“Yes, ma’am. It’s rather a mammoth hotel.”
“Dr. Mayes is across the hallway. Let me take you over to him,” Hal said.
He motioned to Azeem to follow as Rocco Correlli charged ahead. Mike moved back to let them through, while I tried to stay close on the heels of the highly touted forensic guru. I didn’t see any point in being alone with Mike.
“So really, Coop, did you miss me?” he said, playfully poking me in the side as I passed him.
“Any day now I might have started to.”
“You look skinny, kid. How much weight did you lose pining away for me?” Mike grabbed my arm to try to hold me in place.
“Neither weight nor sleep.” I broke loose and kept walking.
“Hey, Coop. Turn around a minute.”
“What is it, Detective?” I worried my annoyance—and hurt—were palpable.
“Death becomes you, Ms. Cooper,” Mike said. “It brings color to your cheeks.”
THREE
Johnny Mayes sipped a glass of wine as the rest of us settled into place in the mini command center on the Waldorf’s forty-fifth floor. Mercer was beside me on the love seat, while Mike leaned on the mantel over the gas fireplace. Hal and Pug pulled up armchairs near the coffee table, and Rocco and Azeem were on opposite ends of the long sofa. It was nine fifteen and there was no sign that the business portion of the evening would end soon.
“It will come as no surprise to any of you that this young lady died as a result of exsanguination,” Johnny said. “The instrument of causation—the knife or other cutting tool—had an extremely sharp tip. A needle point, I might say, which perforated the skin quite easily behind the right ear. There is a very regular and steady path sliced across her neck, which severed the jugular vein and occasioned the outpouring of blood onto her body and the bedsheets.”
I swallowed hard and stared at a spot on the wall above Johnny Mayes’s head.
“I say regular because it is so even, so unfluctuating, that it would appear that this victim offered no resistance to the assailant. She seems not to have struggled or moved during the time of the cutting, nor are there any defensive wounds on her hands or lower arms. Her fingernails are all intact. Polished a pale pink and not even chipped.”
“But it’s the neck wound that killed her,” Pug said, “or the blood flow wouldn’t have been so dramatic.”
“She was alive when he slit her throat, Pug. Drugged, perhaps, but alive.”
“Why do you say drugged?” I asked. “You think she’s a junkie? Any marks on her body?”
“Nothing to suggest that, Alex. Several things make me think you won’t find any photographs of her on the hotel videos. I don’t think she came in here under her own steam.”
“How then?” Mercer said.
“It’s her back, my friends. Her back and the skin on the rear of her thighs and legs. Two things of note,” Johnny said, stopping to sip his wine. “There are more of those so-called ladders you saw on her thigh, Alex. All on her lower back. Four of them.”
“I’ll have a set of photos to you tomorrow,” Hal said to me.
“Did they cause any injury?”
“None at all. I see you’re wincing, Alex. I’m sure the young lady was too intoxicated—involuntarily—to know. There is also a pattern—not in high definition—but sort of vaguely apparent on her skin. Especially her shoulders, her buttocks, and the rear of her legs. You want a guess about why I think she didn’t walk in through the lobby? All I can give you is my hunch.”
Mike started to pace. He rarely stood still when his mind was in gear. “Shoot.”
“There’s a faint imprint—it’s actually on her forearms, too. Just on the surface of her skin, not dug into it,” Johnny turned to me as he spoke. “It looks like a lining of some kind, a motif from the interior of a box or container. Imagine a wallpaper design in a faded red pattern that stamped onto her skin because it was wet. In this heat, enclosed in some kind of container, moisture from her sweat would have collected quickly.”
“Any ideas?” I asked.
“I’m thinking of something large enough, obviously, to conceal a body. Something used to transport or move an object or a piece of furniture.”
“You’re supposed to be helping us, Johnny,” Mike said, one hand in the pocket of his jeans and the other waving in a circle over his head. “You got an enormous square block of Manhattan real estate with exits and entrances on all sides and its own parking garage underneath. Deliveries are made every hour, day and night. Enough food to stock all the restaurants and room service, pallets filled with linens and laundry, boxes full of flower arrangements the size of small trees, and musicians hauling instruments of every conceivable size and shape up to the ballroom.”
Johnny Mayes tried to get a word in. “But there is—”
“That’s before you start with the guests and the transients. D’you ever get held up in Park Avenue traffic by a minivan unloading a family of five with suitcases and backpacks and duffel bags that look like they could hold Mercer’s six foot four inches? I did a security detail two years back—”
“Should have been your last one, Chapman,” Pug said, enjoying the chance to lob a crack at Mike. “You could have saved yourself some embarrassment.”
None of the rest of us laughed with him.
“Nice having you at my back, Pug. Like I was saying, I had this detail with one of the Saudi princes. Picked him up at JFK in an SUV and we needed a caravan to get his luggage here. Right to the Waldorf. Could have had a camel, a two-humper even, in one of the trunks he was carting around.”
“Stick with the idea of trunks for a minute,” Johnny Mayes said, placing his glass on the tray. “I’m quite sure we’re not dealing with something commercial, like a wooden packing crate. The markings would have been entirely different—strips of wood several inches thick, and certainly unlined. I would have expected to find shavings or splinters in the girl’s hair or on her body. A cardboard one, perhaps, but that wouldn’t be likely to have any design on the inside, would it? It would be a far cheaper product than wood.”
“You’re saying she might have been carried into the Waldorf inside a trunk?” Mercer asked. “You’re all so quick to buy into this.”
“She didn’t walk,” Johnny said. “I’m betting good money on that.”
“Wheeled,” Pug said. “Wheeled in, not carried. Fits with Crime Scene findings. They think there were indentations in the carpet. We actually disregarded them, figuring it was a room service cart from a few days ago.”
Mike slapped his palm against his forehead, but Pug was oblivious to the gesture.
“Not all the way into the bedroom, but in the entryway to the suite. That’s where they picked up some of the trace evidence. Dirt and debris.”
“It’s not the wheeled versus carried that stops your heart,” Mercer said. “This girl was alive, then stuffed inside a—a box or container of some kind for the purpose of getting her in here? To die in a suite in one of the most luxurious hotels in the world?”
“I don’t begin to know the purpose,” Johnny said. “I’m just telling you that the endgame was in that suite. I’d say she was drugged to unconsciousness—although toxicology results may take weeks to tell us with what—her body folded practically in half to be concealed in a large suitcase or trunk, and that she was brought to the forty-fifth floor of this hotel to be raped and murdered. She died right on that bed.”
“Why?” I said. “Mercer’s right. For what possible reason?”
“I won’t pretend to be of any help on that count.”
“Any preliminary estimate of when she died?” Rocco Correlli asked.
Johnny lifted his glass again, tilting it in the direction of Fareed Azeem. “I’d say ‘the game is afoot,’ my friend, but it would be in such bad taste. A pathologist outside his morgue versus a chemist with his portable new filter. I’m at such a disadvantage, Fareed. Shall I go first?”
Azeem gestured his consent with bo
th hands.
“It’s now Tuesday evening, after nine P.M. I’d put the time of death at somewhere between noon and six P.M. yesterday. Of course that’s before I get to gastric contents and all that. The rigor, the appearance of the body, the color of the blood.”
“That’s the best you can give me?” the lieutenant asked. “Half a day? That costs me a dozen men stuck on more than a hundred video monitors in real time.”
“They can always fast-forward ’em, Loo,” Pug said. “Bores me to tears to look at those empty corridors on surveillance tapes.”
“Hence my introduction to the amazing Dr. Azeem. I’ll come closer after tomorrow’s autopsy, but let’s see what he can tell us.”
“No insects,” I said softly. “I didn’t see any activity, or any obvious decomposition, despite the intense heat. You’d think if it were more than twenty-four hours ago . . .”
“The air conditioner was on full blow when uniform responded,” Pug said. “It was like a meat freezer in here, Alex.”
“Let me go back across the hall and check my camera,” Azeem said. “I’ll give you a reading of the machine and explain the result.”
He stood up and walked out of the room.
“This imprint you’ve described on the girl’s back,” Mike said. “Is it distinctive enough to give us a clue?”
“The design may be fairly common,” Johnny said. “Sort of chevron-shaped print, perhaps on a linen cloth that lined a piece of luggage. But there are also letters, some of which are quite easy to make out. There’s an uppercase G, followed by an a or an o. In some instances the next one appears to be a v or maybe a y. It hasn’t left the same impression in every place because of the natural protrusions of the bonier parts of the body. It’s clear on the hips and on the shoulder blades, but then you lose the markings in the small of the victim’s back. The curvature there obviously didn’t make contact with the patterned fabric.”
“Any other specifics?” I asked. I was playing with the first few symbols on my pad.
“Seems to end with the letter d.”
“Goyard,” I said, filling in the blanks and sketching the familiar design that adorned all the company’s products. “Probably the oldest trunk maker in existence. Nineteenth-century Parisian.”
“They teach you that at Wellesley, kid?” Mike said. “Give me a broad with a little class, an inherited fortune, a lot of foreign travel to see her old flame, and I’ll show you a prosecutor right in her element. Voilà. Could be the murderer’s a French chef, with a suitcase full of carving knives, out to avenge a broken heart. I’m telling you, Coop’s going to crack this case. She’ll get her personal shopper right on it.”
I was trying to laugh at Mike’s digs rather than take umbrage. I wondered whether he was back to his old ways of putting me down just to save face in front of Rocco Correlli, or if his extended vacation had cooled the affection he had finally expressed two months ago.
“Hard not to be noticed with a friggin’ trunk,” Pug said.
“In the Waldorf Astoria? Everybody’s wandering through the hallways with a wheeler bag,” the lieutenant said. “What’s this Goyard stuff, Alex?”
“Very pricey. Used by half the royals of Europe and tons of celebrities. The Duchess of Windsor never went anywhere without a flock of their steamer trunks. Luggage like that would be perfectly in place in the Tower suites, the bigger the better.”
“Too much trouble for a rape,” Mike said, waving me off.
“What is?”
“Let’s say the girl was drugged. She was clearly someplace remote enough when that happened that this perv could have—”
“Or pervs,” Hal said.
“Whichever. They were able to stuff her into a huge trunk. Why not just rape her there, wherever they were? Wherever ‘there’ was. Finish her off. Why all the drama of staging a scene in the Waldorf?”
“Because there’s a much bigger picture, you think,” I said, following Mike’s lead.
“Exactly. How fast can you solve that puzzle for the commissioner?”
“So if this is a one-off, we’re looking for a serial killer—or a pair of them,” Mercer said, jotting notes in his steno pad. “Bold setting, the Waldorf. It would be too intimidating for an amateur, so they’ve likely done this before. You’ve got to check all the big metro hotels around the country.”
“Maybe it has nothing to do with the fact that this is a fancy hotel,” Mike said. “Maybe it’s a political statement. The president on his way here. Some high-level meeting at the UN a month before the annual General Assembly deal in September. A chance for the killer to make big waves. To make a tsunami, actually.”
“Unlikely this has political blowback,” Rocco said, shaking his head. The presidential invitation and setup was last minute. “The White House pooh-bahs are pulling the man back from his vacation in Yellowstone. Swept the reunion of brain surgeons or whatever hot-shit group had these rooms blocked off over to a downtown Marriott. If this murder was so well planned, it had to have been set in motion before this special session was confirmed. So there could be another target in the Waldorf. Could be a setup to embarrass some other head of state or business leader. I got two guys going over that list with the assistant manager right now. What we need is a make on the dead girl.”
“I’ll have her stitched up for a photo you can use by tomorrow afternoon,” Johnny said.
Fareed Azeem came back into the room, removing his vinyl gloves and tossing his booties in the trash can.
“What can you give us, Dr. Azeem?” the lieutenant asked.
“All indications are that the young lady died between two and three P.M. yesterday. Well within the time frame Johnny targeted, but I can pinpoint it to that hour, if that is of any help.”
“Tremendous help. That will streamline what we’re looking at.”
“I might add, Mr. McBride, that your team may have missed some blood in the room where the body was found.”
“Not likely, Doc,” Pug said defensively. “Fine-tooth comb and all that. You found a stain you think they missed? Show me where.”
“Not a stain, sir, but rather a spot.”
“A spot? Get real, Doc.”
“A spot on one of the panels of the curtains.”
Rose-colored curtains draped the windows of the room. How could one see a microscopic amount of blood against that backdrop?
“I think the lab will have more than enough blood from the vic to work with.”
“It isn’t her blood, Mr. McBride. It might well be the killer’s. It was left on the curtain at least an hour after the girl was slaughtered.”
FOUR
Rocco Correlli was on the phone with one of his sergeants who was downstairs in the IT center of the Waldorf with senior staff and a slew of detectives. “We might have this narrowed down. You got two scenarios we’re looking at. Get this right, Huey.”
Hugh Tatum must have asked for a minute to write things down.
“We got no clue when the girl came to the hotel. It’s possible she was packed unconscious into a trunk or a crate,” Rocco continued. “Might even be fancy luggage. One, two, three guys—don’t know the size of the entourage. She died between two and three yesterday, and it’s possible someone was still in the room with her an hour later. So from three P.M. on, look for luggage going out, assuming no one found anything yet in a stairwell or closet. Am I right? So you can start them watching tape from three P.M. on. Like hawks, got that?”
A uniformed cop ducked in from the hallway. He was a fresh face, reinforcements no doubt sent in from the Seventeenth Precinct after 8:00 P.M. “Excuse me, Lieutenant Correlli? My boss said to tell you that Commissioner Scully is on his way to the hotel. Stand-up press conference in the lobby at twenty-two hundred.”
“Press conference my ass. Fifteen minutes? We got nothing to give them.”
“It’s a zoo downstairs, Loo,” Mike said. “Gotta feed them something.”
“You better tell me how your magic box
works, Dr. Azeem,” Rocco said. “Make sure I understand it, capisce?”
Fareed Azeem cleared his throat and moved into position by the fireplace mantel, as though it was the front of a small classroom. “As you all know, the identification of blood at a crime scene can be difficult to detect and certainly hard to rely on to pinpoint the time the bleed occurred, without months of laboratory analysis.”
“And this is what you’ve tried to do right there in the room?”
“Yes, Lieutenant. The techniques currently in use are actually a century old. Instead, our project involves hyperspectral imaging—”
“Explain that to me. I have to sell it to the media in a few minutes.”
“Certainly. So this imaging is done by a liquid-crystal filter—a tunable filter—that can provide immediate results.”
“How?” Mike said.
“The filter isolates different wavelength bands within every color. And because blood changes color over time—from a bright crimson to a very dull brown—our device is able to put an exact age to a sample.”
“This works in the UK? This wavelength band isolation?” Rocco asked. “Your murder teams use it?”
Fareed looked at the floor. “I remind you that this is a prototype machine. We’re still field-testing it. We’ve had remarkable levels of accuracy at home.”
“That’s what Johnny meant when he asked me if I was in for a forensic adventure,” I said.
Rocco removed a cigarette and matches from his jacket pocket and lit it. “So I’m a test case? Let’s leave your best guess out of the equation.”
“No smoking in here, Loo,” Pug said. “The manager reminded me.”
“I’m fresh out of heartburn medication, McBride. This is all I’ve got to calm my nerves.”
“Scully knows this is a crapshoot,” Mike said. “He’s gonna want to go with it.”
“What got your inner circle access back, Chapman? Last I knew you were headed for the rubber gun squad.”
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