case might have been snatched up by Tarpon P.D.”
Harry swiveled back to the body. “Those are all excellent points. And you’ve got a very dirty crime scene here and no reason for Nick Benevuto to ever have been in this room. So let’s work the room and then you can see if anything we find here ties him to the crime scene.”
Vicky’s jaw tightened. “And if we don’t find anything, what does it prove? Just that he’s as smart a cop as I think he is.”
Harry loved the woman’s tenacity. He smiled up at her. “Lady, you’re like a dog with a bone. But the bottom line is this: we’ve got to put the killer at the scene of the crime. If we can’t do that, we’ve got a lot of evidence and no one to tie it to.”
Mort Janlow, the assistant M.E., finished his examination and turned the crime scene over to the forensic unit before joining Harry and Vicky on the small landing outside the front door. “Looks like the same killer-superficially at least,” he said. “I’ll be able to tell more once I get him on the table. But the killer was a strong son of a bitch. The cut went back so far it nicked the spinal column.” He raised a finger. “But that nick in the bone should let us ID the knife as the murder weapon if we ever get our hands on it.”
“You see anything else that we might pick up from the autopsy?” Harry asked.
“Are you talking about fingerprints on skin, something like that?” He watched Harry nod. “Nothing that’s obvious right now. The body looks fairly clean. There’s some loose hair on the scalp and some more on the shoulders. I suspect the killer held him by the hair to pull his head back just before he cut into the throat.”
“Yes, I saw that,” Harry said. “He didn’t do that with Darlene. He held her close to him when he cut her; pressed up against him. You could tell that from the disturbance their feet made in the sand on that small beach and by the blood splatter evidence from the initial cut.”
Janlow nodded. “But he may not have wanted to do that with a man, to keep him close to him like that.”
“Why is that?” Vicky asked.
Janlow gave her a cautionary look, almost as if he thought his next words might embarrass her. “I don’t know anything for certain, but according to the literature I’ve read on the subject, it’s not uncommon for a killer to become sexually aroused when he kills with a knife, or by strangulation, or anything that brings him in close physical contact with the victim. Maybe in this case our killer didn’t want to be close to another man when he began feeling aroused.”
“He didn’t want it because it was sinful.” There was a faraway sound to Harry’s voice, almost as if he was speaking to himself.
“That could very well be,” Janlow said.
“Maybe he just didn’t want to get blood on himself,” Vicky said with a snide edge in her voice.
Janlow took in the exchange, a small smile forming on his thick lips. “Are we having a professional spat, children?”
“Just a disagreement about who our primary suspect should be,” Harry said.
Janlow grinned at them. “More than one suspect strong enough to be a primary? Be grateful when your cup runs over, kiddies.”
“Except you just got through examining his primary,” Vicky said.
Janlow raised an eyebrow. “The young minister?”
Harry nodded.
Janlow smiled again. “I’ve heard the department folklore that the dead speak to you, Harry, but with this poor devil you might be asking a bit too much. His voice box is all chopped up.” He let out a low cackle, then turned to the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.
Vicky and Harry also turned and saw Jim Morgan coming up toward them.
“Any luck with Benevuto?” Vicky asked.
“He didn’t answer the door at his apartment, and his car wasn’t in the lot,” Jim said. “I tried his cell phone, but didn’t get any response there either.”
“There are a couple of bars he hangs out in,” Harry said. “I’ll give you the names and addresses.” He paused. “Do you intend to bring him in for questioning?”
“That’s the eventual plan,” Jim said. “Right now I was just going to see if he had an alibi for tonight.”
“Take Vicky with you. If you find him, bring him in. Let’s get the interrogation out of the way when the office isn’t full of his peers. But don’t start questioning him until I get there.” Harry glanced at his watch. “I shouldn’t be here much longer. When forensics finishes I’ll connect up with you.”
Vicky gave him a long look. “If we find him and decide to bring him in, do we cuff him?”
Harry let out a long breath. “It’s your call. If he was my suspect, I wouldn’t. He’s still a cop. But he’s also not supposed to be carrying, so pat him down and make sure he isn’t.”
Marty LeBaron, who headed up the CSI unit, pointed to the prints that marred the light tan carpeting on the apartment floor. “We’ve got a beautiful blood footprint leading out the door. The shoes are an eleven-C, and you can see a nice pattern in the heel of one print. They won’t be hard to identify when we find them. Blood gets absorbed into the soles and heels; you never get it all out. So unless our perp tosses them, we find them, we nail his ass to the wall.”
“So find the shoes, we find the killer. Sounds simple,” Harry said.
Marty grinned at him. “It is simple, so why don’t you get your ass moving and do it.”
“You notice anything under the victim’s fingernails, any fingerprints on his skin, defensive wounds?” Harry asked.
“The body was pretty clean. There were some fibers on the back of his shirt. Probably left there when the perp first came up behind him; also some hairs that weren’t his. But it was less than we usually find. We’ll sort it all out back at the lab. As far as skin prints go, nothing. It’s my guess the perp wore latex gloves.”
“So you’d say it was a pretty clean crime scene? Like somebody who knew what they were doing?”
“What are you trying to say, Harry?”
“I want to know if the crime scene looks like it was handled by someone who knew how to keep the level of evidence down.”
“Like a cop?” Marty’s eyes narrowed.
“Some people are looking real hard at a cop,” Harry said.
“I can’t say that, Harry. And I sure as hell wouldn’t testify to that.”
“Ease up, Marty.” Harry placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m not trying to nail a cop for this. I just want to be able to answer any questions that come up.”
Marty looked away momentarily. “It could have been someone who knows crime scenes,” he conceded. “For everything except the footprints, that is. It took a real asshole to leave footprints like that. The clown never even made an effort to clean them up. If he had, we probably never would have gotten that heel print.”
“Maybe something scared him off,” Harry speculated.
“The way this guy killed these two people, he doesn’t strike me as the type who scares easy.”
“You wouldn’t think so,” Harry said.
Vicky and Jim found Nick Benevuto in one of the bars Harry had suggested, a Hooters wannabe joint located on 66th Street just off Ulmerton Avenue. Nick was seated in an obscure booth nursing the same drink he had ordered when he arrived an hour earlier. He was dressed in a black silk short-sleeved shirt, open at the collar, and tan slacks with a razor crease. Vicky thought he was living up to his nickname: Nicky the pimp.
“What the fuck do you two want?” he asked as Vicky and Jim stopped at his table. “Or are you just here to feed off what’s left of me? Fucking vultures.”
“We need to know where you were earlier tonight,” Vicky said.
Jim had placed himself so he blocked Nick from making a quick exit from the booth, and Vicky was off to his side so she had a clear field of fire. Nick looked at each of them; saw the way they’d positioned themselves.
“This a bust?”
“We just need to ask you some questions,” Vicky said.
“Ask away.”
“Where were you tonight?”
“I was home. I just came out about an hour ago, wanted to have a couple of drinks. No big surprise. They suspended my ass today.”
