Final Justice boh-8 Page 20

  The medical examiner needed no one’s permission to enter the crime scene. It belonged to him until he released it to Homicide.

  Matt walked to the bedroom door.

  Dr. Mitchell bent over Cheryl Williamson’s body, took a quick look, put his fingers on her carotid artery, looked at his watch, and announced, “I pronounce her dead as of ten fifty-five. ”

  He looked over his shoulder at Matt.

  “Unofficially, it looks like her neck is broken, and to judge from the lividity of the body, I’d guess she’s been dead eight, nine hours or so.”

  He signaled to the photographer that it was all right for him to enter the room, and started for the bedroom door.

  Matt got his first look at the victim.

  She was naked, with her legs spread apart by plastic ties tied to the footboard. Her upper body was twisted to the left. Her left hand was tied to the headboard, and Matt could see another tie hanging loose from her right wrist.

  She looked at him out of sightless eyes, and his mind was instantly filled with Susan Reynolds’s sightless eyes looking at him in the parking lot of the Crossroads Diner.

  He felt the knot in his stomach and the cold sweat forming on his back, and stepped quickly away from the door.

  Jesus, not now! Dear God, don’t let me get sick to my stomach and make an ass of myself on my first Homicide job!

  He bumped into something, somebody, and saw that it was Detective Olivia Lassiter, and that he had almost knocked her over.

  She looked at him with what he thought was annoyance.

  He started to say “Sorry,” but was interrupted by Jack Williamson, bitterly asking, “You got a good look, I hope?”

  He turned his back to Williamson and touched Detective Lassiter’s arm.

  “You get anything out of him?” and then, before she could reply, asked, “Why didn’t you get him out of here?”

  “I was just getting him calmed down enough to talk when you walked in,” she said. “He doesn’t want to leave, and I didn’t want to push him.”

  “Come with me,” Matt said.

  “That sounds like an order,” she said.

  “Okay,” Matt said. “It was a request, a suggestion, but I want you to come with me.”

  She met his eyes defiantly for a moment, then shrugged and turned away from the open door.

  Matt walked to the couch. Jack Williamson looked up at him with cold contempt.

  “Mr. Williamson, I’m Sergeant Payne. I’m the Homicide supervisor, and I need to talk to you, and we can’t do that in here. In just a few minutes, there will be technicians all over the place, and we can’t be in their way. I want you to come with Detective Lassiter and me to someplace where we can talk. Okay?”

  “The lady next door offered anything we need,” Olivia said. “What about her kitchen? She had said she would put a pot of coffee on.”

  “We’ll just sit around and have a friendly cup of coffee, right? And maybe a Big Mac? With my sister like that in there?”

  “We have to talk someplace, Mr. Williamson, and we have to get out of the way of the technicians, and sitting down over a cup of coffee seems a better idea to me than standing on the sidewalk,” Matt said. “What do you say?”

  Williamson shrugged, a gesture of surrender, and stood up.

  “Mrs. McGrory, this is Sergeant Payne of Homicide. We have to talk, privately, to Mr. Williamson,” Olivia said when Mrs. McGrory answered her knock. “Could we use your kitchen?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Thank you very much,” Matt said, as she led them in her kitchen.

  “Anything I can do to help. There’s a fresh pot in the Mr. Coffee. Just help yourself.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Matt said.

  “I feel just terrible about this, especially with the cops being outside while it was happening.”

  “We don’t know for sure that’s what happened, Mrs. McGrory,” Matt said.

  “Of course, that’s what happened. I was here, wasn’t I?”

  “Thank you very much, Mrs. McGrory,” Olivia said, easing her out of the kitchen and then closing the door.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Matt suggested to Williamson. “I’ll get the coffee. How do you take yours, Mr. Williamson?”

  “Black,” Williamson said.

  “Black,” Olivia said.

  Olivia and Williamson sat down at the kitchen table while Matt took the glass decanter and poured coffee into ceramic mugs. He walked to the table and set the mugs on it.

  “Okay,” Matt said. “Let’s get a couple of things understood between us, Mr. Williamson. I don’t know what happened last night, when Mrs. McGrory called the police, and I don’t care.”

  “You don’t fucking care?” Williamson asked, disgusted and incredulous.

  “My job is to find the person, or persons, who killed your sister, and see that when they’re brought to trial they won’t walk out of the courtroom because some legal ‘t’ wasn’t crossed or some legal ‘i’ didn’t have a dot. I understand that you’re unhappy with what you think happened last night.”

  “What happened last night was that the fucking cops didn’t do a goddamn thing to help my sister.”

  “If you believe the police did something they shouldn’t have, or didn’t do something they should have, you have every right to make an official complaint-”

  “Fucking-A right, I do. And I will.”

  “But I think you’ll agree, Mr. Williamson, that right now the priority is to find out who did this thing, and the sooner the better. Would you agree with that?”

  “Jesus, of course I ‘agree with that.’ All I’m saying is that if those fucking cops had done what they were supposed to do last night, my sister would still be alive.”

  “There’s one more thing, Mr. Williamson,” Matt said. “Your language is beginning to offend me. I hope you’ll watch your mouth. I would really rather not have you transported to Homicide and placed in an interview room until you get your emotions under control.”

  Williamson glared at him but didn’t say anything.

  Matt opened his briefcase and took out his laptop.

  “What’s that for?”

  “I’m one of those guys who can’t read his own writing,” Matt said. “I take notes this way. Are you objecting to it?”

  “If I did?”

  “Then I’ll take out a notebook and ballpoint, and waste a lot of time trying to make sense of my notes when I finally have to type them up. All right?”

  Williamson shrugged. Matt turned the laptop on and began to type.

  “Is it ‘Jack,’ Mr. Williamson?”

  “John J. For Joseph.”

  “What’s your first name and badge number, Lassiter?”

  “Olivia, 582,” she furnished.

  “Okay, Mr. Williamson, let’s start with your personal data,” Matt said. “Residence?”

  Twenty minutes later, Matt said, “I think that’ll be enough for the time being, Mr. Williamson.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know how to work a laptop?”

  Williamson nodded.

  Matt slid the laptop in front of him.

  “Would you take a look at that, please, and see if I’ve got it right?”

  Williamson read the several pages Matt had typed and then nodded his head, “okay.”

  Matt turned the laptop off, closed the cover, and put it back in his briefcase.

  “When I get that printed, Mr. Williamson, I’ll have a detective-most likely Detective Lassiter-bring it to you for your signature.”

  “When?” Williamson asked.

  “It’ll wait until tomorrow,” Matt said. “I know that you’re going to be busy today. I’ll call you tomorrow to see when it will be convenient.”

  “I have to tell you this,” Williamson said. “When my mother hears about what happened last night, this morning, with the cops… God!”

  “I’m not trying to talk you out of filing a formal complaint,” Matt sa
id, “honestly, I’m not. But for what it’s worth, from what I’ve heard, the officers who responded to the ‘Disturbance, House’ call were just going by the book. If they had any indication that something-anything-was going wrong, had gone wrong, in the apartment, they would have taken action.”

  Williamson looked at him but didn’t respond directly.

  “What am I supposed to do if my mother wants to come here?”

  “Well, right now she can’t have access to the apartment. Not today, and probably not tomorrow, either. Tell her that.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Williamson said.

  “I’d be happy to go with you, Mr. Williamson,” Detective Lassiter said. “If you think it would make things any easier. And I’d like to talk to her, too. That doesn’t have to be right now. Your call.”

  “It couldn’t do any harm,” Williamson said. “And maybe, if you were there…”

  “If you’ll give me your cellular number, Sergeant, I’ll call and let you know how things went,” Detective 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.

  He put the memory card into the transfer device, then copied the JPG images from it to the laptop’s hard disk.

  “There’s eight images,” Matt said. “Let’s see what they are.”

  The first picture was obviously evidentiary. It showed Cheryl tied to the bed, staring with horror at the camera.

  D’Amata went to the door and called Harry Slayberg.

  Matt waited until Slayberg came, then displayed the other seven pictures.

  “This critter is a real psychopath,” Slayberg said, softly.

  “You can see, in the first one,” D’Amata said, “that the phone’s still on the bedside table.”

  “And both of her wrists-run the last couple back again, please, Matt, so I’m sure-are still tied to the headboard,” Slayberg said.

  Matt displayed the entire series of pictures again.

  “So what might have happened was that she got one wrist free… ” Slayberg said.

  “And he struggled with her… ” D’Amata picked up. “And that’s when the camera got knocked under the bed.”

  “Or,” Matt offered, “he went into the bathroom to take a leak, or clean himself up, and while he was in there, she got the hand loose, and tried to call 911…”

  “And Dudley Do-Right came out and caught her,” Slayberg picked up, “hit her-probably harder than he intended-and jerked the phone out of the wall and threw it at the mirror.”

  “He was probably scared or in a rage or both,” D’Amata said, “and didn’t think that throwing the phone at the mirror was going to make a lot of noise.”

  Matt picked up the camera.

  “It’s an expensive camera,” he said. “Kodak. I gave one almost like it to my sister for her birthday. Which triggers a couple of thoughts.”

  “Dudley Do-Right is either well-heeled or he stole the camera,” Slayberg said.