The floral upholstered couch and side chair in the living room straight ahead were perfectly arranged around a maple coffee table, and on top of it were magazines impeccably fanned, and in a corner a standard-size Pioneer flat screen that looked new and was precisely positioned to face the exact center of the sofa. Inside the fireplace was an arrangement of silk flowers. The ivory Berber rug was straight and clean.
Other than the cones, there was barely a hint that the police had been all over this place. In this new age of crime scene management, they would have been suited up in disposable clothing, including shoe covers. Electrostatic dust lifters would have been used to recover any impressions from the polished wood floors, and forensic lights and photography would have taken precedence over messy black powders. In sophisticated departments such as the NYPD, crime scene scientists neither created nor destroyed.
The living room flowed into the dining area and kitchen, the apartment small enough that Scarpetta could see the table set for dinner, and the makings of it on a countertop near the stove. No doubt the chicken was still in the oven, and God knows how long it would stay there, didn’t matter how rancid anything got by the time the landlord or Terri’s family were allowed free access to the place. It wasn’t the responsibility or the right of law enforcement to clean up the gore left in the wake of a violent death, whether it was blood or an uneaten holiday dinner.
“Let me ask the obvious question,” Scarpetta said to no one in particular. “Is there any possibility she wasn’t the intended victim? Even remotely possible? Since there’s another apartment across from this one, and what? Two more upstairs?”
“I always say everything’s possible,” Berger replied. “But she opened the doors. Or if someone else did, he or she had keys. There would seem to be a connection between her and the person who killed her.” To Marino she said, “You mentioned the roof access? Anything new about that?”
“A text message from Morales,” he replied. “He said when he got to the scene last night, the ladder was exactly where he found it after installing the roof camera. In the utility closet.”
Marino had a look on his face as he said that, as if he knew a joke he wasn’t about to share.
“I’m assuming nothing new. Nobody of interest in terms of a possible suspect or witness among the other tenants?” Berger asked Marino, continuing the conversation just inside the apartment door.
“According to the landlord, who lives on Long Island, she was a real quiet lady except when she had a complaint. One of those who had to have everything just right,” Marino said. “But what’s a little interesting is, it was something she couldn’t take care of herself, she’d never let the landlord in to fix it. She’d say she’d get someone to take care of it. He said it was like she was making notes of all the problems in case he got any ideas about raising the rent.”
“Sounds like the landlord might not have been too fond of her,” Benton said.
“He called her demanding more than once,” Marino said. “Always e-mailed him, though. Never called, as if she was building a court case, is the way he put it.”
“We can get Lucy to locate those e-mails,” Berger said. “We know which of her eighteen usernames she used for complaining to the landlord? I don’t think it was Lunasee, unless we just didn’t come across anything to or from him while I was with Lucy a little while ago. And by the way, I’ve asked her to forward anything to me she might find. So all of us are rather much online with her while she continues to go through the laptops removed from this apartment.”
“It’s the one called Railroadrun, like running her railroad. My interpretation,” Marino said. “The landlord said that’s the e-mail address he’s got for her. Anyway, point being, it appears she was a royal pain in the butt.”
Scarpetta said, “Also appears she had somebody who helped her when she needed something fixed.”
“Well, I have my doubts it was Oscar,” Berger said. “No references to anything like that in the e-mails we’ve seen so far. Nothing—such as her asking him to come over and unstop the toilet or change a lightbulb in the ceiling. Although his height might have made at least a few tasks rather difficult.”
“There’s the ladder in the closet upstairs,” Marino said.
Scarpetta said, “I’d like to wander through alone first.”
She found the tape measure in her crime scene case and slipped it into her suit jacket pocket, and looked at the evidence inventory that told her which cone corresponded to which item that had been removed from the scene. Some six feet inside the door, to her left, was cone number one, and this was where the flashlight had been found, described as a black metal Luxeon Star with two Duracell lithium batteries, and in working condition. It wasn’t plastic, as Oscar had described, which may or may not be of any consequence, except that a metal flashlight would be a serious weapon, suggesting Oscar hadn’t struck himself very hard at all to cause the bruises she’d examined.
The cones numbered two through four corresponded to shoe prints lifted from the hardwood floor, described only as having a running shoe-type tread pattern with the approximate dimensions of six and a half by four inches. That was small, and as Scarpetta scanned the list, she noted that a pair of sneakers had been removed from Terri’s closet. Size five, women’s Reeboks, white with pink trim. A size-five woman’s shoe would not be six and a half inches from heel to toe, and as Scarpetta recalled looking at Terri’s feet in the morgue, she remembered them as smaller than that, because of her disproportionately short toes.
She suspected the shoewear impressions recovered near the door were Oscar’s, and likely had been left when he’d gone in and out of the apartment, back to his car, to leave his coat and do whatever else he might have done after discovering the body.
That was assuming his story was true, for the most part.
Other impressions lifted from the floor were of interest because they had been left by bare feet, and Scarpetta recalled seeing several photographs that had been taken in oblique lighting. She had assumed the bare footprints were Terri’s, and the location of them was significant.
All were clustered just outside the master bathroom where Terri’s body had been found, and Scarpetta wondered if Terri had put on body lotion or oil, perhaps after her shower, and that’s why the bare footprints had been visible on the hardwood floor, all in close proximity to one another. She wondered what it might mean if Terri hadn’t taken her slippers off until she’d been about to enter the area of the apartment where she was murdered. Had she been attacked the instant she’d opened her front door, and had she resisted or been forced to the master bedroom in back, wasn’t there a good chance her slippers would have come off earlier?
In all of her years working homicide scenes, it had been Scarpetta’s experience that bedroom slippers, one or both, rarely stayed on once the violent encounter occurred. People literally were scared out of them.
She walked as far as the dining room, and from here the smell of cooked chicken was stronger and more unpleasant, the kitchen just ahead, and then the guestroom/office, according to the detailed computer-aided drafting or CAD of the apartment’s interior and its dimensions that was included in the paperwork Marino had assembled.