So even if she wouldn’t say, they knew why Lili Bonaventura had been at the apartment. She probably had her own key. Fingerprints would tell them about that, but Elena didn’t think the volleyball captain had killed him — not that Elena said so. Leo, on the other hand, was more forthcoming. “Once she dissolved him,” he asked, “why have a screaming fit? She’d be smarter to leave and wait for someone else to discover him.”
Elena said, “You think she’s smart?” Leo had been off over the weekend, but she’d talked to him a couple of times by phone.
The interesting thing was that Lili Bonaventura actually turned out to be the daughter of Giuseppe “Fat Joe” Bonaventura, the Miami mob boss, so maybe McGlenlevie’s death had been a Mafia hit. Leo had said, “Oh, come on.” But Elena knew a little about how fathers in Hispanic families felt about their daughters. Her father, Sheriff Ruben Portillo, had asked her as soon as she announced her impending marriage to Frank, “Did that Anglo weasel dishonor you on the backpacking trip? I knew I shouldn’t have let you join the Sierra Club.”
So Elena wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Italian-American fathers took the same attitude toward their daughters and guys who might have been fooling around with their daughters. Maybe Fat Joe Bonaventura had gotten wind of Lili’s biweekly adventures with Gus McGlenlevie and decided to take Gus out, as a matter of family honor. Elena hoped so because the best alternative suspect wasn’t Bimmie, the aerobics instructor, fiancée of the deceased, whom they had left in remorseful tears because she’d spoken ill of the dead, but probably not because she’d killed him.
Elena parked her truck and entered headquarters by the side door. She was downstairs, heading for the fingerprint room in I.D. & R. when she saw Fernie Duran, better known as Fernie the Flirt. They had been in the same class at the Police Academy; Fernie made detective six months after Elena and was down the hall in Special Investigations, assigned to Organized Crime.
“So you’re finally coming to the gym to work out and give us another look at the famous Jarvis body,” said Fernie, grinning. He had on shorts, gym shoes, and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off — ready to work out in the headquarters gym, Elena surmised.
“You wish,” she retorted.
“It’s a great stress reliever,” said Fernie, giving her an exaggerated leer. “Almost as good as the number one stress reliever, which I’d be glad to demonstrate.”
“What’d you have in mind? A ménage à trois?” asked Elena dryly.
“Sounds good to me. What is it?”
“You, me, and Angie.” Fernie was married to Angie Duran, one of two toxicologists in I.D. & R.
“Shucks,” said Fernie, looking disappointed. “I don’t think Angie’d go for it.”
“Me either.” Elena had been a bridesmaid at their wedding, along with Angie’s three sisters and one of Fernie’s. He had two more, but they had been too pregnant to be in the wedding party.
Elena had two stops to make in I.D. & R. before she could go after her unslaked lime. The first was with Steve Curry in Fingerprints, who turned from the AFIS computer, delighted to see her. He had pale red, receding hair, freckles, and more girlfriends than any man Elena knew.
“You’ve decided to marry me, right?” said Steve.
“How’s your new girlfriend going to feel about that?”
“How’d you know about her?”
“Stands to reason. Who is she?”
“A librarian at Main Library. Actually reads books. You don’t find too many of those anymore.”
“Sounds like the girl of your dreams,” Elena agreed. “I’ve got a favor to ask you, Steve.”
“Anything for you, sweetheart.”
“Did you get any makes on the fingerprints from the acid bath case?”
“Only the three guys from the university police force. No known criminals in that apartment.”
Elena opened her shoulder bag and handed Steve a lavender metallic gift box in which a birthday present from Sarah had come. It was carefully but loosely wrapped in tissue paper. “Could you lift prints from here, eliminate mine, and see if what’s left matches anything they got from the apartment?”
He rose and went to a bench where he dusted the box, then examined it under a magnifying glass. “Two good latents, three, one partial,” he muttered. He passed the glass to Elena.
“The one with the left slant loop would be mine,” she said.
“I’ll treasure it forever,” said Steve.
“Sweet, but I’m already in the system.”
“No feeling for romance.” He lifted two prints and a partial, prepared them, and fed them into AFIS, a computer that would match them to the 150,000 prints in the Los Santos system. “Here we go,” he said and put two prints on the screen. The computer threw up tiny circles at points of similarity. Using a mouse, Steve put up more. “I’d need to do a manual, but I’m pretty sure we’ve got a match here.”
Elena sighed. “Where was that print found at the crime scene?”
Steve pulled up the information. “Only one place. On a photo frame and glass.”
Elena hoped it wasn’t Bimmie or any other girlfriend whose picture Sarah had picked up while she was in Gus’s apartment. And what was she doing there when she avoided her ex-husband? Or so she’d always said.
“You don’t look too happy,” said Steve. “You want to give me information on the print? I can’t put a name on it.”
“Sarah Tolland,” said Elena grimly.
She went on to the lab to find Angie looking beautiful, hovering over the intoxilyzer. “Catching lots of DWI’s?” Elena asked.
“You bet.” Angie looked up and took in Elena’s outfit. “All dressed up for work, I see.”
“It’s my day off,” said Elena, who was wearing old jeans and a T-shirt that read SANTA FE’S NICE, BUT I CAN’T AFFORD IT. “I’m going down to get myself a couple of barrels of lime to whitewash my house, but before I — “
“Didn’t I hear my husband down the hall propositioning you?”
“I didn’t accept, did I?”
“Ménage à trois isn’t accepting? You’ve fueled the man’s vanity for months.”
Elena grinned. “Listen, I’m here about the acid bath case. You heard about it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I wondered if you could find out what was in that bathtub.”
“Hasn’t D.P.S. got — “
“Yeah, but I don’t want to wait three months. If I knew what it was, it might help me with the investigation.”
“I’ll sure be glad when the new labs open,” muttered Angie. “At least I can tell you whether it was acid.”
Elena handed her a vial of the cloudy liquid. Angie rooted around in a drawer while Elena stared at the hunks of bloody gauze drying in a glass case. That would be blood sopped up at some murder scene. Angie dried it out and sent it to D.P.S. for typing.
“It’s not acid,” said Angie. “It’s a base.” She held a strip of litmus paper that had turned blue where it touched the liquid. “Beyond that — “ She shrugged, studied Elena, and said, “You’re really worried about this one, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. If it turns out a friend of mine did him, I could be in big trouble, not to say that she wouldn’t be in bigger trouble.”
“A friend? Naughty, naughty.” Angie turned back to her DWI’s. “Maybe you could get one of the university labs to do an analysis for you,” she said over her shoulder.
Elena thought back to the original television broadcast about the case. A chemistry professor from H.H.U. had said if they’d brought the liquid to him, he could have told them what it was. “Can I use your phone?”
Elena called Abelard Moncrief, who said he had a postdoctoral fellow who could run the test for her — free. That was important. The police department wasn’t going to pay for private testing when eventually D.P.S. would tell them what it was — maybe even in time for the trial if anyone was indicted.
Within an hour a skinny young man with b
eige hair that stuck out from his head in untidy tufts told her that she was dealing with simple unslaked lime in a dilute solution with water. He admitted, when asked, that a body could be dissolved with it. “No question it’ll heat up and boil if you put water in it, and it will eat flesh, but to get the job done, you’d have to stay there a couple of days. Dissolve, drain, dissolve, drain. A couple of days — a lot of lime. That’s kind of a weird idea if you ask me.”
Elena shrugged. “Someone did it. Right in your neighborhood more or less.”
“Wow! The acid bath case?”
“Right, but we’ll have a better chance of catching the murderer if you don’t mention this to anyone.”
“I won’t say a word. And if you need any other analyses, just give me a call.”
Support from the public, thought Elena. That was new. “The big question is why lime?” she murmured.
The student thought about the question. “It’s cheap. It’s easy to get hold of. It’s easier to handle than acid. Maybe you’ve got a very neat murderer. With the lime, you’d get no messy decaying corpse, no offensive odors to tip off the neighbors.”
“And by leaving only bones, the murderer ensures that there’s no way we can tell when the deceased bought it,” said Elena thoughtfully, and wondered if anyone at the faculty apartment house had seen the lime being hauled in. They’d need to go back with a whole new set of questions. She sighed, asked to use the chemist’s phone, and called headquarters to suggest that someone from the eight-to-four shift go door-to-door trying a new line of questioning.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” said Beto Sanchez. “No one to do it. We’re going out on what looks like a murder-suicide. You and Leo will have to pick it up yourselves tomorrow. Oh, and say, babe, got a message for you from Frank.”
Elena gritted her teeth.
“Frank says that the narcs have had their eye on McGlenlevie; he’s into drugs — funny-farm mushrooms — so maybe you should look for a drug connection in the acid bath case.”
“We don’t even know for sure that McGlenlevie’s the corpse,” said Elena.
“Well, anyway, Frank says you ought to look into the drug connection, and he’d be glad to help.”
“Tell him to butt out,” said Elena. The corpse had to be McGlenlevie, she assured herself. Who else would those bones belong to? And she guessed she’d have to look into a drug connection, but she’d get her information from some other narc. Mushrooms? Who had McGlenlevie thought he was — Carlos Castaneda?
She picked her shoulder bag up off the floor by the lab bench and set off to make her second-to-last stop — back to the Eastside, to the morgue near Thomason General, where the coroner mentioned odd markings — scrapes and scratches — on the bones. “Could we have done it getting the bones out of the tub?” Elena asked.
“Nope,” said Wilkerson. “Not as many as I found.”
Finally she returned to headquarters to do a detective’s supplement, then put in for her overtime.
Fifteen minutes later she was taking the West Yandell overpass to the acetylene factory. Five minutes after that she was shoveling up bright white sludge, a by-product that sat around in thick puddles waiting for the public to haul it away free of charge. She’d brought along two garbage cans to hold it. Put a little salt in, water it down to painting consistency, and it made great, cheap whitewash.
And evidently it also made a poor but feasible dissolver of corpses. Elena tried to picture Sarah bashing Gus’s skull in, then watching the lime boil up around the corpse. Sarah, who read the New Yorker and went to see art films but had never been to a slasher movie. Sarah, who believed rapists should go to prison for life but disapproved of capital punishment. Sarah who, unless she was the world’s greatest actress, couldn’t have killed Gus.
Am I kidding myself about her? Elena wondered.
Ten
* * *
Tuesday, May 19, 8:20 A.M.
Elena and Leo, now both on the eight-to-four shift, divided the telephone chores. He took the hardware stores and building supply outlets, looking for someone who had bought a lot of unslaked lime, particularly someone who looked like Sarah Tolland.
“She wouldn’t be buying unslaked lime,” Elena pointed out. “She lives in an apartment.”
“Right,” said Leo. “If she bought any, we’ve got her.”
“Not necessarily,” Elena muttered.
“Well, you don’t see it because you botched the case when she tried to blow him up with a snail.”
Elena began calling doctors, trying to find out whether Gus McGlenlevie had had some kind of bone disease that would explain the scratches. Neither she nor Leo had any luck. The only doctor Elena could find who had ever seen Gus McGlenlevie was the one at the university clinic, a woman, who had given him an employment physical. Elena made an appointment to interview her.
Then she and Leo went off to a little hole-in-the-wall cafe for enchiladas verde con dos huevos with refined beans, after which they planned to head for the university and another door-to-door in the apartment building, looking for someone who might have seen a couple of barrels or boxes of unslaked lime hauled in. “His place wasn’t broken into,” Leo pointed out, putting hot sauce on a cluster of tacos. “So who would he let in? His ex-wife. Right?”
“With a big barrel of something and a weapon in her hand?” Elena asked sarcastically.
“Maybe you ought to get off this case. Did you two get to be friends or something?”
Elena looked out the grimy window and didn’t answer. She and Sarah had become friendly, she admitted silently, but that didn’t mean she’d ignore a murder; she just didn’t believe that Sarah had killed him. If she were to make a guess, she’d pick Lili Bonaventura’s relatives or “friends,” or maybe someone else among the large crowd of Gus’s past and present lovers and their husbands and boyfriends. She’d called Fernie and asked him to look into an organized crime connection, since that was his department. She’d asked a detective in Narcotics, not Frank, to follow up on the mushroom tip, even though it seemed like a long shot to her. People killed over cocaine, over crack, over heroin, and even marijuana — but mushrooms?
Leo zipped into the parking lot behind the faculty apartment complex, and they split up to do the interviews. As she trudged from door to door, Elena wished she’d worn comfortable tennis shoes, but she didn’t suppose that degree of informality would impress a bunch of Ph.D. professors, not that some of them didn’t look pretty scruffy in their off hours. By 3:30 she and Leo had talked to everyone who was in.
“You find anything?” asked Leo.
“No one saw Sarah with him or on any floors but her own and the lobby,” said Elena, “with or without unslaked lime, and they all knew her. What about you?”
He flipped through his notebook. “One woman thinks she saw Sarah on Four, doesn’t remember when. Another woman two doors away from McGlenlevie was taking her washing downstairs to the laundry room and saw a delivery man. She thinks it was the Sunday night during finals week. That would be the tenth. And no one saw McGlenlevie after — let’s see.” He flipped back in the notebook. “After Wednesday, the sixth. Anyway, this woman saw a delivery man with one of those dollies, and it had two big boxes, gift-wrapped. She said he could have been heading for Gus’s apartment, but she didn’t know because she was getting on the elevator while he was getting off.”
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