early morning. How early, I can’t be precise. Between four and five is a safe estimate. I’m not seeing anything that tells the story of what happened to her except the obvious, and if the other two are poisonings as well?” He means Kathleen Lawler and Dawn Kincaid. “Then how is that possible? How do you do that to inmates who are incarcerated a thousand miles apart and then to this person?” He means to Jaime. “The good news, if there’s any good news to be found in all this, is the path for the drug or toxin, the route of administration, likely is something that was ingested and not intradermal or inhaled. So hopefully the rest of us are okay.”
“Nice to know,” Chang says. “Since we’ve been poking around in one victim’s prison cell and now are about to dig in another victim’s trash.”
I return to the living room, and the clutter on the coffee table is similar to what was in the bathroom, items scattered, as if Jaime upended her pocketbook and dumped everything out. A bottle of an over-the-counter pain reliever. Lipsticks. A compact. A brush. A small bottle of perfume. Breath mints. Facial tissues. Several blister packs that are empty, ranitidine and Sudafed. Chang looks inside a crocodile wallet and finds credit cards and cash. He reports there’s no obvious sign of anything stolen, and I let him know he might want to check for a concealed weapon. The handgun he pulls out of a side compartment of the big brown leather bag is a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed.38, and he points it up toward the ceiling and pushes in the ejector rod, unloading six rounds into the palm of his hand.
“Speer Plus P Gold Dots,” he says. “She didn’t mess around. Only I don’t think what got her was anything she could shoot.”
“I’d like to get started with the trash.” I walk into the kitchen. “What I can do is place each take-out container in a plastic garbage bag. I noticed a box of them last night when I was helping clean up. The heavier-duty the better. Thirty-gallon garbage bags should work just fine temporarily.”
I go into the cabinet under the sink and begin to shake open black trash bags, deciding to package each take-out container from the sushi restaurant separately. While I deal with the kitchen garbage can, Chang goes into the refrigerator and looks at what’s inside without touching anything.
“I’m assuming you’ve got some waterproof tape with you,” I say to him, as the rancid stench of rotting seafood wafts up from the metal can.
“Damn, that stinks,” he complains.
“She didn’t take out the trash last night, and I didn’t volunteer to do it for her, and now I’m glad. Thank God for that. We need to make everything as watertight as possible,” I explain. “What we don’t want is anything leaking, especially if you plan to transport evidence in your car.”
“Maybe there’s a better way.” He returns to his scene case and places rolls of evidence tape on the counter. He puts on a face mask and hands me one. “Maybe we should get HazMat in here.”
“If that was necessary, I wouldn’t still be around to help you.”
I cover the counter with plastic bags and don’t bother with the face mask. My nose is my friend, even if I don’t like what I’m smelling.
“I touched all of this when I was helping clean up and didn’t have the benefit of wearing gloves or knowing there was any reason for concern,” I continue. “I’m sure Colin has contacts at the CDC, and if not, I do. I suggest making a call and letting them decide exactly how they want to handle transport, for example, which will be subject to regulatory control, since what we’re talking about is the potential of pathogens or toxins present in body fluids and tissues collected at autopsy, and in foods and food containers, et cetera. But the first step for us is to package all this as rigorously as possible, triple-bag it, document everything. I don’t know if you or Colin have biohazard labels or infectious-substance labels or any other type of leakproof packaging. And we need to get all of this back to the lab and immediately refrigerate it.”
“We usually don’t deal with stuff like this, I’m happy to report. I don’t have any special biohazard boxes or containers.”
“We’ll do the best we can. Like this.” From the refrigerator, I retrieve the container of seaweed salad leftover from last night and make sure it’s sealed tightly shut. “It goes in one bag, which I’ll wrap around and tape into a tight little package, then that goes into a second bag, and I’ll do exactly the same thing, and finally a third bag, again the same thing,” I describe. “Probably would pass the four-foot-drop test, but I believe we won’t press our luck. I can take care of this or you can help or you can stand here and watch. Or, if you prefer, Colin can do it.”
“Who’s volunteering me for what?” Colin says, as he walks down the hallway.
“You got any ideas about how to get this stuff to the labs?” Chang asks him. “She says it should be refrigerated.”
“And what you’re saying is you don’t want potentially poisonous garbage inside your candy-ass air- conditioned SUV.”
“I prefer not.”
“I’ll throw it in the back of mine,” Colin says. “Open air and I just hose her off, decon her good, and Lord knows I’ve done it before. Just can’t use bleach on my fine upholstery.”
Chang carries his scene case to the desk near the stacks of expansion files with their different-colored gussets, and he begins to process the two laptops. He swabs keyboards and mouse pads, making sure he won’t wish he had done so long after the fact if there is reason to believe someone might have tried to get into Jaime’s computers.
“I’m going to take these in,” he says, “but I want to look first. Whatever isn’t password-protected.” He moves a gloved finger on the mouse pad. “Bingo,” he says. “If your delivery lady is real, we’re about to meet her. This baby’s got a DVR card. Looks like it goes with that camera out front and the one outside the apartment door.”
I shake open more black plastic trash bags, and Colin and I individually package the containers that I placed in the trash early this morning.
“And it’s got audio,” Chang lets us know. “A pretty fancy camera she’s got outside, we’ll start with that and see who shows up. Long-range, pans and tilts three hundred and sixty degrees. And thermal infrared, so it works in complete dark, fog, smoke, haze. What time did you say you got here last night?”
“Around nine.” I dig chopsticks out of the trash.
“We probably should package her whisky glass,” Colin decides. “And swab the bedside table, like you said. Let’s make sure we don’t forget.”
“The Scotch is in there”—I indicate which cabinet—“but I doubt that’s it, because the bottle was unopened when she first got into it. And here’s the wine bottle.” I lift it out of the garbage and set it on top of a plastic bag, and the memory of drinking pinot noir and talking on the couch tightens my stomach. It almost takes my breath away.
“Nothing like day-old seafood,” Colin makes a face.
“Shrimp bisque. Scallops.”
“Rather smell a floater. Lord, that’s bad.” He bags an empty container.
“Well, this is really strange,” Chang says from the desk where he’s seated. “What the hell happened to her head? Now, this I’ve never seen before. Well, shit. That really sucks.”
We take off our soiled gloves and walk over to see what he’s complaining about.
“Let me back up to when she’s first picked up by the camera.” Chang’s finger moves on the mouse pad.
The images are high-resolution and remarkably clear in shades of white and gray. The entrance of the brick building, the iron railing of the front step, the walkway and the trees. The sound of a car going by and a flash of headlights, then she’s there, a distant figure on the street. Chang pauses the recording.
“Okay. She’s off to the left, right out here in front.” He indicates the street below us in front of the building. “You can barely make her out with the bicycle.” He points at the upper-left area of the computer screen.
“There you are, pressing the intercom button, and here she comes in the distance. But she’s not on the bike. She’s walking it across the street,” Colin observes. “That’s a little unusual.”
“And no safety lights on,” I comment, as I look at what’s on the screen. “As if she doesn’t want anyone to see her.”
“I’m going to guess that’s the point,” Colin agrees.
“It gets better.” Chang touches the mouse pad, and the recording resumes. “Or worse, actually.”
The figure moves again in the distance on the dark street, and I can see the vague shape of her, but I can’t make out her face. A shadow in shades of gray moving the shape of a bicycle closer, and I catch a movement of her right hand lifting up and suddenly a hot spot. A shocking white glare. What looks like a ball of white fire has obliterated her head.
