The Last Precinct - Cornwell Patricia (лучшие книги читать онлайн TXT) 📗
"I need to look at the body now." I get up from the table.
Marino pushes back his chair. Berger watches me with
penetrating blue eyes. She has stopped spreading out her paperwork. "Do you mind if I come along?" she asks.
I do, but she is here. She is a professional. It would be un- thinkably rude for me to imply she might not act like one or to suggest I don't trust her. I step next door to fetch my lab coat from my office. "I guess you've got no way of knowing whether it's possible this guy might have been gay. I guess it's not an area where gays might cruise or hang out." I quiz Marino as we head out of the conference room. "What about male prostitutes in Mosby Court?"
"He has that look, now that you mention it," Marino replies. "One of the cops said he was sort of a pretty boy, that buffed kind of workout build. He was wearing an earring. Like I said, though, I ain't seen the body."
"I do believe you win the prize for stereotypes," Berger comments to him. "And I thought my guys were bad."
"Oh yeah? What guys?" Marino is a millimeter from being snide to her.
"At my office," she says in a blase way. "The investigative squad."
"Oh yeah? You got your own personal NYPD cops? Ain't that sweet. How big?"
"About fifty."
"They work in your building?" I can hear it in his tone. Berger threatens the hell out of him.
"Yes." She does not relay this with any sort of condescension or arrogance, but simply reports the facts.
Marino walks ahead of her and tosses back, "Well, ain't that something."
The removal service attendants are in the office chatting with Arnold. He looks stricken when I appear, as if I have caught him in the middle of something he shouldn't be doing, but then, this is simply Arnold. He is a timid, quiet man. Like a moth that has begun to turn the color of his environment, he is wan with an unhealthy gray tint to his skin, and chronic allergies keep his eyes red-rimmed and runny. The second John Doe of the day is in the middle of the hallway, zipped up in-
side a burgundy, deep-pile pouch that is embroidered with the
name of the removal service, Whitkin Brothers. I suddenly remember the names of the attendants. Of course, they are the Whitkin brothers. "I'll take care of him." I let the brothers know they don't have to roll the body into the cooler or transfer him onto a gurney.
"We don't mind," they are quick to nervously offer, as if I am implying they are lollygagging.
"That's all right. I need to spend a little time with him first," I say, and I push the stretcher through double steel doors and hand out shoe covers and gloves. It takes a few moments for me to do the necessary housekeeping of signing John Doe into the autopsy log, assigning him a number and photographing him. I smell urine.
THE AUTOPSY SUITE GLEAMS BRIGHT AND CLEAN, DE-
void of the usual sights and sounds. The quiet is a relief. After all these years, the constant clamor of water running into steel sinks, of Stryker saws, of steel clacking against steel still makes me tense and tired. The morgue can be surprisingly noisy. The dead are loud in their demands and gory colors, and this new patient is going to resist me. I can already tell. He is completely rigorous and not about to allow me to undress him or open his jaws to look at his tongue or teeth, not without a struggle. I unzip the pouch and smell urine. I pull a surgical lamp close and palpate his head, feeling no fractures. Blood smeared on his jaw and drops on the front of his jacket indicate he was upright when he was bleeding. I direct the light up his nostrils. "He's had a nosebleed," I report to Marino and Berger. "So far, I'm not seeing any injuries to his head."
I begin examining the burns through a lens while Berger moves near me to observe. I note fibers and dirt adhering to blistered skin, and I find abrasions at the corners of his mouth and on the inside of his cheeks. I push up the sleeves of his red warm-up jacket and look at his wrists. Sharply angled ligature
marks have left pronounced indentations in the skin, and
when I unzip his jacket, I find two burns directly centered on the navel and left nipple. Berger is leaning so close, her gown brushes me. "Rather cold to be out with just a warm-up suit and no T-shirt or anything beneath it," I point out to Marino. "Were his pockets checked at the scene?"
"Better to wait and do it here where you can see worth a damn," he answers.
I slide my hands into the pockets of the warm-up pants and jacket, finding nothing. I pull the pants down and blue running shorts underneath are soaked with urine, and the ammonia smell sends an alert through my psyche, and tiny hairs all over my flesh stand up like sentries. The dead rarely frighten me. This man does. I check the pocket inside the waistband and pull out a steel key etched with Do Not Duplicate, and written on it in permanent Magic Marker is the number 233. "A hotel or house, maybe?" I wonder out loud as I place the key inside a transparent plastic bag and am pricked by more paranoid feelings. "Maybe a locker." Two-thirty-three was my family's post office box number when I was a child in Miami. I wouldn't go so far as to say that 233 is my lucky number, but it is one I have frequently used for pass codes and lock combinations, because the number isn't obvious and I can remember it.
"Anything so far that might suggest what killed him?" Berger asks me.
"Not so far. I don't guess we've had any luck with AFIS or Interpol yet?" I say to Marino.
"Didn't get a cold hit, so whoever your motel guy is, he ain't in AFIS. Nothing from Interpol yet, which ain't necessarily good, either. If it's obvious, you usually know in an hour," he says.
"Let's print this guy and get him into AFIS as fast as we can." I try not to sound anxious. With a lens I check the hands, front and back, for any obvious trace evidence that might be dislodged by my getting fingerprints. I clip fingernails and place them in an envelope that I label and leave on a counter-top with the beginnings of the paperwork, then I ink the fingertips and Marino helps me with the spoon. I take two sets of prints. Berger is silent and keenly curious during all this, her scrutiny like the warmth of a bright lamp. She watches my every move, listens to my every question and instruction. I don't focus on her but am aware of her attention, and in the far reaches of my consciousness, I know this woman is making assessments that I may or may not like. I gather the sheet around the body and zip up the pouch, motioning to Marino and Berger to follow me as I roll the gurney to the cooler against one wall and open the stainless steel door. The stench of death blasts out in a frigid front. Our residents are few this night, only six, and I check the tags on pouch zippers, looking for the John Doe from the motel. When I find him, I uncover his face and point out his burns, and the abrasions at the corners of his mouth and around his wrists.
"Jesus," Marino says. "What the hell is this? Some serial killer going around tying up people and torturing them with a blow-dryer?"
"We need to let Stanfield know about this right away," I answer him, because it is apparent that the death of John Doe from the motel may be connected to the body dumped in Mosby Court. I glance at Marino, reading his thoughts. "I know." He makes no effort to disguise his disdain at telling Stanfield anything. "We've got to tell him, Marino," I add.
We walk out of the cooler and he goes to the "clean hands" wall phone. "Can you find your way back to the conference room?" I ask Berger.
"Sure." She looks almost glazed, maybe puzzled as distant thoughts show in her eyes.
"I'll be right there," I say to her. "I'm sorry for the interruption."
She hovers in the doorway, untying her surgical gown in back. "Strange. But I had a case a couple months back, a woman tortured with a heat gun. Burns looked a lot like the ones in these two cases." She bends over to pull off her booties and drop them in the trash. "Gagged, tied up and had these round burns on her face, her breasts."
