“Maybe,” Nell said, “except for his choice of victims and that red letter J he always leaves at the scene. That’s not very professional.”
“J for justice?” Beam asked.
“That’s what we both figure. Or maybe Judgment.”
“Most logical thing,” Looper said. “We figure it’s Justice.”
“Our guy hates the justice system,” Nell said, “but loves justice too much.”
“Yet he doesn’t hit the obviously guilty defendants who got off,” Looper said, playing with his shirt pocket again in search of phantom cigarettes.
“That would be the prosecutor’s job,” Beam said. “Retry them if possible. Nail them on a different charge. Don’t let them walk.”
“But they do walk. The cops, the prosecutors have moved on and are too busy worrying about the present and future to be able to reconstruct and repair the past. Crimes keep getting committed. Other assholes are moving through the system.”
“It’s the system that he hates,” Nell reiterated.
“So?” Beam stared at her, smiling, waiting.
She began to squirm, then suddenly sat still and gave him a level, appraising look, appreciative of the fact that he’d gotten there ahead of her. “He’s trying to change the system.”
Nobody spoke for a few moments.
“Could be,” Looper said finally. “Could very well be.”
“We can’t assume it yet,” Beam said, “but—”
He was interrupted by the phone chirping on his desk.
When he lifted the receiver and identified himself, he was surprised to hear da Vinci’s voice:
“Corey and Looper there yet?”
“Yeah. We were just discussing things.”
“You’ve got another one to discuss, Beam. Upper West Side, not far from your place. The letter J is written in lipstick on a mirror this time.”
“Shot to death?”
“That’s the preliminary.
“Got an address?”
Da Vinci gave it to him, in an area of apartment buildings and townhouses about five blocks away. “Uniforms have got the scene frozen. CSI unit is on the way.”
“So are we,” Beam said.
9
“The victim, Beverly Baker, worked as sales manager at Light and Shade Lamp Emporium on the West Side, not far from her apartment on West Eighty-ninth Street. Hubby Floyd returned from a golf outing with his buddies about five thirty—forty-five minutes ago—and found her dead body.”
So said the uniform guarding the Bakers’ apartment door, a young guy named Mansolaro. He had an improbably long chin, would always need a shave, and looked vaguely familiar to Beam. Looper seemed to know him.
“That hubby in the living room?” Beam asked, noticing beyond Mansolaro, in the apartment, a smallish, plump man in plaid slacks and a white golf shirt, seated slumped forward on a maroon sofa.
Mansolaro nodded. “One Floyd Baker.”
As if there were a two Floyd Baker, Beam thought. He’d been away from cop talk long enough that some of it struck his ear wrong.
“Floyd was gone all day,” Mansolaro continued, “out on the links with his fellow hackers.”
“With his alibi,” Looper said.
“And not a bad one,” Mansolaro said. “He came back, found his wife’s body, and called 911. Me and my partner Al caught the complaint and got here almost immediately after the call.”
“You go right in?” Beam asked.
“Floyd Baker met us at the door, looked like he’d been crying, and led us to the body. Swore he never touched anything, just like he learned on Law and Order. I saw the big letter J on the mirror near where the victim must have been sitting, so me and Al froze the scene immediately and called it in as an obvious homicide.”
“Where’s Al?”
“Downstairs manning the lobby. He told the doorman to stick around, we were gonna talk to him.”
“Excellent,” Beam said, and Mansolaro sort of puffed up. It impressed Nell, what some of her fellow cops obviously thought of Beam. Maybe this odd-ends investigative team would work out. Maybe something positive would come of it beyond capturing or killing whoever was murdering these people.
“Crime scene unit’s inside, along with an assistant ME,” Mansolaro said. He glanced at his watch, anticipating Beam’s next question. “They been here about twenty minutes.”
“Get the neighbors’ statements,” Beam said to Nell and Looper. “Somebody probably heard the shot, even if they thought the noise was something else. We might be able to determine time of death.”
He patted Mansolaro gently on the shoulder in passing, a gesture of approval, as he moved into the apartment.
Another uniform was standing near a fake fireplace—the kind that had a red light in it that was supposed to look like glowing embers—with his arms crossed. Beam nodded to him, and nodded to the distraught man on the sofa. The man on the sofa didn’t nod back, merely gave Beam a distracted, agonized glance.
Beam went into the bedroom, where most of the action was taking place. Crime Scene personnel wearing plastic gloves were standing, bending, reaching, down on hands and knees, searching. They were examining, luminoling, placing minute objects in evidence bags as if they’d found rare and extravagantly expensive gems. And what they found could be extravagantly expensive. It could be life and death.
Beam noticed a high-heeled shoe, a woman’s foot and ankle, and beyond it the open door to a tiled bathroom. When he moved forward a few careful steps, he saw that the victim’s body was in an alcove between bedroom and bathroom.
There was a lot of blood on the carpeted floor. Beverly Baker was sprawled awkwardly on her back, and had apparently fallen from a small upholstered chair that had tipped over. The chair was covered with a cheery floral design that was a mismatch with the ugliness of the event, except for the hole in the material that was stretched across the curved back support.
A little man in a black suit was bending over the dead woman with an intensity that suggested he was making love to her. As soon as Beam saw his balding head, with the thatch of gray hair that stood almost straight up in front, he knew who he was. Assistant ME Irv Minskoff, one of the best at his job.
Minskoff sensed his presence and glanced up. His face had a fiercely gnarled look to it, softened somewhat by thick lensed glasses. “Ah, Beam. I heard you were on this one.”
“Good to see you, Irv. What’ve we got so far?”
“Dead since morning, done sometime between seven and ten o’clock. Shot once. Bullet went in the right side of her back, probably angled in and caught her heart. I’ll know a lot more when I get in there.”
“Looks like a thirty-two caliber.”
“Be my guess, too. Can’t say for sure, since the slug they dug out of the wall’s so misshapen. But before it went through the victim, the bullet went through the back of the chair, and the hole in the underlying wood looks like it was made by a thirty-two.”
“Slug must have been misshapen before it hit her,” Beam said, looking at the vast and ugly exit wound. He could imagine the kinetic force of the distorted bullet slamming through the woman’s slender body. His gaze took in her exposed shapely legs, slender waist, strong features. She must have been vital and attractive