Detective (10 page)

Nobody spoke while the two surveyed
the room. Finally, Verona shook his
head and sighed. "I have two
grandkids. This morning we were
having breakfast and watching this
TV news story about a couple of
teenagers who murdered their
mother's boyfriend. So I tell the
kids, 'This world we're handing you
has become a pretty rotten place,'
then right at that moment I got this
call." He gestured to the mutilated
bodies. "It gets worse every day."

Ainslie said thoughtfully, "The
world's always been a savage place,
Julio. The difference now is there
are a lot more people to kill, and
more who do the killing. And every
day news travels faster and farther;
sometimes we watch the horror while
it's happening."

Verona shrugged. "As always,
Malcolm the scholar's viewpoint.
Either way's depressing."

He began photographing the dead
couple, taking three photos of
several groupings: an overall shot,
a medium, and a close-up. After the
bodies he would photograph other
areas of room 805, the corridor
outside, stairwells, eleva

80 Arthur Halley

tors, and the building exterior, the
last including entrances and exits
a criminal might have used. Such
photos often revealed evidence
originally overlooked.

As well, Verona would make a
detailed sketch of the scene, to be
transferred later to a specialized,
dedicated computer.

Sylvia Walden was now busy,
searching for latent fingerprints,
concentrating on the doorway first,
inside and out, where a
perpetrator's prints were most
likely to be found. When entering,
intruders were often nervous or
careless; if they took precautions
about prints, it was usually later.

Walden was dusting wood surfaces
with a black graphite powder mixed
with tiny iron filings, and applied
with a magnetic brush; the mix
adhered to moisture, lipids, amino
acids, salts, and other chemicals of
which fingerprints were composed.

On smoother surfaces glass or
metal a nonmagnetic powder was used,
of differing colors to suit varied
backgrounds. As she worked, Walden
switched from one type of powder to
another, knowing that prints varied
depending on skin texture,
temperature, or contaminants on
hands.

Officer Tomas Ceballos had
reentered the room and briefly stood
watching Walden at work. Turning her
head, she told him, smiling,
"Finding good prints is harder than
people think."

Ceballos brightened. He had
noticed Walden the minute she
arrived. "It always looks easy on
TV."

"Doesn't everything? In real
life," she explained, "it's surfaces
that make the difference. Smooth
ones like glass are best, but only
if they're clean and dry; if there's
dust, prints will smear they're
useless. Doorknobs are hopeless; the
area's not flat, too small for good
prints, and just turning a knob
smears any prints made." Walden
regarded

DETECTIVE 81

the young officer, clearly liking
what she saw. "Did you know
fingerprints can be affected by what
someone ate recently?"

"Is this a joke?"

"No joke." After another smile, she
went on working. "Acidic foods cause
extra skin moisture and clearer
prints. So if you're planning a
crime, don't eat citrus fruits be-
forehand oranges, grapefruit,
tomatoes, lemon, lime. Oh, and no
vinegar! That's the worst."

"Or the best, from our viewpoint,"
Julio Verona corrected.

"When I make detective," Ceballos
said, "I'll remember all that." Then
he asked Walden, "Do you give private
lessons?"

"Not normally." She smiled. "But I
can make exceptions."

"Good, I'll be in touch." Officer
Ceballos left the room looking
pleased.

Malcolm Ainslie, who had overheard,
commented, "Even at a murder scene,
life goes on."

Walden grimaced, glancing toward
the mutilated bodies. "If it didn't,
you'd go crazy."

Already she had located several
prints, though whether from the
killer or killers, or the dead
couple, or belonging to hotel
employees on legitimate business
would be determined later. For now
the next step was to "lift" each
print onto a transparent tape that
was placed on a "latent lift card."
The card, dated, signed, and the
print's location noted, would then
become evidence.

Julio Verona asked Ainslie, "Did
you hear about our zoo experiment?"

Ainslie shook his head. ''Tell me."

"We got permission from MetroZoo
and took fingerprints and toeprints
of their chimpanzees and apes, then

82 Arthur Halley

studied them." He gestured to
Walden. "Tell him the rest. "

"Everything was exactly the same
as with human prints," she finished.
"The same characteristics ridges,
whorls, loops, arches, identical
points, no basic difference."

"Darwin was right," Verona added.
"We've all got monkeys in our family
tree, eh, Malcolm?" The comment was
pointed. Verona knew of Ainslie's
priestly past.

There was a time when
Ainslie though never a fun-
damentalist accepted the Catholic
skepticism of Darwin's Origin of
Species. Darwin had, after all,
scoffed at divine intervention and
denied mankind's superiority to the
rest of the animal world. But that
was long ago and Ainslie answered
now, "Yes, I believe we came that
route."

What they were all doing, he
knew Walden, Verona, Ceballos,
Quinn, even he himself was
distracting themselves, however
briefly, from the ghastly horror
that faced them. Outsiders might
have viewed their behavior as cold-
blooded; in fact, it was the
reverse. The human psyche even a
conditioned Homicide crew's had
limits on how much sustained
revulsion it could handle.

Another male technician had
appeared and was working on blood
samples. Using small test tubes, he
collected sarnples of the pooled
blood around each victim. Later
these would be compared with blood
taken at autopsy. If the blood
groups differed, some of the pooled
blood might be from the attacker or
attackers. From appearances, though,
it seemed unlikely.

The technicians took fingernail
scrapings from the Frosts, in case
one of them had scratched an
assailant, causing minuscule
fragments of skin, hair, cloth
fibers, or other materials to lodge
under their nails. The scrapings
were placed in containers for lab
technicians to examine

DETECTIVE 83

later. Then the victims' hands were
bagged for preservation, so that
before autopsy they could be
fingerprinted, and the bodies
examined, too, for alien
fingerprints.

The Frosts' clothing was inspected
carefully, though it would remain in
place until their bodies reached the
morgue. Then, before autopsy, it
would be removed, with each item
sealed in a plastic bag.

By now, with the additional people,
a buzz of conversations, and
continuous phone calls, room 805 had
become crowded, noisy, and even more
malodorous.

Ainslie glanced at his watch. It
was 9:45 A.M., and he suddenly thought
of Jason, who, at that moment, would
be in the school auditorium with the
rest of his third-grade class,
waiting for a spelling bee to begin.
Karen would be in the audience with
other parents, feeling anxious and
proud. Ainslie had hoped to join her
briefly, but it hadn't worked out. It
so seldom did.

He turned his mind back to the
homicide scene, wondering if the case
would be solved quickly, hoping the
answer was yes. But as the hours wore
on, the biggest impediment emerged:
despite a multitude of people moving
within the hotel, no one had even
glimpsed a possible suspect. Somehow
the murderer or murderers had managed
to get in and out of the room, and
probably the hotel, without any
attention being paid. Ainslie had
police officers question all the
guests on the eighth floor, as well
as on the two floors above and below.
No one had seen a thing.

During the seventeen hours Ainslie
was at the murder scene that first
day, he and Quinn considered motives.
Robbery was possible; no money
whatever was found among the victims'
possessions. On the other hand, the
jewelry left at the scene (and later
appraised at twenty thousand dollars)
could have been removed easily. And

84 Arthur Halley

certainly a cash robbery could have
been achieved without two people
being murdered. Nor was the awful
savagery explained, or the enigma of
the dead cats. So a prime motive
remained as elusive as a prime
suspect.

Initial information about Homer
and Blanche Frost, resulting from
calls to police in South Bend,
Indiana, their hometown, revealed
them as well-to-do but innocuous
people with no apparent vices,
family problems, or unsavory
connections. Even so, to make
on-the-spot inquiries Bernie Quinn
would fly to South Bend within the
next few days.

Some facts and opinions did emerge
from the medical examiner, Sandra
Sanchez, who inspected the Frosts'
bodies at the scene and autopsied
them later.

After the two victims had been
subdued, then gagged and bound, she
believed they had been placed so
that each could see the other
suffer. "They were tortured while
conscious," Sanchez suggested. She
believed the bodily assaults were
done "methodically and slowly."

While no weapon was found at the
murder scene, the autopsies showed
deep knife cuts on both bodies,
producing distinctive flesh and bone
markings. And a terrible detail:
flammable liquid had been poured
into Mr. Frost's eyes, then set
alight, leaving charred cinders
where the eyes had been and
blackened skin around them. Beneath
the woman's gag, part of her tongue
had been bitten off, probably a
reaction to her agony.

Dr. Sanchez, in her late forties,
had a reputation for directness and
an acid tongue. She dressed
conservatively in navy or brown
suits; her graying hair was pulled
back into a ponytail. Among her
scholarly interests as Bernard Quinn
knew was Santer~a, the Afro-Cuban
religion that flourished in Dade
County, Florida, with an estimated
seventy thousand adherents.

Quinn had once heard Sandra Sanchez
affirm, "Okay,

DETECTIVE 85

I'm not saying I believe in the
orishas the gods of Santena. But if
you believe those other tall
tales Moses parting the Red Sea, the
virgin birth, Jesus multiplying
loaves and fishes, and a whale
regurgitating Jonah there's at least
equal logic in Santeria; And what it
does is offer soothing voodoo for
troubled minds."

Quinn, aware that animal sacrifice
was part of some Santer~a rites,
wondered if the four dead cats were
Santeria-related.

"Positively not," Sanchez told him.
"I've looked at those cats; they
were killed by hand almost certainly
brutally. Santeria animal-killing is
done with a knife and with devotion,
and dead animals aren't abandoned
like those cats. They're often eaten
at a feast, and cat is never on the
menu."

Ainslie and Quinn concluded that
initial results were far from
promising. As Ainslie reported to
Leo Newbold, "It's a classic
whodunit."

A whodunit which, oddly enough, was
exactly what detectives called
it was the kind of murder Homicide
teams liked least. It implied a
total absence of information about
an offender, and sometimes about the
victim, too. In such cases there
were neither witnesses nor anyone to
suggest paths of inquiry. The two
opposites of whodunits were an "easy
rider" a case in which a murder
suspect was quickly apparent, along
with evidence to convict; and a
"smoking gun," easiest of all where
the guilty party was still at the
murder scene when police arrived.

In the end, long after the tragic
saga of Homer and Blanche Frost, it
was a smoking-gun homicide that
would provide an apparent solution
and close the case of the Frost
murders.

Shortly before eight o'clock on
Friday morning, three days after the
Royal Colonial Hotel murders,
Bernard Quinn walked from the
Homicide offices to the
civilian-staffed Identification
Unit, also on the fifth floor of
Police Headquarters. In an interior
office where a half-dozen ID tech-
nicians worked amid computers and
printout-laden desks, Quinn
approached the young fingerprint
specialist who had searched for
latent prints at the Royal Colonial
crime scene. Sylvia Walden was
tapping at a keyboard in front of a
large computer screen and looked up
as he approached. Her long hair, he
noticed, was damp, perhaps from the
heavy rain shower that had also
caught Quinn on his way to work.

"Good morning, Bernard,'' she said,
smiling.

"It isn't good so far," he told
her glumly. "Maybe you can improve
it."

"A shortage of clues from
Tuesday?" Walden's voice was
sympathetic.

"More like none. Which is why I'm
here, mostly to ask why in hell a
fingerprint report is taking so
long."

"Three days isn't long," she
answered sharply. "Not when I had a
fistful of prints to check out and
identify as you should know."

DETECTIVE 87

"Sorry, Sylvia," Quinn said
penitently. "This sick case has
turned me into an ass. Manners out
the window."

"Don't worry, ~- said. "We're all
pretty frazzled over this."

"So what have you got?"

"Some prints came through this
morning fror+.~ew York. They belong
to the guy who stayed in the hotel
room just prior to the Frosts."

"Were they on file there?"

"No, no. He agreed to be
fingerprinted by the NYPD to help us
out. I'm just comparing them with
those we found."

The computer that Walden faced was
a state-of-the-art AFIS
model shorthand for Automated
Fingerprint Identification System.
The machine, after scanning a
fingerprint from a crime scene,
could accomplish in less than two
hours what it would take a human
being an estimated one hundred and
sixty years to complete a search
through hundreds of thousands of
fingerprints on record across the
United States and provide a matching
print, with identification, if one
existed. Fingerprints in the system
were stored and retrieved by a
digital code that worked at light-
ning speed. AFIS was often an
instant crime-solver; also, since
its arrival, many old investigations
had been reopened, with bygone
fingerprints identified and
criminals charged and convicted.
Today, though, Walden's task was
simpler comparing the set of prints
from New York, transferred by modem,
with unidentified prints she had
lifted from room 805 of the Royal
Colonial.