Hanging Time

32

Come.”

Ducci was sitting at his desk, sorting a box of slides when April obeyed his command to enter. He looked up suspiciously and frowned as the door cracked open, then grinned when he saw who it was.

“Hey, pretty one, come on in. What’s happening?”

April shook her head. “Nothing good. What about you?”

Mike followed her into the lab and closed the door after them. “You locking yourself in now?”

“And Mike,” Ducci added less genially.

“Not ‘and Mike,’ Duke. Just Mike. Mike stands alone.” Sanchez slouched over to the bookcase and leaned against it to demonstrate standing alone. He was in a bad mood about the unknown Lieutenant and Sergeant Joyce, who was too busy with her own sulks to tell him what was going on.

“Oh, God, man, I’m sorry.” Ducci crossed himself. “May she rest in peace. When did it happen?”

April turned to Mike. “What’s he talking about?”

Mike scowled. “Damned if I know.”

“Huh? She don’t know?” Ducci wagged a finger at Mike. “You didn’t tell her?”

“What’s going on?” April looked from one to the other. She thought the problem was Lieutenant Braun sitting at his desk. That’s what Mike had been grumbling about in the car on the way over.

Mike shook his head at Ducci, his eyes closed in disgust.

Ducci cocked his bushy eyebrows at April. “If he doesn’t want to tell you, it’s not my place to.”

“Damn right.”

April leaned against the corner of the desk because Ducci’s other chair was occupied by a lot of files, books, and a skull with crooked teeth and a hole in its cranium. She chewed her lip. What was this all about?

Ducci shrugged apologetically. “Hey, sorry. I thought you two talked.”

Mike’s face faded to gray under his tan. “We talk. We talk plenty. We came here to talk about the Maggie Wheeler case, okay?”

April had never seen him angry like this. She turned to him questioningly. “Uh, Mike. You want me to leave?”

He shook his head, scowling. “Stay where you are.”

“Yeah, stay. Here, have a candy bar.” Ducci dipped into his stash in the middle drawer, came out with a Mars bar, and offered it to her, stretching his trademark, the impeccable blue-shirted arm with its starched white cuff, across his desk.

“No thanks, not for me,” April murmured.

“What about you?” He turned to Mike.

“In yours.”

“Hey, man, you should tell her. Women are good at this kind of thing.” Ducci gave up on the candy bar, dropped it back in the drawer. “What can I do for you?”

“Other than throwing yourself off a bridge—?”

“We came about the Maggie Wheeler case,” April interrupted. “You want to tell us about that?”

“Yeah, yeah. I know what you came for. I put a lot of work into it. Overtime.”

“Good. What’ve you got?”

Ducci pulled his case file. Across his desk he laid out two series of glossy color photos on Maggie Wheeler: the first from the crime scene, of her hanging from the chandelier in the storeroom, with and without the tape measure showing the distances from the ceiling to the floor. The second were twelve angles of Maggie naked on the metal autopsy table—with and without the ruler placed beside the ugly marks on her shoulders, on her neck, on her arms. Glossies of her hands showed short fingernails and no signs of a fight. One of her feet showed the ID tag attached to a big toe. In the photos with the makeup cleaned off, she looked pretty bad. He put the autopsy report to one side.

“Okay, this is what I can tell you. See these bruises?” He pointed with the tip of a pencil to the marks on the arms.

Mike pushed off the wall for a closer look. “Yeah?”

“Old.”

“Old?” Mike repeated.

“Yeah, like antique. See, they’re already healing. They don’t mean nothing.”

He moved his pencil to the smudges on the victim’s neck. “See these bruises?”

“Yeah?” Mike leaned closer.

“New.”

“Shit.” Mike slammed the desk with the palm of his hand.

April pressed her lips together in annoyance. Duke was playing with them, and Sanchez was seething. What was it with these two? She thought they were friends.

“Come on, Duke. Don’t jerk us around. We haven’t got all year,” Mike shot out.

“All right, all right. Just trying to cheer you guys up. You look worse than she does.”

“If you tell us something we don’t know, we’ll cheer up, okay?” April said.

“Okay, okay. Here, take that stuff off the chair. Just put it on the floor. Sit. Go on, sit down so I can look at you. I don’t like to talk up, know what I mean? You”—Ducci lifted his chin at Mike—”pull up Bryan’s chair. He won’t mind. He’s on vacation.”

April moved the books, the files, and the skull with the hole in the cranium to the floor. She shifted the chair over so Mike had room to sit beside her. There was so much tension in his body, she could feel him vibrating. She shot him a questioning look. What’s going on with you? He shook his head.

“All right, so the straight line across the neck indicates the victim was murdered. The bruising would curve up under her ears if she had hung herself. And the rope she was hanging from was not the one that killed her. Too thick to match the bruises. Look how the bruises are below the rope. Also, we can see from the pictures that there was nothing for her to jump off. No ladder, no chair. There’s a stepladder in the corner, but she sure wasn’t the one to put it back.

“Now, these marks on the shoulders indicate the guy took hold of her like this, face-to-face, and maybe shook her.” Duke put his hands out and mimed the shaking. “Maybe the person was real mad and kinda lost it. I’m just speculating here.” He looked like he didn’t think he was speculating. He lifted his shoulders modestly as if waiting for applause, then let them drop. Nothing he told them so far was within his area of expertise. It didn’t seem to bother him a bit.

“Perp was someone quite a bit taller than her. Stand up, April. I’ll show you.” Ducci shoved back his chair noisily and made his way through the clutter to the other side of his desk. “What are you—five four, five five?”

“Five five.” April faced him in the crowded space. Ducci’s paunch stood between them like a ship’s prow.

“I’m five eight.” He grinned. “You smell good. What’re you wearing?”

“Hell you are,” Mike protested. “I’m five nine and you’re at least three inches shorter than me. And I thought you were a hair and fiber man.”

“Shut up.” Ducci raised his hands to April’s shoulders. “I’m working.”

“Yeah, well, don’t work too close.”

“Pay attention. Here’s five five and five eight. The guy held her like this, the thumbs in front, the rest of the fingers over the top. Got it?”

“So?”

“So, I’m off balance like this, not tall enough. If I want to shake April, I’m going to grab her here, with my hands on her arms, or the sides of her shoulders. I’m not going to reach over the top of her shoulders.”

“You can take your hands off her now and tell us something we don’t know.”

“Yeah.” Ducci dropped his arms and headed back to his chair.

“Maggie was barely five feet,” April muttered, thinking of Block.

“Yeah, you’re looking for a guy between five nine and six foot with hands—glove size about eight and a half, maybe nine.”

“But what about the damn fibers?”

“Well, these neck ligatures were made by a thin braided cord with a fiber fill of some sort. What kind I don’t know. We don’t have any references to match, but half a dozen fibers from the fill were embedded in the neck wound. Could be the kind of cord that’s in the hood of a wind-breaker. Anything like that in the store?”

“We’ll check it out.”

“What it looks like is he shook her up and then grabbed her from behind.”

“Why behind?” April asked.

“See how the marks are thicker here. The cord was crossed over double here and pulled the other way back around her neck. Looks like the guy had some trouble. There’s bruising from the hand at the back of the neck, and the victim’s hyoid bone was fractured and so was the thyroid cartilage. That suggests the victim struggled, the perp couldn’t hold on that way, and had to resort to manual strangulation.”

“Hmm.”

“Now, the fibers taken from her ring look like a tuft of wool, but it’s not wool. And, A—There’s no clothing in the store that matches it. B—We found some fibers that match it from the taping of the storeroom and just the other side of the archway into the showroom. No similar fibers were found out by the front door. C—The M.E. found some in her nose. What does all that suggest to you?”

“Hah.” April had seen the tuft in the ring. “What?”

“Take a guess.”

“We’re not guessing. Don’t play with us, Duke.”

“You guys are no fun.”

“We’re not paid to be fun.” Mike smiled at April. She smiled back, relieved that his mood had lifted.

“So, do you want to know?”

“Yeah, and you’re paid to tell us.”

“Dog,” Duke said proudly.

“No shit. A dog killed her.” Still smiling, Mike glanced at April. “A dog between five nine and six feet.”

“Remember the Tawana Brawley case?” Ducci asked.

April nodded. “Dog hairs in the feces.” The police had analyzed the feces that Tawana claimed her kidnappers had used to defile her. The feces contained dog hairs, not surprisingly, since dogs lick themselves. A check of the dogs in the building where Tawana had hidden for several days showed that the hairs in the feces came from dogs in her own backyard. The dog hairs helped disprove her story.

“Now you’re talking,” Mike said. Then, more seriously, “What does this do for us?”

“It tells us a dog was present at the scene either at the time of Wheeler’s death or very shortly before. You may well be looking for a murderer with a dog.”

“What makes you think the dog wasn’t in the store hours before?” April asked.

“Because the dog hairs in the victim’s nose would have been blown out after a minute or two. They wouldn’t have stayed in there very long if she had remained alive.”

“Dog,” April murmured. “Block doesn’t have a dog.”

“Forget Block. He didn’t do it,” Sanchez said.

“He was at the scene though. That bothers me. How did he get there if she was already dead?” April muttered.

“Hey, he appeared to have been at the scene. There’s no evidence he was at the scene. He described the dress she was wearing but didn’t say anything about the makeup. Maybe he wasn’t ever there,” Mike said.

“It doesn’t play. Maybe the killer left the door open and Block goes in, sees his beloved hanging there, gets scared, and splits.” April turned back to Ducci. “We’ve been over this a dozen times. The guy comes in four days after she dies and confesses. But he has no idea what happened. Face it—Block doesn’t make sense. We could get a shrink evaluation of him to prove he’s a nut. But we already know he’s a nut.”

Ducci coughed delicately, slicking back his already carefully combed black hair. He glanced down at the dots on his tie, looking offended.

“What’s the matter now?” Mike shook his head at April. What a piece of work.

“Don’t you want to know what kind?” Ducci demanded.

“Okay. What kind of what?”

“Dog. You want me to locate the dog for you?”

“Okay, what kind of dog, Duke?”

“Like I said, it wasn’t so easy to identify. We have no known references here.” He patted a stack of slide boxes. “I’ve got over a thousand slides of different animal hairs. Know how long it takes to go through them all, looking for a possible match?”

“Well, you knew it wasn’t an elephant.”

“Very funny. See, the morphology of long-haired and short-haired dogs is different. Add to that wild dogs and mixed breeds.” He rolled his eyes. “Hey, and the morphology of underhair is different from the hairs on top. Not only that, underhair has no root ends.”

“That’s very interesting,” April said politely. “What kind of dog is it?”

“The hairs found on Wheeler’s ring and in her nose have a natural twist and no root ends, like underhair, or sheep hair. What does that suggest to you?”

April shrugged. “I don’t know a lot about dogs. My mother wouldn’t let me have one when I was little. She thought the neighbors might eat it. What kind?”

Ducci pretended to consult his notes. “From the color, I’d say a poodle. And I’d say a puppy. The twist isn’t pronounced yet. This is still fluff, probably from a dog that hadn’t been clipped yet.”

“Size?” Mike asked.

“Small.” He smiled at them. “I don’t think it walked in. No traces of it by the door, see.”

“Gee. That’s pretty good, Duke. The dog was carried in.”

Ducci nodded. “And the killer let Maggie play with it. There was dog hair in her ring and in her nose.”

“What about the makeup? And those long hairs on the dress?”

He shook his head. “The hairs are human. Two of them. They don’t come from a wig or anything. I can’t tell you anything about them or the makeup without some references. Go get me something more to work with. Get me the dog.”

“Thanks, Duke, you’re brilliant.” April pushed out of her chair.

Ducci nodded and stroked his tie again. “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

“Everything clear now?” April asked as she and Sanchez piled back in the car a few minutes later.

“Oh, sure—we’re looking for a tall guy with a small poodle. Perhaps with long red hair. What kind of a guy carries a little poodle around?” Mike slammed the car door.

Who indeed. April remembered the shoplifter from Charivari who’d been in the pen when they left. “It would complicate things quite a bit if the perp’s a transvestite.”

“Sure would.” Mike had a new thought. “What do you say the odds are Braun is still there?”

“Probably ten thousand to one. Who’s the one who said only days ago, ‘Life is short, take a chill’?”

Mike pulled out into the traffic. “No one I know.”