Absolute Power

Chapter Nine

Walter Sullivan stared at the face, or what was left of it. The exposed foot showed the official morgue toe tag. While his entourage waited outside, he quietly sat alone with her. The identification had already been formally made. The police had gone off to update their records, the reporters to file their stories. But Walter Sullivan, one of the most powerful men of his era, who had made money from nearly everything he had touched since he was fourteen, now suddenly found himself bereft of energy, of any will whatsoever.

The press had had a field day with him and Christy after his marriage of forty-seven years had ended in the death of his first wife. But at almost eighty years old, he had just wanted something young and alive. After so much death, he had wanted something that would most certainly outlive him. With close friends and loved ones dying around him, he had passed his tolerance level as a mourner. Growing old was not easy, even for the very rich.

But Christy Sullivan had not survived him. And he was going to do something about that. It was fortunate that he was largely ignorant of what lay ahead for the remains of his late wife. It was a necessary process that was not in the least designed to comfort the victim’s family.

As soon as Walter Sullivan left the room, a technician would enter and wheel the late Mrs. Sullivan into the autopsy room. There she would be weighed and have her height confirmed. She would be photographed, first fully clothed, and then in the nude. Then X-rayed and fingerprinted. A complete external exam would be conducted, with the intent of noting and obtaining as much usable evidence and as many clues as possible from the body. Fluids would be taken and sent to toxicology for drug and alcohol screens and other testing. A Y incision would split her body shoulder to shoulder, chest to genitals. A horrific chasm for even the veteran observer. Every organ would be analyzed and weighed, her genitalia checked for signs of sexual intercourse or damage. Every trace of semen, blood or foreign hair would be sent for DNA typing.

Her head would be examined, wound patterns traced. Then a saw would make an intermastoid incision over the top of the skull, cutting through the scalp and down to the bone. Next, the front quadrant of the skull would be cut away and the brain removed through the frontal craniotomy and examined. The one slug would be extracted, marked for chain-of-custody purposes and held for ballistics.

Once that process was completed, Walter Sullivan would be given back his wife.

Toxicology would verify the contents of her stomach and traces of foreign substances in her blood and urine.

The autopsy protocol would be prepared, listing the cause and mechanism of death and all relevant findings, and the official opinion of the Medical Examiner.

The autopsy protocol, together with all photographs, X-rays, fingerprints, toxicology reports and any other information constituting the entire case file would be deposited with the detective in charge.

Walter Sullivan finally rose, covered the remains of his deceased wife and left.

From behind yet another one-way mirror, the detective’s eyes followed the bereaved husband as he left the room. Then Seth Frank put on his hat and quietly exited.

Conference room number one, the largest in the firm, held a prominent center position right behind the reception area. Now, behind the thick sliding doors, a meeting of the entire partnership had just convened.

Between Sandy Lord and another senior partner sat Jack Graham; his partnership not yet official, but protocol was not important today and Lord had insisted.

Coffee was poured by the housekeeping staff, danishes and muffins were distributed around, and then the help retreated, closing the doors behind them.

All heads turned to Dan Kirksen. He sipped his juice, tapped his mouth affectedly with his napkin and rose.

“As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, a terrible tragedy has befallen one of our most” — Kirksen glanced quickly at Lord — “or I should say, our most significant client.” Jack looked around the sixty-foot marble-top table. Most heads remained trained on Kirksen, a few others were filled in on the events by whispers from their neighbor. Jack had seen the headlines. He had never worked on any of Sullivan’s matters but he knew they were extensive enough to occupy forty attorneys at the firm on almost a full-time basis. He was, by far, Patton, Shaw’s biggest client.

Kirksen continued. “The police are investigating the matter thoroughly. As yet there have been no developments in the case.” Kirksen paused, glanced again at Lord, and then continued. “As one can imagine, this is a very distressing time for Walter. To make matters as easy as possible for him during this time, we are asking all attorneys to pay particular attention to any Sullivan-related matters, and, hopefully, to nip any potential problem in the bud before it escalates. Further, while we do not believe that this is anything other than a routine burglary with a very unfortunate result, and is in no way connected to any of Walter’s business affairs, we are asking each of you to be alert for any unusual signs in any of the dealings in which you are engaged on Walter’s behalf. Any suspicious activity is to be reported immediately to either myself or Sandy.”

A number of heads turned toward Lord, who was looking at the ceiling in his customary fashion. Three cigarette butts lay in the ashtray in front of him, the remains of a Bloody Mary beside it.

Ron Day, from the international law section, spoke up. His neatly trimmed hair framed an owlish face partially obscured by slender oval spectacles. “This isn’t a terrorist thing is it? I’ve been putting together a string of Middle Eastern joint ventures for Sullivan’s Kuwaiti subsidiary, and those people operate under their own rules, I can tell you that. Should I be worried for my personal safety? I’m on a flight this evening for Riyadh.”

Lord swiveled his head around until his eyes fell on Day. Sometimes it surprised him how myopic if not downright idiotic many of his partners were. Day was a service partner whose main, and in Lord’s mind only, strength was his ability to speak seven languages and politely kiss the ass of the Saudis.

“I wouldn’t worry about that, Ron. If this is an international conspiracy, you’re not important enough to dick around with, and if they do target you, you’ll be dead before you ever see it coming.”

Day fiddled with his necktie as an uneasy mirth quietly circled the table.

“Thank you for the clarification, Sandy.”

“You’re welcome, Ron.”

Kirksen cleared his throat. “Rest assured that everything that can be done to solve this heinous crime is being done. There’s even talk that the President himself will authorize a special investigative task force to look into the matter. As you know, Walter Sullivan has served in various capacities in several administrations, and is one of the President’s closest friends. I think we can assume that the criminals will be in custody shortly.” Kirksen sat down.

Lord looked around the table, elevated his eyebrows and crushed out his last cigarette. The table cleared.

Seth Frank swiveled around in his chair. His office was a six-by-six pen, the sheriff warranting the only spacious area in the small headquarters building. The medical examiner’s report was on his desk. It was only seven-thirty in the morning but Frank had already read every word of the report three times.

He had attended the autopsy. It was just something detectives had to do, for a lot of reasons. Although he had been present at literally hundreds of them, he had never grown comfortable with seeing the dead tinkered with like the animal remains every college biology student had sunk their digits into. And although he no longer became ill at the sight, it usually took him two or three hours of driving around aimlessly before he could attempt to settle back down to work.

The report was thick and neatly typed. Christy Sullivan had been dead at least seventy-two hours, probably longer. The swelling and blistering of the body, and the bacteria and gaseous onset in her organs, substantiated that time range with pretty good accuracy. However, the room had been very warm, which had accelerated the postmortem putrefaction of the body. That fact, in turn, made ascertaining the actual time of death increasingly difficult. But not less than three days, the medical examiner had been firm on that. Frank also had ancillary information that led him to believe that Christine Sullivan had met her death on Mon day night, which would put them smack in the three-to-four-day range.

Frank felt himself frowning. A minimum of three days meant he was facing a very cold trail. Someone who knew what they were doing could disappear from the face of the earth in three or four days. Added to that was the fact that Christine Sullivan had been dead a while now and his investigation was really no further along than when he started. He could not remember a case where the trail was so nonexistent.

As far as they could ascertain there were no witnesses to the incidents at the Sullivan estate, other than the decedent and whoever had murdered her. Notices had been placed in the papers, at banks and shopping centers. No one had come forward.

They had talked to every homeowner within a three-mile radius. They had all expressed shock, outrage and fear. Frank had seen the latter in the twitch of an eyebrow, hunched shoulders and the nervous rubbing of hands. Security would be even tighter than ever in the little county. All those emotions, however, yielded no usable information. The staffs of each of the neighbors had also been thoroughly questioned. There was nothing there. Telephone interviews had been conducted of Sullivan’s household staff, who had accompanied him to Barbados, with nothing earth-shattering to report back. Besides, they all had ironclad alibis. Not that that was insurmountable. Frank filed that away in the back of his mind.

They also did not have a good snapshot of Christine Sullivan’s last day of life. She was murdered in her house, presumably late at night. But if she had indeed been murdered on Monday night, what had she been doing during the day? Frank believed that information had to lend them something to go on.

At nine-thirty in the morning on that Monday, Christine Sullivan had been seen in downtown Washington at an upscale salon where it would cost Frank two weeks’ pay to send his wife for a pampering. Whether the woman was gearing up for some late-night fun or this was something the rich did on a regular basis was something Frank would have to find out. Their inquiries had turned up nothing on Sullivan’s whereabouts after she had left the salon around noon. She had not returned to her apartment in the city, nor had she taken a taxicab anywhere that they could determine.

If the little woman had stayed behind when everyone else went to the sunny south, she had to have a reason, he figured. If she had been with someone that night, that was someone Frank wanted to talk to, and maybe handcuff.

Ironically, murder in the commission of a burglary did not constitute capital murder in Virginia, although, interestingly enough, murder during the course of an armed robbery did. If you robbed and killed, you could be sentenced to death. If you burgled and killed, the most you’d be looking at was life, which wasn’t that great of a choice given the barbaric conditions of most state prisons. But Christine Sullivan had worn much jewelry. Every report the detective had received indicated she was a great lover of diamonds, emeralds, sapphires; you named it, she wore it. There was no jewelry on the body, although it was easy enough to see the marks on the skin the rings had made. Sullivan had also confirmed that his wife’s diamond necklace was missing. The beauty salon owner also remembered seeing that particular piece on Monday.

A good prosecutor could make out a case of robbery on those facts, Frank was sure of it. The perps were lying in wait, premeditation the whole way. Why should the good people of Virginia have to pay thousands of dollars a year to feed, clothe and house a cold-blooded killer? Burglary? Robbery? Who the fuck really cared? The woman was dead. Blown away by some sick goon. Legal distinctions like that did not sit well with Frank. Like many law enforcement people, he felt the criminal justice system was weighted far too heavily in favor of the defendant. It often seemed to him that lost in the entire convoluted process with its intricate deals, technical traps and ultrasmooth defense attorneys was the fact that someone had actually broken the law. That someone had been hurt, raped or killed. That was just flat-out wrong. Frank had no way to change the system, but he could peck around its edges.

He pulled the report closer, fumbling with his reading glasses. He took another sip of the thick, black coffee. Cause of death: lateral gunshot wounds to the cephalic region caused by high-velocity, large-caliber firearm(s) firing one expanding, softnose bullet causing a perforating wound, and a second slug of unknown composition from an unidentified weapon source causing a penetrating wound. Which, in ordinary English, meant her brain had been blown apart by some heavy-duty hardware. The report also stated that the manner of death was homicide, which was the only clear element Frank could see in the entire case. He noted that he had been correct in his conclusion of the distance from which the shots had come. There were no traces of powder in the wound track. The shots had come from over two feet away; Frank surmised that the distance was probably closer to six feet, but that was only his gut talking. Not that suicide had ever been a consideration. But murders for hire were usually of the barrel-to-flesh variety. That particular method cut down considerably on the margin of error.

Frank leaned closer to his desk. Why more than one shot? The woman most certainly was killed with the first round. Was the assailant a sadist, pumping round after round into a dead body? And yet they could account for only two entries into the body, hardly the lead barrage of some madman. Then there was the issue of the slugs. A dumdum and a mystery bullet.

He held up a bag with his mark on it. Only one round had been recovered from the body. It had entered below the right temple, flattened and expanded on impact, penetrated the skull and brain, causing a shock wave of the soft brain tissue, like rolling up a carpet.

He carefully nudged the caged creature or what was left of it. A gruesome projectile that was designed to flatten upon impact and then proceed to rip apart everything in its path, it had worked as designed on Christine Sullivan. Problem was dumdums were everywhere now. And the projectile deformity had been immense. Ballistics had been next to useless.

The second round had entered a half-inch above the other, traversed the entire brain, and exited the other side, leaving a gaping hole much larger than the entrance wound. The bone and tissue damage had been considerable.

This bullet’s resting place had given them all a surprise. A half-inch hole in the wall against the bed. Ordinarily after having cut out the piece of plaster, the lab personnel, using special tools, would have extracted the slug, being careful to preserve the grooving of the bullet, which would enable them to narrow down the make of gun from which it was fired and hopefully to eventually match it to a particular piece of ordnance. Fingerprints and ballistics identification were as close to certain as you got in this business.

Except in this case, while the hole was there, there was no slug in the hole, and no other slug in the room. When the lab had called him to report that finding, Seth Frank had gone down to see for himself. That was as angry as he had gotten in a long time.

Why go to the trouble of digging out a slug when you still had one in the corpse? What would the second slug show that the first wouldn’t? There were possibilities.

Frank made some notes. The missing bullet could be a different caliber or type, which probably would show there were at least two assailants. Strong as his imagination was, Frank could not realistically envision one person wielding a gun in each hand and popping off at the woman. So now he had a probable two suspects. That would also explain the different entry, exit and internal wound patterns. The tumbling dumdum’s entry hole was larger than the other slug’s. So the second slug wasn’t a hollow or softnose. It had blown right through her head, leaving a tunnel half the width of a pinkie in its wake. Projectile deformity had probably been minimal, which was meaningless since he didn’t have the damn slug.

He looked over his initial scene notes. He was in the collection-of-information stage. He hoped he would not be stuck there forever. At least he didn’t have to worry about the statute of limitations expiring on this one.

He looked at the report one more time, and his frown returned.

He picked up his phone and dialed. Ten minutes later he was sitting across from the Medical Examiner in the latter’s office.

The big man pried at his cuticles with an old scalpel and finally glanced up at Frank.

“Strangulation marks. Or at least attempted strangulation. Understand, the trachea wasn’t crushed, although there was some swelling and hemorrhaging in the tissue, and I found evidence of a slight fracture of the hyoid bone. Got traces of petechia in the conjunctiva of the eyelids too. Nonligature. It’s all in the protocol.”

Frank turned that over in his mind. Petechia, or tiny hemorrhages in the conjunctiva, or mucous membrane, of the eyes and eyelids, could be caused by strangulation and the resulting pressure on the brain.

Frank leaned forward in his chair, looked at the degrees lining the wall proclaiming the man opposite from him to be a long-dedicated student of forensic pathology.

“Man or woman?”

The Medical Examiner shrugged at the inquiry.

“Hard to tell. Human skin isn’t a stellar surface for prints, as you know. In fact it’s pretty impossible except in a few discrete areas, and after about half a day, if there was anything there, it won’t be anymore. Hard to imagine, though, a woman trying to strangle another woman with her bare hands, but it’s happened. Doesn’t take much pressure to crush a trachea, but bare-handed strangling’s usually a macho method of inflicting death. In a hundred strangling cases, I’ve never seen one where it was proved that a woman committed it. This was from the front too,” he added. “Mano a mano. You’d have to be pretty damn confident of your strength advantage. My educated guess? It was a man, for what a guess is worth.”

“The report also says there were contusions and bruises on the left side of her jaw, loosened teeth and cuts on the inside of her mouth?”

“Looks like somebody belted her a good one. One of the molars almost penetrated her cheek.”

Frank glanced at his case file. “The second bullet?”

“The damage inflicted leads me to believe it’s a large caliber, just like the first.”

“Any guesses on the first?”

“That’s all it would be. Maybe .357, 41. Could’ve been a 9mm too. Jesus, you saw the slug. Damn thing was flat as a pancake with half of it dispersed through her brain tissue and fluid. No lands, grooves, twists. Even if you find a probable firearm you’re not going to get a match there.”

“If we can find the other one, we might be in business.”

“Maybe not. Whoever dug it out of that wall probably messed up the markings. Ballistics won’t be happy with that.”

“Yeah, but it might just have some of the deceased’s hair, blood and skin imbedded in the nose. That’s some trace I’d love to get my hands on.”

The ME rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “That’s true. But you’ve got to find it first.”

“Which we probably won’t.” Frank smiled.

“You never know.”

The two men looked at each other, knowing full well that there was no way in hell they were going to find the other slug. Even if they did, they couldn’t place it at the murder scene unless it had trace evidence of the deceased on it, or they could find the gun that had fired it and placed the weapon at the murder scene. A potential double whammy.

“Find any brass?”

Frank shook his head.

“Then you got no pinprick either, Seth.” The Medical Examiner was referring to the unique imprint left by the firing pin of a gun on the base of the shell casing.

“Never said it would be easy. By the way, state guys giving you room to breathe on this one?”

The Medical Examiner smiled. “Remarkably silent. Now if it had been Walter Sullivan getting whacked, who knows? I already filed my report in Richmond.”

Then Frank said the question he had really come to ask.

“Why two shots?”

The Medical Examiner stopped picking his cuticle, put down his scalpel and looked at Frank.

“Why not?” His eyes crinkled. He was in the unenviable position of being more than competent for the opportunities presented him in the quiet county. One of approximately five hundred Deputy Medical Examiners in the commonwealth, he enjoyed a thriving general practice but had a personal fascination with both police investigations and forensic pathology. Before settling into a quiet life in Virginia he had served as a deputy coroner for Los Angeles County for almost twenty years. It didn’t get much worse than L.A. for homicides. But this was one he could get his teeth into.

Frank looked at him intently and said, “Either shot would have obviously been fatal. No question. So why fire a second? You wouldn’t for a lot of reasons. Number one being the noise. Number two, if you want to get the hell out of there, why take the time to pump another round into her? On top of that, why leave behind another slug that could ID you later on? Did Sullivan startle them? If so, why did the shot come from the doorway into the room, and not the other way around? Why was the firing line descending? Was she on her knees? She probably was or else the shooter was off the scale height-wise. If she was on her knees, why? Execution-style? But there were no contact wounds. And then you have the marks on the neck. Why try to strangle her first, then stop, pick up a gun and blow her head off? And then blow it off again. One slug’s taken. Why? A second gun? Why try to hide that? What’s significant about that?”

Frank stood up and moved around the room, his hands stuck deep into his pockets, a habit of his when thinking intently. “And the crime scene was so fucking clean I couldn’t believe it. There was nothing left. And I mean nothing. I’m surprised they didn’t operate on her and pull out the other slug.

“I mean, come on, this guy was a burglar or maybe that’s what he wants us to believe. But the vault was cleaned out. About four and a half million taken. And what was Mrs. Sullivan doing there? She was supposed to be sunning in the Caribbean. Did she know the guy? Was she screwing around on the side? If she was, are the two incidents related in any way? And why the hell would you waltz in the front door, knock out the security system, and then use a rope to climb out the window? Every time I ask myself one question another one pops up.” Frank sat back down, looking slightly bewildered at his outpouring.

The Medical Examiner leaned back in his chair, twirled the case file around and took a minute to read over it. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his sleeve, tugged at a corner of his lip with his thumb and index finger.

Frank’s nostrils quivered as he watched the ME. “What?”

“You mentioned nothing being left at the crime scene. I’ve been thinking about that. You’re right. It was too clean.” The Medical Examiner took his time in lighting up a Pall Mall — unfiltered, Frank noted. Every pathologist he had ever worked with had smoked. The Medical Examiner blew rings in the air, obviously enjoying this mental exercise.

“Her fingernails were too clean.”

Frank looked puzzled.

The Medical Examiner continued. “I mean there was no dirt, nail polish — although she was wearing it, bright red stuff — none of the ordinary residues you’d expect to find. Nothing. It was like they had been scoped out, you know what I mean?” He paused and then continued. “I also found minute traces of a solution.” He paused again. “Like a cleansing solution.”

“She’d been to some fancy beauty salon that morning. For a nail job and all that.”

The ME shook his head. “Then you’d expect to find more residue, not less, with all the chemicals they use.”

“So what are you saying? That her nails were deliberately cleaned out?”

The Medical Examiner nodded. “Someone was real careful not to leave any ident material behind.”

“Which means they were paranoid about being identified, somehow, by the physical evidence.”

“Most perps are, Seth.”

“To a degree. But squirting out fingernails and leaving a place so clean our E-vac came up basically empty is a little much.”

Frank scanned the report. “You also found traces of oil on her palms?”

The ME nodded, looked closely at the detective. “A preservative/protective compound. You know, like you’d use on fabrics, leathers, stuff like that.”

“So she may have been holding something and the residue was left there?”

“Yep. Although we can’t be sure exactly when the oil came to be on her hands.” The Medical Examiner put his glasses back on. “You think she knew the person, Seth?”

“None of the evidence points that way, unless she invited him over to burglarize the place.”

The Medical Examiner had a sudden inspiration. “Maybe she set up the burglary. You know? Tired of the old man, brings in the new bedroom buddy to conveniently steal their nest egg and it’s off to Fairy Tale Land?”

Frank considered the theory. “Except they have a falling out or there’s a double cross all along, and she gets the business end of some serious lead?”

“It fits the facts, Seth.”

Frank shook his head. “From all accounts the deceased loved being Mrs. Walter Sullivan. More than the money, if you know what I mean. She got to rub shoulders, and probably other parts of her anatomy, with famous people all over the world. Pretty heady for somebody who used to flip burgers at a Burger King.”

The ME stared at him. “You’re kidding?”

The detective smiled. “Eighty-year-old billionaires sometimes get strange ideas. It’s like where does the eight-hundred-pound gorilla sit? Anywhere he damn well pleases.”

The Medical Examiner grinned and shook his head. Billionaire? What would he do with a billion dollars? He looked down at the ink blotter on his desk. Then he put out his cigarette and looked back at the report, then at Frank. He cleared his throat.

“I think the second slug was a semi- or full-metal jacket.”

Frank loosened his tie, put his elbows on the desk. “Okay.”

The Medical Examiner went on. “It blew through the right temporal bone of the cranium and burst through the left pareital bone, leaving an exit wound over twice the size of the entry.”

“So you’re saying definitely two guns.”

“Not unless the guy was chambering different types of ammo in the same gun.” He looked keenly at the detective. “That doesn’t seem to surprise you, Seth.”

“It would have an hour ago. It doesn’t now.”

“So we probably have two perps.”

“Two perps with two guns. And a lady how big?”

The Medical Examiner didn’t need to refer to his notes. “Sixty-two inches tall, one hundred and five pounds.”

“So a little woman and two probable male perps with heavy-caliber hardware who try to strangle her, beat her up and then both open fire on her, killing her.”

The Medical Examiner rubbed at his chin. The facts were more than a little puzzling.

Frank glanced at the report. “You’re sure the strangulation marks and beating came before death?”

The Medical Examiner looked offended. “Positive. Pretty mess, isn’t it?”

Frank flipped through the report, making notes as he went. “You could say that. No attempted rape. Nothing like that?”

The Medical Examiner didn’t answer.

Finally Frank looked up at him, took off his glasses, put them down on the desk and leaned back, sipping the black coffee he had been offered earlier.

“The report doesn’t say anything about a sexual assault,” he reminded his friend.

The Medical Examiner finally stirred. “The report’s correct. There was no sexual assault. No trace of seminal fluid, no evidence of penetration, no overt bruising. All that leads me to conclude, officially, that no sexual assault occurred.”

“So? You’re not satisfied with that conclusion?” Frank looked at him expectantly.

The Medical Examiner took a sip of coffee, stretched out his long arms until he felt a comforting pop deep within the confines of his aging body and then leaned forward.

“Your wife ever go in for a gynecological exam?”

“Sure, doesn’t every woman?”

“You’d be surprised,” the Medical Examiner replied dryly, then continued. “Thing is, you go in for an exam, no matter how good the ob-gyn is, there’s usually some slight swelling and small abrasions in the genitalia. It’s the nature of the beast. To be thorough, you have to get in there and dig around.”

Frank put down his coffee, shifted in his chair. “So what are you saying, she had her gynecologist visit her in the middle of the night right before she got popped?”

“The indications were slight, very slight, but they were there.” The Medical Examiner paused, choosing his words carefully. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since I handed in the protocol. Understand, it could be nothing. She could have done it herself, you understand what I’m saying? To each their own. But from the looks of it, I don’t think it was self-inflicted. I think somebody examined her shortly after her death. Maybe two hours after, maybe earlier.”

“Checked her for what? To see if something had happened?” Frank did not try to hide his incredulity.

The Medical Examiner eyed him steadily. “Not much else to check a woman for down there in that particular situation, is there?”

Frank stared at the man for a long moment. This information merely added to his already increasing temple throbber. He shook his head. The balloon theory again. Push one side in and it bulges out somewhere else. He scribbled down some notes, his eyebrows bunched together, the coffee sipped unconsciously.

The Medical Examiner looked him over. This was not an easy one, but so far, the detective had punched all the right buttons, asked good questions. He was puzzled, but then that was a big part of the process. The good ones never solved them all. But then they also didn’t remain puzzled forever. Eventually, if you were lucky and diligent, maybe more of some on one case than on another, you would break it open, and the pieces would come tumbling into place. The Medical Examiner hoped this was one of those cases. Right now, it didn’t look all that good.

“She was pretty drunk when she bought it.” Frank was examining the toxicology report.

“Point two-one. I haven’t personally seen that number since my college frat days.”

Frank smiled. “Well I’m wondering where she got that point two-one.”

“Plenty of booze in a place like that.”

“Yeah, except there were no dirty glasses, no open bottles, and no discards in the trash.”

“So, maybe she got drunk somewhere else.”

“So how’d she get home?”

The Medical Examiner thought for a moment, rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Drove. I’ve seen people with higher percentages behind the wheel.”

“You mean in the autopsy room, don’t you?” Frank continued: “The problem with that theory is that none of the cars in the garage had been driven from the time the household left for the Caribbean.”

“How do you know that? An engine isn’t going to be warm after three days.”

Frank perused the pages of his notebook, found what he wanted and slid it around to his friend.

“Sullivan has a full-time chauffeur. Old guy named Bernie Kopeti. Knows his cars, anal as a tax lawyer, and he keeps meticulous records on Sullivan’s fleet of automobiles. Has the mileage for every one of them in a log book, updated daily, if you can believe it. At my request he checked the odometer on each of the cars in the garage, which presumably were the only ones the wife would have access to, and in fact were the only cars in the garage at the time of the discovery of the body. On top of that Kopeti confirmed that no vehicles were missing. There was no additional mileage on any of them. They hadn’t been driven since everyone cleared out for the Caribbean. Christine Sullivan didn’t drive home in one of those cars. So how did she get home?”

“Cab?”

Frank shook his head. “We’ve talked to every cab company that operates out here. No fare was dropped off at the Sullivan address on that night. It’d be pretty hard to forget the place, wouldn’t you think?”

“Unless maybe the cabbie whacked her, and isn’t talking.”

“You’re saying she invited a cabbie into her house?”

“I’m saying she was drunk and probably didn’t know what the hell she was doing.”

“That doesn’t jibe with the fact that the alarm system was tampered with, or that there was a rope dangling outside her window. Or that we’re probably talking about two perps. I’ve never seen a cab driven by two cabbies.”

A thought struck Frank and he scribbled in his notebook. He was certain Christine Sullivan had been driven home by someone she knew. Since that person or persons had not come forward, Frank thought he had a pretty good idea why they hadn’t. And exiting out the window via a rope instead of the way they’d entered — through the front door — meant that something had caused the killers to rush. The most obvious reason was the private security patrol, but the security guard on duty that night had not reported anything out of the ordinary. The perps didn’t know that, however. The mere sight of the patrol car might have prompted such a hasty exit.

The Medical Examiner leaned back in his chair, unsure of what to say. He spread out his hands. “Any suspects?”

Frank finished writing. “Maybe.”

The Medical Examiner looked sharply at him. “What’s her husband’s story? One of the richest guys in the country.”

“The world.” Frank put his notebook away, picked up the report, drained the last of his coffee. “She decided to opt out on the way to the airport. Her husband believes she went to stay at their Watergate apartment in town. That fact has been confirmed. Their jet was scheduled to pick her up in three days and take her down to the Sullivan estate outside of Bridgetown, Barbados. When she didn’t show at the airport, Sullivan got worried and started calling. That’s his story.”

“She give him any reason for the change in plan?”

“Not that he’s telling me.”

“Rich guys can afford the best. Make it look like a burglary while they’re four thousand miles away swinging in a hammock sipping island bug juice. Think he’s one of them?”

Frank stared at the wall for a long moment. His thoughts went back to the memory of Walter Sullivan sitting quietly next to his wife at the morgue. How he looked when he had no reason to believe anyone was watching.

Frank looked at the Medical Examiner, then got up to leave.

“No. I don’t.”