Unknown Means (2 page)

She snapped a close-up photo of the dead woman’s hand. “He wouldn’t have left this rock around her neck. Are there any signs of burglary in the other rooms?”

Riley spoke up. “Nope. The whole floor is Howard Hughes clean. There’s a few rings left on her dresser and a safe in her closet.

Apparently untouched.”

“I didn’t think she’d keep a piece of jewelry like that in a little wooden box with a ballerina that turns when you open the lid.

Crap—I’m going to have to fingerprint the pendant, and carrying around a necklace worth as much as this is makes me very nervous.”

“Why?”

“Family members just love to believe that the Medical Examiner’s staff are not only necrophiliac ghouls but thieving magpies as well.”

Riley strolled the living room, viewing the framed photos. “Not that you’re bitter or anything. Truth be told, places like this make me a little nervous too. Do you know where that table came from, the one our corpse is leaning on?”

“Value City?” Evelyn joked.

“No, that would be my kitchen table. It’s a custom job. The ma-hogany was imported from Malaysia and costs more than I make in three months, or so says the building manager. He wanted to be sure that we would, quote, respect the quality furnishings, unquote.”

“Maybe I should escort Ms. James and the jewelry to the ME’s office,” the contamination officer suggested. “Like a Brinks job.”

“Carl—” Riley had his hand out to adjust a crooked frame, but before Evelyn could protest, he apparently thought better of altering a crime scene in even the most minuscule way. Ten years in Homicide and two ex-wives had trained him to observe without attempting to alter. “Why don’t you go down to the lobby and bring up the ITS guy? He can collect the computer drives now that the vacuuming is done.”

Carl reluctantly pushed the button, and after a few minutes he disappeared into an exquisitely paneled elevator car.

Riley sighed as the doors closed. “Sometimes the eager ones drive me crazier than the lazy ones.”

“Don’t we have to have a perimeter officer?” Evelyn asked.

“Doesn’t matter.” Riley scribbled a note on a battered pad of paper, then used the pen to scratch the middle of his back. “The elevator can only visit one penthouse per trip, and no one can get here from the lobby without the code.”

“Quite a setup.”

“The best money can buy. I bet the doorman has to walk a block downwind just to have a smoke. The insulation is something to crow

about too. If there are any other tenants in this building, I haven’t heard a thump or a scrape or someone’s TV yet. It’s like we’re her-metically sealed.”

Evelyn photographed the woman’s hands, trying to work and absorb information at the same time. “Architecture pays that well, huh?”

“Hubby’s only a fraction of the story,” Riley went on, in his role as a repository of local information. “This is Grace Markham, born Carruthers. Daddy Carruthers has tons of money from the steel mills, from before they all went belly-up. Grace married William Markham a few years ago, and they moved in here. She can afford this place. She can afford the whole building.”

“Huh,” Evelyn said. “My dad worked at Republic for thirty-three years and didn’t make squat.”

“Mine walked a beat in Ohio City,” Riley said, “and made even less.”

David, relatively new to the city and without family there, said nothing.

“It’s got quite a view,” Evelyn noted. From ten floors up, the panoramic windows presented both banks of the Cuyahoga River, which had been a grimy, industrial valley only thirty short years before. Then renewal took hold in Cleveland, and warehouses up and down the Cuyahoga were converted to fashionable, and exorbitantly expensive, lofts for young professionals in designer suits looking for an urban existence and a ten-minute commute. Evelyn wondered if their lifestyle lived up to the magazine ads.

She turned back to the detectives. “Who found her?”

David flipped through his notes. “The maid, Josiela Ramos, found her at three this afternoon. Ramos is still downstairs.”

Evelyn got closer to the straps holding the woman to the chair.

Inch-and-a-half-wide fabric mesh, stiff weave. The killer had strong hands to tie something like that in a tight knot. “Why is the maid just getting here at three?”

“Because she had two other clients to get to this morning. She only comes in twice a week—more of a cleaning lady, I guess,”

David added. “Do rich people have cleaning ladies?”

“Do I look like I hang out with rich people? Did she touch anything?”

“She says no. She came off the elevator, saw the body at the table as soon as she stepped into the living room, and turned right around. By the time she got to the lobby, the hysterics kicked in and it took her ten minutes to make the doorman understand enough to call us.”

“She didn’t touch the victim, check for a pulse?”

“She’s from Guatemala, and says she knows a dead body when she sees one.”

“How long has she worked for them?”

“Three years.”

“She deserves a raise. This place is so freakin’ clean. . . .” Evelyn began to photograph the rest of the apartment, using the lull before the storm of body snatchers, other detectives, prosecutors, family, and media descended. She needed to record the scene exactly as she had found it. At least the vacuuming—something she loathed, since too much evidence could be as frustrating as too little—had been completed. But since the penthouse had obviously been cleaned often and well, the chances were good that she would find something the killer left behind, even though the maid, the building manager, EMS, and Evelyn and the officers had already brought in their own contaminations.

She knew cops found the beginning of a case invigorating. It jazzed them, facing a new situation, not knowing what would turn up. But in an out-of-the-ordinary setup like this, with no discernible method or motive, Evelyn felt overwhelmed. The penthouse contained the accoutrements of two lifetimes, and a clue could lie anywhere in any of the thirteen rooms. A diary entry about a disturbing stranger, the tape of a threatening phone call, a check written to an

extortionist, a disputed family heirloom . . . any innocuous-looking item could hold the story that led to this murder.

On the other hand, the killer might not have intersected with Grace Markham’s life until that morning. Grace might have been as surprised and confused at the time as they were now.

Evelyn paused in the kitchen, noting that even rich people keep cute magnets on their refrigerator doors. A child’s wavering land-scape in fluorescent pink and green rested underneath, remarkably, a dollar-off coupon for delivery pizza. The marble countertops held only two ceramic mugs, the remains of morning coffee solidified at their bottoms. The sink was dry. If anything had been cooked in this kitchen in the past week, no odor remained.

Evelyn put the camera away and pulled out her fingerprinting kit. As she brushed black powder over the glossy floor, a small, bare-foot pattern—probably Grace’s, though now she wore high-heeled Rochas—showed here and there. Two treaded shoes appeared, including one clear heel mark of a man-size boot. She stroked clear fingerprint tape over the pattern and transferred it to two five-by-seven glossy white cards placed end to end. “Any ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends in the picture?”

“Don’t know yet.” David held a piece of mail up to the light.

“You’d think people who could afford this rent would pay their cable bill on time.”

Riley consulted his battered notepad. “According to Sanchez, Grace is an only child and her parents are dead. No ex-husbands and she’s been married for three years—kind of late for a former boyfriend to freak out. But the victim spent four years as a photojournalist for U.S. News and World Report, mostly in South America, with a special interest in human rights abuses.”

David replaced the envelopes on the counter. “Really. A connection to the maid?”

“The husband didn’t say anything about Ramos, apparently. But he said Grace couldn’t possibly have an enemy in the world, except for,

quote, those drug-dealing fascist spics she was always taking pictures of, unquote. I asked for details, but apparently he seems to think South America is one big country. I guess he doesn’t find international politics particularly fascinating. I don’t either,” Riley admitted.

“But I’d take a crash course if I thought my wife might be in danger.”

“But she quit when she got married,” David pointed out.

“Old-fashioned girl,” Evelyn said. Now that she could step on the tile immediately surrounding the table, she pulled out a set of ten tiny glassine paper folds. Normally she would secure the victim’s hands in paper bags for the trip to the morgue and scrape the fingernails there, but in this case she did not want to risk losing even the most minuscule trace of what might be evidence. She held each finger one by one over its labeled fold and dug underneath the nail with a clean wooden toothpick. Then she folded up the toothpick and the scrapings together.

Riley went on. “According to the husband, Grace planned to get pregnant the minute the honeymoon ended. She hasn’t been out of the country, except for a few vacations in Europe, for three years.

Now she divides her time between charity boards and committees and whatnot, raising money for the children’s hospital and the Downtown Festival. She is, in his words, angelic.”

Evelyn placed the paper folds in a manila envelope and sealed it with red tape. “Three years to get pregnant. That could put a strain on a relationship.”

“Maybe it took her enemies this long to find her,” David said.

Riley snorted. “Anybody with Google could find her. She’s in the Arts and Living section every other week.”

“You read the Arts and Living section?” Evelyn asked.

“Sometimes. You know who else does? The police chief, that’s who. He’s already called me three times for ‘updates’—which means I’d better not think about eating, sleeping, or catching an Indians game until I have sweet Grace’s killer locked up tight. And if I don’t sleep, that means you don’t either, partner. No canoodling, you two.”

David ignored him. Evelyn frowned.

“Uh-oh. There wasn’t going to be any canoodling anyway, was there? Come on, tell Doctor Bruce about it.”

Now David frowned. “Riley—”

“Okay, okay, I’ll mind my own business. Who am I, anyway?

Just the guy who introduced you.”

His partner ignored him and turned to the victim, who waited with the infinite patience of the dead. “How did the guy get in here?

That’s what I want to know.”

Evelyn looked more closely at the bruise on Grace’s left forearm, which had a slight sheen to it—not normal for a bruise. After a careful photograph, she broke a clean cotton swab out of its sterile packaging and rubbed. The dark smear came off. “Our killer isn’t as particular about hygiene as Grace was. He left some dirt or oil on her arm. Maybe he picked it up prying the door?”

“No evidence of it,” Riley told her. “The back door to the stairwell is dead-bolted with no sign of jimmying. He could have used her key to lock it behind him, but a key ring is still in her purse. I’ll double-check after you fingerprint to make sure the dead-bolt key is still there. The only other way in is through the lobby, past the twenty-four-hour doorman and a video camera. One of our guys is going over the tape with the building manager now, looking for anyone who doesn’t live here.”

“You might also call Sanchez back to find out if the husband has his stairwell key,” David suggested.

“Because if he loaned it to a hired killer, said killer might not have had time to return it to him yet?”

“Or the husband could have made a copy,” David pointed out.

“Spoilsport,” Riley said. “A key should be the only way in. To arrive by elevator, you need to punch in your code on the number pad, which will bring it to this floor and this floor only. The maid, the mister, and the missus knew the code.”

David examined the back fire door. “Josiela swears she’s never told a soul.”

“That’s what Markham told Sanchez. He was peeved that the maid told us the code, didn’t see why she couldn’t just let us in. No one knows the code—not the building manager, not the doorman, nobody.”

“Is that legal?” Evelyn asked. “I thought landlords always had the right to passkeys.”

“Rules are for commoners. All twenty-seven people who live in this building have serious money, and they want serious security.”

“What if a pipe breaks, or the building’s on fire?”

“I guess the firemen just have to break the door down. That’s why they carry those axes. Of course, this doesn’t mean that any of the three people with the code didn’t secretly give it to a fourth.”

“Say Grace had a boyfriend while her husband was at work.”

David shifted around a collection of coffee-table books, using the end of his pen. “If he calls up and she takes the elevator down to meet him, they might be noticed. She gives him the code, and he can stroll right in.”

Riley considered this. “In that case, he’ll be on the surveillance video in the lobby.”

“Why couldn’t she have let him in from the back staircase?”

Evelyn asked.

“It sets off a light in the building manager’s office—no alarm bell or anything, just a light. The manager would then call the tenant and ask what’s up. That didn’t happen.”

“Maybe he didn’t notice.”

“The light stays on until he resets it. It didn’t happen.”

“What about a fire escape?” Evelyn slid the swab into a plastic microtube and snapped the top closed.

“There’s one up the back, but the window there is latched from

the inside, with a very light but consistent coating of dust on the windowsill.”