'I read them last night, as well as the fourth and fifth,' said Mac. 'Something changed.'
'With experience and confidence, Louisa's work, I'm pleased to say, has steadily improved,' said King.
'Do you keep her books on your hard drive?' asked Mac.
'I have hard copies made in addition to disk copies of all Louisa's books,' King said.
'We'd like to borrow the disks,' Mac said.
'I'll have Amy make copies for you,' she said, 'but why would you- '
'We won't take any more of your time right now,' said Mac, rising.
Aiden got up too.
King remained seated.
'We'll be in touch,' said Mac, going to the door.
'I sincerely hope not,' said King, reaching for her cigarettes.
When they got past the reception area and into the hall, Aiden said, 'She's lying.'
'About?'
'Those first books,' said Aiden.
Mac nodded.
'You noticed,' she said.
'She's protecting her golden calf,' said Mac.
'So?' asked Aiden.
'Let's go see Louisa Cormier.'
Stella saw the red, amoeba-shaped splotch of blood on a low snowbank on the sidewalk next to a black plastic garbage bag.
The driver, a Nigerian named George Apappa, had taken her to the spot where he had dropped the man who had bled on his backseat. George had noticed the blood as soon as he got to his home in Jackson Heights. He couldn't miss the blood. The man had left a small puddle on the floor and a dark, still-moist streak on the seat.
It had taken George almost an hour to clean the bloodstains. He got into bed with his wife at two in the morning and the phone rang at six- his dispatcher, telling him to get into the garage immediately. He told Stella all this with the sound of a man who had planned to sleep until noon, but instead had dragged himself out of bed, half expecting to be told he was fired when he got to the garage. Stella had a feeling the twenty she slipped him would help him get over his lack of sleep.
Stella could feel him watching her from the car as she wiped her nose and took a picture of the mound of snow, then scooped up some of the snow with a shovel and dropped it in a plastic bag.
She started to move slowly along the sidewalk, pausing every few steps to take another photograph. The trail of blood was reasonably easy to follow, frozen in place. Few pedestrians had yet trampled the icy sidewalk.
Stella put the back of her left hand against her forehead and felt both moisture and fever. She had a thermometer in her kit, but it was reserved for the dead. She had taken three aspirin back at the lab along with a glass of orange juice. She had no hope for this remedy.
It took her four minutes to find the doorway. There were blood splatters on the door, not thick, but visible. There was blood on the doorstop and something yellowish-brown that looked like vomit. She took photographs, got a sample of the yellow-brown goop, and started to stand when she noticed a spot of white in the crevice of the concrete step. She knelt again. It was a tooth, a bloody tooth. She bagged it and rose to check the listing of the names of the tenants of the building lined up, white on black, near the right side of the door. The names meant nothing to her. She wrote all six down in her notebook.
Whatever had happened here had happened just before ten, according to the driver's log. It was possible someone inside had heard whatever it was that caused someone to vomit and lose what looked like a reasonably healthy tooth.
Stella rubbed her hands together and called Danny Messer at the lab.
'Check out these names,' she said. 'Got a pen?'
'You sound terrible,' he said.
'I sound terrible,' she agreed. 'The names.'
She read off the names slowly, spelling each one.
'Got it,' he said.
'Check them all out. If you find something, call me back. Guista may have been on his way to see one of them last night when something went wrong.'
'What?' he asked.
'I'm sending what I've got over to you with a cabbie,' she said. 'Pay my fare. I've already given him a tip.'
Stella tried to hold back a cough. She couldn't do it.
'Stella…' Danny started, but she cut him off.
'Got to go.'
She clicked off and went to the car where George Apappa sat, head back, eyes closed. She opened her kit, dropped the digital disk of photos, the blood samples, the bloody tooth, and the clump of vomit, all separately bagged, into a zippered insulated bag. Then she opened the driver's side door.
George awoke and had the bag in his hand before he could speak.
She gave him the CSI address and told him to put the bag directly in the hands of Daniel Messer, who would be waiting for it. Messer, she said, would pay whatever the charge was. She handed him a ten dollar bill on top of that.
There was a beat in which she saw George wanted to ask what this was all about, but he didn't. He placed the bag on the seat next to him as Stella closed the door.
This time when Louisa Cormier opened the door for Mac and Aiden she was not quite so bright and bubbling. She looked as if she hadn't slept and she was wearing what looked like an oversized flowered smock. Her hair was in place, as was her make-up, but not as perfect as the day before.
She stepped back to let them in.
'Michelle, my agent, called to tell me I should expect you,' she said.
Neither Mac nor Aiden spoke.
'You suspect me of having killed that man in the elevator,' she said calmly.
Mac and Aiden were expressionless.
'Please, let's sit,' said Louisa. 'Coffee? Good manners die hard. Unfortunate choice of words, but…'
'No, thank you,' Mac said for both of them.
The three stood just inside the door.
'Well I was just having one so if you don't mind…' she said and headed for the kitchen. 'Please, have a seat.'
Mac and Aiden moved to the table by the window. A cold fog had settled over Manhattan. There wasn't much to see besides a few lights through the dense gray and the peaks of skyscrapers over the cloud.
'I'm sorry,' Louisa Cormier said, cup of steaming coffee in hand, sitting at the table in the same seat she had been in the day before. 'I've been up all night working. Michelle may have told you I have a book due by the end of the week, not that my publisher will do anything about my being late, but I'm never late. Writing for a living is a job. I think it's wrong to be late for work. Sorry, I'm rambling a bit. I'm tired and I've just been told I'm a murder suspect.'
'Gun residue,' said Mac.
'I know what it is,' she said. 'Bits, traces of powder left when a gun has been fired.'
'It's hard to clean off,' said Aiden.
Both CSI investigators looked at Louisa Cormier's hands. They were scrubbed red.
