Lena had been late for her meeting with Art Madina. Fifteen minutes late. Not from the drive downtown, but from an unexpectedly long sleep. A big dreamless sleep so heavy and so blank that she had no idea how she finally broke back to the surface and opened her eyes.
She had gone to bed before the power was restored and fallen asleep before she could reset the time on her clock radio and switch on the alarm.
And it had been late. Long after Bobby Rathbone had given her the bad news and gone home. Long after two glasses of wine and another half a cigarette helped her think it all through.
She had come to a decision last night to leave the bugs in place. Her house would remain hot-wired except for the low-tech bug in the handset. The feel-good bug that she was meant to find. After ripping it out of the phone, she killed it with a hammer on the kitchen floor. And when the electric company got around to turning the juice back on, Klinger and his sidekick would no longer be burdened with loud music. By all appearances, everything would be back to normal, and the dynamic duo could listen in and think that they were outsmarting her.
For Lena, this was the quickest way back to her case and what really mattered. And it was easy enough to avoid Klinger’s camera by using the shower upstairs in her old bathroom.
But none of that was really on her mind as she followed Art Madina inside the cooler and the door snapped shut behind them. None of what happened last night really mattered right now.
Madina switched on his flashlight, checking toe tags in the darkness and rolling gurneys out of the way as he searched through the crowd of dead bodies. The dank air was just above freezing, her breath vaporizing before her eyes and thick as smoke. After ten long minutes, they found Jane Doe resting in the far corner beneath a thin sheet of translucent plastic.
Madina handed over the flashlight and pulled the plastic away. Time, even in a temperature-controlled setting, had a way of changing things. Although Lena’s first instinct was to turn away, she held her ground and looked at the corpse.
“If something was missing, how much would it be?” Madina asked in a low voice.
“I don’t know.”
“What did he do with it?”
“We found a meat grinder in the garage.”
Madina turned and gave her a long look. “You’re not serious.”
“We can’t tell when it was last used,” she whispered.
Several moments passed. Then Madina took charge of the flashlight and panned the beam over the victim’s wounds.
“My problem with all this is that it’s such a neat job, Lena. So surgically precise. This guy went to med school.”
The door opened, the space flooding with light. Two men were peering into the cooler. When they spotted Lena standing beside the pathologist, the man in the lab coat stepped away and the second man entered on his own. He was holding a manila envelope and seemed as uncomfortable by the setting as Lena was. She recognized him as Martin Orth from SID, but they had never been formally introduced. Orth was a division supervisor and it appeared strange to see someone so high in the food chain off-site and making what looked like a delivery.
“Lena Gamble?” he asked.
All three shook hands and introduced themselves. Then Orth handed the envelope to Lena, straining to keep his eyes on her and away from the victim.
“You were right,” he said. “It’s her.”
A moment passed-SID’s confirmation giving the depravity new life and breadth.
“You’re absolutely sure,” she said.
Orth nodded. “We ran side-by-sides from the blood samples taken in the alley last week, the parking lot at the Cock-a-doodle-do on Saturday, and the garage on Barton Avenue. Everything matches. It’s her. It’s Jane Doe. That’s where she was killed.”
His voice trailed off, his gaze finally moving to the victim. Lena could see the pain in his eyes as he measured the woman’s battered face and skimmed over her wounds. A certain amount of determination lingered in his jawline as he turned back to her.
“We’re twenty-four-seven on this, Lena. Weekends and holidays. Forget about the backlog. Anything you want, you get until this guy’s in the ground.”
She wished the case was that simple. One man acting on his own.
“What about the meat grinder?” she said.
“We found trace amounts of muscle tissue, but we don’t think it’s human. There’s enough rust to indicate that it went through a dishwasher. We’re not really sure what it is.”
Lena traded looks with Madina, then turned back to Orth.
“What about the rest of the garage?” she said.
“It’s gonna take a while,” Orth said. “Everything we pulled looks like it came from the victim, not the doer. Hair, fiber, fingerprints. But there’s still hope. There’s still a long way to go.”
“What about the trash can by the workbench? He left behind a smock. Everything he wore Wednesday night.”
“We’re concentrating on the gloves for touch DNA. There’s a chance we might luck out and lift a print, but I wouldn’t count on it. They’re vinyl.”
Lena understood the odds, but remained upbeat. Nathan Good would have been wearing the gloves long enough to have left a fair amount of perspiration behind. Although touch DNA, or low copy DNA, was still new, still not legislated in all fifty states, the science had evolved and could yield a positive result. But lifting a print from inside a vinyl glove would be more difficult. While it had been done before, success depended on the conditions being just right. Still, they were inching closer. And when she caught the glint in Orth’s eye, she realized that there was more.
“What is it?” she asked.
“He left something behind,” Orth said. “It’s not as good as a fingerprint. It’s not something that we can key into a database and pull out his name and address. But it’s almost as good. That sheet of linoleum underneath the operating table?”
“You lifted a shoe print.”
Orth grinned with pride. “About three-thirty this morning,” he said. “It was invisible, but we found it. It’s amazing what florescent powder and a black light can do. I called and they said that you were here, so I came down. The placement on the linoleum couldn’t be reached once the plywood was clamped to the saw horses. I figure he left the print when he was setting up and didn’t have his booties on.”
“You got the entire print or just a piece?”
“Take a look. A copy’s in that envelope. We lifted the whole thing, but it gets better. He was wearing Bruno Maglis just like O.J.: a size ten Magdy boot. It’s a lace-up dress shoe with a rubber sole. List price: four hundred eight-four dollars and ninety-five cents.”
She pulled the photograph out of the envelope and gazed at the shoe print. Everything crystal clear.
“He has money,” she said.
“He’s got more than that. Look. He’s got a small Phillips head screw embedded in his right heel. Maybe he stepped on it in the garage. Maybe not. Either way, you get the deal.”
She found the screw in the photograph. “The shoe puts him away forever.”
“Like I said, Lena, it’s not a fingerprint. But in court-”
“It’ll work just as well.”
Her cell phone started vibrating. When she checked the screen, she knew that she had to take the call. It was Klinger, dialing in from Chief Logan’s office.
“He wants to see you,” Klinger said. “I told him that you’d be here in fifteen minutes. That was ten minutes ago, so you’ll be late.”
The chief’s adjutant didn’t give her a chance to respond. Before she could say anything, he hung up on her again.