Lethal Legacy (8 page)

“How long have you been here?” I asked when Mercer
came up to talk.

“A little over an hour. Have you tried calling her
today?”

“Couldn’t get a number. She hasn’t got a
phone—listed or unlisted—and it’s a sublet, so if there’s a hard line in there,
we need to know who the landlord is to get it.”

“Reverse directory?”

“Nothing.” More and more young people were using
their cell phones and BlackBerrys in place of a traditional phone.

“Knock on the door, Coop,” Mike said. “It worked
for you last night.”

Mercer walked me down the block to Barr’s
building. The vestibule door was locked, so I rang the buzzer next to her name
several times, getting no response. Then I started pressing other doorbells
until the man in 4E responded on the intercom by asking who was there.

“Police,” Mercer said. “I’m trying to get in to
speak with Tina Barr.”

“Who?”

“The woman who lives in the basement.”

The man didn’t seem to care much about our visit.
He buzzed us in and I followed Mercer down to the basement. I knocked but heard
nothing from within.

“Ms. Barr? It’s Alexandra Cooper. If you’re there,
I’d like to talk to you.”

We waited a couple of minutes and then I asked
Mercer for a scrap of paper from his memo pad. I wrote a note on it, with my
cell phone number, and slipped it under the apartment door.

“Let’s get comfortable, Alex. We have some time to
kill.”

The three of us went up to the corner together to
buy coffee. “I’ll sit at this end of the street,” Mike said. “Better chance
she’d be coming from Lex than Third, either by bus or subway. You and Mercer
should be right in front of the building, so you can run interference before
she gets inside.”

It was a beautiful fall afternoon, crisp and
clear, and we leaned against the hood of Mercer’s car, talking about the events
of the last month, catching up on Vickee and their young son, Logan.

“Now you see why stakeouts are so tedious,” Mercer
said, stretching his arms and straightening his back. “Give it another hour and
then go on home. I’ll call you when we see Tina.”

“I can’t take the chance she’ll batten down the
hatches again. Battaglia’s ripped.”

We took turns walking up and down the street just
to stay alert. I checked with Laura for my messages and made calls on several
of my cases. The air chilled a bit as the sun slipped behind the tall
apartments that lined Central Park West, and I bought another round of coffee
before settling in to the front seat of Mercer’s car.

“What have you got?” Mercer said, flipping open
his cell phone. He listened and then answered. “I see him coming.”

It was after six o’clock when Tina Barr’s
neighbor, Billy Schultz, approached the building from Lexington Avenue. He
jogged up the front steps, unlocked the door, and went in. Within the hour, an
older couple got out of a taxicab and made their way inside, too. A minute
later, a light went on in the third-floor window facing the street.

I heard the sirens before I saw the flashing
strobes of the patrol cars that raced into the narrow one-way block from each
direction, coming to a stop nose to nose with each other in front of Barr’s
building.

The passenger in each RMP dashed out of his car
and bolted up the steps. Someone—it looked like Schultz’s head framed in the
narrow space—opened the door, and they disappeared inside.

Mercer was running across the street as I opened
my car door, shouting at me. “Stay put!”

Mike raced downhill from the corner, then took the
steps two at a time and pushed through the door that had been propped open by
one of the cops. I could see the glimmer of the gold detective shield he had
palmed.

A crowd began to collect around the front of the
building—people on their way home, going out for dinner, heading for a run in
the park, or walking dogs.

I tried to get past the driver of the patrol car
who had stationed himself at the building’s entrance, but he didn’t know me and
refused to let me in. I showed him my ID, but he wasn’t interested in admitting
me without orders from a higher-ranking officer.

“You trolling for bodies, Alex?” I turned at the
sound of Ray Peterson’s voice.

The lieutenant in charge of the homicide squad had
pulled in behind one of the RMPs. He had been at too many crime scenes in his
career to feel the need to rush, taking his time for a last drag on his
cigarette before nodding at the uniformed cop.

“What do you know, Loo?” I was already feeling
guilty about not having pushed Tina to talk to me, and now I was panicked at
the thought that her attacker had returned. “Is it Tina Barr?”

“That your vic from last night?” Peterson said, patting
my back. “We got a corpse, but she doesn’t fit that ’scrip. Mike’s in there
now.”

“Yes, we were waiting together for Barr to get
home.”

“What’s he doing leaving you outside with the
riffraff? C’mon in. I’m sure you’ve seen worse.”

The officer stepped aside as Peterson guided me up
the steps. The commotion was downstairs, and the door to Barr’s apartment was
open. Peterson led me in, through the little room where I had talked with the
distraught woman. Tables and bookcases were overturned, as though the apartment
had been ransacked.

Peterson continued down the narrow hallway. I
glanced into the bedroom as we passed it, noting the disarray, including empty
dresser drawers dumped on the floor.

“Chapman?” Peterson called out as he approached
the kitchen.

“Come ahead. I’m out back, in the garden,” Mike
said. He must have seen me when he looked up to answer the lieutenant. “For
Chrissakes, Loo, what’d you bring Coop in for? It looks like a slaughterhouse.”

Mercer tried to intercept us before I saw the
body, but he was too late. The dead woman was lying facedown, spread-eagled on
the wide wooden planks of the kitchen floor, her head split open like a ripe
melon. Blood spatter streaked the refrigerator and dotted the ceiling, and what
hadn’t spurted upward was pooled around her head.

I closed my eyes as Mercer pressed me against his
chest. “The lady’s too tall to be Barr.”

“Who is she?” I asked.

“Don’t know yet. Mike’s talking to Billy Schultz.”

No matter how many crime scenes, autopsies, or
morgue visits came up in the course of my work, the individual horror of each
circumstance never lost its impact. Peterson liked to tell his men it was time
to hang up the job the moment that happened.

I looked again, taking deep breaths to calm
myself. There would be a wait for the medical examiner on call, and for CSU to
process the apartment and photograph the body. All necessary, but it seemed so
cruel to leave her in that position, as a deadly exhibit for the trail of
investigators who would be summoned to ferret out clues.

“When do you figure she died, Mercer?”

“It’s not what you’re thinking, Alex. It didn’t
happen on your watch. There’s rigor, and she’s been cooling down. Maybe late
morning.”

It didn’t help to know the body had been there
while we had been sitting outside, across the street, for close to five hours.

“Do you remember seeing anyone leave the
building?”

“Not a soul,” Mercer said. “You okay, Alex? Let’s
go. C’mon, now—you can’t help the lady.”

I wondered who the woman was and what connected
her to Tina Barr. She looked seven or eight years older than I—in her
mid-forties, perhaps—and almost as tall as my five foot ten. She was dressed in
a well-tailored black wool suit, an expensive one, if I was not mistaken. While
one shoe was still in place, the other appeared to have come off as the blow to
the back of the head knocked her to the floor.

“I’m coming,” I said softly, putting my hands in
my pants pocket so that Mike and Mercer, always trying to protect me from the
atrocities of our chosen jobs, couldn’t see them shaking.

Mike and the lieutenant were huddled in the small
backyard behind Barr’s apartment, talking with Billy Schultz. He was explaining
to Peterson what he must have told Mike minutes ago.

“No, it’s not usual for me, if that’s where you’re
going. I’m not a peeper,” Schultz said, sort of bobbing in place while he
responded to questions. “I poured myself a drink when I got home, came to sit
here for a while—won’t be many more nights so mild I can do that.”

There was a wooden staircase leading down from his
first-floor apartment, and two folding beach chairs with a table between them.
There was an empty tumbler and an iPod resting beside it.

“Ms. Barr’s rear door was open?” Peterson asked.

“Not wide open. It was ajar, which was strange,
considering there were no lights on in the kitchen. After what happened here
the other night, I didn’t want to take any chances.”

I was standing behind Mike as he asked the
questions. “Tell the lieutenant exactly what you did.”

Schultz took a handkerchief out and blew his nose.
“Sorry. I’ve never seen anything like this before. I—uh—I called out Tina’s
name. Two, maybe three times. When she didn’t answer, I pushed the door in a
bit more and said her name again. There was no answer, so I turned on the
light—and, well, that’s when I saw the body.”

“Then?”

“I took a few steps in. I was—um—you guys do this
every day, but I was pretty overwhelmed.”

“Is that blood on your pant leg?” Peterson asked.

“I guess it is. I kneeled down. I wanted to be
sure there was nothing I could do for her before I got on the phone.”

I had seen that expression on the lieutenant’s
face before.
Like what the hell did you think you could do for the broad?
is what he wanted to say. But I understood how Schultz felt. I had wanted to
touch her, too. I had wanted to cradle her broken head and body and get her off
the kitchen floor to a more dignified resting place.

“Did you touch her?”

“Yeah. I tried to find a pulse.”

“Make sure you swab him, Mike,” Peterson said.
“Get his clothes, too.”

Schultz’s eyes opened wide.

“It’s routine, Billy,” Mike said. “We need your
DNA for elimination purposes. You put yourself in the crime scene. It was the
right thing to do, but we just got to account for it, in case you left any
trace of yourself there.”

“Do you know who she is, Mike?” I asked.

“If you don’t mind, try being the silent partner
tonight, Coop. You’re here by the grace of God and your good friend Mercer
Wallace.” He was probably rolling his eyes, too. “How long were you in the
kitchen, Billy?”

“Less than three minutes,” he said, taking his
razorthin cell phone out of his pocket. “I couldn’t stay in there. I came back
out and called 911. I mean right away.”

Peterson lit another cigarette and inhaled,
pocketing his lighter, then bent down to examine a large garden ornament that
had toppled over on its side, resting next to Barr’s back door. Light from
within the kitchen reflected on the decorative brass object and its thick
wrought-iron base.

That must have been the murder weapon. There was a
dark stain covering a dented portion of the brass design, clumped with hair and
probably brain tissue, too.

“But you knew who she was,” Mike said.

“Minerva Hunt.”

“You’ve met her before?”

“I’ve seen her in the building occasionally. She’s
Tina’s landlady, if I’m not mistaken. Her name was on the buzzer before Tina
moved in. I mean, I’ve never been introduced to her.”

“Did you touch the handbag, Billy?”

“No way.”

“How about the tote?”

Schultz hesitated a second too long before
answering. “Maybe.”

“Whaddaya mean, ‘maybe’?” Peterson asked.

“Well, I saw the initials on it. M.H. I just
turned it around—it was upside down—to make sure I was reading them right.”

“You tell the 911 operator—?”

“That I thought it was Minerva Hunt? Yes, I did.”

I took a few steps backward to the door and
glanced toward the body. The shoulder strap of the python-skin bag still hung
on the woman’s shoulder, but the contents had been strewn on the floor. Next to
her was a large vinyl tote, the maker’s logo—now drenched in blood—garishly
stamped all over it. The gold monogrammed initials of its owner—M.H.—were hard
to miss.

“Just a minute, Billy,” Mike said, brushing past
me to walk into the kitchen. His cell phone was ringing, and he answered it out
of the presence of his witness. “Hello?”

The caller spoke to him and he held up a finger to
me. “DCPI.”

The deputy commissioner of public information had
gotten word of a murder on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Mike would have to keep
that office up to speed on every development, no matter how minor, because
newshounds would be on the scene in minutes.

“Only a tentative so far. We haven’t even started
to look for next of kin,” Mike said. “No driver’s license. Nothing confirmed.
Peterson’s got a couple of guys back at the office trying to run it down.”