Four Walls

21

STELLA HAD TO ADMIT to having a great deal of fun going through Marty Johannsen's apartment.

Marty lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in a large complex on Henry Hudson Parkway East. It was a fairly typical "bachelor pad": dirty laundry everywhere, huge piles of unwashed dishes in the sink, moldy food in the refrigerator, and piles of stuff all over the floor.

Marty was already home from Feldstein's when Stella buzzed his apartment number from the lobby. His voice distorted over the old speaker, he asked, "Who is it?"

"NYPD, Mr. Johannsen. Please let us in."

There was a long pause, and Stella feared that he was bolting down the fire escape or something-but eventually the distorted voice came back. "Yeah, okay."

After that came the low buzz of the lobby door unlocking. With that, Stella, Angell, a medtech, and four uniforms from the five-oh went in and took the elevator to the twelfth floor.

Johannsen was standing in the open doorway. "What's this about, Detective Bonasera? Yeah, I remember you. Thought it was cute the way you asked about Chris, too, like I wouldn't know you were just asking about me. But you're wasting your time. I didn't do anything wrong."

"Maybe, maybe not." Stella held up the warrant, signed by Judge Montagnino. "But we're gonna find out for sure."

Johannsen snatched the warrant from her and looked down at it with distaste. "Christ. Fine, whatever, guess I don't have a choice, huh?"

"Nope," Stella said. "First thing I'm going to need is some blood and DNA-and I also need to photograph your face."

While the medtech set up to draw blood and scrape Johannsen's cheek, Stella picked up her Nikon and photographed the bruise on the man's cheek, both by itself and with him (reluctantly) holding up an L ruler next to it. She then removed the memory card from her camera and placed it in her phone so she could e-mail the pictures to Lindsay at the lab.

Snapping latex gloves onto her hands, Stella started going through the dirty clothes scattered around the apartment, eventually finding a black sweatshirt that was inside out. She took several pictures of it before turning it right-side out.

A fingernail shook loose from the fabric and fell to the floor.

Stella took several pictures of that as well, and was overjoyed to see that there was purple nail polish on it. Then she grabbed a pair of tweezers and placed the nail in an envelope.

"Is that our San Diego sweatshirt?" Angell said, walking over to join her.

Stella held up the shirt to show Angell the city's name embazoned in sparkly letters. "Yup. This is what our guy was wearing two nights ago-and looky what I found." She held up the small envelop. "A purple fingernail."

Angell raised an eyebrow. "I just had them bag his laptop. But there's no printer."

"What about the laptop itself?"

Angell shrugged. "Couldn't find the love poems."

"I'll have our guys go over it-he might be hiding them, or they may have been deleted. As long as they weren't purged, we should be able to pull them out."

Smirking, Angell said, "Well, this guy didn't think to wash the clothes he killed a girl in, so I doubt he thought he'd need to do more than delete the files." Then she let out a long sigh.

"What's the matter?"

"It's nothing."

Stella stared at her. "Jen."

"I wanted it to be Morgenstern, just so I could stick it to Bracey," she finally said. "Now I have to actually leave him-and her-alone. Doesn't sit right."

Chuckling, Stella said, "I'm sure you'll live."

As soon as Lindsay received the photos from Stella's Treo, she called them up and compared the size and shape of the bruise on his face to the autopsy photos of Maria's fist. It was a good match. Again, not perfect, but at least you couldn't say with any certainty that the bruise wasn't caused by the fist, which was often the best one could do in such circumstances.

A bit later, a uniform came by with several sample envelopes: the fingernail that was lodged in the sweatshirt, and Marty Johannsen's blood and cheek scraping.

Her first stop was with Adam, to give him the blood sample. Next was Jane Parsons's office. She yawned as Lindsay entered. "Another late night with the ER doc?" Lindsay asked with a grin.

Jane simply waggled her eyebrows. "What have you for me now, Ms. Monroe?"

"A new reference sample-except this may be our perp."

"This is the blood from the necklace, yes?"

Lindsay nodded.

"Spiffing. I'll let you know as soon as I've crosschecked."

Her next stop was the morgue.

Sid Hammerback was waiting for her, along with Maria Campagna's autopsied body. "Good timing," Sid said when she walked in. "We just got a call from the Campagna family wondering when we can release the body."

"Well, how soon we do that depends on this." Lindsay held up the envelope with the fingernail.

Reaching behind him, Sid found a specimen dish, and Lindsay then opened the envelope and tapped its side so the fingernail would come out. Though it had obviously been removed from the body violently-the interior edge was uneven and jagged-you could still see the purple nail polish.

"Wonderful thing, nail polish," Sid said. "You know, some say that it got its start in Japan five thousand years ago. Others say it was in Italy-and others say that's complete hokum. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if it started in the Orient-sorry, they call it the Far East now, don't they?"

Lindsay smiled. "Yeah, nobody uses 'Orient' anymore, Sid."

"Well, I guess I'm just easily dis-Orient-ed."

At that, Lindsay groaned, loudly. "Sid, that was bad even by your low standards."

"We aim to please," he said with a grin as he picked up the nail with a pair of tweezers and put it up against Maria Campagna's right forefinger.

It was a near-perfect fit. And the nail polish was the same color.

Sid peered at Lindsay through his spectacles. "Looks like she is the one who danced with the prince."

"Yeah, but this prince won't live happily ever after. Thanks, Sid."

The next thing Lindsay did was scrape off flakes of the nail polish from Maria's corpse, placing those scrapings in an envelope; then she did the same for the errant nail found in Marty Johannsen's apartment.

Adam was waiting for her upstairs. "That blood you gave me was AB-negative."

"Same type as what was on the necklace."

Nodding, Adam said, "But that doesn't prove anything-just that your guy has the same blood type."

"Every little bit helps," Lindsay said. "Come on, I could use a hand with this."

With Adam alongside her, she brought the samples over to the gas chromatograph. Sealing the sample from Maria's corpse inside, she started the machine up, letting the gas break the flakes down into their component parts. The computer provided the specifics: nitrocellulose, pigment, and all the other usual elements of nail polish. When that was done, Adam removed the first sample and replaced it with the flakes from the fingernail found in Marty Johannsen's apartment.

Everything matched: the molecular structure of that pigment and the proportions of the different elements.

Staring at the computer screen, Lindsay noticed something she was expecting to see missing from both reports. "Okay, that's odd. There's no dibutyl phthalate."

"Gesundheit," Adam said.

Lindsay glowered at him. "Very funny. But every nail polish sample I've examined has that."

"Not for much longer," Adam said. "Phthalates have been linked to testicular problems in lab animals and humans. So last year, the nail polish companies started phasing out its use in their products. Speaking as an owner of testicles, I'm rather grateful."

"Okay, how did I not know that?" Lindsay asked. "I mean, I wear the stuff."

Adam shrugged. "We can't all be incredibly brilliant like me."

Playfully punching Adam in the arm, Lindsay said, "Of course not. Still, the two match."

"Yup."

Lindsay pulled out her phone and called Stella.

"Hey, Lindsay," Stella said. There was considerable background noise.

"Good news, Stell: the blood's AB-negative, the fingernail's a match, and the bruise is the right size. Still waiting on DNA."

"We should have it by morning, and I like the idea of Johannsen stewing in the five-oh's tank all night. It's too late for him to go to processing anyhow."

"Where are you?"

"On the Henry Hudson coming back to you. I should be there in ten minutes."

"Please tell me you're using a hands-free." Talking on a mobile phone while driving was illegal in New York state, unless one was using hands-free technology of some kind.

"Yes, Mom," Stella said with a chuckle. "Trust me, in this traffic, I want both hands on the wheel. I'll see you in a little while."

"Okay." Lindsay hung up.

Marty Johannsen couldn't believe the way he was being treated.

It wasn't enough that he had to have all those cops just pawing through his stuff like that, but then they had to arrest him? There was no feeling in the world worse than being handcuffed. Marty had done it once at the request of a girlfriend, and he hated every second of it-lost his hard-on and the girlfriend all in one shot, but if she was gonna go for that sort of thing, he didn't want her for a girlfriend. Handcuffs hurt, biting into your wrists the way they did, and Marty felt completely helpless in them. Wearing them willingly in the bedroom was bad enough-having them forced on him by cops who were pawing through all his stuff was much, much worse.

Then he had to sit in the damn holding cell. Marty had spent all night in jail once before, but that was in college, and he was so wasted, he didn't really remember it. (Come to think of it, he was probably handcuffed then, too, but that had been lost to the booze.) The NYPD hadn't been kind enough to let him go on a bender, so he recalled every miserable second of it, from the homeless guy in the corner who hadn't bathed since the first Bush administration, to the mean-looking Hispanic guys in the other corner, to the wooden bench that it was just impossible to get comfortable on, either sitting up or lying down.

In the morning, they handcuffed him again, and then they shoved him into a van that had no AC, which sat in traffic for hours, taking him into Manhattan somewhere. Marty didn't really pay attention to where; he just wished he could wipe the sweat out of his eyes.

Finally, they brought him into a dank room and made him sit there. They took off the handcuffs, but then put his left hand in a cuff that was attached to the table. The only way he'd leave was with the table attached. Not that he wanted to-this room, at least, had AC. The sweat cooled on his head, and he started to feel almost human for the first time since he'd buzzed the cops into his building.

Marty had no idea how much time passed before Bonasera, that stupid bitch of a detective, and some other stupid bitch came in. The second bitch had been at the apartment as well, but Marty never got her name. She was kind of hot, actually.

Before they could say a word, Marty said what he'd been saying to anyone who'd listen since they showed up with the warrant. "I didn't do nothin'!"

Bonasera stared at him for a second. "How much do you know about computers, Marty?"

"Huh?" That wasn't the question he was expecting. "Uh, I mean-I dunno, is this a trick question?" Figuring he had nothing to lose, he looked at the other detective, the hot one, but she just stared at him so hard that he had to look away.

Bonasera smiled insincerely. "Not at all. See, the way computers work is that when files are created, they also create a pathway to that file. But that's not the interesting part. You see, when you delete a file, you don't actually remove the file from the computer. What you do is cut off the pathway to the file, so the computer can't see it. But the information? That's still there. Eventually, it'll get written over if the space is required for something else, but if it isn't? It's all still there."

Marty stared at Bonasera for a second, parsing what she had just said. Then his face fell and he felt a new sheen of sweat bead on his forehead, even with the AC. "You mean-?"

"That's right, Marty. We were able to retrieve the love letters you wrote to Maria Campagna, which perfectly matched the printouts that Maria's boyfriend gave us."

Marty's jaw dropped. He hadn't thought that he needed to do anything except erase the letters. Damn it!

"Too bad for you that Bobby gave them to us," Bonasera continued.

Shaking his head, Marty said, "That Neanderthal."

"Who's that?" the other detective asked.

"DelVecchio! The big dumb jock wasn't good enough for Maria!"

"So you tried to woo her away?" Bonasera asked.

"Exactly!" Marty let out a long breath. "Damn it, she deserved better than him, but she just wouldn't leave him. I actually cared about animals-DelVecchio used to, I swear to God, kick puppies when Maria wasn't looking. I saw him do it once! Really!"

The hot detective said, "So you killed her."

Forcing himself to remember that the love letters didn't actually prove anything, he said, "No. Why would I kill her? I loved her!"

Scowling at him, the hot detective-who didn't look so hot when she scowled like that, Marty thought-said, "You know how many killers sit in that chair after murdering people they love, Marty?"

"Well, I ain't one of them. I'm tellin' ya, I didn't kill her!"

"So the bruise on your face didn't come from her punching you, even though the size of her fist matches the size of the bruise?"

"That was the Great Dane-Rex." He hoped he sounded convincing.

"And then there's the blood on Maria's necklace."

Now panic suffused Marty. There was blood on her necklace? Jesus, how the hell did he miss that?

"The blood's yours, Marty-we checked it against your DNA. Maria kept that necklace sparkling, so the only way that blood could've gotten on it was if it happened right before she was killed. Say, when she punched you in the cheek, loosening a tooth enough for it to bleed some?"

Marty couldn't believe he missed that.

"And then there's the fingernail on your sweatshirt. The same sweatshirt that your coworkers said you were wearing the night Maria was killed. One of Maria's fingernails was missing when we examined her body, and the very same missing fingernail was lodged in your shirt."

Oh, Jesus. Jesus Jesus Jesus, he had no idea. He thought about doing laundry, but he always did laundry on Saturdays. If he broke his routine, that was a pattern cops looked for. Marty watched television; he knew how cops thought. If he washed the clothes, he'd look like a suspect, so he wouldn't wash them.

How was he supposed to know there was a fingernail in there?

"All right," he suddenly said, "fine, you got me." He threw up one hand-the other one, still handcuffed, he couldn't raise high enough. "Yeah, I killed her. I didn't want to, but when she hit me, I couldn't believe it!"

The hot detective said, "So you went into Belluso's at closing?"

"Yeah. That long-haired guy who takes karate-he was just leaving as I was locking the vet up. I saw she was alone, so I figured I'd take a shot, see if she'd leave that big dumb ape for a real man."

Marty could hear the disgust in Bonasera's voice when she said, "A real man who kills her when she gets uppity? That's what you mean, Marty?"

"No! Look, it wasn't supposed to happen like that, okay? It just got-" He sighed. "Out of hand, I guess."

"You guess?" Bonasera asked.

He found he had nothing to say, so he just looked down. "I guess I'm going to jail, huh?"

"Good guess." Bonasera got up from her chair and left the interrogation room.

The hot detective got up a second later. "They already read you your rights at the Fiftieth Precinct, so we'll just put you in holding until we can finish processing you. You'll be at Rikers by dinnertime, and you'll stay there until your trial, you sorry son of a bitch."

With that, she too left.

Marty hoped that prison would at least be air-conditioned.