THE MAID HAD CONFIRMED that the man who had rented the hotel room for the night had not used the bed, and that she had not touched it at all this morning. Looking at the bed while Danny Messer crawled on his hands and knees on the floor, Stella Bonasera was sure the man had not even sat on the bed.
The two of them had examined the few pieces of furniture in the room- bed, chair and small desk, cabinet containing three drawers and holding a small color television- the door handle, even the rod and walls in the small closet. They hadn't found what they were looking for.
Stella moved to the window.
Don Flack had interviewed the rest of the hotel staff, including the clerk who had been on duty the day before when Wendell Lang had checked into the room. The man had paid in cash in advance with two hundred dollars extra to cover phone calls or use of the refrigerator/bar. He had made no phone calls, had not used the bar, and had not bothered to pick up his two hundred. He had simply checked out electronically. The clerk hadn't been able to give a good description of the man.
"It was storming," the clerk had told Flack. "He had his hat down and a scarf around his chin. He was big. I can tell you that. Big. At least two hundred and fifty pounds, probably quite a bit more. The other man was small, very small."
"Other man?" asked Flack.
"Yes," said the clerk. "I think they were together. The other man stood back, hands in his coat pocket. He had his collar turned up and his hat, one of those old Fedora types, was pulled down."
"But this Wendell Lang who took the room only signed for himself, one person?" asked Flack.
"Yes," said the clerk, "but it didn't matter. Double and single occupancy cost the same. The room is a single. One bed. They were an odd-looking pair, one huge, one small."
One who didn't weigh much and one who could hold the little man's weight at the end of a steel link chain, Don had thought. He'd immediately gone back up to the room and related his encounter with the clerk to Stella. She nodded in acknowledgement and kept working.
Stella examined the window sill from which Don Flack had taken the sliver sample of steel. She dusted the inside of the window and the handle for prints and then opened it. She leaned out into the frozen air and dusted the outside of the window. She pulled the tapes with the prints into the room and closed it.
"I'll have to remove the carpet," Danny said from where he knelt on the floor. Stella turned to him. Danny, white-gloved hands rubbing together, looked as if he were praying.
"Do it," she said.
Danny nodded, got up, moved to the wall near the door with his toolbox, found a hammer, and went to work. Neither he nor Stella expected to find anything under the carpet, but they were looking for something specific or for some evidence that what they were looking for didn't exist.
"I'm going back to the lab to check out the fingerprint and see what I can find about whatever made that rut in the window sill. "You want to come?" she asked Flack, who declined, saying he would exhaust all possible leads at the hotel.
Danny nodded. In his left hand he held a high power-trace, evidence-collection vacuum. In the vacuum was an evidence bag designed for one-time use. The room wasn't large. Stella knew that tearing up the carpet should take him no more than an hour if he was lucky. On a normal day, he would probably have time after that to go home and shower, but the snow and slow traffic would mean at least an additional hour.
As the first strip of carpeting pulled away from the floor revealing an assortment of dead bugs, including a flattened black roach, Stella said, "Call me when you know either way."
"Right," he grunted.
Aiden and Mac met a very agitated Ann Chen at Whitney's in the Village. She wasn't hard to spot, the Asian woman coming into the almost-empty coffee house alone soon after them.
When she came through the door bringing a rush of frigid air in with her, she looked around and saw the two CSI investigators sitting at a table in the corner, coffee mugs before them. Mac held up a hand, and Ann Chen acknowledged him with a nod of her head. She peeled off her coat and woolen cap revealing an oversized, thick, white turtle-neck woolen sweater underneath. She dropped the coat and hat on the empty seat next to Aiden.
"Coffee?" asked Mac.
"Espresso, double," she said.
Mac placed the order by calling over to the young man a few feet away behind the counter.
Ann Chen was thin, about thirty, pretty but not beautiful. She was also clearly nervous, shifting frequently in her chair in a fruitless effort to get comfortable.
"I usually sleep late on weekends," she said. "Unless Louisa needs me."
"Does she need you a lot on weekends?"
"Not really," said Ann. "Mr. Lutnikov is really dead?"
"You knew him?" asked Aiden.
Ann shrugged as the young man brought her double espresso. Mac handed him three dollar bills.
"I saw him around the building," Ann said, cradling the hot cup in her lean fingers.
"Did he ever come to Ms. Cormier's apartment?" asked Mac.
Ann looked down and said, "I've got to tell you I'm uncomfortable with this. Louisa has been so good to me that… I'm not comfortable with this."
"Did she call you this morning?" asked Mac.
Ann nodded.
"She said I could expect to hear from the police. Then you called."
"Was there anything she asked you not to tell us?" Mac asked.
"No," said Ann vehemently.
"What do you do for Louisa?" asked Aiden.
"Correspondence, set up radio and television interviews, print interviews, signings, tours," said Ann. "Pay bills, answer Website E-mail."
"You don't work on her manuscripts?" asked Mac.
"Yes, when they're finished. On some days I arrive at the apartment and she says something like, 'The new one's done.' Then she hands me a floppy disk, and I take it to the computer at the back of the apartment off of the kitchen and copyedit it. They're usually in good shape though, and there's not much to do. It's still a thrill to be the first one to read a new Louisa Cormier mystery."
"Then?" asked Aiden.
"Then I tell Louisa I'm done and I love the book, because I always do."
"And how does she respond?" asked Mac.
"She usually smiles, says 'Thank you dear' or something like that and takes the floppy.
"I was an English major at Bennington," said Ann Chen after another sip of coffee. "I've got two novels of my own finished. I've spent the last three years trying to decide if I should ask Louisa to read them. She might not like them. She might think I took the job with her just to get her to help my writing career. I did try a few times to let her know that I wanted to be a writer. She never picked up on it."
"How tall are you?" asked Aiden.
Ann looked surprised.
"How tall? About five two."
"Ms. Cormier have a gun?" asked Mac.
"Yes, I've seen it in her desk drawer," said Ann. "The only thing that really bothers me about working for Louisa is the number of real nut cases out there. You wouldn't believe the fans who write to her, send her E-mails, gifts with cards saying they love her and want her to put garlic around her windows to keep out alien invaders, stuff like that. There actually was that one about garlic and the aliens. I didn't make it up."
"Anything else about Louisa?" asked Aiden.
"Like?"
"Anything," said Mac.
"She went out every morning for a walk, rain, sun, snow whatever," said Ann, thinking. "When she worked on a book, she sometimes spent the last week or so working away with the door closed and locked."
"You handled her bank account?" asked Mac.
"Accounts, yes."
"Did she ever take large sums out in cash?" asked Aiden.
"Yes," said Ann. "When she finished a book, she would take fifty thousand dollars out of her personal account, in cash."
"What did she do with it?" asked Mac.
"She donated it to her favorite charities," said Ann Chen with a smile. "Put it in envelopes and went herself to slip it under their doors. The NAACP, The Salvation Army, The Red Cross."
"You saw her do this?" asked Aiden.
"No, never. She did it alone, anonymously."
"Did you do her taxes?" asked Mac.
"Yes and no," said Ann. "My brother has an MBA from NYU. He did them with me."
"And," said Aiden, "she declared her donations to charity?"
"No," said Ann. "I urged her to. My brother said it was ridiculous not to, but Louisa insisted that she wasn't using her gifts as a tax dodge. I'm telling you she's a good woman and I can see that you think she might have killed Mr. Lutnikov."
"Did she?" asked Mac.
"No," said Ann. "She was no more likely to do something like that than I am."
"All right," said Aiden. "Did you kill Charles Lutnikov?"
"What? No, why would I? That's really all I have to say. I don't like feeling disloyal to Louisa."
Ann Chen stood up.
"Thank you for the coffee," she said, putting on her coat.
When she was gone, Aiden said, "I'll check with the NAACP and The Salvation Army offices near Louisa Cormier's building and ask if someone's been slipping envelopes of cash under their doors about the time Louisa comes out with a new book."
"Another coffee?" Mac asked.
"Make it a decaf with half and half, no sugar," she said.
Mac ordered the coffee for her and himself and removed a plastic bag from his kit under the table. He put on his gloves while the young man behind the counter watched perplexed. Mac deposited Ann's used cup in the bag, sealed it, and dropped the bag in his kit.
"You're cops, right?" asked the kid bringing their coffee.
"Yes," said Mac.
"Cool," said the kid.
"How much for the cup?" asked Mac.
"Nothing," said the kid. "No one will notice it's missing. If they do, I'll say a customer broke it."
He looked at Aiden again and said, "You're a cop?"
"I'm a cop," she confirmed.
"You never know, do you," he said and moved back behind the counter as the door opened and a young, laughing couple walked in.
A little over an hour later, Danny sat in the passenger seat of Flack's car while Flack drove. Danny adjusted his glasses and made the call to Stella.
"Hotel manager wants to know who's going to pay for the carpet," he said.
"Tell him to submit a bill to the city," she said.
"I did."
The car came to a stop at a red light and slid to the right, stopping inches away from a small, white delivery truck. The driver looked over at Danny, first with an intake of air expecting a collision and then with a flood of anger.
Even through the frost-covered window Danny could hear the man shouting at them in a language that was definitely Scandinavian. Don Flack calmly removed his wallet from his jacket pocket and reached past Danny to press his badge against the window.
The Scandinavian man, who needed a shave, looked at the badge and flipped his hand to show he didn't care if it was the police, the mayor, the Pope, or Robert DeNiro.
"Video camera on this corner," Flack said, putting his wallet back. "I think somebody should calm the Viking down before he loses it and someone gets hurt."
Danny nodded.
"Danny?" Stella said with exaggerated patience.
"There was nothing in the floor," said Danny. "No holes bigger than ones left by the nails I pulled."
It was what Stella had expected. Danny pushed the button to put Stella on speakerphone so Flack could hear her. Flack had just finished flipping closed his own phone after alerting the video line monitors about the pink-faced Viking who had stepped on the gas as soon as the light had changed. He missed Flack's car by the width of a few sheets of paper and zigzagged forward ahead of them.
"Fingerprint came up with a positive ID," Stella said. "Steven Guista, aka Big Stevie, prior arrests for everything from intimidation to assault and murder. Two convictions for which he served time. One for perjury. One for extortion. Officially, works as a truck driver for Marco's Bakery which is owned by…"
"… Dario Marco," Danny finished.
"Brother of Anthony Marco, who Alberta Spanio was going to testify against tomorrow," she said.
"Mac know?" asked Flack, moving forward, letting the Viking in the van wobble toward the next light.
"I'm going to call him now," she said.
"What do you want me to do?" Danny asked.
"Get back here and become an expert on chains," she said.
"Whips too?" he asked flatly.
She hung up.
Big Stevie sat in Toolie Prine's Bar on 9th Avenue, gargling a cold Sam Adams. Officially, and according to the old-fashioned white letters on the window, the bar was called Terry Malloy's, named after the Marlon Brando character in Big Stevie's favorite movie. Officially, the bar was owned by Toolie's sister, Patricia Rhondov, because Toolie was an ex-con. Officially, Toolie was the bartender. Officially, he still had to report to his parole office once a week. Anybody who knew any of this and most who didn't know any of it still called the place Toolie Prine's.
Big Stevie's behind drooped over the bar stool. Stevie was strong. It was in his genes. He had never worked out. His old man had been strong, worked on the docks. Stevie could have been a stevedore like his father. He would have been Stevie the Stevedore instead of just Big Stevie.
Toolie's was empty except for Stevie, who liked sitting alone in the amber darkness and looking through the window at cars and people plodding through the snow.
Stevie was pleased with himself. He had done the job he had been told to do. It had been easy- except for the part where he had almost fallen out of the window- and he had ten Benjamin Franklins in his wallet without having to break someone's face or knee. The only drawback was that he had spent four hours listening to the jockey complaining.
Jake the Jockey wasn't a bad guy but he was a complainer. He complained about the picture on the television and the size of the television. He complained about the heat in the room. He complained about the gyros they had eaten which Stevie had thought were particularly good. Stevie had eaten two of them.
The job had gone well, which was why Mr. Marco had given him the day off and the next day- Monday, Stevie's birthday- too. He should do something to celebrate besides coming back and sitting in Toolie's and downing mugs of Sam Adams, but he couldn't think of anything he wanted to do except maybe call Sandrine and have her send a girl, possibly that little Maxine, over to his two-room apartment. He liked small girls. Maybe later if he hadn't had too many beers.
The phone rang and Toolie answered it saying, "Yeah."
Then Toolie handed the phone to Big Stevie, who also said, "Yeah."
Stevie listened carefully.
"Got it," he said and handed the phone back to Toolie.
Big Stevie had another job to do. He wondered if maybe he wasn't getting a little old for this kind of thing.
Tomorrow Big Stevie Guista would be seventy-one years old.
Aiden Burn had called the offices of the NAACP and The Salvation Army. There was no answer at the NAACP, but there was an emergency number.
She called the emergency number and got a woman named Rhoda James, who said that she worked in the office and that she remembered no anonymous donations slipped under the door at any time in the past four years.
There was an answer at The Salvation Army. A Captain Allen Nichols said that he did remember one donation in particular, several years ago, an envelope with a one-hundred-dollar bill found inside the mailbox. As it was just before Christmas, all donations were put into the pot, ranging from a few cents to several thousand dollars. They were all anonymous.
She had passed the information on to Mac before returning to Charles Lutnikov's apartment where she started by taking photographs of all the walls of Charles Lutnikov's bookshelves. She stood close enough so that the book titles would all show clearly when she blew the photographs up into eight by tens.
She paused at one of the bookcases in the bedroom where two shelves were devoted to pristine copies of what looked to be all the books of Louisa Cormier. Aiden put down her camera and pulled out one of the Cormier books, Ah, Murder, from the shelf.
She opened it and went to the title page. It had not been signed by Louisa Cormier. She checked all of the author's books, putting them back after she finished. Her feeling that none of them had been read was confirmed when she flipped through the pages of Ah, Murder. Two pages were still attached at the side, had never been sliced or cut, making it impossible for Lutnikov or anyone else to read them. He had not read the books and he had not gotten them autographed by the woman he saw almost every day.
She took out her notebook and wrote a reminder to tell this to Mac. She didn't really need the reminder, but it didn't hurt and it followed procedure.
A random examination of a few dozen of the hundreds of books in the apartment showed that they had been read- jackets showing some wear, spines sometimes split or coming apart, coffee stains and ancient crumbs of toast or doughnut.
And then she turned to the typewriter, lifted the gray metallic top, and leaned forward to examine the black ribbon. Approximately one-third of the ribbon was on the right reel and two-thirds on the left. The ribbon on the right reel was what interested her. She carefully lifted the metal tabs holding each reel and then lifted them out.
Aiden bagged the typewriter ribbon, closed her kit, took a final look around the room, and opened the door. She took one more look back as she ducked under the crime-scene ribbon and closed the door behind her.
Mac sat at the lab station, a pile of slides and photographs of fingerprints taken from the crime scene elevator in front of him.
Mac had great respect for fingerprints, more than for DNA or even confessions. He had made a study of them, had notes in a file cabinet at home on the history of fingerprints, notes he had once planned to turn into a book. He had abandoned that idea the day his wife had died.
Fingerprints simply and truly did not lie. Liars with skill could play tricks with fingerprints, but the fact was simple: There were no two fingerprints alike. A Persian doctor in the fourteenth century had made this discovery. No one had ever found two alike. Even the most uncannily similar identical twins had different fingerprints. Mac had heard a sermon from a police chaplain who suggested that God had included this microscopic truth to show the vastness of his invention. Mac spent little time thinking about that. What interested him was the truth of the statement.
The first use of fingerprints in the United States was in 1882 by Gilbert Thompson of the U.S. Geological Survey in New Mexico. He put his fingerprints on a document to prevent forgery.
A murderer is identified by his fingerprints in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi in 1883.
The first recorded criminal identification was made in 1892 by Juan Vucetich, an Argentinean police official. He identified a woman named Rojas who had murdered her two sons and cut her own throat to implicate a third party. Vucetich found a bloody fingerprint of Rojas's on a door. The fingerprint had been left there before she cut her throat.
In 1897, under the British Council General of India, the first Fingerprint Bureau in Calcutta was established using a classification developed by two Indian experts which is still used today.
Eight years later, in 1905, the United States Army began using fingerprints for personal identification. The Navy and Marine Corps soon followed.
Today the FBI has a computer index, AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System), of more than forty-six million fingerprints of known criminals. Each state also has its own fingerprint file. New York is no exception.
After three hours, Mac concluded that the fingerprints of Ann Chen, Charles Lutnikov, and Louisa Cormier, in addition to many others, were all over the elevator in which Lutnikov had been killed.
Mac wondered when the elevator had last been thoroughly cleaned. He doubted it had been recently. He looked at the fingerprints of Lutnikov and the two women. The elevator might be a dead end, but there was still the murder weapon to find and places to look that they might not yet have considered.
Mac sat up, his back aching, and imagined the Rojas woman murdering her children and cutting her own throat. The image was not vivid, but the one of Juan Vucetich finding that fingerprint was.
It was a moment of forensic history that Mac Taylor wished he could have witnessed.
"No problem," the man said, sipping some coffee at the counter in Woo Ching's on Second Avenue uptown.
His egg roll, with two bites out of it, sat in front of him. He wasn't hungry. To his right sat a woman, not old, not young, once pretty, now good looking with short platinum hair. She was lean, well groomed and wore a fur-lined leather jacket and a fur hat. She had taken a few sips of the green tea she had ordered.
It was eleven in the morning on a Sunday, too cold for off-the-street customers except a few seeking respite from the weather over a cup of coffee or tea and a bowl of wonton soup or some egg foo yung.
The only other customers were a trio of women in a booth by the window.
The man didn't know who would be coming to talk to him, only that he was to go to Woo Ching's and have something to eat as soon as he was able to get away. No phones. When she did enter, he had recognized her.
"Details," she said, warming her hands on her cup, ignoring the small bowl of baked noodles in front of her.
He smiled and shook his head. There was no mirth in his smile.
"What's funny?" she asked.
Neither had looked directly at the other and they wouldn't for the remainder of the conversation. She had come in five minutes after he had ordered, sat across from him and ordered her tea.
"Snow," the man said.
"What's funny about snow?" she asked, checking her watch.
He explained how the snow created a problem they had not anticipated.
"But it's all right?" she asked emphatically.
"It'll be all right," he said, reaching for his pork fried rice, changing his mind and working on the egg roll. "The rest of the money."
"Here," she said removing a thick envelope from her purse and sliding it toward him. He slid the envelope to the edge of the counter, placed it in his jacket pocket, and drank some tea.
She didn't have to tell him what to do if things went badly or a warning call had to be made. He was a pro and he had everything at stake- his life, his family's safety.
She got up, pulled some bills out of her jacket pocket, selected a five dollar bill, dropped it near her cup, and walked toward the door. The man didn't watch her. He waited till he heard the door close before looking around quickly, pretending he was just glancing at the women in the booth and the traffic outside the window. Satisfied that he wasn't being watched, he suddenly felt hungry. He finished his egg rolls quickly, took big bites, savoring the taste even though the egg rolls had gotten just a bit soggy.
Across the street the man in the car with tinted windows had to make a decision, either follow the woman or stay with the man at the counter in the Chinese restaurant. He decided on the woman. He knew where to find the man later.
He flipped down his sun shade, got out of the car, locked it, and went after the woman who was walking slowly, collar turned up, hands in her pockets.
He figured she was heading for the subway station on 86th Street. He was right.
He was also certain that the man she had met in Woo Ching's and to whom she had handed something had something to do with this morning's murder. He meant to find out what it was before people started to pass out more blame, at least some of which would fall on him.
He buttoned his jacket, put on his ear muffs, and followed the woman down the street.
Stella stood over the table looking down at thirty one-foot-long, new metal chains laid out next to the wooden section of window sill that had been removed from the hotel room in which Alberta Spanio had been murdered.
Mac, arms folded, looked down at the display of chains. Danny stood at his side.
"Couldn't be a cable?" Mac asked, pointing at the groove in the wood and picking up a magnifying glass.
"Take a close look," she said.
It was her turn to fold her arms.
"See it?" she asked.
Mac examined the groove carefully and nodded.
"Cable would leave a smoother groove, neat, cleaner," Stella said. "The groove is half an inch across. All these chains are half an inch."
Mac straightened up and looked at her.
"If the killer came down a half-inch chain to the bathroom below, he or she would have to be really light," Stella said.
"Or really brave," said Danny.
"Or stupid or desperate," said Stella. "And he or she would have to swing through the bathroom window below without disturbing the snow. That, given the size of the space in the open window would mean a supermodel."
"Or a child," said Mac.
Stella shrugged, wondering just how small the man who had been with Stevie Guista when he took the room in the Brevard was.
"Still leaves a big question," she said. "Who was inside the room holding the chain?"
"It wasn't screwed into the floor or tied to any furniture," said Mac, picking up one of the chains.
"No. Danny tore up the floor. No holes. No chain marks or significant scratches in the furniture," she said.
"So, whoever was in the room held the chain."
"Or tied it around himself," Stella added.
"Even so, it would take a strong person to do it, lower someone down and hold steady while they swung into the bathroom window," he said.
"I tested the strongest chains that would fit marks on the window sill," she said. "Even a ninety pound person on the end of the chain would probably break it, especially if they had to swing through a small space."
"Sounds like a circus act," said Mac.
"Think so?"
"No," he said. "Database. Check for height and weight."
"Can we do that?" asked Danny.
"We can," Mac said.
"Can you see a man or boy dumb enough to let himself be lowered by a chain from a seventh-floor window during a snowstorm?" asked Danny. "Have to be awfully stupid or awfully brave."
"And have a lot of faith in whoever was holding the chain," added Mac.
"And what about that hole in the wood at the bottom of the bathroom window," Stella said. "It's not from a chain. It's from a big screw."
"So," Mac said. "What do we have?"
"A fingerprint belonging to Steven Guista," she said. "Also known as Big Stevie."
"Got an address?"
"He could be out celebrating," she said, handing Mac a fax sheet with Big Stevie's photograph and record on it. "Today's his birthday."
"I wonder what he was celebrating last night," said Mac. "Let's bring him a present."
It felt wrong. Flat. Detective Don Flack felt it. No evidence. Gut feeling. He had checked out the door to the bedroom in which Alberta Spanio had been killed. He had asked a maid to go into the room and scream after he closed the door. The maid was Mexican, a legal alien, Rosa Martinez. She didn't want to go into the room where the woman had died hours ago.
"You're not going to lock the door?" she asked.
Even as she asked the question, she knew the answer. The door could only be locked from the inside.
Rosa went in the room, closed the door, and screamed. Then she opened the door.
"Go over by the bed, next to the bed and scream again," he said.
She definitely did not want to go over to the bed in which the woman had died, but she did, and Flack closed the door. She screamed again and then hurried to open the door and step into the outer room.
"OK?" she asked.
"One more thing," Flack said. "Go into the bathroom. Open and close the window and scream."
"Then I'm done?" she asked.
"Then you're done," he said.
Rosa returned to the bedroom, closed the door, moved to the bathroom, and opened the window. Then she screamed once, closed the window, and hurried through the bedroom and into the outer room where the detective was waiting.
"OK," he said. "Thanks."
Rosa left quickly.
The first time she had screamed Flack had heard her, but faintly. The second scream from the bedside was even more faint, and he heard neither the scream from the bathroom nor the opening and closing of the window.
He pulled out his cell phone and called Stella.
They had news for each other.