Part 31 (2/2)
”Christine said his coronary arteries would have taken him out in a few more years if someone hadn't cut his head off.”
”Is he missing any sections of neck, by the way?”
”Nope. Both halves fit perfectly. Christine also thinks there's a blunt force injury on the back of the head, and no defensive wounds. Not even a bruise.”
”So the killer got up close without much difficulty. Like it was someone he knew.”
”He seemed a bit hard of hearing when I met him. It might not have been difficult to sneak up on him. So then the killer takes him to the train, undresses him en route, and jumps off for the decapitation.”
”Why undress him on the train? How do you know that?”
”Because there's no staining on the s.h.i.+rt that would indicate he had it on at the time of the decapitation, no staining on the shoulders. It seemed to me there should have been more blood at the scene, so maybe he killed Van Horn by slitting his throat somewhere else, but there's no spray or flow down the front of his s.h.i.+rt. No, he undressed him first to save time, then killed him at the scene because that's how the Torso killer did it. He brought a live victim to that valley, just to slaughter him right at our feet.”
”Don't take this personally, Tess.”
She looked at him as if he'd begun speaking Swahili. ”How am I not supposed to take this personally? Aren't you?”
He didn't confess what she knew he believed-It's different for me, I'm a cop-and instead asked, ”Did you get any sleep last night?”
”Did you?” she shot back. ”What about his house?”
”s.h.i.+pshape and b.u.t.toned up. The man was a neat freak of the highest caliber, and you were right, he had pretty much no life at all outside the preservation society. His datebook had their official doings written in for the next six months and nothing else. No lunch dates, no business meetings. Not even a doctor's appointment.”
”Unless he kept two. One for society business, and another for personal appointments.”
”Good thought, cuz. But we didn't find a second one and no sign of someone else rifling through his possessions. Besides, the landlady confirmed his loner status. Their lobby is locked and only residents can enter. Of course someone could have buzzed in a delivery boy or the killer could have ducked in behind a tenant. Sanchez has a couple of uniformed guys and they're canva.s.sing the neighbors now. And the scene is still secure-we had to let the rapids start up again, but aside from that-so you can see it in the daylight. Though the two on duty there were going to do a second search as soon as the sun came up.”
”Then I don't really need to go, do I?”
He raised one eyebrow. ”Do you?”
”I can't see why,” she thought out loud, trying to convince herself more than him, or perhaps the ghost of their dead grandfather. Family vs. job she could decide easily. But family vs. family? ”I won't see anything the cops won't. I don't have X-ray vision.”
”No. But you met the victim.”
With a sinking feeling she knew that to be true. She might see the significance in an item the cop with no knowledge of William Van Horn's personality or habits might dismiss. What little she knew about the man was still more than nothing. ”All right. I'll go there on my way home.”
”Besides, what else do you have to do?”
As she taped the unremarkable turquoise s.h.i.+rt she told him Rachael had come home for the weekend in honor of her birthday. Frank sympathized but did not discourage her from revisiting the crime scene. The department did not waste two cops guarding a hunk of land lightly.
”How does it feel to be over the hill?”
”Terrific. Just great. Two new wrinkles just this morning.” Theresa sealed all the bags of clothing with red tape, scribbled her initials, and locked them all in the storage room in record time. Then she collected her sheets of acetate and written report and nudged her cousin, who dozed in one of the many seats in the old amphitheater. ”Why don't you go home and get some sleep?” she told him. ”I'll call you if I find anything significant.”
”I was hoping you'd have some coffee. Then I have to start interviewing Van Horn's acquaintances, if Sanchez finds any worth talking to.”
”Come along, then, and we'll forge an a.s.sault on the Braun.” They trudged up the three flights of stairs to the trace evidence lab.
Peace and quiet reigned there. Usually Theresa enjoyed her a.s.signed Sat.u.r.day mornings at the lab-giving up part of the weekend was worth it for the uninterrupted time. But this Sat.u.r.day she would have preferred to be at home, planning breakfast.
The fibers trapped in the tape's adhesive appeared to be the usual conglomeration of debris every person carried around with them: lint, khaki-colored and turquoise-colored fibers almost certainly from the clothing items themselves (though she would confirm that), and pieces of vegetation. But she also found a black fiber on the trousers and made a mental bet that it would match the fibers found on Richard Dunlop, one of the two men from the side of the hill, and the fiber from the bottom of the crate that held the body parts of Peggy Hall. She cleaned this new fiber with xylene to remove all traces of the tape's adhesive and folded it into a piece of gla.s.sine paper to wait for the FTIR. She cleaned the yellow dog hair and mounted that on a gla.s.s slide. Organic materials-like hairs and natural fibers-were not uniform enough to yield a reliable spectrum on the FTIR. She would have to do a microscopic examination on the hair, and should they find a dog to compare, the root could be tested for the animal's DNA.
The front of the s.h.i.+rt had not yielded much. But the back of it gave her another dog hair and other animal hairs, too fine and black to belong to the yellow dog, and also a number of white cotton fibers. Terrific. The killer had worn the one fiber so ubiquitous in the world it was considered to have no forensic value whatsoever. White cotton also had other advantages. Any bloodstains would be easy to bleach from white cotton, at least to the point where DNA would be unusable. As a natural fiber it would burn clean, if he chose to go that route, and not leave the gloppy mess that synthetic fibers could. He could bury it and the fibers would disintegrate completely within a few years, provided the killer felt comfortable waiting that long.
The soles of the shoes had two blue, trilobal fibers, and as her cousin returned with a steaming cup she asked him how Van Horn's apartment had been decorated.
”Heavy, ugly curtains; a decent leather sofa; and blue carpeting that should have been replaced twenty years ago.”
”I'll need a sample of that.”
”Gotcha.” He yawned and propped his feet up on the edge of her worktable. If she didn't know better, she might have thought her cousin was now waiting around to talk about their respective relations.h.i.+ps with their grandfather and any inequities in same. But she knew better. Frank never talked about his feelings. Frank didn't admit he even had feelings.
She didn't do much of that herself.
No, he hung around for the coffee and a few moments of peace, period.
”Did he have any pets?” she asked.
”Van Horn? Not so much as a goldfish. No animal lover he-except for birds, he had pictures of birds, but nothing live. I expect he didn't want the place messed up.”
One of the white specks from the handkerchief flattened easily and stuck to the salt window after only a few seconds of fiddling. Once the stage had been moved so that the light beam could pa.s.s through the material, the spectrum popped up on the computer screen. Polyethylene and some t.i.tanium dioxide to make it extra white. But why the shape?
Frank sniffed the air. ”I smell something musty. Is the stuff from the dead cop up here?”
Theresa allowed that James Miller's notebook lay humidifying in the fume hood. Frank's curiosity must have overcome his weariness because he wandered over to the hood and switched on the light.
Theresa called up the spectrum for the white flecks she had found on Kim. No surprise there. ”Hey,” she said.
”Hey!” Frank said.
”The white flecks I found on Kim Hammond are identical to the white flecks I found in Van Horn's handkerchief.”
”This notebook has the same handwriting as the one in Kim Hammond's apartment.”
They stared at each other over the top of her microscope. ”What?”
”What?”
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