The Broken Window (15 page)

· Duct tape, Home Depot house brand, not traceable to particular location.

· No friction-ridge prints

The doorbell rang and Ron Pulaski walked briskly into the room, carrying two milk crates containing plastic bags, evidence from the scene where Myra Weinburg had been killed.

Rhyme noted immediately that his expression had changed. His face was still. Pulaski often cringed or seemed perplexed or occasionally looked proud—he even blushed—but now his eyes seemed hollow, not at all like the determined gaze of earlier. He glanced at Rhyme with a nod, walked sullenly to the examination tables, handed off the evidence to Cooper and gave him the chain-of-custody cards, which the tech signed.

The rookie stepped back, looking over the whiteboard chart Thom had created. Hands in his jeans pockets, Hawaiian shirt untucked, he wasn’t seeing a single word.

“You all right, Pulaski?”

“Sure.”

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“You don’t look all right,” Sellitto said.

“Naw, it’s nothing.”

But that wasn’t true. Something about running his first solo homicide scene had upset him.

Finally he said, “She was just lying there, faceup, staring at the ceiling. It’s like she was alive and looking for something. Frowning, kind of curious. I guess I expected her to be covered up.”

“Yeah, well, you know we don’t do that,” Sellitto muttered.

Pulaski looked out the window. “The thing is… okay, it’s crazy. It’s just she looked a little like Jenny.”

His wife. “Kind of weird.”

Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs were similar in many ways when it came to their work. They felt you needed to summon empathy in searching crime scenes, which allowed you to feel what the perp, and the victim, experienced. This helped to better understand the scene and find evidence you otherwise might not.

Those who had this skill, as harrowing as its consequences might be, were masters at walking the grid.

But Rhyme and Sachs differed in one important aspect. Sachs believed it was important never to become numb to the horror of crime. You needed to feel it every time you went to a scene, and afterward. If you didn’t, she said, your heart grew hard, you moved closer to the darkness within the people you pursued. Rhyme, on the other hand, felt you should be as dispassionate as possible. Only by coldly putting aside the tragedy could you be the best police officer you could—and more efficiently stop future tragedies from occurring. (“It’s not a human being anymore,” he’d lectured his new recruits. “It’s a source of evidence. And a damn good one.”)

Pulaski had the potential to be more like Rhyme, the criminalist believed, but at this early stage of his career he fell into Amelia Sachs’s camp. Rhyme felt for the young man now but they had a case to solve.

At home tonight Pulaski could hold his wife close and silently mourn the death of the woman she resembled.

He asked gruffly, “You with us, Pulaski?”

“Yes, sir. I’m fine.”

Not exactly, but Rhyme had made his point. “You processed the body?”

A nod. “I was there with the M.E.’s tour doctor. We did it together. I made sure he wore rubber bands on his booties.”

To avoid confusion when it came to footprints Rhyme had a policy of his crime scene searchers’ putting rubber bands around their feet, even when they were in the hooded plastic jumpsuits worn to prevent contamination from their own hair, skin cells and other trace.

“Good.” Rhyme then glanced eagerly at the milk crates. “Let’s get going. We ruined one plan of his.

Maybe he’s mad about it and is out targeting somebody else. Maybe he’s buying a ticket to Mexico.

Either way, I want to move fast.”

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The young cop flipped open his notebook. “I—”

“Thom, come on in here. Thom, where the hell are you?”

“Oh, sure, Lincoln,” said the aide with a cheerful smile, walking into the room. “Always happy to drop everything in the face of such polite requests.”

“We need you again—another chart.”

“Do you?”

“Please.”

“You don’t mean it.”

“Thom.”

“All right.”

“‘Myra Weinburg Crime Scene.’”

The aide wrote the heading and stood ready with the marker, as Rhyme asked, “Now, Pulaski, I understand it wasn’t her apartment?”

“That’s right, sir. A couple owned it. They’re on vacation, on a cruise ship. I managed to get through to them. They’d never heard of Myra Weinburg. Man, you should’ve heard them; they were
way
upset.

They didn’t have any idea who it might’ve been. And to get in he broke the lock.”

“So he knew it was empty and that there was no alarm,” Cooper said. “Interesting.”

“Whatta you think?” Sellitto was shaking his head. “He just picked it for location?”

“It was real deserted around there,” Pulaski put in.

“And what was she doing, do you think?”

“I found her bike outside—she had a Kryptonite key in her pocket and it fit.”

“Biking. Could be that he’d checked out her route and knew she’d be by there at a certain time. And somehow he knew the couple were going to be away so he wouldn’t have any disturbances… Okay, rookie, run through what you found. Thom, if you would be so kind as to write this down.”

“You’re trying too hard.”

“Ha. Cause of death?” Rhyme asked Pulaski.

“I told the doctor to have the medical examiner expedite the autopsy results.”

Sellitto laughed gruffly. “And what’d he say to that?”

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“Something like ‘Yeah, right.’ And a couple other things too.”

“You need a bit more starch in your collar before you can make requests like that. But I appreciate the effort. What was the
preliminary
?”

He looked over his notes. “Suffered several blows to the head. To subdue her, the M.E. thought.” The young officer paused, perhaps recalling his own, similar injury a few years ago. He continued, “Cause of death was strangulation. There were petechiae in the eyes and inside the eyelids—pinpoint hemorrhages—”

“I know what they are, rookie.”

“Oh, sure. Right. And venous distention in the scalp and face. This is the probable murder weapon.” He held up a bag containing a length of rope about four feet long.

“Mel?”

Cooper took the rope and carefully opened it over a large sheet of clean newsprint, dusting to dislodge trace. He then examined what he’d found and took a few samples of the fibers.

“What?” Rhyme asked impatiently.

“Checking.”

The rookie took refuge in his notes again. “As far as the rape, it was vaginal and anal. Postmortem, the tour doctor thought.”

“Posing of the body?”

“No… but one thing I noticed, Detective,” Pulaski said. “All her fingernails were long, except one. It was cut really short.”

“Blood?”

“Yes. It was cut right down to the quick.” He hesitated. “Probably premortem.”

So 522’s a bit of a sadist, Rhyme reflected. “He likes pain.”

“Check the other crime-scene photos, from the earlier rape.”

The young officer hurried off to find the pictures. He shuffled through them and found one, squinting.

“Look at this, Detective. Yeah, he cut off a fingernail there too. The same finger.”

“Our boy likes trophies. That’s good to know.”

Pulaski nodded enthusiastically. “And think about it—the wedding ring finger. Probably something about his past. Maybe his wife left him, maybe he was neglected by his mother or a mother figure—”

“Good point, Pulaski. Reminds me—we forgot something else.”

“What’s that, sir?”

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“Did you check your horoscope this morning before we started the investigation?”

“My…?”

“Oh, and who got the tea-leaf-reading assignment? I forget.”

Sellitto was chuckling. Pulaski was blushing.

Rhyme snapped, “Psychological profiling isn’t helpful. What’s
helpful
about the nail is knowing that Five Twenty-Two now has in his possession a DNA connection to the crime. Not to mention that if we can decide what kind of implement he used to remove the trophy, we might be able to trace the purchase and
find
him. Evidence, rookie. Not psychobabble.”

“Sure, Detective. Got it.”

“‘Lincoln’ is fine.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“The rope, Mel?”

Cooper was scrolling through the fiber database. “Generic hemp. Available in thousands of retail outlets around the country.” He ran a chemical analysis. “No trace.”

Crap.

“What else, Pulaski?” Sellitto asked.

He went through the list. Fishing line, binding her hands, and cutting through the skin, which resulted in the bleeding. Duct tape covered her mouth. The tape was Home Depot brand, of course, torn off the roll 522 had ditched; the ragged ends matched perfectly. Two unopened condoms were discovered near the body, the young officer explained, holding up the bag. They were Trojan-Enz brand.

“And here are the swabs.”

Mel Cooper took the plastic evidence bags and checked the vaginal and rectal swabs. The M.E.’s office would give a more detailed report but it was clear that among the substances were traces of a spermicidal lubricant similar to that used with the condoms. There was no semen anywhere at the scene.

Another swab, from the floor, where Pulaski found the treadmark of a running shoe, revealed beer. It proved to be Miller brand. The electrostatic image of the tread was, naturally, a size-13 Sure-Track right shoe—the same that 522 had ditched in the trash can. “And the owners of the loft had no beer, right?

You did search the kitchen and pantry?”

“Right, yes, sir. And I didn’t find any.”

Lon Sellitto was nodding. “Bet you ten bucks that Miller is DeLeon’s brew of choice.”

“I won’t take you up on that one, Lon. What else was there?”

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Pulaski held up a plastic bag containing a brown fleck that he’d found just above the victim’s ear.

Analysis revealed it to be tobacco. “What’s the story with that, Mel?”

The tech’s examination revealed that it was a fine-cut piece, the sort used in cigarettes, but it was not the same as the Tareyton sampler in the database. Lincoln Rhyme was one of the few nonsmokers in the country who decried the bans on smoking; tobacco and ash were wonderful forensic links between criminal and crime scene. Cooper couldn’t tell the brand. He decided, though, that because the tobacco was so desiccated it was probably old.

“Did Myra smoke? Or the people in the loft?”

“I didn’t see any evidence of it. And I did what you’re always telling us. I smelled the scene when I got there. No smell of smoking.”

“Good.” Rhyme was pleased with the search so far. “What’s the friction-ridge situation?”

“Checked fingerprint samples of the homeowners—from the medicine cabinet and things in the bedside table.”

“So you weren’t fudging. You really did read my book.” Rhyme had devoted a number of paragraphs in his forensic text to the importance of collecting control prints at crime scenes and where to best find them.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m so pleased. Did I make any royalties?”

“I borrowed my brother’s.” Pulaski’s twin was a cop down at the Sixth Precinct in Greenwich Village.

“Let’s hope
he
paid for it.”

Most of the prints found in the loft were the couples’—which they determined from the samples. The others were probably from visitors but it wasn’t impossible that 522 had been careless. Cooper scanned all of them into the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. The results would be available soon.

“Okay, tell me, Pulaski, what was your impression of the scene?”

The question seemed to throw him. “Impression?”

“Those are the trees.” Rhyme lowered his eyes toward the evidence bags. “What did you think of the forest?”

The young officer thought. “Well, I
did
have a thought. It’s stupid, though.”

“You know I’ll be the first one to say if you’ve come up with a stupid theory, rookie.”

“It’s just, when I first got there my impression was that the struggle seemed off.”

“How do you mean?”

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“See, her bike was chained to a lamppost outside the loft. Like she’d parked it, not thinking anything was wrong.”

“So he didn’t just grab her on the street.”

“Right. And to get into the loft you went through a gate and then down a long corridor to the front door.

It was real narrow and it was packed with things the couple stored outside—jars and cans, sports things, some stuff to be recycled, tools for their garden. But nothing was disturbed.” He tapped another photo.

“But look inside—that’s where the struggle began. The table and the vases. Right by the front door.” His voice went soft again. “Looks like she fought real hard.”

Rhyme nodded. “All right. So Five Twenty-Two lures her to the loft, smooth-talking her. She locks up the bike, walks down the corridor and they go into the loft. She stops in the entryway, sees he’s lying and tries to get out.”

He considered this. “So he must’ve known enough about Myra to put her at ease, and make her feel that she could trust him… Sure, think about it: He’s got all this information—about who people are, what people buy, when they’re on vacation, whether they have alarms, where they’re going to be… Not bad, rookie. Now we know something concrete about him.”

Pulaski struggled to keep a smile off his face.

Cooper’s computer dinged. He read the screen. “No hits on the prints. Zero.”

Rhyme shrugged, not surprised. “I’m interested in this idea—that he knows so much. Somebody give DeLeon Williams a call. Was Five Twenty-Two right about all the evidence?”

Sellitto’s brief conversation revealed that, yes, Williams wore size-13 Sure-Track shoes, he regularly bought Trojan-Enz brand condoms, he had forty-pound fishing line, he drank Miller beer and he’d recently been to Home Depot for duct tape and hemp rope to use as a tie-down.

Looking at the evidence chart of the earlier rape, Rhyme noted that the condoms used by 522 in that crime were Durex. The killer had used those because Joseph Knightly bought that brand.