Page 18 of Stay Awake
The chief pathologist was a sixty-year-old doctor with a semicircle of white hair on an otherwise hairless pate. He had the somewhat apt name of Dr. Cutter, although he generally went by his first name, Richard.
“Can I help you, Detectives?” Dr. Cutter asked, looking up from the metal autopsy table once he’d completed the incision.
“Any chance you can expedite the autopsy of the stiff that’s just checked into cabin twenty-four?” asked Lavelle. “So far we’re stumped on the ID. We haven’t found anything at the scene that so much as tells us his first name.”
“There’s a backlog of bodies waiting for autopsy, and I have two staff members out sick,” said Dr. Cutter. “But we can definitely get dental impressions done today, even if the autopsy has to wait a few days.”
“Whatever you can do, Doc,” Lavelle said. “There was no murderweapon at the scene so we’re keen to find out what sort of implement was used to stab the vic. By the way, this is my partner, Detective Darcy Halliday.”
The pathologist picked up a round electric blade for cutting through the rib cage. “Detective Halliday, I don’t know what you did to draw the short straw and get Jack as your partner. But either way, you have my deepest commiserations.” He turned on the electrical cutter and began working the round blade into the body on the slab.
“And that,” whispered Lavelle ironically to Halliday as they turned to leave, “is why no male detective ever likes to stand too close to Dr. Richard Cutter when he’s doing an autopsy.”
After their fleeting visit to the morgue, Lavelle did a quick detour to the forensics lab. He double-parked while Halliday ran out to drop off several pieces of evidence they wanted fast-tracked. Among them was an evidence bag with the wine bottle Halliday had found next to the bed. She hoped it would turn out to be the holy grail of evidence. There was as good a chance as any that the bottle contained the killer’s fingerprints, and perhaps even saliva so they could extract the killer’s DNA.
“We’ll head back to the precinct,” Lavelle said when Halliday returned to the car. “The first batch of security camera footage should be there soon. I’m expecting we’ll get hundreds of hours of CCTV footage to trawl through.”
Halliday glanced sideways at Lavelle. She wondered whether he’d try to put her in charge of reviewing all the security camera footage. That was the sort of desk jockey work she’d been assigned since she’d been transferred over to homicide. As if reading her thoughts, Lavelle told her he’d rustled up two detectives and a few uniformed cops to go through the video footage.
“We both need to be out in the field. Not chained to a desk,” he said.
A small team of rookie cops had been assigned to search for themurder weapon in trash cans and drains in the vicinity of the building where the murder had taken place. Another team had fanned out across the neighborhood, knocking on doors to collect security camera footage and checking whether anyone had witnessed anything suspicious overnight. They were in the process of collecting surveillance footage from city CCTV cameras, as well as private security cameras in shops and buildings in the vicinity of the murder scene.
The only lead Halliday and Lavelle had to work with, at least until the security camera footage arrived, was the writing on the bedroom window. Halliday zoomed in and out of the photo she’d taken of the wordsWAKE UP!written in the victim’s blood.
“Ever seen writing in blood at a crime scene?” she asked Lavelle.
“A few times,” he conceded. “Usually when the killer was drugged out of his mind, or going through a psychotic episode. In those cases, they write lots of crazy stuff, sometimes in blood or feces. Usually whatever they write is rambling garbage.”
“That’s not the case here,” Halliday said, staring at the two succinct words on her photo of the crime scene window. “The killer was making a point. The question is what point, and why go to the trouble of writingWAKE UP!in blood on the window?”
Even though Halliday had been assigned to Lavelle’s precinct for a couple of months already, the two hours they’d worked together on the homicide was the longest she’d ever spent in his company.
They knew each other in passing. She’d nodded to him a few times when she’d seen him lifting weights at the fitness center near the precinct where she also worked out. They’d shared elevators and rubbed shoulders making coffee in the kitchenette by the Detective Bureau. They’d attended plenty of team meetings at the precinct. Their casual interactions had never gone beyond the most basic niceties, and they’d never worked together on a case.
Halliday had been in the unit long enough to get the impression that Lavelle rarely socialized with the rest of the team. Despite that,the other detectives treated Lavelle with the same deference they gave to the captain.
“What did the neighbors tell you when you interviewed them earlier?” Lavelle asked, making a left turn near the precinct.
“The teenage son of the neighbor who lives at the end of the hall said he was binge-watching a TV series in bed when he thought he heard a door slam. He thinks it happened at around two in the morning.”
“How can he be so sure of the time?” Lavelle asked.
“It was near the end of his episode. He set his alarm and went to sleep as soon as it finished. It’s possible the noise he heard was the killer leaving the apartment.”
“Did you talk to anyone else?”
“The woman who lives diagonally opposite the apartment didn’t hear or see anything last night. However, she did see a couple coming out of the elevator yesterday morning around ten, when she was waiting to take it down to get to work. She said the man looked like Ryan Reynolds. That’s why she remembered him. The woman accompanying him had dark hair. Very long.”
“Did the couple go into the apartment where the murder took place?”
“She didn’t see where they went because she stepped into the elevator and the doors shut behind her. She did say that she’d never seen them before. That might not mean much. Two apartments on that floor are regularly rented on short-stay websites. There are always new faces around. My hunch is that the couple did go in there.”
“What makes you think that?”
“The long dark hairs I found on the pillow and in the bathroom fit the neighbor’s description of a woman with extremely long hair.”
“So you think our killer was a woman.”
