ED TAXX ADJUSTED THE THERMOSTAT in room 614 of the Brevard Hotel. The thermometer showed it was sixty-five degrees, but the Brevard was old, the heating system unreliable, and the weather outside frigid white.
Taxx was a twenty-five-year veteran with the District Attorney's security division. One more year and his daughter would be off to college in Boston. Then, Ed told his wife, they would head for Florida and screw the New York winters.
Ed had grown up on Long Island, had looked forward to winter snows, snowball fights, sledding down Maryknoll Hill, being kid macho like the other boys playing hockey with freezing fingers and ears in Stanton Park. When he reached the age of forty, he stopped looking forward to the winters, the car that threatened not to start, the snow that kept him in his car for hours with the heat turned up, and the need to concentrate to keep from skidding always on his mind. Worst of all were the long gray depressing days. He would not miss the city when he retired.
He looked at Cliff Collier, who didn't look cold at all. Collier was thirty-two, bull strong. He had been an NYPD uniformed officer for six years and a detective for two years.
In two hours they would be relieved by another team guarding Alberta Spanio, who was currently asleep in the locked bedroom. Cliff and Ed had met two nights earlier when they relieved two others from their respective offices. Each night they had tucked Alberta in just before midnight, heard her lock the dead bolt. Collier had spent the night watching television shows constantly being interrupted by weather reports as the snow piled higher and the temperature dropped lower. Taxx had sporadically watched television and read a mystery novel set in Florida.
The two men neither liked nor disliked each other. They had little in common but the job. After ten minutes of small talk once Alberta locked her door, they had settled into conversational silence and Jay Leno as background white noise.
The Brevard Hotel was not a regular safe house for the NYPD or the District Attorney's office. No chances were being taken with Alberta Spanio. No chance that there was a leak in the department. That's what the two men and the people on the other two shifts had been told. They all had enough smarts and experience to be selected for the job, which meant that they all knew there was a chance that the people they were protecting Alberta Spanio from might find out where she was.
Had Alberta, short, big busted, unnaturally blonde, and very naturally frightened, asked for a phone call, Ed and Cliff would have given her a polite "no," the same polite "no" she would had received if she asked for a ham sandwich. No room service. No outside delivery. Food came in only when there was a shift change.
The relief officers, due in about an hour, would bring something for breakfast, probably Egg McMuffin sandwiches and coffee, which had been their breakfast of choice the day before.
"It's eight," Taxx said, looking at his watch. "We'd better wake her."
"I could use the john," said Collier, who rose from the couch and nodded as he moved to the bedroom door. He knocked loudly and called, "Wake up call, Alberta."
No answer. Collier knocked again.
"Alberta." First a call and then a question, "Alberta?"
Taxx was at his side now. He knocked and shouted, "Wake up."
Still no answer. The two men looked at each other. Taxx nodded at Collier who understood.
"Open it up or we break it down," said Taxx, loud but calmly.
Taxx looked at his watch, counted off fifteen seconds and stepped out of the way so the younger, larger cop could throw his weight against the door. Collier threw his shoulder into the door the way he'd been shown in the Academy. Use the muscle part of the arm not the bony part of the shoulder. Don't throw everything into the first lunge if you don't have to get in fast. Hit it hard, wear it down. Fight the wood, not the lock. When Collier hit it, the door cracked but didn't open. The dead bolt held. Collier backed up a few steps and threw himself into the door again. This time it flew open to the sound of splintering wood, and Collier stumbled forward, almost falling.
The room was nearly frigid.
Taxx looked at the bed, a mound of blankets. The window across the room was closed, but a draft of icy air was coming from the open door of the bathroom.
"Bathroom window," said Taxx, rushing for the bed.
Collier righted himself and ran the eight or ten feet across the room to the bathroom. The window was open, wide open. Collier stepped into the tub to look out the window over the mound of snow that had gathered, considered closing the window but stopped himself, stepped out of the tub, and went back across the tile to the open door of the bathroom.
Taxx stood next to the bed. He had pulled the covers back. Collier could see the close-eyed corpse of Alberta Spanio turned on her side, her face white, a long-handled knife plunged deeply into her neck.
Ed Taxx and Cliff Collier didn't know Alberta Spanio and what little they had seen of her they had not liked. She had no record, no arrests. She had cut no deal. She had been Anthony Marco's mistress for three years and was afraid of him. She had wanted out, and when Marco had been arrested for murder and racketeering, Alberta had made a call to the District Attorney's office.
If she had second thoughts after telling everything she knew about Anthony, which was a lot, she had settled in to a sullen, surly, and foul-mouthed irritability.
There was no moment of grief for Taxx and Collier, but there was an understanding that their failure to protect a key witness in the murder trial of a major organized crime figure would have consequences that would affect their careers.
There was no phone in the bedroom. It had been removed to keep Alberta Spanio from making any calls. Collier moved quickly into the other room through the broken door and headed for the phone.
Homicide detective Don Flack knew Cliff Collier, not well, but well enough for first names and talks and a cup of coffee from a machine in a precinct hallway when they ran into each other from time to time. They had gone through the Academy together.
Now Collier was District, caught all kinds of calls, from double-dealing prostitutes to gang mayhem. Because of his size, Collier looked intimidating. Because of his nature, he was. Flack knew that because of Collier's ambition- his father and uncle had both been cops- he was worrying about his future as he answered Flack's questions.
Taxx seemed to be more stoic about what had happened. They had lost an important witness in a trial in which she was going to testify in two days. This wasn't the kind of thing that you'd lose your pension over, and Taxx had no further departmental ambitions. What had happened would go in his record. So what? He was not looking for a promotion or a pay raise. Still, he had been on watch when the person he was responsible for had died, not under his nose exactly, but close enough.
Flack had his notebook in hand, the collar of his leather jacket pulled up over his neck to hold back the cold. With the door down and the bathroom window still open, the room in which they were standing seemed to be getting colder by the second despite the rush of warmth from a nearby heating vent.
Inside the bedroom, Detective Stella Bonasera was standing at the side of the bed looking down at the corpse, taking photographs. In the bathroom Danny Messer, wearing latex gloves, called out, "No sign of forced entry."
Stella coughed and felt a slight tickle in her throat. She might be coming down with a cold. Maybe, if she got a chance, she would swallow a couple of aspirin.
She held the camera at her side, looked down at the corpse and resisted the impulse to brush a stray lock of dark-rooted blonde hair from the face of the dead woman. Alberta Spanio had tried hard to hold onto the Brooklyn good looks she'd had ten or twelve years earlier, but she had been losing the battle. The blood had run down her neck and onto the pillow she was resting on, not a lot of blood, at least not a lot compared to what Stella might have expected. She put the camera in her pocket, reached into her CSI kit, took out the magnetic powder container, opened it, removed the powder brush, and carefully checked for prints on the smooth handle of the knife in the woman's neck. Clean. No prints.
On the end table next to the bed were two items of interest. One was an open pill container with two pills left in it. The container was labeled ALEPPO, which Stella knew was a generic name for Sonata. Sheldon Hawkes would tell her how much of the drug was in the dead woman. Stella dusted the container for prints. There was one clear print. She picked up the pill bottle by placing two fingers of her gloved hand inside it, and then she dropped the container and the nearby cap into a plastic bag which she zipped shut and put into her kit on the floor.
The other item on the table was an eight-ounce clear glass with a small amount of amber liquid at the bottom. Stella leaned over to smell the glass. Alcohol. Hawkes would also tell her how much alcohol the dead woman had consumed. A combination of sleeping pills and alcohol could kill, but the knife in Alberta Spanio's neck probably ruled out that option as cause of death.
Stella dusted the glass for prints, found three good ones, poured the liquid into a plastic cup with a screw top she retrieved from her kit and then, after putting the cup in her kit, carefully placed the glass into a plastic envelope and sealed it.
"Want to take a look?" Danny called from the open doorway to the bathroom.
He had already brushed the door handle inside and out for prints, found some, and carefully lifted them.
"Coming," Stella said, stepping back from the bed.
She moved into the bathroom and looked at the open window.
"When did she die?" asked Danny.
Stella shrugged.
"Body's cold, can't be sure, maybe Hawkes can narrow it, but she's not frozen. I'd say the last three hours tops."
"When did the snow stop?" Danny asked.
"I don't know," said Stella. "Four, five hours ago. We'll check it out."
"Killer must have been little," said Danny, looking at the small open window. "Climbed down from above on a ladder or a rope. There's no fire escape out there. Hell of a circus act with the wind and snow."
Stella moved to the window, took a fresh pair of latex gloves from her pocket, put them on, and reached out and ran her fingers across the lower wooden frame. Then she reached out and felt along the outside frame of the window. The cold burned her cheeks and she eased herself back in.
"Take the window to the lab," she said.
"Right," said Danny.
"Check the toilet, too," she said, suppressing a sniffle.
"I did," he answered. "Nothing."
"Then let's both work the other room. I'll check the body, bed, and end table. You do the floor and walls."
"After I remove the window?" he asked.
"The window can wait till we're done," she said.
In the next room, Taxx was saying, "Look for yourself."
He moved to the window and looked out, Flack at his side. Collier simply stood in the middle of the room, looking toward the open bedroom door, his hands fidgeting.
"Six floors up," said Taxx to Flack. "No fire escape."
"None outside the bathroom window?" asked Flack.
Taxx shook his head. "Brick wall," said Taxx. "See for yourself."
"I will," said Flack. "And you didn't hear anything from the bedroom all night?"
"Nothing," said Taxx.
"Nothing," Collier agreed.
"When she went to bed… tell me what happened," Flack said.
The pattern, the two officers agreed, had been the same all three nights. Alberta Spanio brought a drink into the bedroom, took two sleeping pills, said "good night" with drink in hand, dead-bolted the lock, and presumably went to bed. There was a television in the bedroom, but the two men guarding her hadn't heard it, and it wasn't on when they broke down the door. They hadn't heard the bath or shower running either though they knew they would have had Alberta used them. She had showered two nights earlier. Besides, they had seen her take the sleeping pills and a long swallow of Scotch. She should have been asleep about a minute after they left her room.
"What the hell happened?" Collier asked, looking toward the bedroom and probably imagining the rest of his life in his current grade, if he was lucky.
Flack didn't give an answer. He knew Collier didn't expect one. He closed his notebook.