Hanging Time
Page 21
On Tuesday her hours were four in the afternoon to twelve at night. She’d started studying for her Sergeant’s exam at five A.M., her hundreds of pages of notes and exercises laid out all over the bed and floor. The phone rang at two minutes to ten.
“April?”
“Yeah?” she confirmed without enthusiasm.
“Mike. There’s been another one.”
The adrenaline kicked in like a shot, instantly filling her with energy. With just those words she knew what he meant. “Where?”
“Little boutique on Second Avenue. Fifty-fifth Street.”
“I’m on my way.” The location rang a bell. It was where the other friend of Maggie’s lived, the one who didn’t get out of bed.
40
By the time April got there, over fifteen vehicles and thirty cops jammed the area that was already roped off with sticky crime-scene tape. The two beat officers from the 17th Precinct who got there first and were responsible for securing the scene were still fighting a losing battle trying to keep interested colleagues out of European Imports. At least a dozen people had marched into the store to have a look. All had come out in a hurry, green as the corpse.
The ABC news van that April had seen the week before outside the bagel store on Fifty-sixth Street must have picked up the police call while they were getting breakfast. They were already setting up for a special broadcast.
“Get them out of here!” Lieutenant Braun barked at the beat officers, pointing to the news team.
Two other officers from the 17th were trying to direct the traffic. The street was a mess. Vehicles, including half a dozen blue-and-whites from each precinct, the news van, an EMS ambulance, and a crime-scene station wagon were all triple-parked on Second Avenue, slowing the traffic to a frustrated trickle.
April had double-parked her white Le Baron a block down and walked back. She heard Braun barking orders before she could see him. The first person she saw was Igor unloading his equipment—the cameras, evidence boxes, kits, and the vacuum. Good, they called for the same team that worked the other case. She waved.
Lieutenant Braun and Sergeant Sanchez were deep in conversation on the sidewalk in front of the store.
“Ah so, Detective Woo, thanks for joining us,” Braun said without turning his head in her direction.
April nodded at him, brushing off the sarcasm with a smile. She figured him for a heart attack in the not too distant future and comforted herself with the thought that someday she’d be the Lieutenant and he’d be dead.
“Morning, sir,” she murmured. From downcast eyes she noted that Braun’s stringy hair was thinning fast. He was wearing the same powder-blue jacket he’d worn the week before. It still looked clean. Maybe he had more than one.
“How ya doing, Mike?”
He looked at his watch, then at her. “You made good time.”
“Yeah, I took the tunnel.”
She didn’t have to ask why they were hanging around on the street. The air conditioner was on, and the unmistakable odor of a not-so-recent death pumped out to the sidewalk like the frying garlic from Chinese restaurants.
“Nobody reported this all weekend?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.
“Nope. Apparently the owner turned on the air conditioner when he got here. He said he wanted to air out the store, didn’t want to lose his merchandise,” Mike told her.
“Oh.” They’d all been contaminated often enough to know how persistently this odor lingered in the nostrils, on the skin, in whatever clothes they were wearing. It would cling to the walls and carpets of the store itself, like smoke after a fire.
“Did he touch anything else?” Igor, loaded down with cardboard evidence boxes, stopped beside them for a second.
“Igor, do you know Lieutenant Braun?” April asked.
“We’re old friends,” Braun said. “Keep-your-fucking-hands-behind-your-back Stan, we call him.”
Igor looked offended. “It’s the rules,” he muttered. “Some of you people can’t keep your hands to yourself. Mess up the whole thing. It’s not a hard one to keep your hands in your pockets.”
He jerked his head at Ari Vittleman, standing at a safe distance down the block, surrounded by officers physically preventing ABC from attempting to get their story.
“Did he touch anything else? I got to know.”
“He says no.” Braun turned to April. “He says they close at seven on Saturdays. He figures it happened about then.”
“Why? That was the storm day, wasn’t it? She could have closed earlier.” April looked around at the proximity of other stores. Who could have seen what in that rain? She saw the boutique had the kind of metal barricade that pulled down. Had it been down when the owner came? Would the neighbors have noticed anyone going in, coming out at closing time? From here she could see the plumbing supply store and the apartment above, where Maggie’s friend lived. The guy who claimed he hadn’t seen her in years but whose name and number were in her phone book. Her mind whirled with questions.
“That’s what your pal here said. What are you, hotshots or something?” Braun demanded.
“Yeah. Or something.” Sanchez smiled at April.
Braun shot her an appraising look. “Ready to go in?”
“Any time.” April took out her notebook and shifted her bag from one shoulder to another.
“Clasp your hands behind your back,” Igor called over his shoulder.
“What a piece of work. How am I supposed to take notes with my hands behind my back?” she muttered.
“It’s the rules.” Braun laughed at his joke.
April moved inside the store. She would take notes of everything—the weather, the time, the placement of each article in the small store, the whole setup. She’d never forgotten the example given in a John Jay class of a cut-and-dried homicide that was lost in court because the two detectives on the case couldn’t agree whether an article of clothing, totally irrelevant to the case, had been on the bed or the floor of the room next to where the crime had been committed. The defense attorney convinced the jury if the police couldn’t be trusted to agree on what was at the scene of a crime, none of the rest of their “evidence” could be trusted either. The guy got off.
April moved toward the smell.
“You going to be okay, Detective?” Braun asked.
“Yessir,” April replied. Lot of them didn’t know it, but after about three minutes in a very bad smell the olfactory nerves went numb. All those people who kept running in and out of horrendous crime-scene stenches for fresh air got hit with the same blast of nausea each time they returned. Anybody who lived with the pungent pickling and drying rotting smells of the Orient knew that.
But when she looked through the open door, she could not control a spasm of revulsion. This was worse than Maggie Wheeler. Clearly, it had been hot in there. The girl’s body was not in good condition. It had already begun to swell from the gases forming inside. Decomposition works from the inside out.
Aware of Braun behind her, gauging her reaction, April pinched her nose and breathed through her mouth, her internal camera continuing to click. What was she seeing here? What was the story? On the grimy bathroom floor under the hanging body there appeared to be some congealed blood along with the other fluids that had leaked out of her orifices after death. April looked for an open wound that would have bled. She didn’t see one. Several two-to-three-inch patches of blistered skin were visible on the dead girl’s neck and shoulders, but April had seen that before and knew they were post-mortem artifacts. Bacteria was eating away the tissues under the skin.
April noted that the rope the girl was hanging by appeared to be the same kind used in the Wheeler murder. Obviously the huge black evening gown on the small body, and the tinges of blue and red makeup, partially dissolved and further distorted by feeding beetles, told the same twisted tale that was understood only by the teller. Little girl dressed up as a big girl. Strangled. But what if it were a little boy dressed up as a big girl?
“Hello, pretty one. How’s it going?”
She shook her head, backing out so he could take her place.
“Clasp your hands behind your back,” Igor admonished from the front of the store, where he’d begun dusting for fingerprints.
“Oh, fuck off,” the Duke told him.
“Nice talk.” Braun turned to Sanchez, who was busy taking notes. “Well?”
“Looks similar. No marks on the door. No signs of struggle in the store. Similar rope, not tied correctly for a suicide. Although, if the other hadn’t come first, this might have the appearance of a suicide.”
“Yeah?” Braun moved toward the door, hot-footed it outside. Sanchez followed him.
“She could have jumped off the toilet,” Sanchez said.
“Sure, and dressed herself up like that first.”
“I wonder where McLellan was Saturday night.”
April watched Ducci take in the scene. They were honored. His workload was too heavy for him to get out much anymore. For a half hour he worked with Igor and Mako, collecting and labeling, putting items in paper bags and then cardboard boxes. Like April, Ducci seemed puzzled about the blood on the floor. But, not to worry, blood wasn’t his business.
After the body had been sketched and photographed, Ducci lifted the black silk skirt, looking for a wound. All he could see was an irregular semicircle of small marks on the corpse’s right ankle.
“Looks like a bite,” he remarked loud enough to be heard in Jersey.
April looked where he pointed. From the showroom she could hear the sound of Sanchez’s derisive laugh at this outrageous speculation. “Oh, sure, oh, sure. Four days later on a decomposed body he can identify a bite mark.”
“Looks like the work of insects,” April said.
Ducci straightened and pointed to the mottled hands. “That’s insects. Just a mess with no particular pattern wounds. Here, there’s a distinct pattern.”
April nodded, though she had her doubts. Ducci was a trace man. It was up to the M.E. to tell them what happened to the body. Where the blood on the floor came from and what made the marks on the hands, the shoulders, and the ankle.
Sanchez called her from the street. “The Lieutenant wants us to go home now.”
April took one last look around and closed her notebook.
41
Jason sat in his swivel desk chair. Milicia was opposite him in the chair he used with patients who liked to lie on his leather sofa. Her face was very pale. He could see a muscle twitch in her cheek. She was wearing a conservative suit and very little makeup. The sensitive skin under her eyes was dark and bruised-looking. She’d lost a few pounds. The stress in her face, and what appeared to be sleep deprivation, made her look vulnerable and seriously frightened. Jason could feel his body stiffen in defense against any sympathy that would work against his being able to help her.
“What is your real concern, Milicia?” he asked, getting to the core of the matter right at the start.
“I told you I was afraid Camille would hurt somebody, and now I know she has.” Her words were angry. She spat them out at him, showing him how furious she still was at his being out of town when she needed him. She regarded him accusingly, as if it were his fault that it had taken twenty-four hours to make contact. He knew it was the time lapse she would count, not the attempts he made to reach her when she was out.
Milicia had insisted that she needed to see him Tuesday, his first day back in the office. There was no putting her off. In order to work it out, he’d had to reschedule his appointment with Jenny, the woman who did his secretarial work and bookkeeping.
He was used to hearing his patients accuse him of everything under the sun. He was concerned by the way Milicia looked, but unmoved by her rage.
“You think … Camille … has hurt someone?” he said flatly, careful to keep the disbelief out of his voice.
“Killed someone, Jason. Don’t you listen to the news?”
He nodded. Of course he did. “So?”
She stared at him as if he were retarded, or worse. “There’s been another boutique murder.”
“Oh?” Her face was flushed. He could see she had begun to sweat.
“Just like the one last week,” she prompted. “Right here on Columbus. Don’t you remember?”
He nodded. “Salesgirl in a boutique, wasn’t it?” He’d read about it.
“I had a feeling then. I had this really creepy feeling.” Milicia covered her face with her fingers so he couldn’t see her. “I just had a feeling Camille had something to do with it. And now there’s been another one. The truth is, I’m terrified, and I feel responsible.”
She dropped her hands and confronted him, green eyes flashing. “I came to you for help. I told you all about Camille, and you let this happen.”
Jason didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until he let it out. He glanced at the clock on the table. He didn’t have much time to calm her down.
“Milicia, let’s go back a little. You didn’t tell me when we met the first two times that you thought your sister was a murderer.”
“How could I? You didn’t even believe that she was sick.”
Had he missed something here? Jason thought back to his notes, quickly reviewed them in his mind, shook his head. Milicia had been vague. She said she came to him because she wanted her sister to get treatment, wanted her removed from her boyfriend’s influence and taken care of in a safe environment. But she had not been able to give any convincing reasons for intervention. And certainly no legal ones. It was very hard to put people away. You couldn’t do it just because they were inconvenient.
At the time of Milicia’s visits, Jason had a feeling her assessment of her sister’s violent tendencies was an afterthought. Milicia hadn’t known what constituted symptoms of potential violence. Certainly, she didn’t mention the homicide in the neighborhood as part of her concern. If she was really worried about the boutique murder, why didn’t she tell him about that right away?
“Milicia, I must confess. I was away this weekend, and I read the papers only briefly this morning. I didn’t see any article about another—”
“It was on the news a little while ago. I heard it in the office,” Milicia said. Defiantly, she crossed her legs the other way, showing a lot of thigh in the process.
“It happened today?” Jason frowned. But Milicia had called him on Sunday, starting very early in the morning. How could she have known if it happened today? “But you called me on Sunday.”
“I called you on Sunday because she disappeared on Sunday. I told you she’s been acting very strange lately. So when I couldn’t reach her, I was concerned. In fact, I was frantic. Camille is autistic, catatonic—I don’t know what you call it. Sometimes she can’t move at all. She just sits like a stone with no reflexes.… She calls it soul death. And then she goes kind of wild afterward.”
What was going on here? Jason’s face was perfectly still, like Camille’s in soul death. He was trying to figure it out. The scene wasn’t playing for him. He didn’t know where it was wrong.
“Have you located her since?” he asked.
“Yes. She’s come back. She won’t tell me where she was. I’m so scared.” She looked scared.
Jason drew a breath. “What makes you think Camille is responsible for these—murders?”
“I just do, just the whole picture, the sort of killings they are. She liked to hang our dolls. In a row. Sometimes she put my clothes on the dolls and then hung them. I told you that, didn’t I? Dressed them up and hung them by their necks.”
Jason’s head had begun to throb, but he didn’t move.
“She’s obsessed with death, and with hanging. She says she feels like she’s chokin
g. Often she can’t eat anything because she thinks she’ll choke on the food. Sometimes she chews one bite for an hour. It’s disgusting to watch.” Milicia’s agitation became extreme as she described it.
“Look, Milicia,” Jason said gently. “I can understand that all of this is disturbing. But murder is going a very long way. The two, uh, murders you’ve told me about happen to coincide with your own anxiety about your sister. It’s an unfortunate coincidence. In any case, all the studies have shown that most murders are committed by men. Only a tiny percentage of murders are committed by women, and they’re almost never stranger murders. Look, I’m not a detective, but I haven’t heard any compelling evidence—”
“But I know—”
“What do you know?”
“I know Camille. You don’t. Sometimes you just know things.” Milicia thrust out her chin. The twitch had moved up to her temple.
He watched it jump. It was true that he didn’t know Camille, and his not knowing Camille made it even more important that he be extremely careful with this. Milicia had her own agenda. He decided to try something else. He’d float an interpretation. If he was right, she’d calm down. If he was wrong, she’d dismiss it out of hand. Then he’d know what to do.
“You’ve told me Camille is angry,” he said gently. “What she does is experience her emotions as murderous and dangerous. But that is very far from acting on those impulses. You’ve also told me that Camille’s angry feelings incapacitate her. She’s overwhelmed and becomes immobile. People like that are not capable of any action at all, much less very complicated and stressful acts of violence. Having murderous feelings is kind of like having fantasies—watching movies of oneself killing someone, smashing a car, setting a building on fire. They’re wishes about committing violent acts. Wishes are not reality.”
Yet as he spoke, Milicia shook her head. “You’re wrong about this. You’re talking theory. You’re telling me what you’ve read in studies. I’ve seen you do this before. You push yourself away from what you don’t want to hear. The bottom line, Doctor Frank, is if my sister is killing people, and if you don’t do something about it, you’re responsible for murder.”