bite on her back as she paused to take her long, deep breath, her ritual remembering breath. When she was ready to meet the victim, she walked the long row of dusty parked cars with grease-penciled windshields to the investigation scene. The M.E. van and another from Forensics were parked close to a tow truck still hooked up to a newish, green metallic Volvo wagon. Technicians in white coveralls were dusting the outside of the Volvo. As Nikki got closer, she could see the body of a woman slumped in the driver’s seat, the top of her head pointed out the open car door.
“Sorry to interrupt your morning workout, Detective.” Lauren Parry stepped around the rear of the M.E. van.
“Not much gets by you, does it?”
“I told you Jameson Rook was doable.” Nikki smiled and shook her head, she was so busted. “Well, was he doable?”
“And doable.”
“Good. Glad to see you enjoying life. Detectives just told me you had a close call the other night.”
“Yeah, after SoHo House it was all downhill.”
Lauren stepped to her. “You all right?”
“Better than the bad guy.”
“My girl.” Then Lauren frowned and tugged aside the collar of her friend’s blouse to look at the bruising she saw on her neck. “I’d say it was a very close call. Let’s take it easy, all right? I have enough customers, I don’t need you, too.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Nikki. “Now, you dragged me out of bed for this, it better be worth it. What are you working here?”
“Jane Doe. Like I said, found in her car by the tow truck driver when he dropped it off here this morning. He thought it was heat asphyxiation.”
“A Doe? In a car?”
“I hear you, but no driver’s license. No purse. No plates. No registration.”
“You said you found something connected to my Matthew Starr case.”
“Give a girl a little sex and she gets very impatient.”
Nikki cocked an eyebrow. “A little?”
“And boastful.” The M.E. handed Nikki a pair of gloves. While she put them on, Lauren turned to the back of her van and came out with a clear plastic bag. She pinched it at the corner and held it up so that it dangled in front of Nikki’s eyes.
Inside was a ring.
A ring shaped like a hexagon.
A ring that was a good match for those bruises on Matthew Starr’s torso.
A ring that could have put that cut on Vitya Pochenko’s finger.
“Worth the drive?” said Lauren.
“Where did you find this?”
“I’ll show you.” Lauren took the ring back to her evidence locker and led Heat to the open door of the Volvo. “It was there. On the floor under the front seat.”
Nikki looked at the woman’s body. “It is a man’s ring, isn’t it?”
The medical examiner gave her a long, sober look. “I want you to see something.” The two leaned in through the open car door. Inside it was humming with blowflies. “OK, we have a female, aged fifty to fifty-five. Hard to get an accurate postmortem interval without labbing the rate test because she’s been in that car so long in this heat. My guess—”
“Which is always damn close.”
“Thank you—based on the state of putrefaction is four, four and a half days.”
“And cause?”
“Even with the discoloration that’s taken place over the last few days, it’s pretty clear to see what happened here.” The woman had a thick curtain of hair across her face. Lauren used her small metal ruler to pull the hair aside and reveal her neck.
When she saw the bruising, Nikki swallowed dryness and relived her own choking. “Strangulation” was all she said, though.
“Looks like from someone in the backseat. See where the fingers would have laced together?”
“Looks like she put up a hell of a fight,” said the detective. One of the victim’s shoes was off and her ankles and shins were mottled by scrapes and bruises where she had kicked the underside of the dash.
“And look,” said Lauren, “heel marks on the inside of the windshield over there.” The missing shoe rested broken on the dash above the glove compartment.
“I think that ring belongs to whoever strangled her. It probably came off in the struggle.”
Nikki thought of the woman’s desperate last moments and her brave fight. Whether she had been an innocent victim, a criminal getting a payback, or something in between, she was a person. And had she ever battled to live. Nikki made herself look at the woman’s face, if for no other reason than to honor that struggle.
And when Nikki looked at her, she saw something. Something death plus time couldn’t obscure. Images played hazily in the detective’s mind. Grocery clerks, and bank loan officers, and photos of women from society pages, an old schoolteacher, a bartender in Boston. Nothing came to her. “Could you…” Nikki pointed at the woman’s hair and waved her forefinger. Lauren used her ruler to gently draw all the hair off the face. “I think I’ve seen her before,” said the detective.
Heat shifted her weight on her heels, leaned back from the woman about a foot, and tilted her own head to match the angle of hers. And pondered. And then she knew. The grainy photo, at a three-quarters angle with the expensive furniture in the background and the framed lithograph of a pineapple on the wall. She would have to look it up to be sure, but damn it, she knew. She looked at Lauren. “I think I’ve seen this woman on the surveillance tape from the Guilford. The morning Matthew Starr was killed.”
Her cell phone rang and she jumped.
“Heat,” she said.
“Guess where I’m standing.”
“Rook, I’m not up for this right now.”
“I’ll give you a clue. Roach got a call about a burglary last night. Guess where.”
A cloud of dread gathered around her. “Starr’s apartment.”
“I’m standing in the living room. Guess what else. Every single painting in the room is gone.”
ELEVEN
Thirty minutes later, Detective Heat stepped off the Guilford’s elevator on six and strode the hall to where Raley stood with a uniform outside the open door to the Starr apartment. The door frame bore a crime scene posting and the requisite yellow tape. Stacked on the luxurious hallway carpet by the door were plastic snap-lid tubs labeled “Forensics.”
Raley nodded hello and held up the police line tape for her. She ducked under and entered the apartment. “Holy shit,” said Nikki, turning a circle in the middle of the living room. She craned her neck upward to the take in the full height of the cathedral ceiling, believing what she was seeing, yet stunned at the sight. The walls were stripped bare, and all that was left were the nails and mountings.
That living room had been Matthew Starr’s self-proclaimed Versailles. And even if it hadn’t been an actual palace, as a single room it most certainly qualified as a museum chamber with its two stories of wall space graced by some valuable, if not cohesively collected, works of art. “Amazing what happens to the size of a room when you strip everything off the walls.”
Rook stepped over beside her. “I know. It looks bigger.”
“Really?” she said. “I was going to say smaller.”
He flicked his eyebrows. “Guess size is a matter of personal experience.”
She shot Rook a furtive cool-it look and turned her back on him. When she did, Nikki was certain she caught a
