death is pending an autopsy tomorrow. He’ll blame it on the weekend.”
“Every cop in the lower end of Manhattan knows Tony.”
“None of the cops know any details and Jimmy won’t be talking; he’s busy helping with the funeral arrangements.”
Stinelli rubbed the back of his neck as he paced the kitchen.
“You know you got one helluva Monday coming up, pal. Two murders plus I promised you’d meet with that guy Hamilton about the Cramer case.”
“Don’t worry, chief, I’ll take care of it. Look, we got a very slick killer on our hands. The longer we keep it in the closet the better.”
Stinelli thought for a moment or two more.
“Okay…okay. But keep me up to speed on this. You turn up anything new, anything, you call me.”
“Maybe the less you know the better.”
“You let me decide what I should and shouldn’t know. Just keep me informed, kid. We clear on that?”
“Clear.”
Stinelli cradled the phone and sat down. He and Valerie had a rule: He never discussed business with his wife. But she knew Lo Zio and Venezia was one of their favorite restaurants. It was less than a mile from his office at One Police Plaza.
“Uncle Tony’s dead,” he said. “That’s all we know so far.” He took her hand as she sat down beside him, her eyes tearing up.
“Who’s Androg?” she asked.
“One of the bad guys.”?
Vinnie Hue was ready for the Sunday morning briefing. He had all the photographs and comments from the scene of Tony Crosetti’s murder as well as the exterior front and rear shots of the Venezia prepared for projection on the big board.
There was another addition: an alphabetical list of the categories with which forensic pathologists break down and identify how homicide victims are killed. They varied from one pathologist to the next but basically were pretty much the same. It was typical of the mordant humor of the enclave, much of it initiated by Vinnie, that the list, in his comic book script, was headed “Wolf’s Biggest Hits”:
1. Blunt trauma 2. Cutting, stabbing, piercing 3. Drowning 4. Drugs, including poisons 5. Gunshot 6. Suffocation 7. Thermal (electric, freezing, fire)
Individually, serial killers usually employed the same method to kill; strangulation and stabbing were popular because they enjoyed watching their victims die. Ted Bundy, one of its more prolific practitioners, once described serial killing as “a contact sport.”
Nearby in the lab, Wolf had moved the thawed corpse to the stainless steel table and was dictating his findings into an overhead mike.
Only Wolf, Rizzo and Bergman were absent. Rizzo was a few blocks away preparing to interview anyone who might have seen the killer. He was at a distinct disadvantage. Anyone working in the restaurants or on the street within view of the Venezia during the crucial hours between one and three a.m. would not be showing up for work until late afternoon. Bergman, meanwhile, had returned to the scene to go over Tony Crosetti’s receipts from Friday night, hoping something familiar might turn up since he was the last customer to leave the place. It was a long shot but at this point everything was.
But Larry Simon had some surprises for the crew and had provided Hue with several photographs and some documents for a presentation he would make following Cody’s briefing.
Simon sat back in his chair, patiently watching the panorama of death flick across the big screen as an obviously edgy Cody described in detail how Charley had led Cody and Jim Farrell to the freezer and thus to the harrowing discovery.
There was a murmur of discomfort as the first grotesque photo of Uncle Tony’s frozen corpse flashed six-feet high on the board. The entire crew was aware of the murder by then, but since they all knew the victim, the bizarre scene conveyed to each an ineffable sense of melancholy, of sorrow, despair, and, ultimately, anger. Nor did anyone in the room doubt for a moment that this was the work of the psychopath they knew only as Androg.
Cody gave them a moment to compose themselves before continuing, playing Annie Rothschild’s description of the entire scene.
“I think it’s safe to say we won’t be finding any DNA except perhaps Crosetti’s,” she said. “There’s no blood anywhere. We dusted the office and freezer and picked up some prints but I’m guessing they’re either Tony’s or the nephew’s. We’ll be checking his clothes for fibers, prints, anything that might give us a lead but the team agrees that our killer undressed him in the office, not at the freezer as I originally thought. The killer had more room and could stack the clothes in the closet where we found them and get them out of the way. This was a very carefully planned and executed homicide, just like Handley’s.”
“Rizzo and Bergman are canvassing the area with a team of Farrell’s best detectives,” Cody said. “Hopefully he’ll find someone who saw Androg or his car in the lot. And we’re waiting for Wolf to complete the autopsy. I’m sure he’ll have something to add.”
“Is there any possible connection between Crosetti and Handley?” Kate Winters said.
“Well, we’re pretty sure the killer was in the place at least once before this morning.”
“Not much help there,” Ryan said. “The place is crowded every night.”
“Typical,” said Simon. “Our killer’s hiding in plain sight.”
Before he could continue Wolf and Annie entered the room. He was still wearing blue scrubs and booties but had removed the blouse. The sleeves of his plaid shirt were rolled up to the elbows and he was drying off his hands with paper towels Annie was handing him one at a time from the roll she carried.
“Well,” he said, tossing a used towel into a waste basket, “we haven’t done the toxicology reports yet, but I can tell you how Tony Crosetti was killed.”
The entire crew turned their attention to Wolfsheim, which is how he liked it.
“He was drugged with a dose of chloral hydrate. He was nearly comatose when he died but he was dead before the freezer door was closed.”
“Okay,” Cody said, “what’s the kicker?”
“He was drowned,” Wolfsheim answered.
“We found diatoms, a form of plant life that lives in water,” Annie nodded. “When a person drowns, their lungs fill with water and the microscopic diatoms burst through the lungs and enter the blood stream. They move rapidly through the blood stream and throughout the body and ultimately settle in the bone marrow. Cut a bone and if it contains diatoms, it is a drowning.”
“In short,” Wolfsheim theorized, “the killer slipped Crosetti a mickey in his wine to knock him out. Then held his nose, opened his mouth, and forced enough water down his throat to drown him. That’s why the water glass was empty.”
32
Although he could have knocked off for what was left of the weekend-Uncle Tony certainly wasn’t going anywhere-Wolf spent the afternoon writing up his autopsy report.
Wolf was intent on comparing Uncle Tony’s murder to Handley’s point by point. Both occurred approximately the same time of night. Both victims were naked, both sitting. Both had no obvious motive. Both killings went out of their way to confuse the cause of death, as though intentionally playing games with the investigators. In both cases, fiber evidence that Androg was wearing surgical booties seemed all too easily discovered, as though the clue had been left on purpose to perplex. The vague imprints were approximately the same in size.
Rizzo and Bergman, for their part, were making plans to interview anyone who might have seen the killer at La Venezia Friday night and planned to sit down with Ricky both to go over his unprompted recollections of the crowd and to jog his memory with the Venezia’s credit card slips-though they found it hard to accept that this particular killer would have used a credit card.
Bergman kept thinking about the woman in red, who looked somehow vaguely familiar as she passed his
