Lassiter said.
Matt wrote the number on a small sheet of notepaper and handed it to her. She tore it in half and wrote two numbers on it.
“I guess you have the Northwest number, right?” she asked. Matt nodded. “My cellular and apartment,” she said.
“Thank you,” Matt said.
Under other circumstances, Olivia, my lovely, I would be overjoyed that you shared your telephone numbers with me.
Come to think of it, Olivia, despite the circumstances, I am overjoyed that you have shared your telephone numbers with me.
Mrs. McGrory was not in her living room as they passed through, but Matt could hear her voice in the next room. Only her voice, which suggested she was on the telephone.
He decided he had already thanked her and it would be better not to disturb her when she was on the phone.
When they went downstairs and through the front door, he saw that the press was gathered behind the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, and that the moment they saw them- two detectives, with badges showing, escorting a so-far-unidentified white male-video cameras rose with their red RECORDING lights glowing, and still camera flashbulbs went off.
“Where’s your car?” Matt asked.
“Halfway down the street,” she said, and pointed.
Matt touched the arm of one of the uniforms.
“I want to get Detective Lassiter and this gentleman to her car, down the street, and I don’t want the press to get in the way.”
“No problem,” the uniform said, raised his voice, and called, “Dick!”
Dick was a very large police officer of African-American heritage.
He and the other uniform led the way through the assembled journalists, one on each side of Detective Lassiter and Mr. Williamson.
Sergeant Payne brought up the rear, which gave him a chance to decide that Detective Lassiter had a very nice muscular structure of the lower half of the rear of her body.
As he walked back to 600 Independence, ignoring questions from the press about the identity of Mr. Williamson, he realized he didn’t really have much of an idea of what he was supposed to do now.
He remembered something he had been taught at the Marine Base, Quantico, while in the platoon leaders program: reconnoiter the terrain.
He spent perhaps ten minutes walking around the outside of the big old house, even going up the rear stairs, and then into the basement. He saw nothing of particular interest.
When Matt returned to the front of the house, two uniforms were carrying a stretcher with Cheryl Williamson’s body on it down the pathway to a Thirty-fifth District wagon.
Well, I won’t have to look at the sightless eyes again-not that I’m liable to forget them.
When they had moved past him, Matt went up the stairs and into the Williamson apartment.
“What happened to that very pretty detective from Northwest?” Joe D’Amata greeted him.
“She went with the brother to tell the mother.”
“This is our job, Matt,” D’Amata said. There was a slight tone of reproof in his voice.
“She calmed the brother down. He liked her…”
“I can’t imagine why,” D’Amata said.
“… and (a) I thought that would make things easier with the mother. The brother suggested his mother was going to blow her cork when she found out that there was a ‘Disturbance, House’ call here and the uniforms didn’t take the door. And (b) somebody had to talk to the mother, and I think she can do that as well as we could, which means that we can be here.”
“Your call,” D’Amata said. “Two things, Matt: You want a look at the rear door?”
“I saw the outside from the stairs,” Matt said, as he followed D’Amata into the kitchen and to the door. “I didn’t see any signs of forced entry. Did you?”
“Those scratches might be an indication that somebody pried it open,” Joe said, pointing. “Operative word ‘might.’ The door was latched, locked, like that, but if you leave the lever in the up position like that, it locks automatically.”
“What do the crime lab guys say?”
“What I just told you. No signs at all on the front door. So we don’t know if the doer broke in, or whether she let him in. Could be either way. If she knew the doer, let him in…”
Matt grunted. Most murders are committed by people known to the victim.
“You said two things,” Matt said.
“This is interesting,” D’Amata said, taking a plastic evidence bag from his pocket. It held a digital camera.
“It may be, of course-and probably is-hers. But it was under the bed, which is a strange place to store an expensive camera like this. Even stranger, there are no fingerprints on it. Not even a smudge.”
“Why don’t we see what pictures are in it?”
“It doesn’t work,” D’Amata said, his tone suggesting that Matt should have known he could come up with a brilliant idea like seeing what pictures were in the camera all by himself. “Which might be because it got knocked off the bedside table when the doer jerked the telephone out of the wall and threw it at the mirror.”
“No prints on the phone, either?” Matt asked.
D’Amata held up his rubber-surgical-gloved hands.
“I’m getting the idea the doer is a very careful guy,” he said. “Which also suggests he knows how to get through a door without making a mess, and which suggests that although they are lifting a lot of prints in here-so far, they’ve done both doors, the bedroom and her bathroom-I would be pleasantly surprised if they came up with something useful.”
'Yeah,” Matt agreed.
“So, I was just about to call you to ask if I should take the camera to the crime lab and see if there are any pictures in it.”
“As opposed to having a District car run it down there, which would put a uniform in the evidence chain?”
“That, too,” D’Amata said. “I was thinking that if there are pictures in there, I could get a look at them a lot quicker if I was there when the lab took them out of the camera, then wait for the lab to print them.”
“The camera’s been fingerprinted?”
“I told you, there’s nothing on it. Not even a smudge.”
Matt set his briefcase on the kitchen table, opened it, rummaged around, and closed it again.
“We’re in luck,” he said. “I’ve got the gizmo.”
“What gizmo?”
Matt walked to the door leading from the kitchen to the living room and motioned to one of the uniforms in the living room.
“Don’t let anybody come in here until I tell you, okay?”
The uniform nodded and stood in the center of the doorjamb. Matt closed the door.
“Who’s in the bedroom?” he asked.
“Harry, making the sketch,” D’Amata said. “A uniform’s keeping people out of there, too. What are you doing?”
Matt went back to the kitchen table and took out his laptop, then a small plastic object with a connecting cord. He plugged it into the laptop, then turned it on.
“You can look at them here?” Joe asked.
“And store them in the laptop,” Matt said.
D’Amata handed him the evidence bag. Matt took the flash memory cartridge from it and saw that D’Amata had initialed it. If there were evidentiary photos in the camera, a defense attorney could not raise doubts in the jurors’ minds that the pictures they were being shown had actually come from this camera.
