Neil was monochromatic in a navy blazer and navy shirt and jeans. The dark colors emphasized his florid face and nearly transparent hair. In his mouth was a red plastic stirrer that he worked with his back teeth. It was what he did instead of smoking cigarettes. Half the pens and pencils on his office desk were chewed. Neil was a bundle of nervous energy that could make him impatient and ornery, especially when maxed out on overtime. And he was maxed out.
“No sign of forced entry. No scratches on the lock. No evidence of a struggle. Nothing that anybody else was here.” The red stirrer jiggled up and down as he talked like one of those pens that record seismic activity.
“We’re waiting for you to take a look before we take her,” Mangini said.
“Who found her?” Steve’s eyes fell on three framed photos on the fireplace mantel.
“Patrol came on an alarm call about seven thirty after her girlfriend found her. She got concerned, when she got no response by phone, so she came up and tried the door, and when she couldn’t get in she contacted the landlady in the apartment below. They found her. They’re both downstairs with the responding officer.”
“Any estimate how long she’s been dead?’
“Hard to tell. Based on lividity and rigor, maybe fifteen, twenty hours.”
The apartment had the familiar Victorian layout—living room, dining room, kitchen in a line, a hall with two bedrooms off the dining area. Steve followed Neil through the dining room where a closed Dell laptop sat under a chair. In the kitchen were technicians he knew from crime scene services. “We’re ready to take her when you are,” Mangini said.
Steve nodded. The kitchen looked as if it had just been tidied up. The only thing suggesting activity was a single wineglass on the counter, and near it an open bottle of Taittinger, two-thirds full. Fingerprint dust showed latents on it and the single glass. The sink was empty. When Steve glanced at Neil, he saw something in his expression that didn’t look right. “You okay?”
Neil nodded him into a small bedroom that had been set up as a workout space with an elliptical machine and free weights. On a wall was a poster of a woman in workout clothes making a muscle while three other people in workout clothes glared at her biceps in mock-dismay.
“It’s Terry Farina.”
It took Steve a moment to register the name. “Oh, shit.” In the poster her hair was darker and cut short, so he could barely recognize the night student from Northeastern University.
“Yeah.” Neil peeled off the wall and headed toward the master bedroom. “In here.”
Steve felt his heart rate kick up as he followed him down the hall to the large bedroom at the end. His attention was arrested by a bizarre structure rising from the mattress of a queen-size bed, sitting cater-cornered across the far wall. A white bedsheet had been draped from the headboard and over the deceased’s body like a pup tent.
“When did crime scene get here?”
“About two hours ago. Where the hell were you?”
“My PDA was dead.” For some reason he had forgotten to recharge his PDA-smartphone last night. It took the captain three calls to rouse him on the landline.
Steve stepped into the room, which felt cooler than the rest of the apartment. A built-in air conditioner on the left wall was turned off. As Steve approached the bed the acrid odor of urine hit him. He snapped on a pair of latex gloves and braced himself as Neil lifted the sheet as if unveiling a sculpture.
The sight was like a jab to Steve’s solar plexus. The woman was sitting naked in a lotus position, her torso held in place by a black noose fashioned from a woman’s stocking, the foot-end of which was tied around her neck, the other fastened around the metal headboard behind her. A hand towel was pressed between her neck and the hose, probably as padding to prevent injury. Because of the weight of her upper body, the stocking was stretched to a rope, her head flopped forward.
She did not look like the woman he knew. She did not look human.
Although the color of her hair and paleness of her torso identified her as Caucasian, her flesh was gray and devoid of the flush of life. Her face was bloated and the gross congestion and cyanosis had turned it purple. Her mouth was slack and the black tip of her tongue protruded through a froth like a slug. Her eyes were slits of red jelly from scleral hemorrhaging. Her hands were balled at her sides, and urine stained the space between her legs where she had voided.
Steve could see no bruises on her body, which was lean and athletic, the physique of a fitness professional. She had firm full breasts, and although the hair on her head was auburn red her pubic hairs were dark and trimmed to an exclamation point.
“We figure she passed out and the pressure did the rest,” Neil said.
Steve nodded. He had seen a lot worse in his seventeen years as a cop. For sanity’s sake, he had developed a psychic detachment that allowed him to view ruined bodies like an insurance adjuster evaluating wrecked cars. But this was different. He knew this woman—the handsome gleaming woman in that poster—her head now a grotesque alien thing.
As if reading his mind, Neil said, “You fucking believe it?”
Terry Farina had been Neil’s fitness trainer at a North Shore health club before he transferred to Boston. She had also taken night classes at Northeastern University, where Steve taught Introduction to Criminology. She had taken a psychology course in a classroom next to his.
Steve shook his head as he looked around the room. It was a feminine space in mauve with a beige and green Berber rug on shiny hardwood floors, a white love seat with coordinating pillows neatly arranged, and floor plants. On a small round table sat a framed photograph of the woman and a female companion smiling. Too cheerful a setting for what sat on the bed.
Against the wall was a flat screen television, a remote control sitting on the nightstand. Draped on a nearby chair was her dress—a shiny black piece with spaghetti straps—and a black bra and black thong. What looked like the mate to the stocking lay draped over her dress. Her shoes stood side by side each other on the floor under the chair. On another chair against the wall was an unzipped green suitcase packed with clothing. As Neil had said, no obvious signs of struggle.
“She and the girlfriend were supposed to leave town this morning for a few days with her friend’s family in Vermont.”
Steve nodded. “Anybody touch the body?”
“No.”
“What about patrol?”
“He says he didn’t touch her, just called the alarm when he found her. Name’s Larry Abraham. Steve, we’ve been through all this, it’s in the report.”
“Were the lights on or off when they found her?”
“Off.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Neil snapped.
Steve looked at him. “Is there a problem?”
“Look, we’re ready to wrap up is all.” He checked his watch. “Forget it. I’m going for a coffee. You want one?”
“You put away any more caffeine you’ll need a straitjacket.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re eating plastic.”
“You want one or what?”
“No. Send in Officer Abraham.”
“I already got a statement from him.”
“Well, I want a statement from him.”
Neil scowled his way out of the room.
Steve moved closer to the body. His hand was shaking as if there were a small nugget of ice at the core of his body. He had examined hundreds of bodies, including some he knew from the streets—druggies, snitches, gang-bangers, hookers—but never a personal acquaintance. He took a deep breath to center himself.
Because of the ambient coolness, decomposition had not begun. He examined the body and took photographs, and when he was finished he checked her clothing. With tweezers he examined the stocking mate—
