The residents of each of the upper seven floors of the building, if they were home, would probably have heard gunshots only if they had been fired on their floor. Probably. The apartments were old with thick walls. Mac wondered if the tenants would have heard a gunshot even if they had been standing in front of the elevator. It would depend, he concluded, on how many floors away the shot had been fired.
Six of the residents, according to the doorman, were wintering in Florida, including the Galleghers on sixteen and the Galleghers on seventeen. The Galleghers on seventeen were the son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren of the Galleghers on sixteen. Mason and Tess Cooper on nineteen were in California, in Palm Springs. Cooper had told McGee more than once that the house he owned in Palm Springs was right next door to the one that had been owned by Danny Thomas.
That left fifteen, eighteen, twenty, and twenty-one.
Evan and Faith Taft on fifteen were still asleep when Mac used the brass knocker on their door. Evan, in his fifties, blue robe failing to hide a paunch, tousled brown hair, answered the door, and blinked when Mac showed him his badge.
'What's wrong?' asked Taft.
'Someone was killed in your elevator, Mr. Taft,' said Mac.
'In our elevator?'
'Did you hear any shots or unusual noises this morning?'
'Someone was shot in this building? In our elevator?'
'Yes,' said Mac. 'Did you hear anything?'
'No,' said Taft. 'I'm going to have to tell my wife. Oh, shit, she's got a heart problem. We'll probably have to sell the apartment and move. She won't want to go on that elevator again. You know what the housing market's like in this city?'
Mac waited while Evan Taft sighed and continued.
'Maybe we'll stay at our place on the Island. If we can get to it with all this snow.'
'Do you know Charles Lutnikov, who lives in this building?' asked Mac.
'Name doesn't… Did he kill someone?'
'No, he was the victim.'
'What floor is he on?'
'Three. Heavy-set man, slightly balding, maybe a little unkempt.'
'I don't know, maybe,' said Taft. 'Sounds familiar but…'
'I'll have someone come by with a photograph of him later,' said Mac. 'How well do you know the rest of your neighbors, the ones who use this elevator?'
'Not well,' he said. 'The Wainwrights on eighteen, he's the Wainwright of Rogers and Wainwright, the stock brokers. He handles some of our investments. The others, we don't know them very well, enough to say hello if we meet on the elevator or in the lobby. The Barths on twenty are retired, Red-wear cardboard cartons factory in North Carolina. The Coopers on nineteen, you know the Daisy Ice Cream chain in the South?'
'No,' said Mac.
'Well, the Cooper family owns them,' said Evan, brushing back his hair and looking over his shoulder to see if his wife was coming. 'Big family.'
'Top floor, penthouse? Louisa Cormier?' asked Mac.
'Our celebrity,' said Taft. 'She's on the
'Yes,' said Mac. 'Did you hear any noise this morning, probably just before eight?'
'Noise?'
'Like a gunshot,' said Mac.
'No, our bedroom is in the back of the apartment. Anything else?'
'No,' said Mac.
'Then I'd better go figure out how to tell my wife.'
Mac nodded. Taft closed the door.
Mac had no better luck on any of the other floors. Aiden caught up with him on twenty-one, and they went over the foyer together as he had on the lower floors. When they were finished, Aiden vacuumed the floor, as she had every other one, and put the vacuumed contents in a separate marked see-through plastic bag.
Before Mac tapped the shining brass knocker on Louisa Cormier's door, he used an ALS to examine the foyer. There were small but definite traces of blood.
4
DR. SHELDON HAWKES, lean, dark-skinned wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt with the letters CSI across the back, stood between the tables bearing the two corpses. Standing at his side was Stella Bonasera.
The sparse room was large, with blue-tinted light and slightly shadowed corners. The only bright lights were those which shone down from the ceiling, white beams on the two naked and tagged stars of the day, Alberta Spanio, knife still in her neck, and Charles Lutnikov, the two holes in his chest now clearly visible. Both bodies were nude on the steel tables, devoid of jewelry, going out of the world as they had come in with the exception of the autopsy, their eyes closed, their heads on stabilizing blocks.
Hawkes had checked the temperature of both bodies the moment they had arrived and compared them with the rectal temperatures Stella and Aiden had taken. Time of death was never 100 percent accurate unless there happened to be a witness standing there when it happened and you had full trust in the witness and his or her wristwatch. Rigor mortis had not set in on either body, which suggested the deaths were less than eight hours ago. 'Suggested' was the operative word since Alberta Spanio's body had been first examined by Stella in a room in which the temperature was 22°F.
Rigor mortis, however, is a highly unreliable predictor of time of death. Rigor mortis is the stiffening and contraction of muscles resulting from chemical reactions in muscle cells. Normally, rigor begins in the face and neck and works down through each muscle till even those in the corpse's toes are affected. Rigor usually begins eighteen to thirty-six hours after death and lasts about two days when the muscles relax and begin to decompose. Heat quickens the process. Hawkes had seen it in bodies which had only been dead for a few hours. Cold slows down the process. Hawkes remembered cases in which rigor did not take place for a week. In thin people it could come on rapidly regardless of temperature. In obese people, the process would be much slower than the norm. And then again it was not unusual for a body to never show signs of rigor.
Hawkes concluded, without beginning his autopsies, that the time of death calculated by the CSI detectives at the site of the killings might be reasonably accurate. Normal body temperature is 98.6°F. At the rate of approximately 1.5°F per hour, the body equilibrates with the temperature of the environment in which the body has been found unless the temperature of the environment is very hot or extremely cold. Given the 72°F temperature in the elevator and the dead man's temperature, it was relatively easy to determine Charles Lutnikov's time of death; it had been harder, much harder, with Alberta Spanio because of the partial freezing which would have dropped her body temperature rapidly. Hawkes could make a better estimate of time of death if he began with her and examined her systems and organs with his own instruments.
He began with the knife sticking out of her neck.
'Downward stroke,' he said carefully, removing the knife. 'Deep. Someone strong. Also someone lucky or someone who knew just where the carotid artery was. She was asleep. No struggle. No movement. Not even after she was stabbed. Knife is a switchblade right out of
Hawkes dropped the bloody knife into a stainless steel pan and handed it to Stella. She would add it to the collection, which included the pill bottle and lid and the glass with alcohol from the hotel room. By the time Hawkes finished, the bathroom window might also be in the lab waiting for her.
Hawkes moved into the routine autopsy procedure which always seemed new and sacred, not the defiling of the dead but the honoring of justice which they and their families deserved.
