A shoe.
With a foot in it.
Connected to the leg of someone slumped against the railing of the icy marble balcony.
CHAPTER
4
—
, 1909
Reacting automatically, Sigrid Harald warned us not to touch anything. She stooped over the figure and pressed her fingers against a pressure point on his ankle before moving onto the balcony to check the side of his neck.
“No pulse,” she said.
Rain had saturated his hair and run down the side of his face, and when her fingers came away, they were not only wet but tinged with blood. Buntrock handed her his clean handkerchief. She wiped her hand dry, then pulled out her cell phone.
When someone answered on the other end, she said, “Hentz? Lieutenant Harald. I didn’t realize you were on call tonight.”
She described the situation and gave him the address. “Lieutenant Vaughn of the Six-Four is here, but we need extra uniforms immediately. There’s a big party on this floor so there should be possible witnesses to whoever entered this apartment. I want everyone detained till we get all their names.”
While she talked, Elliott Buntrock wandered over to look at the signatures of several paintings grouped on a wall.
Dwight and I had not used this room except to check out the balcony when we first arrived, and I hadn’t paid much attention to the furnishings. A little wooden cat—Mexican?—painted in lavender, turquoise, and pink stripes sat on a table beneath the pictures beside two small, brightly enameled cloisonne pillboxes. The pointed face had blue eyes, a knowing grin, and yellow whiskers and it was utterly charming. I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed it before. Such whimsicality didn’t really go with either the pillboxes or the rest of the apartment, which had been stripped of Kate’s personality and replaced by what I presumed was her tenant’s more conservative taste in decor. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that there had been several of those boxes and that the cat hadn’t been there earlier.
“Would you mind getting Lieutenant Vaughn?” Harald asked me. “And maybe your husband, too. He’s a sworn law officer, isn’t he?”
I nodded and hurried toward the door.
“Try not to let any of the others know,” she called after me.
Moments later, Dwight and Vaughn were following me back into the apartment. Josh Cho had tagged along, too. I hadn’t been able to keep him from hearing and I figured it didn’t matter. Anyone who teaches at John Jay would surely be professional enough to help, not hinder.
I hadn’t tried to see the dead man’s face, but Dwight took one look and said, “It’s the building’s super. Phil Something.”
“Phil Lundigren,” I reminded him. “He told us he and his wife live on the ground floor.” I was still feeling guilty about the open door. “Maybe he’s the one who left the door open.”
Dwight frowned. “The door was open?”
I nodded. “Remember when I came back for our camera? I thought I closed it, but when we got here just now it was standing open a crack.”
“Which opens it up to everyone out there in the hall,” Lieutenant Harald told Jarvis Vaughn. “So if you would?”
She didn’t have to say more. He immediately headed for the door. “I’ll tell the elevator operator not to take anyone else down.”
“What about stairs?” Dwight asked her.
“Yes, please.”
“There’s bound to be a service elevator, too,” said Josh Cho, trailing after the other two. “I’ll go secure it.”
When it was just the three of us again, Lieutenant Harald questioned me more closely as to our interaction with the building’s dead super, then asked, “How much time elapsed between your coming back for the camera and when we discovered the body?”
“About eighty-five or ninety minutes tops,” I told her. “We came out into the hall around nine. The hall was jammed with people, and when I saw some guys from the Steffingtons—”
“The
“Not the Who,” I said. “The Steffingtons.”
Buntrock grinned. “Who’s on first?”
She frowned at him. “Not a game, Elliott.”
“Sorry. The Steffingtons are a bubblegum rock group, not Daltrey and Townshend.”
“My nieces like them,” I said defensively.
