Defensive Wounds (35 page)

But she couldn't let remorse paralyze her, and besides, Neil Kelly knew William's story, and it was his investigation. He could figure out what to do about it. She would have to tell him about Bruce Raffel's connection to William's trial. But why would William murder the three people who'd set him free? That made no sense at all. Unless it was some sort of guilt-induced legal suicide—he had decided that his own acquittal was a travesty of justice—and if he were really that unbalanced, then he deserved a Motion Picture Academy lifetime achievement award.

“She was disturbed about the conference falling apart, came up here to be alone,” Neil Kelly guessed, looking at Angela, but Theresa got the feeling he wanted to include her. Maybe he wanted to apologize for his boorish behavior. Maybe he wanted to let her know he forgave her for
her
boorish behavior. Maybe he thought there was still a chance of getting in her pants, and—this was the real hell of it—there was.

“Or,” he went on, “she came here to meet somebody.”

“Or she came with somebody,” Theresa said. “There's no bruising to her face or her arms, no hunks of hair torn out. She came willingly, with someone she trusted.”

“Maybe he put a gun in her back,” Neil said. “Just because he didn't use it to kill her doesn't mean he didn't have one.”

“So they come up here. Then what?” Angela asked Theresa.

“Then Sonia either didn't notice that he picked up a murder weapon when they passed through the inside observation deck below or she couldn't do much about it by that point. She turns away, to check out the view—or to run—and he brings the two-by-four down on the back of her head.” Theresa pointed out a spray of blood on the chest-high outer wall. The elliptical drops downward, toward the floor of the deck. “She falls, he strikes her again, giving us this impact pattern halfway along this wall, two feet to the west of the first. She's trying to get away. She lands here, where we find her. I think, from the relatively small amount of blood on her blouse, that he undressed her then, trussed her up. Then he hit her again at least once, most likely twice, spattering blood along the platform here and up her bound arms to the tie around her wrists.”

“She's already incapacitated, and still he caves her head in?” Angela asked.

“He wants to make sure she's dead,” Theresa stated. “This isn't sick, out-of-control impulses. He came here to kill her, and he wanted to make sure he finished the job.”

With the body enclosed in the superglue chamber, Theresa pulled on a set of coveralls and got out the black fingerprint powder. She began just past the body, hoping the preserved area might have kept some clues about Sonia's murderer. She balanced on the balls of her feet, hovering so close to Don's legs that she brushed his calves.

“You're not going to get fresh down there, are you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Darn.” The lab tech didn't move but continued to hold the upper edge of the superglue tent to keep it from either collapsing or blowing away. They had worked in close quarters before.

Sonia had a horizontal gash to the back of her skull, and given the artistic spray of blood along the floor of the deck at the same location, Theresa figured the blow had come when Sonia was already down. It would make more sense to have the attacker standing behind Sonia, between her and the stairwell, but this gash would be more easily administered from a position between her and the scaffold. The two-by-four had been dropped between Sonia and the scaffold, though the killer could easily have tossed it from the other side. It wasn't positive proof, but it was safe to assume that once Sonia was trussed up with her feet and wrists in the air, she fairly effectively blocked access. The killer might have turned and gone the other way, over the scaffold. Unless it was someone who was really afraid of heights, and this killer must like them. Otherwise he would have killed Sonia in the lower observation rooms, where the windows would have obscured the view from surrounding offices. No, either this killer didn't know that the staff used the deck as a smoking lounge and figured that no one would find the body for weeks or he wanted to maximize his visuals. He was all about the drama.

The scene cut Theresa a break on this one point: The glossy white paint created about the most ideal surface she'd ever found in an outdoor scene. Unfortunately, that wasn't saying much. It had already been coated with the residue of the city, hoisted aloft by the winds. Aside from the normal dust, dirt, and grime, there was overspray from the roiling lake, factory emissions, and the exhaust of twice-daily rush hour. As she brushed the fine black powder onto the two walls, the floor, and the scaffold of the U-shaped trench, all that came into view seemed to be smudges, layers of dirt, ancient bird droppings, and streaks of rain.

The floor of the deck and the scaffold platform did give up some shoe prints, partial and sometimes indistinct patches of various soles. No sign of the smooth triangle of Sonia's pumps, but pieces of rubber-soled shoes like boots or athletic trainers. She found traces of her own Reeboks, trailing along the inner edge where she'd carried the vacuum. She also found a smallish-looking Nike and the simple straight-line tread of a cheap canvas sneaker.

Each decently distinct pattern was then covered with three-inch-wide tape, which Theresa pressed and massaged until it was well and truly stuck and then removed to a glossy five-by-seven card, which she labeled and stored before inching forward to the next section of deck. A slow process, to put it mildly, and producing pieces of evidence that could be of extremely limited use. Who knew how many people in the building might have found their way to the observation deck at some point? Their shoe prints did not necessarily implicate them in murder. The killer had managed to avoid stepping in the victim's blood, and without that obvious timeline a shoe print could be explained away. But still she toiled.

Behind her the two men facing each other over the weak construction of wood strips and plastic were silent except when Angela returned on occasion to report some new development: The search warrant for Sonia's home had been written and now waited on a judge's reading and signature. One had been made up for her car as well. The murder weapon had almost definitely come from the enclosed observation rooms below; specks of white paint across the wood were similar to specks left across others. Co-workers at the public defender's office had expressed shock and grief but got predictably less voluble when asked about the victim's current casework, reporting that they either did not know anything about her present clients or were not aware of any extreme behavior among them. The more forthcoming attorneys insisted that Sonia hadn't complained of any threats and hadn't seemed to fear any one of her clients. But then, they invariably added, she wouldn't.

Angela intended to speak with the convention organizers and to find out if Sonia had had any particular plans for the day's schedule before the convention wound up unexpectedly canceled. Frank, she said, was still at the courthouse, a slave to Dennis Britton's whims.

Theresa continued to process for latent prints, beyond both the body and the platform now. A set of two fingerprints showed up on the outside wall, just under the upper edge and facing eastward and slightly downward, as if someone had been moving toward the body and put his left hand on the wall to steady himself. She set the edge of the tape down on one side of the prints, smoothed it over the black marks, and only then tore the other edge off the roll. That kept the wind from catching the tape and flapping its ends.

The sun pricked sweat from her glands, buried beneath a layer of clothes plus the heavy cotton overalls. The overalls had become covered with the powder, since she had to crawl through the already processed area to reach the next unprocessed area, but the overalls were designed for this purpose and washable, and the point here was not to stay clean. Using powder in the wind became a much bigger concern. The stuff was so fine as to be nearly invisible in the air, and she had no doubt that she would look like a Navy SEAL trying to breach some foreign shore by the time she had finished. The black powder would coat her face and her wrists, get caught in her hair, and turn up for the next day or two in her eyes, nose, and ears. It couldn't be wiped off; wiping would simply make it smear even more. The only solution would be a full-scale scrub-down in a sink with plenty of soap and water, removing all her makeup along with the powder. She didn't even want to think about the insides of her lungs.

Another print materialized, more shoe prints. At forty-five minutes she had completed nearly half the circular deck area and returned to the tent to remove the HotShot from underneath the plastic sheeting.

“Are we done?” Neil asked.

“No.” She sealed the small canister into a Ziploc bag, just to keep the fumes from bothering the men until she could discard it. “Another half hour.”

Don, bless his little heart, continued his attempt to make pleasant conversation. “How high are we?”

Neil said, “I think it's about seven hundred feet. No witnesses up here except a pigeon or two.”

“What about the BP Building? Isn't it taller?”

“Nope.”

“I thought they argued that this could still be the tallest building west of Ontario and it wouldn't really be going against the Van Sweringens' wishes to let something
east
of Ontario be taller.”

“I wouldn't know,” Neil said. “Before my time.”

Theresa rechecked the weights along the edges of her makeshift tent. “They did argue. They lost, and the BP Building is shorter by about fifty feet.”

“Key Bank is taller, though.”

“Yeah, by over two hundred feet. Commerce finally triumphed over tradition.”

“So maybe some early-rising executive looked out his window this morning.”

Neil said, “Both buildings are at least five hundred feet away. That's a good distance to be able to see a person on a rooftop.”

Theresa sneezed, then rubbed her nose with the back of her right hand. Since she'd removed her gloves, this made it the only clean spot on her body, but it didn't matter. She could tell from Don's expression that the powder that had settled on her face was now smeared into a thick black swipe. “Not only that, but after the first blow or two she would have gone down. The rest of their activity—removing the clothes, the bludgeoning—would have been hidden by the wall to anything except a plane.” She paused, looked Neil in the face. “But you'll canvass anyway, won't you? All the upper floors of those two buildings?”

“No stone unturned,” he promised. “Theresa?”

“What?”

“I'm sorry.”

She wasn't ready to respond, and didn't, instead went back to processing the outside deck of the observation level, leaving out the quarter section of it where the kids and now the cops milled.

A half hour later, she finally put the powder and brush aside and secured her lifted latent prints in a manila envelope. Then she released the two men, wishing she'd had a reason to send them away before and pulling up the plastic tent. Uncovering Sonia's naked body felt as if she were exposing her friend to a new round of indignity. At least the wave of superglue fumes released from underneath the plastic reared up and made them turn away for a few seconds. Then the lake breeze cleared the air, and they stood and stared anew at the pasty flesh and bloodied skull.

Theresa had only superglued a body twice before, both times without positive results, but those victims hadn't been as fresh as Sonia. Don held the stiffening limbs for her while she brushed powder, ever so lightly, over the dead woman's skin. She paid special attention to the wrists and ankles, where the killer would have had to grasp and pull the limbs in order to wrap them up with the tie. Prints appeared, although as a mishmash of smears, overlapping and sliding. Theresa examined them with a magnifying glass but couldn't find a usable pattern in the lot.

Then, in the middle of Sonia's back, Theresa found the impression of three distinct fingers. They looked to be from a right hand placed on the left side of Sonia's back, angled downward. The killer had held Sonia's body in place while he pulled off her blouse; they seemed too thin to be Sonia's, assuming she could wrap her own hand around herself to that extent. This also made them too thin to be William's, Theresa thought with a distinct relief, picturing the tall boy's large hands. Perhaps Rachael was right about William. Perhaps Theresa had not been directly responsible for Sonia's death.

Theresa photographed, then lifted them as best she could, noting that most of the patterns were smudged. This did not surprise her. Finding a print on human skin could be considered a miracle as it was. Recovering one of comparable quality would give her the basis for an article in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences
.

Then she took a closer look. The prints weren't merely smudged, they had no discernible ridges at all. Instead they had an irregular, bubbly look to them—as if someone had been wearing latex gloves.

Terrific.

It made sense. No one who had ever watched Discovery would set out to commit a crime without wearing gloves.

Theresa said nothing to the two men who had just spent over an hour holding a tent in place so she could find fingerprints on the corpse. Besides, after latex gloves are worn for a while, they begin to conform to the fingers. A faint pattern might still be visible once she got the lifted prints under a magnifier. And thought happy thoughts. And prayed hard.