Mona Lisa Eyes (Danny Logan Mystery #4) (28 page)

“Soon as
you can,” Ron said. “We’d appreciate it.” I handed
the bag back to Barry.

I turned and looked at
the rest of the apartment. The furnishings, along with the
apartment itself, were old and well-worn. Still, the place
was neat and clean, apparently well cared for. It certainly
didn’t look like any kind of dive. And Barry
was right—everything looked to be in its proper place.
Nothing appeared to be broken or damaged, nothing was missing.

I walked over and examined the front door. “Doesn’t
look like any signs of forced entry,” I said.

“I
agree,” Barry called out, “but I’ll bet you guys
find this interesting.” We walked over to the dining room
table where he was standing. “Have a look at this.”

There were two stacks of mail on the table. One
looked like typical junk mail, the other looked like more
important stuff: utility bills, that sort of thing.

“Look at
the postmark dates,” Barry said.

“Okay to touch?” I asked.

“
Yeah, go ahead,” Barry said. “Just keep ’em in the
same order.”

I picked up the top letter in one
of the stacks. The date was October 25—just two
days ago. “It was just like this?” I said. “Stacked
and sorted just like this.”

“Just like that. We haven’
t moved it.”

I looked at the stacks. “Well, somebody’
s been bringing the mail in and going through it.
And this stuff is only a couple days old.”

“Had
to have been Bannister,” Ron said.

“But why would he
risk doing that?” Toni asked. “Or even more odd, if
he planned to kill himself, why bother?”

“Who knows?” Ron
said. “Maybe he was waiting for something. Or maybe he
wanted to get his affairs in order.”

“You mean before
he jumped?”

“Before he turned himself in,” I said.

“He
could have also done it because he was planning to
jump,” Barry said. “I’ve seen that lots of times.
People get screwed up in the head and want to
kill themselves, but they don’t want to leave a
mess for their relatives. So before they go, they pay
off bills, clean things up, do the laundry—that sort
of thing.”

“I’ve seen that too,” Ron said. “There’
s something about the finality of—”

“Yo! Detective Levine!” one
of the CSI detectives working in the bathroom called out.

“
Yeah?” Barry said.

“Got something you need to see.”

Barry
turned and walked over to the bathroom. With his back
to us, he said, “That’s interesting.”

“What?” Ron said,
impatiently. “What is it?”

Barry turned around. He was holding
a blue plastic bag. He removed the black binder clip
holding the bag shut and opened it to look inside. “
It looks like cocaine to me.” He looked up. “We’
ll Scott test it here, and then we’ll check
it out in the lab.”

“I’ll bet we can
already tell you what it is,” Ron said. Toni and
I both knew what he meant. The blue plastic bag
was an identical match to the half-pound bag we
found in Judie Lawton’s apartment. “If it’s what
I think it is, I’m guessing it’s cocaine,
high-grade, about 60 percent pure.”

When we’d finished
examining Bannister’s apartment, Barry led us back to the
hallway and up the utility stairs to the roof. Stepping
outside, I saw that the rain, which had been falling
most of the day, had started up again. The building’
s roof was flat, perhaps one hundred feet long on
the street side and maybe just a little more than
that in depth. Small puddles formed here and there.

The
building had apparently been retrofitted for central heating and cooling—
HVAC machinery was located next to the doorway we’d
just stepped through. Ventilation turbines and plumbing vent pipes poked
through the roof at seemingly random intervals. A low parapet
wall, perhaps two feet high, completely surrounded the roof, I
suppose to shield the machinery and the plumbing from view
from the neighboring buildings. Two CSI detectives had strung an
extension cord to a portable light where they were working
near the parapet at the front of the building—where
Bannister had jumped. We walked over and joined them.

“Hey,
guys. Anything new?” Barry asked when we reached them.

“Yeah,”
the detective said. “It started raining again.”

“Other than that.”

“
Oh. Well, in that case, no, nothing new.”

Barry chuckled. “
Okay. Explain to the homicide detectives here what you’re
seeing.”

“Alright,” the man said. “First thing, as you can
see, the roof is flat. A lot of these little
mid-rise buildings were built around the time of the
World’s Fair back in the late fifties, and they
have a similar roof style. My dad was a roofer,
and he used to call this a built-up roof.
That means it’s got layers of roofing paper and
asphalt emulsion built up and then sealed with an emulsifier.
Then, the whole thing gets a coating of this pea
gravel you see down here.” He nudged the gravel with
his shoe. “The gravel’s supposed to protect the roof
from UV rays. Not that we have many of those
up here, but whatever.” He leaned over and scratched at
the damp gravel. “If the roof was old, this gravel
would have been pushed and shoved and kicked all over
the damn place through the years, and it wouldn’t
be much use to us. Kind of like one of
those old-fashioned Etch A Sketch things that’s been
used and hasn’t been cleared off. But since the
roof here looks like it was redone within the last
couple of years, the gravel is still relatively undisturbed. We
might be able to use it to get a bit
of the story of what happened here.”

“First off, we
can see what it’s not saying. There don’t
appear to be any dramatic scuff marks or displacement marks
that you’d probably see if there’d been a
fight up here. In a scuffle, people kick and scrape
the ground a lot. Unless someone noticed the scuff marks
and fixed them later, the gravel would be moved, and
we’d probably see more exposed roof material than we
do. But we don’t see that here. Based on
that, I’m saying that there was probably no struggle
up here. On the other hand, you can see right
over here where the gravel
is
displaced a little, kind
of flattened out.” He pointed to a place where the
gravel looked compressed.

“Looks like someone was sitting down there,”
I said.

“That’s exactly what we think too. We
think that’s where the vic sat down and removed
his shoes and socks. And he left them right there.”
He stepped aside and pointed, and we saw a pair
of sneakers placed side by side. A sock was stuffed
neatly into the top of each shoe. A small yellow
CSI marker with the number 3 was placed alongside the
shoes, to be used for reference in the photographs that
had undoubtedly already been taken.

“He left them like this?”
Ron asked.

The detective nodded. “Yep. Just like this. Classic
suicide behavior with jumpers. We see it a lot.”

Ron
nodded his head. “Strange, but true.” He looked at the
shoes, then he walked over to the edge and looked
down. “So it looks like this is the spot—where
he went over?”

“Right about there, yep. Landed right down
there where you see him.” I looked over the edge
and saw Bannister’s body sixty feet below us on
the sidewalk.

I scanned the whole area. “And you checked
the rest of the roof?”

“We have. We’ve done
a pretty thorough search of the whole roof, looking for
anything that might be suspicious. We didn’t find anything
though.”

I nodded. “It’s pretty dark up here. Will
you be coming back in the daylight?”

“Oh yeah. We’
ll be back in the morning to do a follow—
up. It’s our standard procedure. But we like to
make sure we do our initial assessment as soon as
we know about the crime scene so that we can
avoid as much contamination as possible—even if it means
doing it at night.” He looked up. “In the rain.”

I nodded. This was the same way I had been
taught.

I walked over to the edge and carefully looked
down. “Let me ask you, if someone jumps from this
high, are the falls always fatal?”

He thought for a
minute. “Five floors? Fifty-sixty feet? I don’t know
for sure, that’s probably a better question for the
ME. But if you pressed me, I’d have to
say the answer is probably. Maybe not always, but most
of the time, probably so. I imagine it depends a
lot on what you run into when you land. ’Course
our vic didn’t get any help in that area
because he landed on a concrete sidewalk. Not much give.”

I nodded. “How fast do you think he was going
when he hit?”

He shrugged. “I’d say probably forty,
maybe fifty miles per hour. Something like that.”

“Don’t
matter,” Ron said. “You know what they say. It ain’
t the speed, is it, Yosh?”

“Nope,” Yoshi said. “It’
s the TDS.”

“TDS?” Toni said, walking right into it
again.

Yoshi nodded. “Terminal Deceleration Syndrome. Gets ’em every time.”

We finished up on the roof and made our way
back downstairs, where the ME staff was still working to
release the body to the coroner. The rain was falling
steadily now. The sidewalks glistened and reflected red, then blue
with the lights from the patrol cars. Each brilliant flash
from the ME’s camera illuminated the scene and seemed
to freeze Bannister’s body in a grotesque death-pose,
arms and legs splayed to the side, eyes half-open,
a dark pool of blood beneath his head reflecting the
light.

I watched for a minute, lost in thought, almost
mesmerized by the sights and sounds until Ron walked over
and joined me. “Well, hell. I just love it when
a case solves itself,” he said, happily.

I turned to
look at him for a second. For me, things had
happened pretty fast in the last couple days, and I
wasn’t quite sure what to make of it yet—
I was going to need a little more processing time
to sort through all the events. Other than the incontrovertible
fact that a man who had not long ago been
alive was now lying here stone-cold dead right in
front of me, I had no conclusions. Then again, I
didn’t want to be rude, so I just nodded. “
Yeah.” I said. “I suppose that would be nice, wouldn’
t it.”

P
ART 2

C
hapter 17

WE NEEDED A BREAK
TO CLEAR
our heads, so Toni and I took Sunday
off. We drove over to Lake Crescent in the Olympic
National Park and just hung out. I went for a
long run, and afterward I sat in a camp chair
and played my guitar. Toni alternated between reading a novel
and dozing off and on. Mostly, we were just quiet
, thinking about the case—so many unanswered questions.

Monday morning
, we went to work, rested and determined to come up
with answers. Unfortunately, things were not clearer. One day passed
, then another, then another, and pretty soon, the whole week
flew past in a blur. For about the fourth time
, we went over all the evidence looking for something—anything
—that would either corroborate or refute the case against Josh
Bannister. We went through phone records looking for evidence of
phone calls to or from Bannister, interviews that might shed
some light on a drug transaction, financial records, photographs—everything
SPD had. By the time the weekend rolled around, though
, we still had the same murky lack of understanding as
when we started: physical evidence saying one thing; what little
we could find about Bannister’s background saying something else
. Our main suspect was dead, and I didn’t know
whether to be happy or sad.

In theory, the case
was solved—that was the police position, anyway. I didn
’t know what to believe—I’ll grant that what
actual evidence there was tended to support the notion that
Bannister was the guy. But to my mind, I wasn
’t sure there was enough to reach a definitive conclusion
. For her part, Toni didn’t have any doubts at
all. Her intuition told her that Bannister was being set
up and somebody was about to get away with murder
.

In any case, when she hired us last month, Cecilia
paid us for three weeks through November 9—this Friday
. After that, she either needed to extend our contract, or
we were off. Business economics 101.

“Look at you,” Toni
said to Kenny when he walked into our staff meeting
the following Monday. “No more nose pack.” Kenny’d just
gotten back from an early appointment at the doctor’s
office where he’d had his bandage removed.

Kenny smiled
. “That’s right. I’m back in business.”

“Good. You
’re going back to Krav Maga, right?” I asked.

He
nodded. “I am. I’m not going to let one
little mistake mess things up for me.”

“Good for you
,” Toni said.

Doc suddenly leaned over and stared at Kenny
, then he turned around and looked at me. He turned
back and we both stared at Kenny’s nose.

“What
?” Kenny said. “What’s wrong?”

Doc tilted his head, then
I followed suit.

“It’s just . . .” I said, holding my
hands a few inches apart then shifting them to a
small angle from straight up and down.

Doc nodded. “I
think maybe it’s a little . . .”

Toni looked at Doc
, then at me, then she caught on. “Stop it! You
two stop it right now.” We froze, then straightened up
.

Kenny looked at her, questions in his eyes.

“Your nose
is fine,” she said, reassuring him. “These idiots are acting
like children. Don’t listen to them.”

Kenny looked back
at us, and Doc and I both tilted our heads
again. I lifted my hands again, then we both started
laughing.

“Ha, ha. Very funny, you fuckers,” he said. “I
owe you.”

We were interrupted when the phone rang. Caller
ID: Ron Bergstrom. I put him on speakerphone.

“Hey, guys
. The lab got the sample tests back on the rope
this morning,” he said without preamble.

I felt a momentary
wave of tension. “And?”

“And it’s unusual, a specialty
item. It’s made by a company called Marlow, and
it’s called D12. The fibers are something called Dyneema
SK75—super strong—supposed to be stronger than steel. It
’s used in pulleys and winches, things like that. Anyway
, once they knew what it was, the lab was able
to match the rope found in Bannister’s apartment to
the rope used to strangle Judie Lawton. It’s an
exact match. They contacted the manufacturer, and turns out they
can identify it right down to the batch.”

“What about
the fibers from Sophie?” I asked.

“They compared the fibers
that the Lewis County ME found embedded in Sophie Thoms
’s neck too. Want to guess what they found?”

I
knew what he was going to say. “The fibers matched
up.”

“Gold star for you,” Ron said. “I just found
out. They were an exact match. Rope’s right off
the same spool.”

I considered this for a few seconds
. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly
. “Well, I guess you have your answers then.”

“The rope
ties everything together,” Kenny said.

We all looked at him
. “Very funny,” Toni said.

I turned back to the phone
. “So the rope makes it look like Bannister killed Sophie
Thoms. A perfect bow around the package.”

He laughed. “What
? I’m over here thinking ‘right on!’ We’re about
to have a party because we just confirmed our killer
and yet, listening to you, I’m sensing . . . skepticism? That
you are, shall we say, less than convinced?”

“Nope—ain
’t sayin’ that,” I said. “We’ve been reviewing evidence
for the past week, looking for answers. One of our
scenarios is that the ropes would match up. We’ve
been asking ourselves why and how. And honestly? The whole
thing sounds a little convenient to us, but who knows
? You know the old saying: ‘Sometimes the easy answer is
the right answer.’” I turned to Doc. “What’s that
theory called again?”

“Occam’s razor,” Doc said.

“That’s
right,” I said. “Occam’s razor. Could be the case
here . . . it’s just a little sudden, that’s all
.”

“Sudden?” Ron said. “Not for us. We’ve been at
this for more than three months.”

“You haven’t been
after Bannister all that time, though.”

“True. But the science
don’t lie.”

I thought about this. Science may not
lie, but it doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story
, either. “Here’s the deal, Ron,” I said. “We’ve
been talking about this very thing this afternoon. This is
our last week on the case—we’re only contracted
through this Friday. We’re going to take some time
and try to digest this latest bit of information before
we figure out our next move for the rest of
the week. You mind sending us a copy of the
report?”

“You bet. I’m emailing you a copy
right now.”

“Thanks,” I paused, then said, “so what’s
this mean as far as you guys are concerned? Case
closed? Where’s that leave SPD? You’re going to
wrap things up with the task force, I suppose?”

He
laughed. “Hell, Danny, they don’t tell me that kind
of stuff until the decision’s already been made. I
haven’t heard anything yet. If I had to guess
, knowing the kind of budget heat we’re under, I
’d say yeah, they’ll at least start scaling back
, maybe even shut it down. They got this thing around
here—once a case is solved, they like to stop
spending money on it. But they haven’t said anything
like that yet.”

He was silent for a few seconds
, and then he said, “Listen—you keep snoopin’ around, you
’d damn well better call me if you turn something
up between now and the end of the week, you
hear? Or later, even. I want to wrap this thing
up as much as anybody, but I don’t want
to make a mistake and cause the captain to pull
the plug on the task force too soon. I can
see it now: Captain Jerry goes on TV and announces
we’ve got our man, and he closes the task
force. A week later, you guys roll out someone else
altogether. We end up looking like idiots.”

“If you’re
worried about that, maybe it’s because you’re a
little concerned that SPD is calling the game too early
,” I said sharply.

“I ain’t callin’ shit,” he protested
. “It ain’t up to me. I want to catch
the son of a bitch who did this same as
you—the
right
son of a bitch. Personally, I think
it was Bannister. But if it wasn’t him, then
I want to find out who it was and hammer
the fucker. And the brass is under a shitload of
pressure to solve this thing and move on. So don
’t you get all uppity with me. All I’m
saying is that you’d just best not dare go
and figure something else out and saw off the limb
we’re sittin’ on. That wouldn’t be fair and
you owe us that, at least. Besides, we’re supposed
to be on the same fuckin’ side here. You find
something, you come to me.”

I smiled. “Easy problem to
prevent, Ron. Go to work on Captain Jerry. Keep the
task force going ’til we’re all certain.”

“Yeah? How
am I gonna do that? You guys have nothing but
hunches and feelings.”

“I’m not worried about what
we
have or don’t have,” I said. “I’m worried
about what
you
have or don’t have. All I
’m saying is hold up until there’s a little
more certainty.”

“Yeah. Piece of fuckin’ cake. I’ll do
what I can,” he said. We wrapped up and said
our good-byes.

We sat back for a moment and
just looked at each other.

“Wow,” Toni said. “This is
going to take a second—I don’t know what
to make of it yet.”

“Me neither,” I said, shaking
my head.

Two hours later, just as I was getting
ready to leave for the day, Ron called back to
tell me that a press conference had been scheduled for
Wednesday morning—they’d have made it for the next
day, but they didn’t want to compete for coverage
with the presidential election. He didn’t know what was
to be announced. Or maybe he knew, and he just
didn’t want to say.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d
like to read a short prepared statement, and then I
’ll be available for questions.” Captain Jerold Cunningham was a
tall, silver-haired man with a serious countenance. The mayor
and a half-dozen city officials flanked him to his
left. To his right stood all the members of the
Sophie Thoms Task Force, including Ron and Yoshi. Captain Cunningham
looked out over the crowd of reporters gathered before him
for the ten o’clock press conference called by SPD
in the city council chambers. Toni and I watched from
the back of the room.

“As you know, the Sophie
Thoms Homicide Task Force was formed back in late July
to investigate the murder of Seattle resident Sophie Thoms. Since
then, the task force has conducted a thorough investigation, including
the interviews of literally hundreds of people. We have meticulously
assembled this information in accordance with the best police practices
being used anywhere. Approximately ten days ago, Seattle resident Judie
Lawton, a friend of Sophie Thoms, was also brutally murdered
. Because of the nature of the relationship between the two
young women, and the fact that forensic evidence found at
the scene of each crime indicated that they were killed
in a similar manner, the task force was immediately assigned
the lead in the investigation into Ms. Lawton’s murder
.