Defensive Wounds (34 page)

“No.” He still seemed skittish; he'd said something wrong, and he knew it. He wanted to keep his friend out of trouble and instead had thrown him right into a thicket of it.

Theresa gestured toward Sonia's body. “What about this attorney? Did you see her and Bruce or Marie together this week? Any week?”

“Nope.” He seemed more certain of that.

“Do you know her?”

The boy—young man, really—studiously avoided looking at the corpse. “No, man, I don't think so. I don't know any lawyers, and … I didn't get a good look at her. And I'm not going to.”

Noises behind them spared him any further questions. Neil Kelly, Angela Sanchez, Rachael and William, and a uniformed patrol officer spilled out of the stairwell door.

Neil glanced at Ray, gave Theresa a more searching look, and asked if she was all right. But he barely waited for a reply before approaching the body. Just as well. She could hardly fold herself into his arms—even when it was the only thing she wanted to do at the moment—in front of Rachael and a bunch of cops.

“Stay here,” Theresa instructed her daughter, and joined him.

Stop looking at Sonia as a friend,
she told herself,
and look at her as a vitally important piece of evidence. Without this evidence the guy will stay free to kill again.

Sonia Battle's wrists and ankles had been bent behind her and secured with a necktie. Her knees showed a few scrape marks, fresh but only slightly bloodied. Her hands were clean except for a light smudging of dirt on her right index and middle fingers. Theresa could count at least two deep lacerations to the skull. A bloodied two-by-four, about two feet in length, lay on the other side of her—most likely debris from the renovation of the inside observation deck. The killer had probably picked it up there, just as he'd picked up a chair in the hotel rooms. Why did this killer use weapons of opportunity? So he couldn't be caught with the incriminating item or because the crimes were truly unplanned, spur-of-the-moment's-passion attacks? But how could someone that impulsive avoid detection this long?

Why had Sonia come up here? She hadn't been afraid of the height but had hardly seemed entranced by it. Theresa prodded a fleshy thigh, startled at its pliability. Sonia hadn't been dead very long, probably not more than four hours. She certainly hadn't been there all night and so had not come here for a romantic starlight stroll.

Theresa didn't disturb the clothing since she hadn't photographed it, but it seemed to be Sonia's typical work uniform of black skirt, white blouse, nylons poking out from the bottom of the pile, and a pair of sensible, square-heeled shoes in patent leather. Their smooth surface, Theresa thought, might be able to hold a decent set of fingerprints.

Sonia had come to the deck early that morning, while Theresa had been brooding in the amphitheater next to Don, and Rachael had possibly been handing the killer his bill and telling him to have a good flight home. Why? To watch the sun rise? Or because, like Rachael, she needed to talk to someone and didn't want to be overheard. Someone who'd brought a two-by-four along to the meeting.

Sonia lay almost straight across the walkway, facing the scaffold with the top of her head touching the outer wall, pointing north toward the lake. It would have been incredibly uncomfortable, if not impossible, to sexually assault someone in that position. Theresa had no faith that they would find semen and its attendant DNA. The nudity, the hog-tying were all for show, a final indignity heaped upon a hated enemy.

And this
wind
. The killer could have dropped more hairs, more fibers, his driver's license, and Social Security card, and it all might be across the Cuyahoga, sailing over the old steel mill.

“Has anyone cleared the other side of this deck?” Angela asked, with good reason. The killer could be waiting there, out of sight around the bend of the ring, trapped. She and Theresa argued briefly, as Theresa wanted her to put protective booties over her shoes before traveling any further into what was now their crime scene, and none of them had any. Finally Angela agreed to go down to Marcus Dean's office and retrieve Theresa's crime-scene kit, full of booties and gloves and other items, while the armed patrol officer would stand guard at the door in case the killer decided to flee from the unseen curves of the deck. Angela would also escort Rachael back to the front desk, with strict instructions to remain there until Theresa returned for her. The strictest of instructions, Theresa emphasized, watching her daughter lean against William's chest, his arms around her. The girl closed her eyes, obviously finding great comfort in this gentle support. He rubbed her back with one hand, then patted her hair and held it steady against the wind. Basically, he did to her daughter exactly what only a few moments before Theresa had been wishing Neil Kelly would do to her. Maybe, she thought suddenly, her daughter was right. William
was
a truly nice kid and someone else had killed Jenna Simone.

Maybe.

She turned to Neil, but he had not stopped staring at Sonia Battle's blood-soaked face.

“One more down,” he said, without looking at her. “This keeps up, this planet might actually become livable again.”

Theresa blinked in the strong wind. “What?”

Now he did glance at her, with an odd smile as if they were sharing a joke, as if this were just another day on the job and they hadn't been dry-humping each other on the deck of his boat the night before. “Another scumbag defense attorney knocked off her filthy little perch. I'm really starting to like this guy.”

A gust of wind struck Theresa, and she felt as if it sucked all the oxygen away in its path, leaving her gasping to say, “Don't talk like that about her. She was my
friend
!”

“Then I'm sorry for your loss,” he said, without sounding sorry at all. “But it's not a loss to anyone else, and I can't pretend it is. She put bad people back on the street. That was
all
she did, and she'd tear us down to do it.”

Theresa extended a hand to steady herself on the outer wall's edge but stopped herself in time. Fingerprints. “No, she wouldn't. She did what she could for her client, but she never pulled any dirty tricks.”

“Maybe not on you. I can tell you from personal experience that she wasn't so delicate with the rest of us.” His voice faded toward the end, as if his brain had engaged; he immediately backpedaled. “Look, I'm sorry. I forgot you actually liked her. But you have to admit, Theresa, you were doing the Electric Slide on Marie Corrigan's grave along with the rest of us. Don't go getting on a high horse now.”

She said nothing, because of course he spoke the complete truth, and it made her want to push him over the side. She had convinced herself that Marie Corrigan and Bruce Raffel didn't deserve the slightest consideration, didn't deserve even a
fare-thee-well
on their trip to the afterlife. But was that really true? And did she react so strongly to losing Sonia because she cared for the woman, or did she simply feel guilty?

She forced herself to put all this aside for the moment. The only thing she knew was that Sonia's death made her want to scream with grief and frustration, and she would find out who had caused it no matter how long it took.

She could throttle Neil Kelly later.

He'd grown tired of waiting for a response and went to step over the body. She put out a hand to stop him, splaying her fingers across that same chest she had so eagerly felt up the night before. “Don't.”

“I just wanted to check out the rest of—”

“No. The path from the door to here is already shot with everyone walking on it, but the rest of it hasn't been touched. With all this glossy paint on everything, I'm going to check for fibers, shoe prints, fingerprints—everything I can think of. And,” she added with a determination that startled her in its violence, “you're going to help me.”

Two hours later she remained nauseous and had to fight the urge to call Rachael every four minutes to make sure she still toiled at the front desk, in full view of witnesses, and hadn't snuck off for another tête-à-tête with William. She and Neil Kelly had barely said five words to each other, not when she used his foot as a sandbag to steady her camera tripod in the strong wind, not when he held the snaking orange extension cord above Sonia's body so that Theresa could mince along as close to the wall as possible and vacuum the curving, bowl-like observation deck and its small scaffold (the unupholstered surface did not lend itself to taping), not when she spent forty minutes constructing a miniature greenhouse of stakes and clear plastic to form a superglue chamber over the dead woman. As the cyanoacrylate esters in the superglue permeated the nearly airtight space, they would bond to the amino acids left by the killer's fingers and, with luck, leave her a plasticized impression of his prints.

In theory anyway. It rarely worked.

First she had photographed and then cut off the tie holding Sonia's wrists and ankles—a charcoal gray polyester thing with understated pinstriping. Not a designer job in imported silk, but cheap and generic and therefore much more difficult to trace. Oh, for the days when people all sent their laundry out and detectives could find something called laundry marks on clothing. The killer wouldn't have used his own tie; most likely he bought one for the occasion. It could also belong to Sonia herself. It would go along with the black skirt, not to mention Sonia's personal style.

Either way it could still hold skin cells sloughed off the killer's hands when he pulled it tight around his victim's limbs. Theresa stowed the tie in a paper bag, clearing the way for the supergluing process.

“Wow.”

Don Delgado appeared, having been summoned from the lab to bring extra equipment and a friendlier extra hand. She allowed him to step, very carefully, over the body to hold the tent structure steady.

“This is extreme,” he observed.

“The circumstances are good for it. The … body … is fresh, the killer had to touch her bare skin to get her positioned, and we're outside so we don't have to worry about asphyxiating ourselves with cyanoacrylate fumes,” she said, answering a question no one had asked—why they hadn't tried supergluing either of the other two victims' bodies.

“If we get one, photographing it's going to be a bitch,” he warned. Usually light was their friend, the more the better, but not when it came to taking a picture that required good contrast to see the pattern.

Theresa ignored him, frustrated by the stubborn HotShot superglue container. The canisters were the size of tomato-paste cans, and since she used them only once in a blue moon, they tended to dry up sitting in the back of her car. If this one had, she'd have to send Don back to the lab for a mug warmer and some foil tubs to hold the liquid superglue over a heat source, the same thing that these canisters did in one handy package. But she got it open and placed it under the tent, laying a wooden stake along the bottom of the hanging plastic sheet to seal it (as much as possible) to the uneven flooring, once again using Neil Kelly's foot as a weight to hold it down.

“How long is this going to take?” he asked.

“About forty-five minutes. First we fume. Then I take the superglue out but leave the chamber closed up so it can polymerize.”

“You want me to stand here for forty-five minutes. Correct that,
another
forty-five minutes?”

“It's necessary,” she said, now trapped between the body and the scaffold.

“It's not so bad,” Don said, almost certainly having noticed the tension and trying to help. “Great view.”

Neil said, “I've been staring at it for the past two hours. I'm kind of over the view. And I think I'm getting windburned.”

Angela appeared. She had pulled her raven hair back into a hasty braid and clutched a sheaf of papers against her chest to keep them together. “Her car is in the garage, locked, no signs of disturbance, though it's hard to tell for sure. It's a rolling office, all scattered files and old coffee cups. A porter saw her in the lobby at about eight-fifteen this morning talking to two men. She seemed to be trying to talk them out of leaving, or berating them for leaving. The men weren't having any of it and got into the elevator, wheeling their suitcases behind them. Then the porter went on break, and no one else admits seeing her after that.”

“Until Rachael finds her a little after ten-thirty,” Theresa said.

“Why did she come up here?” Angela asked. “She didn't smoke, and you said she didn't seem crazy about heights.”

Maybe it wasn't heights, Theresa thought. Maybe she wasn't crazy about seeing William Rosedale when we visited this deck the first time, but I'm not going to bring that up just yet, even though Sonia's former client had been all but convicted of a very similar murder years before. Keeping this information to herself might be construed by some as obstruction of justice, and it could turn out that if Theresa had revealed William's history earlier in the investigation, Sonia might still be alive. If that were true, then Theresa had sentenced Sonia to death merely in order to stay on her daughter's good side.

This hit her in the face more strongly than any gust of wind.