At the Scene of the Crime (2 page)

“And the techno-poops shall inherit the earth.”

“Now I’m despondent.”

 

The morgue was all stainless steel and Coopersmith, the medical examiner, all starched white cotton. He got out his cell phone to check the time; Henry seemed to be taking too much of it from the first minute. The young man drew the sheet down from the victim’s naked corpse so the sergeant could examine her left wrist.

“Doesn’t look like she ever wore a watch there,” Henry said.

“She didn’t. There are old pressure marks and a tan line on the right, where she wore it all the time.”

“I’m working on the theory she was left-handed.”

Coopersmith lifted a sheet on a metal clipboard. “Greater muscle and bone density in the left biceps, humerus, radius, and ulna, indicating more frequent use. Theory checks.” He sounded reluctant to surrender the point.

“Her boss said she was a rightie.”

“Witnesses are human. Trust science.”

Henry straightened. “This isn’t Angela Kaybee.”

“Based on what, some kind of hunch? Those went out when DNA came in. It’s her. No two people have the same.”

“That’s what they said about fingerprints.”

“They said that because it’s true. It’s like snowflakes.”

“I saw a snowflake last winter that looked just like one I saw in 1963. Nobody’s taken a close look at all of them. If you printed everyone who
ever lived and everyone who ever will, the law of averages says there has to be a duplicate set somewhere, sometime.”

“But not in the same place or time. Odds against it are ridiculous. This is Angela Kaybee.” The M.E. slid the sheet back up over her head as if to seal off any more discussion.

 

The mother’s name was Kaybee as well. The computer search established her as a natural-born U.S. citizen who had married a German national named Oskar Bern and accompanied him when he returned to Düsseldorf. Hospitals in that area found no birth records connected with either name.

“Home delivery,” Henry told Davidoff. “Spread the search to include individual doctors and midwives.”

“New faith in technology?”

“It has its advantages when you know where to look. What about that toxicity report?”

“Next item on the list.” Davidoff turned a page in the folder he’d carried to Henry’s desk. “Barbiturates in her system. Checks with the prescription bottle in the bathroom. Her doctor was treating her for insomnia. That can lead to depression, you know.”

“Did she take enough to kill her?”

“No.”

“Why use a rope when sleeping pills are so much easier?”

“Let’s ask her. Oh, wait, we can’t. She killed herself!”

“What effect would the amount she took have on her?”

“I asked. I’m a detective too, don’t forget. Depends on level of resistance. She’d been taking the pills for a year. Trace amount could put a beginner out for the count or just make a chronic user pleasantly drowsy.”

“What I hate about science,” Henry said. “It isn’t an exact science. Somebody slipped her a mickey, then strung her up.”

“I gotta say she was a possible candidate for murder. So far everyone we’ve talked to—coworkers, neighbors, her boss, even her doctor—wouldn’t nominate her for Miss Congeniality. Money seemed to come up missing
from purses when she was around. That doesn’t mean they hated her enough to go to any more trouble than just bonk her with a rock.”

“You’re forgetting it isn’t her in the morgue.”

Worry lines accordioned his partner’s forehead. “Aleck, you’re running full-tilt into a brick wall of evidence, all because a couple of people who knew her said she was right-handed.”

“Three so far. It isn’t her. What’s holding up that out-of-state record?”

“You’ll have to look into it yourself.” His partner spoke coldly. “The brass want this one closed so we can get through the rest of the pile sometime this year. You can afford to be a dinosaur. I’ve got three years till retirement.”

“Okay, Mac.”

Davidoff snapped shut the folder. “Oh, hell, I’ll get you what I can. You realize if it turns out she’s wanted for something it’s just another motive for suicide.”

“I’m okay with suicide, if that’s what it is. I just can’t go fishing until I find out who it was who committed it.”

 

It came to him next morning when he was brushing his teeth.

The evidence clerk didn’t recognize Sergeant Henry at first. A careful dresser, he had his coat buttoned wrong today and the skinny part of his necktie hung down longer than the wide part in front. It was plain he’d thrown everything on at a run.

“Kaybee case,” Henry said. “I need her driver’s license.”

He drove with it to the airport, where he showed the clerks at the airline counters Angela Kaybee’s picture on her license with his thumb covering her name. Northwest and American were no help, but as he was turning away from Delta a baggage handler spotted the photo and remembered her as the woman who’d tipped him a quarter to push a half-dozen bags up to the counter. The clerk who’d checked her through was drinking coffee in the break room. She nodded when Henry showed her the picture, shook her head when he moved his thumb away from the name.

The police in Düsseldorf arrested Angela Kaybee when she stepped off the plane. She was traveling on a passport in the name of Andrea Bern.

“Twin sister.” Mac Davidoff shook his head over the fax from Europe. “Separated in infancy when the parents divorced. The mother returned to America with Angela, Andrea stayed in Germany with her father. How did you know?”

Henry sat on the corner of his partner’s desk. “I heard somewhere that identical twins have identical DNA. Techs overlook that; untidy. It made Andrea a likely candidate for the woman in the morgue. They were mirror twins. In a case like that, one is left-handed, the other right. Sometimes they even have their organs on opposite sides, but not this time.”

“They don’t have the same fingerprints.”

“Not exactly, but there were enough points of similarity not to clash with the partials we got from Angela’s apartment. She gave us the only complete set we got when she pressed Andrea’s fingers around the bathroom glass. By then the barbiturates had made Andrea pliable enough for anything. They were Angela’s prescription, remember; she was the one with the resistance.”

Davidoff glanced through the rest of the communications on his desk and slid them over. “Angela dipped into the till of every business she ever worked for in three states. She’d’ve done forty years easy when it all caught up with her. Her sister picked a hell of a time to visit.”

Henry read. The recent death of Andrea’s father had placed his documents in her hands. When she found out she had a twin sister in the U.S., she’d looked her up on the Internet.

“It was a gift to Angela,” Henry said. “Andrea’s record was clean and she had their father’s trust fund. Angela even had a sample of her sister’s signature on her passport for practice.”

“She needed it. She had a one-day layover in Germany, just long enough to transfer the fund to a Swiss account before she skedaddled to Amsterdam. She couldn’t risk slipping up in front of her sister’s friends in Germany.”

“I knew she’d be moving fast. She’d need the cash to fight extradition once we got the official fingerprint file and found out it wasn’t Angela in the morgue.”

Davidoff grinned. “Congratulations, Aleck. You proved all the scientific bells and whistles in the world are no match for old-fashioned detective work.”

“I’m not knocking the bells and whistles today. They’ll help make the conviction.”

“You can afford to be generous; you’re legend now. What was the name of that old-time railroad worker who beat a steam engine?”

“John Henry.”

“Any relation?”

Alexander Henry glanced at the watch on his right wrist. He’d been retired six minutes. “We’ll have to compare DNA to find out.”

“We can thank television for this. Not a thing goes on anywhere in the world that we aren’t privy to. We’ve become inured to the horrible atrocities inflicted every day upon the most vulnerable in places whose names we can’t pronounce. Terrorists and tornadoes wipe out entire villages in third world countries and we don’t give them a second thought. Wars are waged, but unless they affect the price of oil, we yawn and click the remote.”

I had to stifle a yawn myself. I agreed with everything he said, not that it bore the faintest relevance to what we were here to investigate. At best, he was making an ass of himself in front of strangers. At worst, his pontificating in the middle of a case confirmed what some of my colleagues long suspected: my partner was losing it.

We’re standing in the middle of the Rare Book Room at a major Denver university. McDuff, me—Detective Lorna Fitzgerald of the Felony Theft Squad—and the forensic team. It’s 9:30 a.m. on a Tuesday in late October. The call came in to dispatch two hours ago. The head librarian reported to work and found the door ajar. At first, she thought it was the cleaning team. Again.

Until she opened the Rare Book Room. Six volumes were missing. Books worth a cool $3.2 million.

Standing right outside the room now are two hand-wringing librarians: the head librarian who discovered and reported the crime, and her assistant, who arrived moments after we did. Members of the forensic team have taken photographs and are now at work processing the scene.

The Rare Book Room is a room in name only—in actuality, it’s a vault. About ten feet by ten feet in size. Two walls with floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted bookcases fitted with key locks. Tempered glass, according to the librarians. The vault door is six-inch tempered steel with a combination lock. There is no sign that it was tampered with. The interior is temperature controlled, with a security camera in the upper right-hand corner. A six-foot steel work table and two metal chairs with padded seats and backs are against the third wall. The only items on the table are a computer monitor and a box of latex gloves.

All my observations. McDuff doesn’t seem interested in anything except continuing his diatribe.

“The one area we seem to be paying close attention to,” he says, “is crime—specifically how to commit it and get away with it. We have here a perfect example.”

He draws a breath, poised to rage on.

I put a hand on his arm. “I think calling this a good example of a perfect crime is disturbing the natives.” I keep my voice low and surreptitiously jerk a thumb toward the librarians. “They’re upset enough without giving them the idea we’ll never recover their books.”

McDuff pauses at that, looking down at me as he always does, making me feel like a kid who wandered into the adult’s corner by mistake. He’s fifty-something to my twenty-nine, six feet to my five-two and built like a square-bodied wrestler, all planes and angles. He has six months to go until retirement and he’s determined to spend those last six months letting everyone know how he feels about everything.

He does, however, stop long enough to follow my gaze to the two outside the door. The librarian closest to us has stopped her hand wringing and is frowning. “You don’t think you’ll catch whoever stole our books?”

Thick, horn-rimmed glasses perched on a thin nose magnify the concern in her owlish eyes. Even with those glasses, she’s pretty in an efficient sort of way. Her short, sun-touched brown hair frames a heart-shaped face. She’s wearing a nicely tailored suit, good shoes. She’s in her forties, and,
according to her statement, the head librarian.

“Not at all, Ms. Simmons,” I reply before McDuff can. He’d probably advise her to file the insurance claim. Now. “We’re giving this case our full attention. These books, besides their monetary value, have immense historical value as well. They are irreplaceable and we intend to get them back.”

She doesn’t look reassured.

Probably because McDuff is shaking his head in a way that suggests I have no idea what I’m talking about.

As usual. The fact that we’ve been partners for a year and have the best record in the major crimes department for closing cases is eternally and irrevocably lost on him.

Laura Givens, one of the forensic investigators, catches my eye. I excuse myself and step over to where Laura has been swirling fingerprint powder over the glass doors that until a few hours ago held six rare art books. She inclines her head in a curt nod toward McDuff.

“He’s in fine form today.”

“Let’s shut him up. Got anything?”

Givens nods and points to a set of fingerprints caught by the magnetic powder above the catch on the cabinet door. “Clean as a whistle except for this. One full, several partials. Of course, we won’t know if these belong to our thief until I compare them with Ms. Simmons and her assistant. According to her, they’re the only two allowed access to the books.”

“Run them as soon as you can and let me know.”

I’ve turned back to Ms. Simmons, now speaking with quiet urgency to the woman introduced earlier as her assistant, Melanie Byers. Byers is a little shorter than Ms. Simmons, heavier, plainer. Ten years older. She’s dressed in tan slacks and a white shirt over which she’s draped a worn cardigan of muddy brown. She’s looking up at Simmons with an expression bordering on hysteria. I step closer to hear the exchange.

Simmons: “Why did you come back last night?”

Byers: “I didn’t.”

“Don’t lie. I saw you. You were spying on me.”

“Why would I?”

An eyebrow rises. “Because you wanted something to use against me? You’ve been trying to get in his good graces since I came on board. This must have looked like your best chance.”

“Use what against whom?” I interject myself into the conversation.

They jerk away from each other and turn toward me.