'Not usually. Normally she works out of her apartment in the Village. My phone number is unlisted but somehow people get hold of it. The calls go to Ann who with a simple touch of a button forwards them to me after she screens them.'
Both Aiden and Mac could see that Louisa was definitely considering a question, but decided not to ask it.
'Is that it?' she said instead.
Aiden opened the stairway door. The crime-scene elevator was still on the first floor.
'For now,' said Mac with a smile. 'I'm sure Sheldon will appreciate the book.'
Mac held the book up. He followed Aiden through the door, and they stepped out, leaving Louisa smiling behind them.
When the door closed, Aiden said, 'Hawkes reads mysteries?'
'Don't know,' said Mac, starting down the narrow stairs. 'Give me a large bag. I want to check our famous author's fingerprints. You got blood samples from the carpet?'
Aiden nodded.
'Now,' said Mac, 'let's see if they match Charles Lutnikov's.'
'She know something?' asked Aiden, her voice echoing as they moved slowly downward.
Mac shrugged and said, 'She knows something. She was very bubbly, talked too much, kept changing the subject. She was working hard to be a thoughtful hostess with nothing to hide.'
'But she lied,' said Aiden. Mac had a sense about falsehood. Those who worked with him had learned, sometimes the hard way, not to lie to Mac.
'Everyone lies when they talk to the police,' Mac had once told her.
'You find anything?' he asked her now.
As they entered the lobby, Aiden removed a small plastic container from her jacket pocket and handed it to Mac. He held it up to the light to look at the contents.
'What is it?' he asked.
'Six small pieces of paper,' she said. 'White, like confetti. Found them in the carpeting outside Louisa Cormier's door.'
5
ON THE TABLE in front of Stella and Flack lay the pill bottle, the bathroom window, and the drinking glass taken from the hotel bedroom where Alberta Spanio was murdered.
Stella had checked for fingerprints. There were clear ones on the glass and the pill container, all belonging to the dead woman. There were no prints on the bathroom window, but Stella hadn't had the window removed with any real hope of getting reasonable prints. What she wanted was reasonable answers.
'That's the outside of the window. See that hole?' she said to Flack.
She pointed at something on the window. It was hard to miss. The inch-long gash was shaped like a comet and was the color of untreated wood.
'I checked the inside of the hole,' she said. 'Screw grooves. Something had been screwed into that window and ripped out, leaving that tail-like mark in the wood.' Using an extruder gun, Stella had taken a casting that showed even, minute grooves.
At that point, Danny Messer, wearing a white lab coat, came in with two microscope slides and handed them to Stella saying, 'The scraping I took out of the screw hole in the window.'
Stella inserted the first slide into the microscope and examined it as Danny said, 'Iron oxide. Whatever was screwed in there was iron, almost new.'
Stella moved to the side to let Flack look at the slide. He did and saw little dark chips in no particular arrangement. When he moved away from the microscope, she inserted the second slide, the one from the room above Alberta Spanio's. She looked for a few seconds and made room for Flack. More chips, but these looked different from the ones on the other slide.
'Steel,' said Danny. 'Taken from the particles Detective Flack took from the groove in the window above Alberta Spanio's bathroom. They don't match the iron in whatever was screwed into the window.'
'And what do you make of that,' asked Flack.
'Nothing more than whoever dangled that steel object out the window,' Danny said, 'had to have something heavy pulling at him on the other end to make a groove like that in the sill.'
'A kid?' asked Flack.
'A kid was lowered to the window, went through, and stabbed Alberta Spanio in the neck?' asked Stella.
'I've known kids on the street who'd do it for a few hundred dollars,' said Flack. 'And maybe it was a woman, skinny, maybe wasted from drugs, willing to risk her life for drug money.'
'How about this?' said Danny. 'Someone lowered a chain from the window above Spanio's bathroom with a hook on the end. The hook fit into another hook or hoop screwed into Spanio's bathroom window. He pulled the window open and kept pulling till the screwed-in hoop came out, leaving the hole.'
'And then someone climbed down the chain?' asked Flack.
'Possible,' said Danny. 'Or they were lowered.'
'Dangerous,' said Flack. 'Climbing down a steel chain.'
'In a snowstorm,' added Danny.
'And then climbing or swinging through the window,' said Flack. 'Hard for a kid or a druggie.'
Stella felt weak, tired. She wanted to put her head down on the table and get an hour of sleep. Instead she said, 'Let's go take a closer look at that room above Spanio's bathroom window.'
Spread out on the stainless steel table in front of Dr. Sheldon Hawkes was the body of Charles Lutnikov. There was a clean long incision from just below the dead man's neck to just below his stomach. The flap created by the incision was open and deep, dark red surrounding exposed ribs.
Viscera lay open, chest cavity cracked and open like a large book. The light above the corpse left no shadows, exposed every twist of colon and curve of bone and artery.
The room felt slightly colder to Mac than usual, for which he was grateful. The aroma of whatever the dead man had eaten that morning or the night before wafted through the room. Mac looked at Hawkes, who had both hands on the table across from Mac.
'Man had a pizza for breakfast,' said Hawkes. 'Meatball, eggplant, and onion.'
'Interesting,' said Mac.
'We start with the easy stuff,' said Hawkes. 'What do you know about our man?'
'His fingerprints were matched in the military database,' said Mac. 'Lutnikov served four years in the United States Army in the Military Police. Served in the first Gulf War. Purple Heart.'
Hawkes pointed to a scar on the dead man's leg, just above the ankle.
'Probably a land mine,' he said. 'Still a few small fragments of shrapnel. Surgeon probably decided not to probe for them and cause more trauma. Probably a good decision.'
'What about the shot that killed him?'
Hawkes reached down and closed the left side of the chest cavity like the cover of a book.
'Wound that killed him came from a handgun, judging from the size of the wound, a small caliber, probably a.22. Bullet went straight into the heart, almost no angle. He was standing in front of the shooter, who either knew what he or she was aiming for, or got lucky.'
Mac nodded and leaned forward to examine the wound.
'Aiden ran a blood splatter drop from the floor of the elevator,' said Mac. 'Blood from the wound dropped four feet six inches.'
'Dead man is five ten and a fraction,' said Hawkes.
'So, since the bullet went straight in, Lutnikov was standing up,' said Mac.
'And…?' asked Hawkes.
