Irv Minskoff from the ME’s office walked over. Beam saw that since the last murder he’d been attempting to grow a mustache. It was coming in gray and bushy, and along with his gnarly features and thick-lensed glasses, made him look like a country-town general practitioner who mostly gave flu shots and birthed babies. Didn’t talk that way, though. “Poor bitch was damn near decapitated.”
“What kind of wire was it?” Beam asked.
“Hard to say. Very thin but with lots of tensile strength, like dental floss or fishing line leader.”
“But it wasn’t either of those?”
“No, it was wire. Maybe piano wire. She died quickly, probably didn’t make much noise.” Minskoff used a forefinger to smooth both sides of his mustache. “Nice car, but it’s not gonna be worth anything after this, what with all the blood and what came out when her sphincter relaxed. Smell just about knocks you out when you stick your head in there.” He turned to watch the silent ambulance pull away. “Probably a looker when she was alive. Slender body, good enough rack. Not much tit but terrific nipples. Killer noticed that, too. Looks like he ran whatever he wrote with—his finger, probably—over her right nipple to get his blood ink.” He shook his head. “I see a waste like that, it saddens me. Know anything about her?”
“I thought you might tell me,” Beam said.
“I make her out to be in her mid-forties. Fashion label clothes to go with the new car. Married.”
“How do you know she was married?” Beam asked, almost dreading the answer from the callous little medical examiner.
“Wedding ring,” Minskoff said with a smile. “Looks reasonably expensive. More to the point, she’s been dead less than an hour. So if she came here to catch a plane, it either left not long ago or it’s still here. You might wanna hurry.”
“Maybe she just flew in and was about to drive away when she was killed.”
“Yeah, I suppose that’s possible.”
“She didn’t come here to catch a plane,” Beam said, “and she didn’t just arrive. No luggage in the car. No airline ticket. And she’s in short term parking.”
Minskoff looked slightly embarrassed. “I guess that’s why I do my job and you do yours. Need anything else on prelim? Like cause of death?”
Beam thought Minskoff was probably joking, but he simply shook his head no. About ten years ago he’d investigated to see if someone had been pushed out a high window, and an autopsy revealed a bullet in the mess the victim had become.
“Safety belt wouldn’t have saved her,” Minskoff said, with a glance at the Saab behind the yellow tape. He gave Beam a little half salute, then walked away toward the city car he drove.
Beam figured the last word must be important to Minskoff in crime scene humor, so he let him have it.
Beam beckoned Nell and Looper over. He told Looper to go into the terminal and start a check on passenger lists to see if anyone named Flitt was booked out of the airport for that evening.
Then he walked over to the car that was surrounded by crime scene tape. Three techs from the crime scene unit remained. “Check the car out all the way,” Beam said. “Photograph it, check for prints, black light it, vacuum it, then have it towed in so it can be gone over again. The bastard we’re looking for was in the backseat, probably waiting for the victim to get in. He must have left something. A bloody footprint, maybe a hair. We get a hair, we got a DNA sample.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” the tech said, sounding miffed. Beam didn’t care.
“You want the whole purse bagged for evidence?” one of the other techs asked.
“The purse and everything in it. And make sure you bag the set of keys on the floor by the accelerator.”
Tina Flitt not only hadn’t had time to fasten her safety belt, she hadn’t even gotten the car key in the ignition before the killer had struck. He’d been ready for her. Eager for her.
Beam glanced around, noticed a small object affixed to a nearby post, and smiled.
Security camera.
24
The next morning, da Vinci’s office: Hot. Stuffy. It smelled as if someone had recently smoked a cigar in there.
The scene on the TV looked like one of those slow dissolves that French directors love to use.
“He stood out of sight and squirted wasp killer on the security camera,” Beam said. “Stuff sprays a stream about twenty feet so you can get outta the way and not get stung when the wasps get pissed off.”
“Hell of a way to take out a camera,” da Vinci said.
“Attracts less attention than shinning up a pole with a can of spray paint. It messed up the lens, but not all the way, so we got some images on tape.”
“Anything that’ll help?”
“It’s doubtful,” Beam said. “Security guy inside the terminal didn’t notice right away that the picture was blurred on his monitor, and when he did, he assumed it was equipment failure.”
“Naturally,” da Vinci said. “Much easier to deal with than vandals or serial killers.”
Both men were silent, staring at the screen.
As Beam had said, the insecticide didn’t do a perfect job. Blurred human figures came and went on the black and white tape, but not many. The light was dim in the parking garage, and the airport hadn’t been busy at that time, so traffic was at a minimum. The upper right part of the screen was where things were less blurred.
“What was that?” da Vinci asked, pointing as a dark, uniformed figure briefly appeared on the screen.
“Airport security,” Beam said. “They patrol the area. Unfortunately, they weren’t at the right place at the right time. Fact is, there aren’t enough of them.” Beam fast forwarded the tape, then slowed it to normal speed. “This is the approximate time of the murder.”
Da Vinci sat forward. “Hell, you can’t even see the car.”
“There!” Beam said. He stopped the tape, backed it up, slow motioned forward, stopped it again. “That’s it.” Beam pointed to a light-colored sedan halfway down a row of parked cars. A figure behind the steering wheel was definitely visible, and so was a dark form in the back seat. The picture blurred again into meaningless patterns like paint splashed on a window.
“That was him?” da Vinci asked. He sounded awed, but also disappointed.
“We think so. He was visible, so he musta been raising up from where he was crouched behind the driver’s seat. And the victim was in the car. This had to be seconds before he looped the wire around her neck. As you can see, the time marked on the tape is eight sixteen. Her ticket’s got her in the lot at seven forty.”
“Thirty-six minutes in the airport,” da Vinci said. “She musta been dropping off someone. Or picking them up.”
“What we managed to piece together, from witnesses and airline records, is she dropped off her husband for a flight to Chicago. Flitt used her maiden name. He’s Martin Portelle.”
“And she musta gone inside the terminal with him,” da Vinci said, “since she was in the short-term garage.” Da Vinci looked thoughtful. “Wait a minute!”
He moved aside the scale model sculpture of the motorcycle he’d ridden as a young cop, then rooted through some papers on his desk. Beam saw on the wall behind the desk a framed photo of an even more youthful da Vinci posed seated in full uniform on an identical cycle.
“Ah!” Da Vinci had found a computer printout. “These are the jury forepersons from ten years of the trials we think might get the killer’s blood up.” He ran down the page with his forefinger, then slapped the desk with the flat of his hand. “I thought it sounded familiar. Here it is—Martin Portelle was the foreman of the jury that let Dan Maddox, the subway killer, walk six years ago.” Da Vinci flipped the paper in reverse across the desk so Beam could read it. “We were concentrating on the victim, not her husband.”