“No. Dr. Slope said the Ariel kid was really flying on dope. I don’t know that he would’ve bothered to lock the door.”
Mallory pulled out a notebook and flipped through the pages of her father’s scrawl. “Slope says the killer did the artist first, then spent some time torturing the girl.” She found the page she was looking for. Markowitz had underscored the word “torture” and added three question marks. “Did Markowitz have a problem with that?”
“Well, yeah, he did. The blows were pretty vicious, like the perp really wanted to kill her with every stroke. It wasn’t so much a drawn-out kill, not like torture. It was more like a botched kill. Aubry just wouldn’t lie down and die for the bastard. She was fighting to stay alive. That was one thing that really got to Markowitz, that and her freckles-just a light sprinkle across her nose. I think the freckles destroyed him.”
Mallory held out the notebook and pointed to the word “cavalry” followed by a question mark. “Any idea what that means?”
Heller smiled. “Markowitz thought the kid was probably raised on old cowboy movies. So Aubry was holding on, waiting for the bugle call and the cavalry charge to come over the hill and save her.”
“This is what Koozeman said.” She read from the notebook. “ ‘The gallery was full of reporters when I arrived.’ You know, Koozeman could’ve come out from behind the wall when the room was packed with sightseers. The reporters would have been at the back of the room, looking at the bodies.”
Heller shook his head. “That scenario works just as well for Oren Watt, and he was definitely on the scene that night. We took his footprints. He had blood on his shoes.”
“Everybody had blood on their shoes. The pizza place was six blocks west of the gallery, and Watt’s apartment was three blocks east. After he picked up his check, he probably killed an hour scoring some dope and then walked home this way. All that noise, all those people. Of course he was going to go inside.” She pulled a diagram from her tote bag. “Markowitz always had a problem with the time frame. Can you remember how you reconstructed the scene?”
“Like I’m ever gonna forget. I still have dreams about this one.” Heller walked to the back of the room and hunkered down to inspect the floor. Mallory knelt beside him. He took out a penlight and aimed the beam low. “Look close and you can still see the axe marks in the wood. This is where the artist’s body was cut. The wounds were all postmortem. There was blood, but not the same kind of flow you’d get if the heart was still pumping. Splatter patterns and blood type show all the work on the artist was done here. The girl was killed at the front of the room, and her body was dragged back here and laid three feet away from the artist.”
Heller moved over to his right and swept the dusty floor with his hand. His penlight picked up the indentations in the wood. “These are the marks for the dancer. Dismemberment was done after death. Small mercy, huh? There was blood trapped between the floorboards to separate her site from the artist’s. I tracked blood from the artist’s body to the site of the first strike on the dancer.”
Mallory marked the axe scars on her diagram. She pulled out the bundle of floor photographs and riffled through them. The boards were awash in blood pools, drops, smears and tracks. “And you found tracks? How?”
“Not tracks-drops of blood from the weapon and the first splatter pattern. I followed a line of drops from the artist’s body to the first attack on the girl. The reporter’s tracks passed through it and smeared it here and there, but it was still a definite line. It was Peter Ariel’s blood. That’s how I figured the perp was working on the artist’s body when the dancer came into the room. Then he went for her and the blood dripped from the axe as he was crossing the floor.”
Heller stood up and moved to the center of the long room, with Mallory following. “The drops were elongated, so the perp was moving fast. I figured the first blow was struck here. It was a hard blow to the neck to bring her down. She began to crawl.” He walked closer to the front of the gallery. “Bloody handprints toward the door. Then she was herded back.” He walked toward the center of the long room. “Here’s the spot where she made it to her feet, God knows how, but there were two partial prints matching her shoes. And then she was brought down again.”
Mallory was marking the strikes, when Heller took the floor plan and the pencil from her hand. “I’m gonna teach you a trade secret, kid.” He made lines on her diagram. “This is how I knew how many times he cut her before she died. I never even had to look at the bodies. Slope agreed with my figures.”
Now her diagram showed a march of lines moving across the floor and then changing direction and moving back. He handed it back to her. “Every time the attacker pulled the weapon back for another strike, he sent out a flying line of blood from the axe to the floor and part of the wall. That’s how you can tell where he was, what direction he was walking in. So here, you can see him walking along beside her, making the blows while she crawled.” He pointed to a change of line angles. “This is where Aubry turned and made one last try for the door.”
He walked back to the front of the room. “She’s crawling toward the door, and this is where the killer made the fatal strike. This is where I found skull fragments in between the floorboards. And then the body was dragged to the back of the room.”
Mallory walked back to the site of the first blow. “It doesn’t work. She didn’t have to come this far into the room to see what was happening to Peter Ariel’s body. She would have turned to run long before she got this far.”
“She could have fainted or frozen with the-”
“Aubry was no helpless bimbo. She was a dancer with good reflexes. She was young with good eyes. She wanted to live just like the rest of us. Maybe there were two killers.”
“Markowitz didn’t figure it that way.” Heller’s tone was skeptical.
“How do you know he didn’t? The old man was always holding out. He held out on everybody else-why not you? But this time, he played it too cagey. Everybody got information on a need-to-know basis. If he’d laid open all the problems with the case, Quinn might have told him about the ritual of whitewashing the gallery walls and waxing the floor the day before every opening. Peter Ariel’s show was scheduled for the next day.”
“Oh, Christ, all the-”
“Yeah, if you’d only known, you might’ve gotten latent prints and worked up the hair and fiber evidence. But I’m sure Koozeman never volunteered that information. And he never mentioned the door in the wall either. Not your fault, Heller.”
But Heller didn’t agree. He stared up at the ceiling, shaking his head, his expression wafting between anger and frustration. “So, what now, Mallory?”
“Well, Starr and Koozeman would make a neat party of two.”
“So you’re tying their murders together with a revenge motive?”
“Maybe. When Dean Starr was a critic, he gave Peter Ariel two rave reviews. Suppose Koozeman wasn’t the only one who owned a piece of the artist?”
“I can still run the old physical evidence. Would that help you any?”
“I can’t have any paperwork on a case I’m not supposed to be working.”
“I’ll do it off the books. I can bury the cost in other investigations if I spread it around.”
“You won’t let me break into an empty gallery, but you’ll risk your job to work evidence off the books?”
“If I break the rules, I’ve got a good reason. You break rules because you can get away with it. It’s a game to you. Time to grow up, kid.”
“Heller, I don’t want any-”
“Grow up or fake it. At least try to make it look like Markowitz raised you right.”