Fatal Reaction (8 page)

“Sorry to just barge in,” said Elliott a few minutes later as he appeared, grinning, in my doorway. He was wearing a blue blazer and khaki pants, radically casual attire for the suit-and-tie environs of Callahan Ross. If it weren’t for the bulge from the Browning automatic he wore holstered under his arm he could easily have been mistaken for a trust-fund brat dropping by to pick up his check. After six months of deliberate avoidance I found it dis-concerting to find Elliott suddenly, even casually, appearing at my office.

When he stepped aside to let Cheryl usher in Joe Blades, I sprang to my feet. Blades was a homicide cop and a good friend of Elliott’s from his days in the state’s attorneys office when they had worked the gang crimes I unit together.

“Detective Blades,” I said, extending my hand in greeting, “this is a very pleasant surprise.”

Blades was young for homicide and looked nothing like you’d expect for a man who spent most of his working life gazing down upon the newly deceased. Indeed, with his beard and gold-rimmed glasses he had a vaguely professorial air. In point of fact he’d come to the police department from Princeton, of all places, during that brief season when the idea of recruiting for law enforcement from the Ivy League had come briefly into vogue. Unlike most of his cohorts who’d quickly fled the grim realities of the street for the safe haven of law school, Joe Blades had remained. He had found his calling.

“Come on, make my day, Joe,” I said, folding my hands together on top of my desk once we’d all settled comfortably into our respective chairs. “Please tell me that you’ve been assigned to investigate Danny Wohl’s death.”

“Right now no one’s been assigned to the case,” replied Blades. “But as it happens I was one of the detectives who took the unattended-death call, so I did work the scene. Elliott tells me your firm represents the company that Mr. Wohl worked for.”

“Yes. I’m also one of the directors of the company.”

“So you knew him quite well.”

“Professionally, yes. We didn’t socialize much outside of the office.”

Blades shot me a look that said he knew I didn’t have much of a life outside of the office. In the past Blades had tried his hand at playing Cupid between Elliott and me. For a brief flash of time I found myself wondering what Elliott had told him about what had almost happened between the two of us but immediately forced myself to focus on more pressing matters.

“And I take it from what Elliott tells me,” he continued, “you and Dr. Azorini have questions about his death.”

“Come on, Joe. You went to the scene. Of course we have questions. From the blood all over everything it seems pretty obvious that Danny didn’t die quietly in his sleep.”

“So far the medical examiner hasn’t made any ruling as to cause of death.”

“Has the autopsy been performed yet?”

“No.”

“Has it at least been scheduled?”

“Not that I’m aware.”

“So tell me, when are they going to get around to it? Once they find a name and a cause of death for Jane Doe Number Sixty-three?” I knew it didn’t make any sense to get sarcastic with a homicide cop, but the thought of what had happened to Danny passing unnoticed galled me.

“I can’t answer that Kate,” he replied, not unkindly. “But I can tell you what we have so far.”

Blades pulled a small spiral notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket. As he flipped it open I noticed that besides his scribbled notes there were several drawings of stick figures. It took me a second to realize these were representations of Danny’s body.

“Mr. Wohl was discovered Monday morning at approximately ten-twenty by the building engineer, who’d let himself into the apartment to check that the heat was on. The weather had turned cold Sunday night and they were having trouble with the furnace in that part of the building. Dispatch took the call at ten thirty-four
A.M.,
and a patrol unit responded immediately. They took one look inside the apartment and got on their radios requesting backups. It was called into homicide at ten thirty-six as a possible fatal stabbing. Art Wypiszinski and I were out interviewing family members of one of Sarrek’s suspected victims and took the call, but we didn’t get there until eleven fifty-one. As soon as we walked in the door we figured we were looking at some kind of dispute between homosexual lovers.”

“Why is that?” I asked, curious about what would lead him to draw that conclusion so quickly.

“No motive besides sex produces that kind of overkill,” replied Blades matter-of-factly, “and no woman is strong enough to do that kind of damage to a man. Besides, there was no sign of forced entry, so it seemed likely that the deceased knew his assailant and let him into the apartment. From the blood trail it looked as though Mr. Wohl was on his feet when the attack started and despite sustaining severe injuries, he managed to stay on his feet for several minutes and put up a fight. That would explain not just the blood splatter, but the overturned furniture and the overall condition of the apartment.”

“Did anybody hear anything?” Elliott asked.

Blades shook his head. “A canvass of the neighbors turned up nothing. In that kind of building no one knows anybody else. Besides, the victim’s apartment was a corner unit on the top floor of the building. The only wall he shared with another unit was the bedroom and the struggle appeared to have been limited to the front of the apartment.”

“What about the apartment below?” I demanded.

“Out of town for the weekend. I’m not sure they would have been able to hear anything because the building is pretty solidly built.” Joe Blades consulted his notes again before continuing. “From the dishes in the sink and the condoms in the wastebasket it looked as though the deceased had recently had company. The condoms had been used two-ply, by the way.”

“Why is that significant?” I asked, not meaning to sound naive.

“The condoms had been used two at a time, doubled. It usually indicates that one of the partners had AIDS or was afraid of contracting the disease.”

“Danny was HIV positive,” I said. “Whether he technically had AIDS is something you’d have to get from his doctor.”

“Other than that, was he sick?”

“No. But the anti-AIDS drugs he was taking were giving him a bad time with side effects.”

“What kind of side effects?”

“Nausea, weakness, muscle pain. About once every two weeks he’d just feel so crummy he wouldn’t be able to get out of bed and drag himself into the office. That’s why nobody thought anything of it when he didn’t show up to work on Monday morning. He’d just been on a grueling business trip to the Orient. Everyone at Azor just assumed that he wasn’t feeling well.”

“It’s going to be up to the medical examiner to give us the time of death, but when we got there rigor was already starting to pass off in the upper extremities. By my guess he’d been dead at least twenty-four hours. He didn’t have a history of hemophilia or some other blood-clotting disorders that you know of, did he?”

“No,” I replied, puzzled. “Why do you keep asking?”

“When we arrived at the scene the body was lying facedown in the living room a few feet away from the telephone in a large pool of blood. From that position there were no visible wounds, but we figured that once the lab boys were finished and we rolled him over, we’d find the killer’s handiwork all over the victim’s face and chest.”

“And did you?” I asked.

“No,” replied Blades, removing his gold-rimmed glasses and slowly polishing them with the fat end of his tie. “When we turned him over there wasn’t a mark on him.”

CHAPTER 7

“How is that possible given the condition of the apartment?” I demanded. “There was blood all over the walls and the furniture was turned over. You said yourself you found him lying facedown in a pool of blood. What you’re telling me now makes absolutely no sense.” Blades raised both his hands in the shrug universally understood to indicate that this was not his problem. “I’m not pretending it makes sense,” he countered. “I’m only telling you what I saw. When we rolled him over he was covered in blood all right. It was smeared all over his face, his hair was stiff with it, and his clothes were completely soaked. But there were no wounds of any kind that I could see and no other signs of injury or trauma. Certainly nothing like what we were expecting to see given the condition of the apartment.”

“What about under his clothes?” I asked, mentally scrambling to try and make what Blades was telling me fit in with what I imagined had taken place in Danny’s apartment. “Could the killer have removed Danny’s clothes and dressed him in something else to hide the wounds?”

“Yeah,” replied Blades, “but why would he want to? Besides, if that had happened we’d have seen much less blood on his clothes. As it was they were so saturated you couldn’t even begin to guess the color of the fabric.”

“Okay then,” I said, my frustration mounting. “You tell me. What happened to him?”

“He bled to death.”

“I’d say that was pretty obvious,” I snapped, losing patience. “What I want to know is how.”

“The medical examiner is in charge of how. My job is to find out who.”

“Come on, Joe,” urged Elliott. “You’ve looked at a lot of dead guys. You’re telling me you aren’t even willing to make a guess?”

“I honestly don’t know,” replied Blades, shaking his head. “Vampires maybe? I’m serious, this is a strange one.”

“Could his AIDS have had something to do with it, do you think?” I asked, unable to come up with anything else.

“You’d have to ask a doctor, but I’ve got to tell you, there’s lots of ways that AIDS can kill you, but none of them is quick. I honestly wish I had something else to tell you, Kate. I’m not jerking your chain. But I’m afraid I came here to tell you that all we really can do now is wait for the autopsy results.”

“But when will we get them?”

“Right now the medical examiner’s office is being squeezed from every direction to identify Sarrek’s victims and homicide is stretched to the limit. I’ve been Pulled off regular duty and assigned to the task force investigating Sarrek. Everybody else is working double shifts trying to put together a case against this creep.”

“And in the meantime what about Danny?” I demanded, suddenly feeling very angry.

“Sony, Kate,” said Blades. “Word from above is ‘no unnecessary inquiries.’ The medical examiner’s got to say the death’s suspicious before anyone can take the next step. The way things are now it could mean my shield if I stepped out of line on this one.”

“Just tell me one thing,” I said. “If the highway patrol had pulled Sarrek over in Texas as opposed to Illinois, how would you be working Danny Wohl’s death?”

“As a probable homicide,” replied Blades with a rueful shake of his head. “Definitely a probable homicide, at least until I heard otherwise from the ME’s office.”

“Then what about Elliott?” I asked, my gaze shifting from one man to the other. “Why couldn’t he start looking into things?”

“Under the circumstances I’d be willing to give him access to any information we have,” said Blades.

“Good,” I declared.

Blades turned to Elliott. “I’d start by trying to find out who was with him in the apartment when he died. We lifted his address book and his bankbook. I’ll get you copies.”

“What makes you think there was someone with him?” I asked sharply.

“There were two sets of footprints,” answered the detective, “and only one of them matched the victim. One set corresponded to the dress shoes that Wohl was wearing when we found him. The other looks to have been made by a slightly smaller, narrower athletic shoe.”

“Any chance the athletic shoes belonged to one of the people who found the body?” asked Elliott.

Blades shook his head. “The building engineer never made it past the front door. He took one look at the blood, locked the door behind him, and hightailed it down to the management office on the first floor to call 911. He swears he didn’t open it back up until the uniforms arrived. Besides, it’s not only the footprints that point to someone else having been in the apartment at the time of Mr. Wohl’s death.”

“What else is there?” I asked.

“We found traces of dried blood in the cracks in the wood floor in the kitchen and blood in the trap in the sink. Also, the tape was missing from the answering machine. We turned the place upside down looking for it, but we never found it. Of course, there may be some other explanation for why it wasn’t there, but I’m willing to bet that whoever was in the apartment when Mr. Wohl died took it with him when he left.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked even though deep down I already knew the answer.

“For the same reason he stood in the kitchen after Mr. Wohl was dead and washed his blood down the sink. Because whoever it was didn’t want anyone to know that he had ever been there.”

As soon as Elliott and Blades left, I picked up the phone and tried to reach Stephen only to be told by the officious Rachel that he was in yet another meeting and she didn’t dare disturb him. Aggravated, I left another urgent message and tried to get back to work, but I found rt impossible to concentrate. Flashes of Danny’s apartment kept running through my head like a disturbing movie whose images were impossible to forget. As unsettled as I’d been while I was in Danny’s apartment, I’d at least felt sure of what it was I was seeing. Educated by the movies, inured by the news, I had been certain I was Poking at the aftermath of a violent and bloody crime. Now, like stepping in front of a fun-house mirror, Joe Blades’s revelations had twisted those assumptions around to the point where I didn’t feel certain about anything I’d seen.

The phone rang and I jumped. I looked at my watch. Cheryl must have gone while I was still meeting with the two detectives. On Thursdays she had class at five. I was hoping it was Stephen, but instead it was Mimi Sheraton, the decorator. She was calling on her cellular phone from the new apartment. In her own restrained and aristocratic way, she sounded terribly upset.

“Oh, Kate. I’m so glad I was able to reach you. I’m here with Dick Brimstead, the architect, and I’m afraid he’s found something that you need to have a look at right away.”