“It would make your hypothesis a lot more credible if we knew what that incident in Vietnam was all about.”
“I’m sure it would. But it involved some highly classified operations. All I can say is that I can fully believe it,” Sherman looked down at the rug again for a moment. “I know.
That’s not much to go on.”
Mcnair gave him a look that made it quite clear he was in full agreement with Sherman’s last remark. “See, Admiral, it’s not just us,” he said.
“To open a homicide investigation, especially if there’s a new element, we have to convince our lieutenant-and maybe a judge-that we want to do some searching. Now if we just had that letter-“
“I know,” Sherman interrupted. “But it’s cane. Maybe? the postman might recall sorting it. I don’t know. But as to what happened in Vietnam, it’s classified. I can’t tell you any more than that.”
“Is there a homicide investigation in progress?” Train asked from his perch by the window.
There was a sudden silence in the room. Mcnair opened his mouth but closed it without saying anything. Karen decided to make her move.
“Detective Mcnair,” she said, “in our original meeting, you mentioned certain forensic ambiguities. The admiral here has been concerned that, over and above the slippers problem, if he told you about this letter, it would make Elizabeth Walsh’s death seem less like an accident and more like a possible homicide. The problem is, up to tonight, the only person you are talking to is him.
He’s told you as much as he can. What can you tell us about those forensic ambiguities?”
Mcnair thought about that, and then he nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Our first take was accident. Lady fell down the stairs, landed wrong, broke her neck. Medical examiner’s preliminary report said the same thing. We caught the fact that the laundry room down there didn’t appear to be used very-often, if at all. But she could have been carrying that stuff down to store it, and using a laundry basket to carry it. Who knows? There was no apparent forced entry, no physical evidence of personal violence, other than that which could have reasonably been caused by the fall. Abrasions where you would expect them. And later, postautopsy, nothing in the pathology reports indicating assault, poison, drugs, rape, or anything like that.”
“You did an autopsy?” Sherman asked. Karen had seen him wince at the word., “Yes, sir. Standard procedure in an unexplained death.
Unless the victim’s doctor can come in and give us a reasonable explanation, an autopsy will normally be performed.
But, like I said, that didn’t give us any indication of homicide.”
“So what were the ambiguities?” Train asked.
“Well, it’s like this. When there’s no obvious cause of death, we assume misadventure, or accident. But we also look at it from the other perspective: If this had been a homicide, what kind of evidence should be there? Well, first of all, some physical evidence of someone else being in that house. So just to make very sure, we had our crime-scene unit come in and do a standard sweep.” He leaned back in his chair for a moment before going on.
“Let’s put aside fingerprints for a minute. Let’s postulate, for instance, that someone who knew what he was doing broke in waited for her, and, surprised her, say, and then pushed er down the stairs. He probably wouldn’t have come in the front door-too exposed. More likely, he’d use the back door or a back window, say from that garden. Either way, there should have been some physical traces of that garden in the house-grass, dirt. And the back porch paint is old and dried out. There should have been some tiny flakes of that paint in the carpets. None of the windows had been kicked in, right? The back door lock is a Baringer.
They use a peculiar steel alloy for their keys. If somebody had picked the lock, there should have been physical evidence of foreign metal-alloy particles in that lock, or in any of the locks. Stuff like that.”
“But there wasn’t?” Train asked.
“That’s right.”
“This sounds like a pretty thorough examination,” the admiral said. “But I don’t understand the premise. If this was an accident, none of this evidence would be there in any event.”
“Ah, yes,” Mcnair said, leaning forward. “But from a forensic perspective, that place was hinky.
Like’fingerprints?
Well, we did find fingerprints-hers, Mrs. Klein’s, and, incidentally, even some of yours, Admiral-but only upstairs.
Remember what I said about physical evidence a mirfute ago? That there wasn’t any? We didn’t get a single fingerprint lift downstairs. None.
Zero. Zip. And you know what else? Mrs. Klein, the nice old lady who says she goes over there all the time to have coffee, shoot the breeze, whatever?
Mrs. Klein says she always comes over via the back porch.
They’re connected. She even has a key. Her porch paint is like Miss. understand,” Sherman said. “Except for the very obvious trail she left when she found the body, there were no other signs of that paint in the Walsh kitchen, or in any of the rugs on the main floor. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything in those rugs. Very little dirt. And no sand or bits of moss from those bricks in her front walk. Assuming Miss. Walsh came home via her own front door that afternoon, there should have been something, see?”
Karen twisted anxiously in her chair. This was beginning to sound like something far different from the cut-and-dried accident they had been talking about all along.
“Admiral,” Mcnair continued, “this may be painful to hear, but there was something wrong with Miss. Walsh’s clothes, too, besides what you told us about the slippers.”
“Her clothes?” he asked, obviously baffled now.
“Yes, sir. We found none of the things on her clothes that should have been there after a working day in the office-no dandruff, no loose hairs, no foreign fibers on the seat of her slacks from an office chair, no ink smudges on her fingers, no residue of toner from a copy machine or a laser printer on her hands or sleeves. Now you know most Washington people can’t spend a day in the office without touching a Xerox copy of something, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And in. addition to all the stuff that collects after a day in the office, there’s the ride home on the Metro. She took the Metro, didn’t she? There was a fare card in her purse.”
“Yes, she did. Park and Ride from the West Falls Church station. “
“Well, okay. You come home Friday at rush hour, it’s back-to-back, belly-to-belly, right? But her street clothes were clean-much too clean.
No one else’s hair. No traces of another human being anywhere on her collar or her raincoat. We checked.”
“Like somebody had vacuumed them?” Karen asked.
Mcnair gave her a look, as if to say she had just incriminated herself.
“Maybe. Or the clothes she was wearing weren’t the clothes she wore to work.”
“How about her shoes?” Train asked.
Mcnair smiled. “Bingo,” he said softly. “Oh, we found shoes aplenty up in the closet, but none that showed evidence of having been worn to the office that day and then exchanged for slippers.”
Karen let out a long breath. “So can’t you check with the people in her office, find out what she was wearing that day?”
“We did,” replied Mcnair., “Slacks, blouse, sweater. But no one remembers exactly which ones, which colors. One guy said gray; another guy said dark. They were mostly men in the office. You know how it is, Commander: Men never notice a woman’s shoes. And you review investigations, right? You know how poorly even eyewitnesses’ statements correlate.”
Karen knew only too well. “Yes, I do. How about her vacuum cleaner?”
“New bag.”
“Ah,” she said, understanding what he was trying to say.