Presumption of Guilt (29 page)

This time, however, the call wasn't social. He merely stuck his head through the doorway, said, “Got a homicide on Elliot, if you want it fresh off the boat,” and left just as abruptly.

Willy laughed. “Small-town policing. Gotta love it.”

He and Joe, the only ones then in the office, swung in behind Ron, who was already moving rapidly toward the stairs.

“Any details?” Joe asked his back.

Ron glanced over his shoulder. “Not much. A male in an apartment not his own, which is listed to Kelly Doane. She's a known player to us.”

“Doane,” Willy repeated—he of the elephant's memory. “That rings a bell. Prostitution and drug use?”

“That's her,” Ron told him. “Although we have no clue of her whereabouts right now.”

“The dead guy have an ID?” Joe asked.

“Maybe. We just got the call. Patrol's there, and the scene's sealed.”

*   *   *

Well sealed, too, as they discovered minutes later, Elliot Street being only a couple of blocks south of the municipal center. There were two cruisers in the street, and four patrol officers positioned along the way to the apartment, three flights up. The last cop was at the open door, holding a clipboard.

“Anyone inside?” Klesczewski asked, struggling into his white Tyvek suit, as were his two companions—including Willy, with his own well-practiced, one-arm technique.

“Only the dead guy,” the officer said, registering their names. “And you're the first ones I've logged in.”

“Any word on the girl who lives here? Doane?”

The man merely shook his head.

“The medical examiner been called?”

“ETA's about ten minutes. He happened to be in town when we paged him.”

The three of them entered the sparsely furnished room and stood silently, looking around. The daylight barely eked through a pair of small, filthy windows. A single overhead light provided a harsh and graceless glare to the place, all the better to bounce off the flat pool of dark blood that held the body in its midst like a large blob of sealing wax. The dead man, bald and nicely dressed from what they could see, was facing the distant wall.

“Jesus,” Willy observed. “That looks like every drop he had in him.”

There was some talking at the door, and the trio turned to see Jerry Senturia again, the local ME, already half dressed in white, being entered into the log. He looked up at them as he finished pulling on a pair of latex gloves.

“Hey, guys. We meet again. Another homicide? I get like one of these a year.”

He stepped inside, carrying a small silver case, which Joe had once heard him refer to as his “corpse kit.”

“We need to point out your customer?” Willy asked.

Senturia whistled instead. “You boys don't fool around.”

“We were wondering if that puddle represented a complete bleed-out,” Ron said.

Senturia gave an appraising grunt, followed by, “Close, I'd say. It's arterial, too, by the color of it. Wherever he was hit, it bled out like a garden hose.” He hesitated at the edge of the pool, somewhat at a loss on how to proceed.

“Hang on,” Ron told him, crossing to the door and asking, “You guys bring those little stools we bought for scenes like this?”

He was almost immediately handed a stack of shiny metal blocks designed to create a non-contaminating path through any field of potential evidence. In the meantime, Senturia had begun taking general scene photographs.

In short order, they arranged a staggered row of the metal blocks like stepping stones across a pond, leading up to the body's edge. Awkwardly, working to not lose his balance, Senturia juggled his camera, his clipboard, and a small flashlight, all while kneeling atop the carefully placed pedestals.

“Crime techs coming?” he asked as he examined the body.

“You want to make it easy?” Willy asked from the edge.

“They're on their way,” Ron told him. “Won't be long. What've you got?”

Senturia glanced at him. “I'll show you in a sec. I've updated some of my toys. You'll love it.”

He finished doing the best he could, poking about and taking photographs without disrobing the body as he usually did, and then retraced his steps back to dry land.

“Okay,” he said triumphantly. He took his camera, cabled it to a tablet computer he removed from his kit, and entered a few commands.

“There,” he said, sitting back on his haunches, having set it all up in the middle of the bare wooden floor. His three companions clustered around him like shuffling ghosts.

The first images showed the body's neck. “See that line?” Senturia asked them, tapping the screen with his gloved finger.

“What the hell is it?” Ron asked. “A knife wound?”

“I don't think so,” Senturia said. “You can't see it in this shot, but it goes about ninety percent round.”

“A garrote,” Joe spoke softly. “I saw those in combat—used to take out sentries.”

“Right,” Willy agreed. “A piano wire with wooden handles at both ends. I've only seen a couple of those, in New York.” He glanced meaningfully at Joe before adding, “Almost like a signature Mob hit.”

“It certainly explains the blood,” Senturia told them. “I poked my finger into the wound to see how deep it is. Basically, the only thing keeping the head attached is the spinal column. All the major vessels have been transected.”

He forwarded through several more photos as he spoke, until he reached a shot of the body's face.

“Damn,” Joe muttered, straightening. “That's not good.”

Senturia looked up at him. “You know him?”

“Yeah,” Willy said. “That's Johnny Lucas.”

*   *   *

“I'd normally say that we ought to stop meeting like this,” Beverly told him. “But that would be completely disingenuous.”

She glanced around the autopsy room, saw that Todd, her diener, had stepped out briefly, and pulled down her surgical mask for a kiss, which Joe happily supplied. He had never seen her so spontaneous and playful as he had since they announced they were a couple. It didn't make him regret the months they'd been circumspect, but it certainly pleased him that he no longer had to tiptoe around the issue.

They were gazing down at Johnny Lucas, who'd been opened up from neck to groin and had his innards removed. Beverly had also made the incision across the top of his head and peeled down his face in preparation for the removal of the skullcap, when Todd realized that his saw blade needed replacement.

“I didn't ask you before,” Joe said, putting his own mask back in place. “But a garrote was the weapon, wasn't it?”

She glanced at the traumatized neck. “It's consistent with that,” she said. “Interesting thing to use, though.”

“Why?” he asked. “It clearly worked.”

“Oh, it did that, all right,” she agreed. “But this is the first such case I've had on this table. Garroting is an ancient form of execution, and as you've discovered, impressively messy.”

“Fast, though,” Joe said. “And subtle, in its way.”

“In what fashion?”

“Well, it's just a wire, isn't it? If the handles are kept elsewhere, you could say you got it off a picture frame, or from around a bundle. And it's fast, assuming you have the element of surprise and know what you're doing.”

She nodded at the body. “Indications are that his attacker was behind him, but that his head was turned to the left—the way it was when he was found, facedown and with his right cheek in contact with the floor.”

Todd reentered with the saw, and efficiently went about removing Lucas's skullcap. After he'd stepped away, Beverly approached the glistening brain itself, gingerly removed it, weighed it on a scale, and moved it to a small cutting board near one of the sinks.

“This may be useful,” she announced after a minute's careful examination.

Joe moved beside her, seeing little more than a slightly bloody, lumpy blob, the size of a deflated half-soccer-ball. “What?”

“He suffered a cerebral bleed before he died.”

Joe shrugged. “That would've made it easier. Whack him on the noggin and then garrote him on the floor. Probably explains the positioning you just described.”

But she was shaking her head. “True, but that's not exactly what's being suggested here.” She tapped the brain with a fingertip. “This was given a longer interval to hemorrhage than that.”

Joe paused, staring. “How long an interval?” he asked.

“Hard to say without knowing the circumstances,” she predictably answered. “But he definitely was not struck and then immediately killed. From the scene photographs of the body's placement and the subsequent pooling of blood inside the cranium—which I can see here—I'd say it was beyond a half hour between events.”

“Huh,” he grunted thoughtfully. “That opens up the possibilities.” He brushed her waist surreptitiously with his hand and stepped back. “Guess I better head back and start poking into a few of them.”

She turned toward him, a carving knife still in her hand. “By the way?”

He removed his mask and smiled. “What's up?”

“I've seen this kind of head injury often enough to venture a guess on what caused it.”

“Really? You're kidding. You almost never do that.”

She looked embarrassed. “Well, as I said—familiarity. And I did stress it's going to be a guess.”

“Fire away.”

“It's consistent with a fall,” she said. “Combining the findings on the brain with the markings on the scalp suggests that Mr. Lucas landed with some force.”

“Like from a roof?” Joe asked, incredulous.

“No, no, no. Nothing that grand. More likely from a standing height, but forcefully. I've seen it in children, adults—multiple times. It's similar to a skiing injury.”

“As if he'd been tackled,” Joe revised his scenario.

“Yes,” she said. “That would fit. And it would nicely correspond with a bruise that I found on his right hand, consistent with someone reaching out to break a fall—and which I couldn't explain until I saw the brain injury.”

He shook his head in wonder. “I know I'm prejudiced, but I think you're terrific.”

*   *   *

“What is this?
The Godfather
?” Willy groused. “Next we'll be falling over packages of dead fish.”

Joe ignored him. “We have a location on Kelly Doane?”

“Not yet,” Lester told him.

“You think there might be an organized crime element, after all?” Sam asked from her desk.

Joe swiveled his chair around to take in the falling rain outside. He'd just returned from Burlington and Lucas's autopsy, and delivered his report about both the garroting and the brain injury. “I've never ruled it out, given what we learned about the funding of Ridgeline Roofing, complete with a requisite burial in concrete. But extending that out so many years, long after Ridgeline's buyout, seems a stretch. After a while, I'd like to think even the Mob knows when to let something drop.”

“So we're talking something personal,” Sam fairly concluded.

“Or a mixture of both,” Willy ventured.

“What about Linda Lucas?” Joe asked. “I know you pounded on her door to break the news and got no answer. Has she showed up yet?”

Lester remained the harbinger of bad news. “Nothing. We put a guy on the house. Looks like she vanished.”

“Or got vanished,” Willy said.

“Damn,” Joe growled, and asked more loudly, “All right. How 'bout the crime lab? They find anything?”

“Somebody was murdered in Kelly Doane's apartment,” Sam reported, deadpan.

No one laughed, but Joe did stir from his pensive state, turning back around to face them. “That's what we got, isn't it? But why? What connects Johnny Lucas to Kelly Doane?” He leaned forward and placed his elbows on his desk. “Three murders. All interrelated. People are angry out there. They're acting on their passions, lashing out, presumably covering up, scrambling as fast as they can. What does that suggest?”

Willy understood immediately. “Screwups.”

“Correct,” Joe said. “More than one. Which means evidence and witnesses that we've missed. We find just one of those dropped balls, it might be what we're after.”

He got to his feet to drive home his final point. “One thing we do know: This is a closed game. It's not a nut shooting strangers at random, and it's not a single person acting out some puppet master fantasy. It involves a limited number of interconnected people, most of whom we've probably talked to by now. We need to get out there and do what we do. This crap has got to end on our terms.”

“Unless they all bump each other off,” Willy added.

*   *   *

Sally held her friend in her arms. “Kelly, I only knocked him out. He'll be fine. You'll be fine.”

“But who
was
he?” Kelly complained in a whine. “What did I ever do to
him
?”

“He had no interest in you,” Sally tried explaining for the fourth time. “He was using you to get to me.”

“But I don't understand,” Kelly continued. “He wanted to kill you.”

Sally continued stroking her hair. “I know, I know. He got it all wrong. That's what I've been trying to tell you. Once the dust has settled, my dad and I'll get together and figure it all out.”

“Was it a dope deal?” Kelly asked, searching among her own experiences for a rational explanation.

“Something like that,” Sally said agreeably, wondering where her father was. They were in the penthouse for the time being, but she knew that was only temporary, while Dan put an alternative plan together. That was a shame, she thought absentmindedly. She liked this place.

The bedroom door opened and Dan stuck his head in far enough to mouth,
Can you come?