the only recognizable ones being ethoxydiglycol and hydrogen peroxide. A touch of ethanolamine made her think of hair coloring, something like the shampoo-in hair color marketed to men to cover gray. This particular hair had not been gray, but perhaps too many surrounding ones had.

Bruce also had two foreign hairs, one about the same length as the auburn hair and a similar color, but minus the dying product. Visually it appeared slightly different, with more pigmentation and a less distinct medulla, so that it might be a different hair from the same head or a different hair from a different person entirely. The other was short, with an undulating shaft and heavily pigmented with dark brown color—a black hair. There were only two colors of hair pigmentation, brown and yellow, plus the form of yellow that produced red.

Microscopy alone could not tell her more than that. She turned the hairs from Bruce Raffel's body over to Don for DNA analysis. He could do nothing with the auburn one from Marie's knot, since it had no root and therefore no adhering follicular skin cells, which would contain DNA. The shaft of a hair is composed of proteins called keratins, essentially dead cells. If Theresa wanted any further information from this section of hair, she'd have to ship it to the FBI with a detailed and articulate request for mitochondrial-DNA analysis.

One of these hairs could belong to the killer or none of them could, artifacts left over from other guests, other lives. She considered the fibers.

Most of the fibers had come from the carpet each victim had lain upon, no surprise there. A pink acrylic fiber had been found on Marie's body, a brown acetate one on Bruce's. Blue cotton on Marie, a pink cotton on Bruce similar in hue to the pink acrylic. The microscopic globules attached to the fine spandex thread found on Marie's skirt turned out to be a number of esters, or fatty acids, and some fatty alcohols. In short, wax, probably used on cars, shoes, or furniture. Either the spandex had the wax or Marie had leaned against her car, picking up the wax on her skirt, which in turn gave the spandex fiber something to cling to. Theresa shut down the FTIR, wondering what Marie Corrigan would drive—a restored Jaguar or an Escalade? A black Viper might be appropriate. She found no wax or spandex on Bruce.

The two victims had only one item in common: cat hair. Someone had a gray-colored Persian mix, but was it the killer, or the maid, or some other staff member? Or even a guest whose room had been vacuumed by the same machine used in the victim's rooms? Hotel murders were murder, no pun intended.

The stray hair from Dennis Britton's lapel came from a cat, but not a gray Persian.

Maybe Marie had a cat, or Bruce. They might have encountered each other, given a hug for old times' sake. Maybe more than a hug. Maybe they only sat next to each other at one of the seminars, transferring the cat hair. Maybe anything. And why had Marie Corrigan's shirt been removed after she'd been struck and was bleeding, but Bruce Raffel's clothing had been neatly put aside? Who would Bruce Raffel have taken off his clothes for? Besides Marie Corrigan? It was maddening.

Neither attorney had been under the influence of drugs or alcohol. The pills in Bruce Raffel's bottle were simply vitamins and the water in his glass simply water.

Theresa then needed to process the chair—an ungainly piece of evidence if ever there was one. It wouldn't fit in the superglue chamber designed for guns and tools, so she constructed one out of two cardboard boxes in which paper towels had been delivered to the laboratory. Packaging tape connected them and sealed up the edges, and she used a box cutter to slice a small flap in one bottom corner. With the chair enclosed inside, she slid in an electric mug warmer and then placed a foil tray carrying a dime-size puddle of superglue on top of it. Careful not to spill it, she trailed the cord out of the flap and then closed and sealed that opening. She stood back to survey this disposable structure. Not high-tech, but sometimes high-tech wasn't needed.

She left it on the floor of the amphitheater after writing
“Don't touch”
in Sharpie marker on its sides. Provided no one stumbled into it, upset the superglue, or somehow moved the mug warmer against the cardboard to start a fire and incinerate her evidence, all would be well. She grabbed a much-needed cup of coffee and checked her e-mail before returning to find the box apparently unmolested.

Holding her breath to keep from breathing in the fumes, she opened the box.

The dark wooden chair now had various swirls and marks permanently marring its finish. The two pieces of wood supporting the backrest, which the killer must have gripped in order to swing the object with enough force to shatter a skull, had a heavy concentration of marks and smudges but not a single usable ridge. Several—in the straight, wide pattern of fingers—had a roughened, almost bubbly appearance. Latex gloves. Who wore latex gloves? Doctors. Cops. Paramedics, maids, food-service workers—anyone about to commit a crime who had a single brain cell in his or her head; they were sold by the box at Home Depot.

The DNA analyst appeared at her elbow. “Something you need to see.”

Don led the way to the back room of the trace-evidence lab, briskly enough to worry her. As the DNA-analysis equipment hummed around them, he said, “The auburn hair from Raffel had a smooth, complete bulb.”

“It had finished growing.” Theresa nodded.

“And so it didn't have enough skin cells clinging to the root to give us sufficient DNA—mitochondrial is the only hope there, so we'll have to send it out if and when a suspect is available. But the black hair found on Raffel's body, that had plenty, so I ran it through the database without doing the quantification step.”

“But—”

“Yeah, it's not proper, but I had plenty of sample and I'll be rerunning it with all the proper steps, so as long as I call it a preliminary test instead of a conclusive one, we're good.”

“And you got a match?”

“No.”

Theresa rubbed one eyebrow. “That was what you wanted to show me?”

“No. This is.” He held up a printout showing two STR profiles, one from the unknown hair, one from a sample already in the database. “I got somebody pretty close. Twelve out of fifteen alleles.”

She studied the printout. The biochemical phenomenon behind each colored peak meant little to her, but even Theresa could see how many of those peaks lined up between the two samples. “Could that be coincidence?”

“Possibly. But what's more likely is that the depositor of the unknown hair is a close relative of this person in the database. But here the plot thickens. The person in the database is a victim, not a suspect. Her name was Tamika Johnson. Any idea who that is—or was?”

“Sounds vaguely familiar,” Theresa said. “I'll look it up.”

Children, Frank thought, were nature's great explorers. Nothing pleased them more than something new—new shoes, a new cereal, most of all a new space to run around in. He watched a well-coiffed woman check in with her brood. She wore a running suit that probably cost more than half his closet and carted along two girls and a boy without actually looking at any of them at any time. The children proved his point. In the five minutes since arriving, all three had crisscrossed every inch of the lobby, discovered where every door and hallway led (much to the displeasure of an unseen voice inside the manager's office), and touched every piece of expensive-looking artwork around, including the paintings, though they had to stand on the cushioned settee to reach two of them. As they did this, they relayed each discovery to one another by a series of very sharp screeches, unrecognizable as speech except perhaps to dogs and birds. Frank avoided children as a rule, but for once this display of overindulged, expensive youth did not irritate him. Instead he tried to recall when something as simple as an unexplored twenty-by-twenty area of real estate could make him so happy.

He could not.

Maybe hotels were as magical as fairylands or Disney World to children, a fabulous way station that had all the comforts of home without Mommy and Daddy's vested interest in same. But to adults they became necessary evils, a foreign territory entered only with a qualified gratitude. An adult could just pretend that the marble floors and the artworks and the turndown service distracted him from laying his head on a pillow slept upon by hundreds of strangers, with nothing more than a thin and presumably well-washed piece of cotton in between one's face and the germs, bugs, and dead skin cells left by those hundreds. They could only pretend to enjoy the abandon that came so naturally to children. An adult's unsettled concern hovered until he returned home to bask in his own—benign—germs and bugs and dead cells.

Then Marcus Dean came by, and Frank stood up to ask, “Got a minute?”

The former cop studied him for a moment. Frank must have looked grim, for Marcus seemed to sense that this was a less-than-friendly visit, that Frank wouldn't have come in person only to ask if he'd found out how the Presidential Suite had been breached. “Step into my office.”

Frank followed the man to a functional, cream-colored square in the maze behind the front desk. He had expected it to look like a cop's desk or a manager's office, crammed with papers and files and a manual here or there, all of them balanced in precarious piles on top of boxes, CDs, and old coffee cups. But apparently Dean liked organization; three matching file cabinets along one wall were neat and closed, the desk clear except for a phone, an in-box, and the minimum computer equipment now necessary to everyday life. Wall art consisted of a large framed photograph of a beach, possibly Caribbean, the water so turquoise it looked fake. Frank sat in a well-upholstered chair opposite the desk.

“How's it going?” Dean asked, but with a wary manner.