Death by Misfortune Page 3

  “I watch football, but I mute the commercials.” Bill regarded the crowded staircase. He could see the yellow crime scene tape festooned on the highest balcony and a uniformed officer guarding the doorway to the shop. But the stairs were stacked three bodies deep with press. “How’re we going to get up there?”

  “Lieutenant!” From the seething mass of bodies, flash cameras, betacams and microphones almost toppling from the teak structure, a tall towheaded man leaned over the railing and waved.

  Bill cringed.

  The man worked his way back down the staircase, hand over hand, pulling himself through bodies, until he was coming across the pavement. Another man, hefting a camera that sported an enormous lens and bulbous black microphone, flowed behind him like a shadow. “Lieutenant Turner,” the reporter cried, coming toward them, big hand extended. “Is this your case?”

  The rest of the people on the stairs seemed to notice them then, and the general thrust of the mass shifted, heading back down the hill as media people focused on Bill and Kate.

  As if to withstand a sudden, large wave, Bill and Kate steeled themselves, unconsciously squaring shoulders against the assault.

  The tall rangy man who led the pack wore a suit and tie but looked like he’d be more comfortable in jeans and a Stetson. Crew cut blond hair and eyes a bright sky blue, straight out of a country song. “Is this your new partner, Turner?” Just the hint of a drawl in his voice. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Kate Crandall.” Her hand was enclosed in an enormous palm, her face and body appraised in a coolly appreciative manner.

  “Kate, this is Derek Stuart of ‘Entertainment Today’.”

  “I covered the famous gay murder at Garfield High,” announced Stuart, in one of those voices that would carry across a deep canyon. It cut through the chaotic buzz around them, easily, and Kate could see reporters tilt their heads up to listen. “Turner’s first case, wasn’t it, Turner?”

  Kate noted that Bill seemed to be grinding his teeth.

  “You could say I broke Turner in,” drawled Stuart, all thirty-six capped teeth showing in a wide smile.

  The distinct sound of digital and flash cameras, and Bill and Kate were completely surrounded by media. Kate could see the crime scene techs at the top of the stairs, finally festooning the upper deck with their yellow tape. She nudged Turner, who saw the direction of her gaze.

  “We’ll have a statement as soon as we know something,” announced Kate to the floating cloud of microphones that followed her and Bill as they thrust their shoulders through the crowd. Street cops and techs, even the fire department crew that had arrived in tandem with the ME bus, pushed the crowd back as Bill and Kate were able to finally ascend.

  Derek Stuart seemed not as easy to shake. He leaned over the shoulders of two restraining officers, long tanned neck straining. “Detective Turner,” he shouted, as Bill and Kate ducked through the shop doorway. “Do you think this has anything to do with her book?”

  * * *

  “What book?” asked Bill.

  “I’d guess that book.” The uniformed officer who answered him pointed at a promotional display located just inside the doorway which contained rows of glossy hardcover books. Each dark black, with a Hollywood walk of fame star and Secrets and Lies emblazoned in red across the face.. Bill studied the display, frowning. Then he turned and scanned the interior of the shop. It was a chaotic mess. Glass and wood shelves crammed with books, bags, beads and what looked like bongs. Half-filled plastic drink glasses had been perched on it seemed every available surface. Folded chairs stacked against the walls and also on the floor, as if they’d been tipped over. A spilled trash can, its contents paper plates, napkins and a multitude of twizzle sticks.

  “Who was first on the scene?” asked Kate, looking around with a frown.

  The uniformed officer had that hard look that beat officers got within a few weeks of hitting the streets and which they never seemed able to lose thereafter. Now his hard face flushed red, his expression both angry and embarrassed. “I was. Officer Ortiz ma’am,” he told her, stiffly. “My partner and I were first on the scene. We responded five minutes after the call, but the mob was already in here. We got them out in a hurry, but there was a party in this shop last night. That might account for some of the mess.” He pointed at a spot on the floor and then another. Bill could see that Ortiz or someone else had guarded the spots with makeshift markers. “We found a bloody toe print there. And my partner made every member of the press show her the bottom of their feet before she let them out of here. None of them had left it.”

  “Good thinking,” said Kate. “Who called it in?”

  “Anonymous 911 caller. My partner is already canvassing the shops, trying to find a witness. Call was placed from that public phone.” Ortiz pointed down the stairway to a prominently visible phone booth just around the corner. From where he stood, Bill could see an officer standing guard over it.

  “Not many public phone calls these days,” said Ortiz. “Thought you guys might want to try to lift a print. The ME’s in back waiting for your go-ahead.” He brought forward the scene sign in sheet and handed it to Kate.

  “You said there was a party?” asked Bill, taking it from her when she’d finished printing her badge number after her name.

  “Last night,” nodded Ortiz. “Universal Studios had a huge party to kick off a movie or something.”

  Bill handed the sign in sheet back to Ortiz and pulled out his notebook. He made a note to acquire a copy of the guest list for the party.

  Kate asked. “Where’s the DB?”

  “Back room.”

  *****

  The Medical Examiner on the scene was a woman Bill had never met, but Kate seemed to know her.

  “Hey Betsy, we make you wait?”

  The woman snapped the wrists of her gloves as she pulled them on, shaking her head. A unanimous grumble of discontent issued from her three-man crew. A man lowered a camera and said. “This whole scene has been compromised, Lieutenant. When we arrived, we found a reporter in the room, taking pictures. He surrendered the camera under protest.” He nodded at a small digital camera in an evidence bag.

  He produced a white business card, also in an evidence bag, and handed it to Kate. “And when we asked him for prints, he told us we’d need a warrant. He said you should call him if you had any questions.”

  “Derek Stuart,” read Kate off the card.

  Bill’s teeth made a grinding sound.

  “This guy’s a problem,” Kate stated rather than asked. “We need to call our Media Relations officer and get a proactive statement out there?”

  “He won’t talk to him,” declared Bill. “He’ll call Smith. Or me. You, when he digs up your number.” He nodded at the bagged camera. “That wouldn’t be his only camera. If he surrendered it that easily he’s got another one with better pictures on it.”

  “Crap.”

  Bill shrugged it off and continued scribbling notes and a sketch of the tableau in his blue notebook. Kate slipped on a pair of sterile booties, and entered the small room, choosing her steps with care.

  The room was only about ten by ten, A small scarf- covered table stood in the center, with a chair on either side. Blood dribbled down two of the walls and smeared the carpeted floor in a rich dragging pattern that led behind the table. Kate arched her head up and around to take in the small ventilation windows at the top of one wall. No other entry or exits.

  “Dust the entire door,” she said. “The top of the frame, the edges, everything.” She frowned at the gory walls. “We’ll need blood splatter analysis immediately.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said one of the techs.

  Bill nodded his approval. The spatter on the wall didn’t look right, and when something in a murder scene didn’t look right, there was usually a reason. He pocketed his notebook temporarily and followed Kate’s careful path around the table so they both stood over the body of Sylvie Black.

  Kate sighed.

  It was a subliminal sound. Bill doubted she was aware she’d done it. But he’d noticed that Kate always sighed in that bone-deep dismayed manner whenever they looked down upon the body of a rape victim.

  Sylvie Black did seem to be the victim of a rape and murder. She lay face up, red party dress hiked above her hips, panties off, bruising and all manner of what looked to be bodily fluids spilled across her bloody limbs.

  “After he killed her,” Kate observed. Bill nodded. Blood smeared the woman’s white skin. Whatever had been spilled on top of the blood had run down and left streaks. Kate looked away.

  “Looks like COD was the cut,” said Bill. He had recently begun taking his own crime scene photos and now he brought the camera out of his pocket and began snapping pictures of the victim.

  Sylvie Black, Bill observed dispassionately, had been pretty. He’d always imagined fortune-tellers as old and scary with wild hair and possibly a glass eye or two. Their victim was slender, long shapely legs, well-turned arms. Her hands were bloody, but he could see that her torn nails had been manicured. Her face was distorted and staring in death, lipstick smeared across the pretty mouth still opened in a silent scream, but he could see that she’d been attractive. Her sleek blonde hair was orangish at the tips where it lay in the blood pooled beneath her torn neck.

  “Messy job,” said Kate. “She fought back, too. I want a DNA kit on the blood on her hands.” She ignored Bill’s expression. Unless they found a way to rush the tests, it would be weeks before they got DNA results back. Bill had made his opinions on this topic clear. If they hadn’t at least a reasonably logical suspect before the DNA tests were run, they simply weren’t doing their jobs. But juries liked science and, as Kate had said to Bill time and again, a positive DNA match on blood a
nd semen could be the best bit of solid evidence they could present at trial.

  Betsy crouched down and gingerly lifted Sylvie’s head, turning it very slightly.

  “Haven’t taken a liver temp, but rigor is almost complete. Less than twelve hours ago. I’ll know more soon.”

  Now Bill stepped away from the room, gaze sweeping the tiny hallway. “Murder weapon?”

  “Sharp object cut the jugular. She definitely bled out here, detectives.” She dipped her head close enough to the gory throat to make Kate wince. “Multiple shallow stabs, hesitation before the perp found the courage to do the deed. Or a vein,” she said, in a clinically appraising way. “Possibly with a small, short, sharp blade.”

  Bill stooped in the corner. “Possibly a box cutter?”

  The ME nodded. “Possibly.”

  Bill waved the photographer over and they both took their fill of pictures, then plucked a bloody box cutter up from where it lay and bagged the thing.

  Kate stepped gingerly around small numbered squares on the floor and looked down again at their victim.

  “There’s teeth marks on her arm,” she said.

  Betsy didn’t like these wild assumptions being tossed about and her expression showed that. She frowned at the bright red marks and said, “Possibly.”

  “Nice touch,” said Bill. He could feel Kate looking narrowly at him, but he didn’t meet her gaze. He motioned to the photographer again. They set a ruler against Sylvie’s arm and took pictures from various angles.

  The coroner barely acknowledged them.

  “What are these?” Kate frowned at the evidence bags. Several of them held plain consumer-quality VHS tapes.

  A tech pointed toward location markers on the shelf of an AV unit in the corner. Bill frowned and pressed the power button on the television. It immediately popped on, making a few techs jump. Sylvie Black smiled out at them, shuffling cards and talking. Bill flicked off the machine and pressed the eject button. A tech was at his elbow with another bag before he had the tape out of the machine. Bill noted that the tape had a label on it already. The previous day’s date and a circled number.

  “Twelve,” he read. And checked the other tapes on the VCR stand. “I see one through eight here,” he said. “Can anybody find nine, ten, and eleven?”

  Nobody found them anywhere.

  Rubbing his eyebrow with a gloved finger, Bill strolled around the narrow space and regarded the table covered with scarves.

  “Bruises are coming up around the mouth,” Kate observed.

  Bill pocketed the camera and brought out his notebook again. “She was gagged and stabbed. Then the rape was staged.”

  The hairs went up on Kate’s arms and crawled up her neck. Bill had a way of stating opinions as if they were indubitable facts. What creeped her out was how often his pronouncements turned out to be true.

  “In theory,” she said.

  “Sure,” said Bill. He tilted his head, gazing at the cards laid out on the table.

  “Now, that’s appropriate.” Kate pointed at a card that sat at the top of the fortune-teller’s spread. It was a skull and crossbones with a sickle that appeared to be harvesting a field of skulls. In big gothic black letters at the bottom of the card was the word Death.

  “Like she was telling someone’s fortune,” Bill observed.

  “Looks like she ended up telling her own,” said Kate.

  * * *

  The news crews outside lost interest soon enough, and Kate and Bill were able to knock and talk the surrounding shops. Most of the businesses opened around ten a.m., long after the preliminary TOD estimation of midnight. But one shopkeeper had seen a young man jogging up the steps to the store and shortly thereafter he’d heard the sirens.

  They got as good a description as they could, though it was meager. “That might be our anonymous 911 caller,” said Kate. And it wasn’t uncommon for murderers to call in their crimes.

  “Medium height. Medium build. Twenty to twenty-five?” Bill folded the page of his notebook over. “Narrows things down, doesn’t it?”

  “If it’s a sex crime, we have a good chance of finding prints in the system,” said Kate, hopefully.

  “It’s not a sex crime,” said Bill.

  “We don’t know that yet, partner.”

  From the doorway of the shop, Kate and Bill watched the ME unit load the body. Kate had had one of the techs bag a book as evidence. “‘Secrets and Lies,’” she read through the plastic. “Says it’s the ultimate Hollywood tell-all. You know, I remember hearing about this recently. Oprah or somebody was up in arms about ‘client confidentiality’.”

  “There’s a code of ethics for fortune-tellers?” said Bill dubiously.

  “We still haven’t got a next-of-kin.” Kate touched her hair. Bill had noticed that Kate had recently done something to her hair that made it seem much longer and thicker. She kept unconsciously touching it, as if to make sure it was still there. Bill was unwise in the ways of women, but he was certain that he shouldn’t inquire about the hair. “All of the paperwork in the shop lists the franchise owner as emergency contact.”

  “This…supposed business, is a franchise?” asked Bill.

  “The Evil Eye bookstores have branches all over town,” said Kate. She reached into the deep pocket of her coat and brought out a four-by-five white linen envelope. “Here. While I remember.”

  Bill took the thing, eyebrow raised in inquiry.

  “Wedding invitation,” said Kate, brusquely. “You and a guest.”

  Bill wasn’t sure what the appropriate response might be and his face showed it.

  “My mother-in-law to be is a dragon about these things so please RSVP by the date on the card,” said Kate.

  Bill hadn’t been sure he was even going to open the envelope, so, with a feeling of disaster narrowly averted, he pocketed it and nodded.

  Kate scanned the meager crowd.

  “The media lost interest quickly enough,” she observed. “Why does that make me nervous?”

  “Because Derek Stuart is involved,” said Bill.

  Kate’s cell phone rang and she flicked it open to see the number, holding Bill’s gaze as she answered it. “Hello, chief. Yes, sir?” She grimaced. “I see. Yes, sir, I’ll tell him.” She flicked the phone closed.

  “Smith says we’re on the news.”

  Bill mouthed an expletive. “Stuart.”

  “There were shots of the book and coasters with the name of the studio on them. A lawyer from the production company that hosted the party has already called the station screaming legalese. Smith talked him down and turned it around. He convinced the lawyer he should get a pass for us to go to the lot and interview the crew from the party last night.”

  “Crew?” Bill instantly imagined a team of rowers and, as if she knew what he was envisioning, Kate said, “Film crew. The movie people at the party. They’re working on something called, ‘Mother’s House’, it’s supposed to be the next big thing. Smith said get in there, get the statements, then get out, and try to stay off-camera this time.”