A Cruel Season for Dying (2 page)

The living area had the same studied spareness as the bedroom. Artwork dominated. A few large canvases, mostly abstract, arranged
on pale glazed walls—collections of small ancient-looking objects on glass and wrought iron tables. The Crime Scene Unit had
begun their work in the rest of the upstairs apartment, and fingerprint powder like drifting volcanic ash lay everywhere on
the living room’s hard surfaces. A single sooty shoe print marred the bleached wool carpet, like an artifact or an omen.

Sakura stood inside the doorway observing the man on the sofa. Jerry Greenberg was, according to Kramer’s report, the victim’s
business partner and lover. He sat hunched forward on the gray leather cushions in a classic pose of mourning, elbows on knees,
the heels of his palms pressed hard against his eyelids. He wore jeans and a turtleneck sweater, which showed above the collar
of the outdoor jacket he had not taken time to remove. He did not seem aware of the heat in the apartment or that anyone had
entered the room. Sakura walked over.

“Mr. Greenberg …”

An indistinguishable noise, a simultaneous sucking in of breath and grief, shuddered in the fabric of the jacket as Greenberg
pulled himself up, his blond head thrown into relief against the abstract painting behind him. He was thinner than Sakura
had first imagined, and the vague slackness of sudden shock made his face appear older than the thirty-six listed in Kramer’s
report. The pale eyes seemed unnaturally large, as if he had to concentrate to keep them open.

“I’m Lieutenant Sakura, Mr. Greenberg,” he introduced himself. “I’m sorry for your loss, but there are questions I have to
ask.”

Greenberg swallowed once, nodded.

“As I understand it,” Sakura began, “you’ve been away for the last few days. You arrived here from the airport around one
forty-five this morning.”

“Yes, I’ve been on a buying trip. I was supposed to fly home tomorrow.” Greenberg’s voice was unexpectedly deep and resonant.
It made his simplest statement sound important. “But I finished up early and managed to get a flight….” The words trailed
off.

“What happened when you got here?”

“I came straight up to the bedroom.”

“The downstairs door was locked as usual?”

“Yes.”

Sakura nodded. As with the Carrera apartment, there had been no sign of forced entry. “So you came upstairs, and you saw Mr.
Milne,” he prompted.

“Yes,” Greenberg said again, “but I couldn’t make sense of it. I mean, I didn’t even know it was David at first. It wouldn’t
register…. Then I just knew he was dead.”

“Do you have any idea who might have done this?”

Greenberg shook his head. He was no longer looking at Sakura.

“Could you have done it?”

The gray eyes flashed upward, indignation penetrating the grief. “What kind of question is that?”

“Direct.” Sakura didn’t smile.

“I loved David.”

“That doesn’t disqualify you, Mr. Greenberg.”

Greenberg had pushed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. Now one of them came out. “This does.” He held up a boarding
pass.

Sakura took it, read the time and flight number. “May I keep it?”

“Of course … check it out.” Greenberg’s voice had developed an undertow of belligerence.

Sakura did not react, slipping the boarding pass into his pocket. “Perhaps Mr. Milne invited someone up here this evening,”
he said.

Greenberg’s eyes flashed again, but his answer was calm. “David and I were faithful to each other.”

“But you had friends?”

“A lot of them. Everyone loved David.” There was no irony in the statement.

Sakura held the man’s eyes. “Were you or Mr. Milne, or any of these friends, into any kind of religious or ritualistic … activity?
Something that could get out of hand?”

Greenberg didn’t flinch. “I know no one who could have done
this.
”

Sakura let it drop. “We’ll want a list of those friends,” he said, “as well as lists of your artists and clients…. You get
a lot of traffic in the gallery?”

“Yes.” For the first time Greenberg nearly smiled. “David was a sculptor,” he said. “The problem was he had rheumatoid arthritis.
He started the gallery when he couldn’t continue to work. He liked finding new artists and helping them. Even when our people
made it uptown, a lot of them would come back here and do shows for us.”

Sakura listened, letting him finish. “I think you would have to agree,” he said, “that there is a certain artistic element
to what happened in that bedroom. I ask you again. Can you think of anyone who might have done this to Mr. Milne?”

“No.” Greenberg was shaking his head violently. “And I find it disgusting that you could call what I saw in there … artistic.”

Sakura watched him. There was a suggestion of performance in all Greenberg’s reactions. The man was very self-aware. It did
not follow, however, that the emotions had to be anything less than genuine.

He tried another tack. “Does the name Luis Carrera mean anything to you?”

“No,” Greenberg said, looking up again. “Should it?”

Sakura did not answer. The truth was, he’d been hoping for some easy connection between David Milne and Friday night’s victim,
who’d also been homosexual, but Greenberg’s denial seemed real. And with no personal link between the gallery owner and the
dancer, it seemed more probable that the killer was targeting gay men at random.

“It’s important,” he said finally, “that you don’t talk to anyone about the details of Mr. Milne’s death. Especially anyone
from the media.”

Greenberg nodded.

“One of my people will drive you to headquarters for a formal statement. You can wait here till we finish; then get whatever
you need. The building will have to be sealed for a few days.”

Greenberg stared, and Sakura could read in the man’s face exactly what he was thinking. That a few days would do nothing to
change the enormity of what had happened.

“I’ll want to speak with you again,” he said, “so make sure we know where you can be reached. If anything occurs to you before
then”— he pulled a card from the inside pocket of his jacket—“this has my number. And don’t forget what I said about talking
to anyone about the details of what happened here tonight. That would damage our chances of finding Mr. Milne’s killer, and
you could be charged with obstruction of justice for interference in a criminal investigation.”

Greenberg’s eyes had gone blank again. He took the card without looking. Kept it in his fingers.

At the door Sakura turned back. The man had not changed position. His stricken face, made paler by distance, seemed frozen
and flat, floating like an icon on the painted surface behind him.

Beneath the corner of Thirtieth Street and First Avenue was the realm of the dead, the basement morgue that handled Manhattan’s
homicides. Colder and damper than the outdoor October, the morgue was a fluorescent-lit underworld where toe-tagged bodies
waited like hitchhikers along the steel-lockered corridors for attendants who would wheel them into the cutting room. Fortunately
for Sakura, the hierarchies of city bureaucracy reached even beyond the grave. Bodies with clout moved to the head of the
line.

Still with a weekend between the two murders, Sakura had yet to receive even the most basic toxicological or lab reports.
And Saturday’s autopsy on Luis Carrera had failed to establish a cause of death. Earlier at the Milne apartment, he had tried
to question Linsky, but the medical examiner had remained determinedly closemouthed, deferring any discussion of his findings
to this morning’s autopsy on the gallery owner.

The procedure had been quickly scheduled, and Linsky, as was his custom, had shunned the protective “bunny suit” for more
traditional scrubs and apron. The son of Russian émigrés, the medical examiner possessed the preciseness of an old-world technician.
It was not unusual for the apron to remain virtually spotless throughout the most involved procedure. A starched white lab
coat would replace it as Linsky exited the swinging metal doors.

The cutting room was silent except for the shuffling of the attendant and Linsky’s monotonous droning as he talked through
his external examination for the overhead mike. Some medical examiners played taped background music on the theory that sound
helped to dampen the brain’s response to odor. Linsky took no such mercy. A detective was present to preserve the evidential
chain. The smell was part of the job. For the moment Milne’s body remained unopened. It lay facedown on the stainless table,
the two shoulder wounds like butcher cuts in tallow.

“… A pair of wounds are present on the posterior chest wall, parallel to the spine and deeply incised into the underlying
skeletal muscle.” Linsky continued to speak for the microphone. “The incisions are approximately five to six centimeters in
length. Margins are sharp and even, suggestive of a small knife or a scalpel-like instrument. Lack of
bleeding into adjacent tissue indicates the injuries were made postmortem. Bruising about the mouth and around the ankles
and wrists is consistent with the use of duct tape.

“You seem to have a question, Lieutenant Sakura?” The M.E. had cut the mike and was looking at him through the plastic visor
shield.

“I was wondering about the fingernails,” Sakura said.

“The lab work isn’t in yet for Carrera. But I saw no obvious skin fragments beneath his nails or Mr. Milne’s here … if that’s
what you’re asking.”

“You said that the bruising was consistent with the victims struggling
after
they were bound?”

“Yes … after.” Linsky’s voice betrayed a bit of impatience. “Otherwise, we’d expect to see more bruising or abrasions. On
the hands for instance.”

“That’s what puzzles me,” Sakura said. “Why didn’t they struggle before he taped them? Why just let him do it?”

The medical examiner was notoriously reluctant to speculate. A moment passed while he appeared to weigh the worth of the question.
“Perhaps these were bondage situations that turned into something else,” he said finally. “Or given that these victims were
both relatively small men, it’s possible they felt sufficiently threatened physically that they just didn’t fight…. I don’t
know, Lieutenant.”

“Neither do I,” Sakura admitted.

He watched as the attendant helped Linsky turn the body. Faceup again on the table, David Milne was suddenly real, the body
somehow more human than it had appeared last night in the bedroom. Sakura felt an odd pang of impersonal guilt, as if the
indecency of the forensic procedure and his own silent witness could take as much from the dead man as the killer.

Milne was small, with that adolescent boniness that Sakura associated with some gay men. His chest was pale and hairless.
The killer’s charcoal drawing stood out below the nipples, more smudged and faded since last night. Linsky obliterated it
further. Pressing with one hand against the sternum, he began the thoraco-abdominal incision. First the long shallow curve
through the pectorals from one shoulder blade to the other. Then the straight deep line from breastbone to
pubis. With the Y-shaped cut gaping open, Linsky peeled back flesh and cartilage from the rib cage, then crunched with the
cutters through the breastbone to the pale milky sac veiling the organs. Standing behind the medical examiner, Sakura could
identify the lungs and liver above the snaky loops of intestine. With the layers coming away, it was easier again to think
of Milne as just a body. The smell resisted abstraction.

The process continued. Linsky removed the organ tree, transferring it to a metal sink. He proceeded to extract his samples,
inspecting and weighing the organs. Sakura thought the medical examiner looked no more satisfied than he had at Carrera’s
autopsy. He waited for a moment when the M.E. ceased speaking for the mike.

“You still don’t know how they died, do you?” he said.

Linsky turned to him. “No, Lieutenant Sakura, I do not. The needle marks on the arms are suggestive, but on Saturday, when
I opened Carrera, I found no damage to the organs. And the basic toxicological screens turned up nothing beyond a common pain
medication, an anti-inflammatory, and an antidepressant.”

“And Milne …?”

“The organs, as you’ve heard me say, appear normal.”

“You said the needle marks were suggestive—”

Linsky cut off the implied question with a look. “It is my intention,” he said, “to push through a much wider range of tests
on blood and tissue samples from both victims.”

“When?” Sakura asked.

“As soon as possible, Lieutenant. I don’t like mysteries any better than you do.”