In the next fifteen minutes they established that Lia, twenty-two, had no conflicts with anyone and no one would mean her harm. She had no ex-boyfriends that he knew of—he didn’t ask, she didn’t tell—and had not expressed any concern or fear of anyone or anything in the months before her death. When Riley suggested that perhaps they had had an argument on Friday night and that’s why she had packed, he got another disgusted glare and Durling said that Lia had planned the vacation weeks before and had reservations at a hotel on the beach. He had not reported her missing because he assumed she had gone to Atlantic City. He hadn’t noticed that her car still sat in the garage (which David had learned from the superintendent) because each tenant had a separate, closed garage and he had had no reason to look in Lia’s. He had no idea how Mario Ashworth had known Lia’s parents but knew that her father had been an accountant. Lia wanted to be one as well but lacked the funds for college. Lia would not have let anyone into the apartment except himself or the super. The super, Durling added, might be a little lax on maintenance but that didn’t make him a pervert. Besides, the super had been out with his wife and daughter at a relative’s wedding on Friday night, because he and his middle-aged daughter were singing loudly and miserably off-key when they returned about two A.M. and passed his, Durling’s, apartment.
Durling himself grew up in Solon and currently worked at Home Warehouse. When asked what Lia had been wearing on Friday night, he described the clothes she had been found in, although David didn’t tell him that. She had been wearing shorts, Durling explained, because her thermostat didn’t work properly and her apartment always got hot—not too bad if you sat still, but she had been bustling around with dinner and packing. She cracked the window to be able to sleep at night. She had complained to the super, but when it came to anything other than collecting rent the man was chronically slow.
When the detectives ran out of questions, Durling began to ask his own—namely, what were they doing to catch the guy? Their answers were nowhere near as satisfactory as his had been, and he plainly resented it. They finally got rid of him by directing him to the ME’s office to identify and claim the body.
Once he had left, David and Riley looked at each other, suddenly afraid to touch anything in the apartment.
“He took her out of here,” Riley said.
“If she had left of her own will she would have put warmer clothes on. He grabbed her after Durling left—if Durling is telling the truth—and before she went to bed. But without raising a fuss, unless one of the neighbors tells us differently, and without much violence, unless he came back later and cleaned up.”
“If he had come back later, he should have taken her suitcase and her car. He could have dumped it at the airport or something and she would go down as a young lady who got tired of her life and left it behind.”
“We’ve got to get Forensics out here.” David felt oddly pleased at the idea. “We’re going to have to tear Evelyn away from Destiny’s clothing—again.”
Chapter 15
“WHAT IS THAT STUFF you’re using?” David asked Evelyn two hours later.
“Mag powder.”
“What’s that?” They stood on the fire escape outside Lia’s living room window, shivering in the cold and looking for fingerprints. He knew he topped Evelyn’s shit list, but he needed her too much to stay on her bad side, or so he told himself. The truth was, he really wanted her to like him, case or no case.
He’d just be real careful what he said around her, that was all. He could not lose another partner, another case, another last chance.
“You can’t use black powder on wet surfaces—the carbon dust sticks to water. However, the outside of this window isn’t exactly wet, it’s frozen, especially since the super turned off the heat to this apartment. It’s just possible to develop frozen prints with magnesium powder, a black powder with magnetic shavings in it. Since it’s applied with a magnet and not a brush, I can control how much gets on the print better than I can with black powder. If any areas are wet I can dispose of the mag powder without ruining the wand. Nothing ruins a black powder brush faster than water.”
“I hope you find something.” David sighed. “We need a break. Either she knew this person—which she could have, we’ve only begun to investigate her life—or she didn’t know him and yet he managed to get into her apartment without leaving any sign of forced entry.”
“There’s just one problem.”
“Yeah. According to Durling she left her bedroom window open, and it is cracked a few inches. So how did this guy hang in midair to get into a window that’s ten feet from the fire escape?”
“She could have left both windows open.”
“The window leading to the fire escape is locked from the inside. He could have gone in and shut it behind him, but then he couldn’t have come back this way. I think he took her out her own door. She’s right next to the stairwell and it lets out into the back parking lot. He goes out, down, out. It’s the middle of the night and there’s no one around to see him.”
“He’d have to be pretty strong to toss her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He couldn’t have dragged her, she’d have more bruises.”
“What did she weigh, one-ten? One-twenty? It wouldn’t be too hard.” He leaned on the tenuous railing, thought better of it, and continued to watch her.
In his line of work he met both women who worked with or hung around cops because they liked being around men and women who came on with a tough-as-nails persona to keep men from scaling the walls they had carefully constructed. The first type were usually available for the asking; the second type, well—a little persistence always crumbled the walls, exposed the vulnerability, because those women didn’t really want to be tough as nails. Evelyn didn’t fall into either category. There was no technique to make her either need him or want him, no strategy he could apply. Did he want her to want him? He couldn’t waste important time thinking about it.
Evelyn finished with the powder. “Either the rain we had on Sunday took care of any prints or there weren’t any here to begin with. I’ve got nothing.” She packed up her print kit and started down the fire escape. Their feet made the iron steps ring as David followed, holding tightly to the banister.
David said, “I haven’t run into too many perps who are neat enough to close the window behind them. Maybe this guy came in the front door.”
“You think she knew him?”
“According to Durling, she isn’t the type to let a total stranger into her place, especially late at night. If we take away him and the superintendent, that leaves someone from work.”
“From what you told me of her supervisor, Murfield, he doesn’t sound like a likely suspect.”
“No, but supposedly she would never have let anyone she didn’t know into her apartment.” With gratitude he put his feet on solid ground.
“Mmm.”
“You sound skeptical.”
“Not skeptical. I just always found it worrisome that the Boston Strangler said he never forced his way into an apartment. He always convinced the women to let him in. He said he never knew what to say until they opened the door, but he’d always come up with something.” She shivered, and not from the cold. “Scary.”
“Well, that’s according to Durling, anyway.”
Evelyn turned to face him, her eyes the exact shade of the overcast sky. “You don’t believe him?”
“I don’t know yet. He’s still the most likely suspect—and he works at Home Warehouse.”
“Plenty of cement and steel chains.”
“If I bring you samples from where he works, can you compare them?”
To his surprise, she laughed. “I haven’t done it before.”
“There’s always a first time.”
“Well, no, there’s not.” She settled her butt on the series of steps leading into the apartment building, looking over the snow that gleamed over the trees like frosting, sighing as if she hadn’t had enough sleep in the p
ast few days. “Not in Forensics. Before there’s a first time, there’s a vast collection of samples, comparisons, and self-tests. I can’t pick up a type of evidence I’ve never worked with before and say, ‘Gee, they look the same to me.’”
“Why not?” he asked, only half seriously.
“Because every chain in the world might look identical, for all I know.” She blew on her fingers through leather gloves.
“So you have to look at every chain in the world?”
“I need what is called a representative sample. I have to make a sincere effort to collect a cross section of available chains of similar size and shape, then look at them all and see if I can tell them apart.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad.”
“It depends. They may all be so similar that I can’t tell them apart. They may have distinctive links, but we can’t be positive he bought the chain in this city. We can’t be positive we aren’t missing a mom-and-pop hardware store somewhere that carries other types. We can’t be positive the judge will allow it in. After all, when we do quantification trials for DNA or gunshot residue trials, we do ten thousand samples, a lot more definitive than gathering ten or twelve types of chain from the local hardware store.”
“I stand corrected. It does sound bad.”
“Welcome to the scientific method.”
He held out a hand. “Come on, get up. My mother said that sitting on cold cement will give you hemorrhoids.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? Well, my mother says that sitting on cold cement will give you a kidney infection.”
He hauled her to her feet until their noses were a mere four inches apart—just a joke, a laughing situation, but it surprised him how desperately he enjoyed it. He broke away before the proximity went to his head. “Either way, you don’t want it. Come on.” He held the door for her as they reentered the comfortably warm building. She avoided the elevator and insisted on the stairs. “Claustrophobic?”
“Getting my aerobics for the day.”
They entered Lia’s apartment. Marissa had arrived and now neatly sketched the shape of the room and the placement of the furniture.
“I’m going to take the bedding when I’m done with this,” she told Evelyn while checking David out. He noticed her scrutiny, but if she had come to any conclusions, her face kept them well hidden. He didn’t know if he passed or didn’t pass her muster, whether she considered him a possible suitor for Evelyn or herself, or if she simply wondered if he could solve such a high-profile case. He wondered himself.
“Why?” he asked. “The bed had been made with the suitcase on top of it.”
“Maybe there’s a second boyfriend,” Marissa theorized. “They have sex and she makes the bed and starts to pack. All I know is, Tony will chew my ass if I don’t collect it.”
“He got her out of here without a noisy struggle or screams,” Riley pointed out. “All her neighbors were home and no one heard a noise. That indicates she knew him, or somehow he knocked her out before she could fight back.”
Evelyn studied the linen closet.
“Want to borrow the vacuum cleaner?” David asked.
“It could be that I just watch too much TV, but assuming she left here not willingly but unconscious, he might have wrapped her in something. The bedspread and the shower curtain, the two obvious choices, are still present. There’s sheets and blankets here, but no way to know if one is missing.”
“Did you say there were fibers on her clothing?”
“Everyone has fibers on their clothing.”
“What kind were on hers?”
“I don’t know.”
Riley lit a cigarette, confident that Lia could not object. He took a tin from his pocket to contain the ashes rather than leave them at the scene. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I mean I’ve spent the last forty-eight hours at cemeteries, hospitals, and crime scenes. I barely got back to work before you guys pulled me out here. Where do you think I’d have time to look at Lia’s clothing?”
“Can’t you work past four-thirty? You know, put in a little overtime?”
Evelyn gave him a look that could have boiled water. “My daughter’s at home recuperating from surgery. I don’t give a damn about overtime.”
True to her word, she stubbornly left work at the usual time and spent the evening with her mother and daughter. But the next day she succumbed to the accursed work ethic and arrived at the ME’s office two hours early, hoping that with no one but the deskmen about she might actually get some work done.
“You look like you ought to be on a gurney,” Greg, the deskman, told her.
“Thanks a hell of a lot.”
“No prob. You see Jason on the news?”
“Never turned it on.”
“He stuck his face in the camera, gave this firm, pro-fesh-en-al smile, and said he could not comment on an open investigation.”
“Well, that will make the ME happy.”
“Yeah. But he still got on the news, didn’t he?” the deskman said. “Something weaselly about that boy.”
Evelyn flicked on lights as she made her way to the examination room. The building sat around her as still and silent as a—well, as a morgue. Time to work. The killer’s next victim might have cement hardening around her feet at that very moment.
Lia Ripetti’s knit pink shirt had dried to a stiffness that quickly collapsed under Evelyn’s probing fingers. The label said Ralph Lauren and it had eye hooks all the way down the front. Two were missing and one hung loose, as if the shirt had been pulled but not with any real violence. Slight brown-purple stains were scattered around the right shoulder area. They could have been there for some time; after all, she had worn the shirt only to work around her apartment.
The Lee denim shorts were size 8 and faded, with nothing in the pockets but an unwrapped Life Saver candy and a Kleenex dried into a misshapen lump. The shorts had a bleach spot on the right front thigh and a green stain on the left buttock, perhaps a grass stain—who would be out rolling around in the grass in this weather? Evelyn dutifully noted all these facts on a sheet of paper. Lia had also been wearing a pair of white cotton panties and an underwire sports bra, and Evelyn briefly noted their size and brand. Then she got out the tape.
She taped the clothes with 3M standard clear packaging tape, placing a strip of tape down on the clothing and lifting up, repeating until the front of the shirt and its sleeves were done. She placed the tape on a sheet of clear acetate paper, something normally used by artists. Then she repeated the process until she’d covered the surface of each item, including the underwear, inside and out. She put the sheets of acetate in a clean nine-by-twelve manila envelope, rebagged and resealed the clothing and put it back in storage, then wiped the table off and re-covered it with fresh brown paper. Ideally she should move to another room entirely to avoid cross-contamination, but that wasn’t an option, given the cramped conditions of the building. Then she got Destiny Pierson’s clothing from the drying room.
She thanked her lucky stars that both girls were so scantily dressed. Usually winter deaths meant she had to work through several shirts, a pair or two of pants, underwear, socks, boots, gloves, hats, scarves, and heavy coats. In her opinion nothing weighed more than a man’s leather coat except a man’s wet leather coat.
What Riley had referred to as a T-shirt was actually a Halston creation in lightweight purple polyester with subtle gold threads. Simple but elegant. There were no holes, but the fabric had several snags in the back, as if it had been up against something rough. There were no stains, at least none that she could discern against the dark fabric. She taped the shirt inside and out, without much confidence. Both sets of clothing had spent some time in the river, which greatly reduced the possibility of finding anything significant. The girls had to have been transported there by car, but the water could have washed away any carpet fibers. What an involved, complicated, cumbersome way to kill someone, she mused; impossible to do without a great
deal of victim-killer contact, which would deposit all kinds of trace evidence from the killer and his location to the victim’s body. Then he throws her in the water and it all washes away.
Destiny’s bra, a Chinese-red crushed-velvet Victoria’s Secret Miracle Bra, brought a smile to Evelyn’s face. Every sixteen-year-old’s dream. Angel had one in white—the product of an entire week’s paycheck from her afterschool job at the miniature golf place. Evelyn had not been able to teach her daughter how to wait for a sale.
Destiny’s panties, like Lia Ripetti’s, were plain white. The miniskirt she had reportedly been wearing had most likely traveled several miles upstream by the time they found the body. She had no coat. Not even a teenager would go barhopping in a Cleveland November without a coat.
“You’re in early,” Jonathan said from the doorway.
“Catching up. I haven’t had a chance to look at the clothing until now. Jonathan, somebody got both these girls without a cry, without a struggle. What does the tox screen show?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
He leaned on the doorway, looking as tired as Evelyn felt even though the day had just begun. “Ripetti came up clean. The Pierson kid had a slight amount of alcohol—either from the bar or from a glass of fund-raiser champagne.”
“You didn’t go to that, did you?”
“I wasn’t interested in being the ME’s token black pathologist,” he said simply, then smiled. “Besides, I had a date, and I’d rather spend time with her than the city council members.”
“Did the two girls have any head injuries?”
“Some superficial bruises, like the rest of their bodies.”
“So if he didn’t knock them unconscious or gag them hard enough to bruise their faces, how did he overpower them so quickly and quietly? Will the tox screen check for Rohypnol?”
“Not normally, but we pulled out all the stops on this one, so they checked for all the date-rape drugs. Nothing.”
She gave him a disappointed look. “Then we have a real mystery.”
Trace Evidence Page 11