Defensive Wounds (3 page)

Time to move on to the body.

The body: Marie Corrigan. A woman who had pranced in front of the jury box, berating Theresa for a scratched-out digit on an evidence label. A woman with an enviable figure and even more enviable cheekbones, and the glossy hair and fashion sense to go with both. A woman who seemed composed of sheer energy, so brutal and rapacious it should have rendered her incapable of dying at all, much less being murdered. At least not without a stake through her heart.

Powell appeared at the other end of the bedroom. “Neil!”

That's it,
Theresa thought. First name or last name?

“We got Des Moines back.”

“He talking?”

“Won't stop.”

Neil followed Powell, and Theresa followed Neil. Sensing her on their heels, they both turned.

“I want to see him,” she explained. “Has he had any time to clean up between reporting the body and now?”

“Let's find out.”

In the corridor she gave the contamination officer—the uniformed guy guarding the door—strict instructions not to let anyone in until she returned. Frank had disappeared.

“We've got no place to talk to him,” Powell explained as he led them up the hallway toward a slouching, youngish man. “The other suite is occupied, and the rest of the floor is the Club Lounge. They have snacks and shoeshines and other stuff for the high-dollar room people, and apparently the Ritz doesn't feel like kicking them out so we can use it. We get the hallway.”

They cornered the man at the end of it. He wore an indie-band T-shirt and khakis a bit too small for him. Theresa supposed he got enough of suits and ties at the office.

“Detective Neil Kelly,” the cop said by way of introduction. “What were you doing in that room?”

“I shouldn't speak to you without an attorney present,” the man said, biting one nail.

“You
are
an attorney.”

“I know, but—” He sighed. “I just feel so dumb, doing what I always tell my clients
not
to do, but … I really don't know that woman or how she got … in there.”

“Start from the beginning,” Neil said in a kindly tone, which didn't fool Theresa for a second, and she doubted it would have any more effect on the lawyer. “Why did
you
go there?”

Another sigh, as if a decision had been made. “Okay. This morning I had a small hangover, so I missed my first session on recent Supreme Court decisions. I walked in at the very end, and this guy in the last row said he'd make me a copy of his handouts. My firm is paying for this trip, so I wanted to make good, you know?”

“Admirable,” Powell said.

Theresa watched from behind the cops. The man's hands were clean, and no spatters of blood appeared on the bare arms or the light-colored pants. Of course he'd had plenty of time to change. She believed him about the hangover, picking up the scent of alcohol excreted along with the nervous sweat.

“He said come to the Presidential Suite during the next break and he'd give me the copies. So as soon as I got out of my ‘Defending Child-Pornography Cases' seminar, about ten to ten, I came directly here.”

Both detectives paused at that, but Neil said only, “In the elevator?”

“You think I'm going to
walk
fourteen floors? I come to the door, I knock. No Bob.”

“How'd you get in?”

“It was open. Not standing open, but ajar, you know? So I push it open and go in—no Bob. I glance in the bedroom, I see her, I pick up the phone and call the hotel.”

“Which phone?” Theresa asked.

“Who did you call?” Neil asked.

“The phone next to the sofa.”

“In the outer room?”

“I sure as hell wasn't going into that bedroom. And I guess I called the front desk, that's what the little bimbo said when she answered.”

Theresa bristled.

“Took a minute to get her to figure out what I was saying, but she did. I waited by the door until about three people showed up. I don't even know who they were. Managers, I guess.”

“Where'd you go then?”

“The lobby bar. I needed a drink.” The lawyer ran a hand over his forehead, flipping one lock of hair out at an angle. “I needed a drink
bad
.”

“And you never saw the victim before?”

“No. I don't think so. How can I tell? All I saw was blood and black hair.”

“Her name's Marie Corrigan. She's a lawyer, too. You know her?”

“No,” the man insisted, and kept insisting. He didn't know a soul in this city except two civil-defense chicks from Michigan he'd been up drinking with the night before—and Bob.

“You hadn't arranged to meet Marie here? She was pretty hot. Maybe you guys decided to ditch the child-porn lesson together?”

“Absolutely not. Didn't know the woman.”

As if on cue, the elevator bank gave a
ding
and a tall, bespectacled man with a skinny tie and skinny lips stepped off to blink in surprise at the cops and the lights. “What's going on here?”

“Bob!” the young attorney breathed in relief.

The fresh arrival confirmed the story, but not the agreed-upon location.

“You said Presidential Suite,” the attorney from Des Moines insisted.

“Junior Presidential Suite.” Bob pointed to the door next to them. “Junior.”

“I never heard ‘Junior.' You were all ‘I got the best room in the hotel' this morning. You said you had a presidential expense account to go with the suite!”

“
Junior
suite,” Bob said, rapping on the discreetly labeled door for emphasis.

Neil broke into their bickering to establish that Bob had never seen the door of the senior Presidential Suite open or ajar and had heard nothing from inside it in the two days he'd been at the hotel. He insisted he did not know Marie Corrigan and volunteered that he had not said “Presidential Suite” simply to make himself sound more prestigious. Neil and his partner finally got the appropriate information from both of them and left them to it. Theresa asked the attorney from Des Moines if he had returned to his room between the suite and the lobby bar, but he said he had not, and as they walked away, the two detectives doubted they could get a warrant to search his room.

All three of them returned to the crime scene, the contamination officer dutifully noting same in his log. Powell and Neil traded theories while Theresa continued to examine the body of Marie Corrigan.

“I don't believe him,” Powell said. “I think Corrigan decided to mix business with pleasure. All these out-of-town guys, they can't come back to haunt her. Locals would use any history to stab her in the back when she poached one of their clients.”

“True.”

“They're power junkies, lawyers.”

“Then why is
she
the one tied up?” Neil asked.

Theresa took a close-up photo of the dead woman's wrists. She'd been bound with a pair of nylons, probably her own.

“Because she's tired of being the powerful one, wants to be dominated for a change.”

Because women can't handle power?
Theresa's mind asked, forming one possible conclusion for Powell's line of thought. She felt, had been feeling, a twinge of gender guilt for letting them disparage the victim. Marie Corrigan had climbed into the arena with a cabal of aggressive, ruthless men and beaten them at their own game. She'd faced belligerence and opposition and the dreaded accusation of not being “feminine” on a daily basis and persevered, something Theresa would never choose to do. Theresa should stick up for Marie Corrigan.

But she didn't. Because Marie Corrigan had won not by besting the legal system but by manipulating it for her own ends. Theresa knew that for a fact and would save her championing for a more deserving recipient.

“That's a big deal in this S&M crap,” Powell had continued. “This guy from Des Moines shows up for his appointment—maybe he and Bobby were going to do it together—but then dominating isn't enough. He has to go further. Power junkies.”

Theresa moved to the heap of clothing located partially under the end table between an armchair and the overturned desk chair. She removed each item, holding it up and snapping a picture—difficult to do with only two hands—and then placed each item in a separate paper bag from her kit. Marie had worn a black pencil skirt, a red satin blouse of exquisite cut, a set of black lace underwear from Victoria's Secret, and a pair of glossy black pumps by some designer Theresa had never heard of but which probably cost more than the entire contents of Theresa's dresser drawers. A mirror, or perhaps the antithesis, of Theresa's courtroom costume: a straight black skirt, ivory blouse, black pumps that were not glossy or towering but had extra cushioning for the instep, nylons from the drugstore, and underwear by Hanes. Sisters they were not, neither under the skin nor over it.

Only the blouse had a few smears of blood on it. The other items were clean. No purse.

“Maybe,” Neil said about Powell's theory. He slumped as if to sit on the edge of the bed, thought better of it, and surprised Theresa by asking her, “What do you think? Is Des Moines lying?”

“No.”

Both detectives raised their eyebrows.

“This room isn't rented,” she explained. “He could have killed her, shut the door, and left. Her body might not have been discovered for days or weeks. Why alert us?”

They thought on that. Powell said, “Guilty conscience. Some guys call in the body because they can't take the stress of waiting for it to be found.”

“True,” she agreed. “And he could have gone to his room, cleaned up, and changed clothes before he made the call, or afterward when he was supposedly in the bar. But I don't think so.”

“Maybe he wanted to be in on the action,” Powell went on, “see the results of his handiwork. Power again. It fits with the … with the way she's trussed up. Maybe it was his idea in the first place.”

Neil snorted. “Can you see that dorky little weasel out there talking Marie Corrigan into anything? For that matter, can you see Marie Corrigan wasting one flip of her hair on him? I can't picture those two people together unless
he
was the one chained to the wall getting whipped.”

“There's that, too,” Theresa said. “I don't see any bruises or red marks on her wrists.”

“So she was tied up voluntarily,” Powell said. “Just what I've been saying. Besides, you want to hurt someone, you use rope. Nylons are soft and sexy.”

Neil said, “You know a little too much about this dominatrix stuff, partner.”

“We worked that case last year, remember?”

“But,” Theresa told them, “a few things bother me. That bed is pristine, not a hair or a fiber in the sheets, so far as I can see without moving the linens.”

“Maybe they started on the bed, moved to the floor.”

“Possibly.” She'd have to use the ALS—alternate light source—on both the bed and the floor to check for semen. A hotel room—no telling what a rainbow of results
that
might produce. “She has a smudge of blood on her blouse, but nothing else, and obviously the clothes would have to have been removed before she was tied. There's also a spray of blood spatter on the bindings.”

“Oh,” Neil said, getting it. “You think someone clocked her with the chair, then removed her clothes and tied her up, then finished the job on her skull.”

“I think it's a possibility.”

“So the whole sex angle is to throw us off? Can you tell if she actually
had
sex?”

“We'll take swabs at autopsy.”

Theresa focused her camera on Marie Corrigan's battered scalp. She could see at least four distinct tears where some blunt object had split the skin—obviously the wooden, straight-back chair meant for use with the cherry desk near the doorway. Red stained the rear left leg, and dots appeared on the other legs. The top of the back remained clean. The killer's hands had not been bloody when he swung it up and over, onto the head of his victim. “Then again, he used a weapon of opportunity, not one he'd brought with him, so maybe it wasn't planned and you're right, it was a sex act that got out of control. Maybe the clothes were already off but he got blood on the blouse when he picked it up and moved it. Except I found it partially under the skirt, and the clothes appear to have been tossed, not piled or folded in any particular way. If the tying-up was voluntary, it would explain why there's no bruising, why she wasn't straining against the bounds. Heck”—she took another look—“the knots aren't even that tight, and nylons are stretchy. She probably could have slipped out of them but cooperated up until the first blow. Then she didn't struggle because she wasn't conscious. But it still doesn't answer how either of them got into this room.”

“Bribed a maid,” Powell said. “Place like this has a huge staff, and half of them make minimum wage. How hard could it be?”