Four Walls

18

LINDSAY MONROE OPENED THE evidence envelope and plucked out the gold necklace.

The first thing she did was lay it down gently on the white surface of the big table in the crime lab, with the tiny stain visible, and photograph it. After taking several shots of it as a whole, she attached the Sigma telephoto lens to the camera and zoomed in on the stain itself.

She grabbed a sterile cotton swab and moistened it with distilled water, then applied it to the necklace where the stain was. The blood obligingly came off on the swab.

She applied part of the sample on the swab to a plastic container. Then she brought the swab over to the matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) mass spectrograph. The MALDI would measure the mass-to-charge ratio of the ions, which would enable Lindsay to discover the molecular nature of the sample. In this particular case, it would allow her to identify the species of the sample's source from the hemogloblin in the blood.

While she waited for that analysis to complete, she brought the plastic container to the DNA lab.

She saw the blond-haired head of Jane Parsons sitting at her desk. Turning around at Lindsay's entrance, she smiled raggedly and said, "Ah-beware Montanans bearing gifts."

Lindsay smiled. "Sorry, but I've got blood."

"Don't we all?" She shook her head. "Sorry-had a long night. I've been dating this nice young ER doctor, and he keeps odd hours."

"When do you get to see him?" Lindsay asked. She knew that emergency-room physicians kept hours that were as long as they were odd. She'd gotten to know a couple of ER docs since coming to New York. Often during assault and rape cases, she'd have to go to the ER at Bellevue or Cabrini or St. Luke's-Roosevelt or somewhere. In particular, Lindsay had had to do a lot of rape kits, since it was generally preferred that female techs do those, and Stella wasn't always available. But the docs in the ER were constantly talking about their lack of a social life.

"Not very often, which is why I take advantage when I can. I joked with him last night that he should become a librarian-their hours are a trifle more sane. Besides, he likes to read, it'd be good work for him. And I'm babbling, I'm sorry-what've you got for me?"

Handing over the sample, Lindsay said, "This is for the Campagna case. It might be the vic's, but if it isn't, we need to know. First person to check it against after the vic is Jack Morgenstern-he's in the system. And then do the reference samples that are in the case file."

"All right. Oh, and the results are back on the trace around the vic's knuckles. Hang on." Jane started digging around on her desk. "I swear, I was organized once." She finally liberated the proper folder. "I'm afraid there's no love there-the blood and epithelials you found were all hers. The only way it's a transfer is if she was killed by a family member."

"Thanks, Jane. And I hope you and the ER doc are able to make it work."

"I'm sure we will, somehow. Pity he can't actually become a librarian."

Frowning, Lindsay asked, "Why not?"

"You need a degree for that, I'm afraid. And the only master's degree my young man has is in biology."

Lindsay had no idea you needed a master's degree to be a librarian, but that was neither here nor there. "Well, I'm sure you two will work it out."

"Let's hope, shall we? We don't have it as easy as you and Danny do."

Having already turned to leave, Lindsay stopped dead in her tracks. "What're you talking about?" She tried desperately to sound casual and hoped it worked.

"Don't be coy, Lindsay. He flew to Montana for you. I've known the good Mr. Messer for some time-he wouldn't willingly cross the Hudson River without good cause, much less go somewhere like the Show-me State."

Chuckling, Lindsay said, "That's Missouri."

"Beg pardon?"

"Missouri is the Show-me State. Montana is the Treasure State. Or Big Sky Country."

"There's treasure in Montana?"

Lindsay smiled, remembering something Danny had said: that Montana's best treasure was in New York now. It was one of the most romantic things Danny had said to her-not that the competition was fierce, as Danny wasn't good at romantic sayings. Gestures, yes, but the actual words had a hard time making it through his sarcasm filter.

To Parsons, she only said, "There's some left, yeah. Let me know about the blood."

"I will. And best of luck with Danny."

Tempted to say "I don't think I need it," Lindsay just nodded and left. Things had been going really well for them, after a rocky start. Still, they were taking it very slow. Office romances were fraught with peril, and they didn't want to risk the work. They also weren't completely sure how Mac would respond to two people on the same team having a relationship, though Danny seemed to think that he didn't have a leg to stand on, considering his relationship with Peyton.

But Peyton wasn't on the team. It wasn't the same thing.

However, she'd worry about that later. While she was waiting for Parsons and the MALDI to finish their respective work, she returned to the necklace.

Something had been bothering her about the necklace from the moment she walked into the Rosengauses' apartment, and looking at it now, she finally realized what it was: it was sparkling. Gold necklaces didn't stay that clean without a great deal of effort on the part of the owner.

Repeating the steps she'd taken with the dried blood, Lindsay used the cotton swab on a cleaner part of the necklace, hoping that the residue that came off would be something useful. Bringing it over to the MALDI, she saw that the mass spectrometer had just finished on the dried blood sample. Grabbing the printout from the printer attached to the MALDI, she saw that the hemoglobin came from human blood, type AB-negative.

Now she put the new sample into the mass spectrometer and ran it. While she waited, she returned to the necklace, examining it closely but not finding anything else of use. However, she did call up the autopsy photos and compared the photos she'd taken of the lobster-claw clasp to that of the abrasion on the back of Maria Campagna's neck. It wasn't a perfect match-one of the first things she learned in the Bozeman crime lab was that there was no such animal-but it was a very close match. Certainly close enough to convince a jury that the necklace belonged to her and that she'd worn it regularly.

When the MALDI finished, Lindsay looked at the molecular composition and found her memory jogged to a case she'd had back home a few years earlier. It was very similar to a sample from that rash of home robberies. The perp's lawyer had claimed that the jewelry recovered wasn't the same as the jewelry that was reported stolen, and one of the ways Lindsay had been able to prove the lawyer wrong was by testing the residue of silver polish and gold cleaner on the recovered jewelry against what the victim used.

Right now, she was staring at a molecular composition that bore a very close resemblance to the ones she saw from the mass spectrometer back in Bozeman.

She was flipping through patent applications on the computer when Stella came in, shrugging into a white lab coat. "How goes it?"

"Not bad. All done with Cabrera?"

Stella nodded. "Yeah, the testimony'll be a breeze. Anything on that necklace?"

Handing the results from the MALDI to her, Lindsay said, "The blood's definitely human. Type AB-negative. Jane's running it now. Oh, and she said that the only DNA on Maria's knuckles was Maria's."

"Damn." Stella scanned the results. "Morgenstern's O-positive."

"There's more," Lindsay said. She knew Stella and Angell both had latched onto Morgenstern as a suspect, so she knew that this news wouldn't be well received. "I examined the necklace, and besides the blood, there's residue from another substance. I've been checking it against patent applications, and I've got a hit." She pointed at the flat-screen monitor in front of her. Two identical molecular compositions were in two windows on the screen, but one image came from the U.S. Patent Office and the other from the New York Crime Lab. "This is a gold and silver cleaner that went on the market earlier this year."

Stella was impressed. "Why'd you go straight to the patent applications?"

"It looked similar to the usual gold and silver cleaners that I've seen, but it was different enough that I figured it was something new. We had a case back in Bozeman involving this stuff. I got to learn more than I thought it was possible to know about what you use to clean jewelry. Besides, apart from the bloodstain, the necklace was very clean, so cleaning products made sense."

Nodding, Stella said, "That tracks with what Angell got out of the other employees. She reinterviewed Annie Wolfowitz, the one Maria was supposed to close with last night. She said that the necklace was clean when she saw it last and that Maria was obsessive about keeping it shiny."

"I think that's part of why Dina stole it," Lindsay said. "Maria was constantly showing it off and reminding everyone that her boyfriend got it for her. Not that I blame her-it's eighteen karat. That isn't cheap."

Letting out a long sigh, Stella said, "The problem is, all of this is telling us that it probably isn't Morgenstern. Whoever left this blood trace is probably our killer, and we don't know who it is."

Stella was growing quite frustrated with the Campagna case. Lindsay's work on the necklace had been superb, but mostly what it did was eliminate Jack Morgenstern as a suspect, which put them back at square one.

When Mac returned from Staten Island, Stella asked to see him for a brainstorming session. She brought Lindsay and Angell along as well.

Just as they were settling down, Parsons sent Stella a text message. Stella read it and sighed. "DNA on the blood isn't Morgenstern's or Maria's and it doesn't match any of the reference samples we got. So not only is Morgenstern clear, but so are Dina and all the other people who work there, and so's the boyfriend."

Angell sighed. "Great. We can also eliminate Gomer Wilson."

Frowning in confusion, Stella asked, "Who?"

"The guy from the Health Department that Maria got into a shouting match with?"

Snapping her fingers, Stella said, "Right. How could I forget Gomer?"

"Who's Gomer?" Mac asked Stella.

"According to Belluso, the bakery was shut down by the Health Department after their inspector, a man named Gomer Wilson, got into an argument with our vic. He shut Belluso's down for a day."

"Unfortunately," Angell said, "he has an airtight alibi. Last week, he and his wife and two sons moved to Indianapolis. His wife's a college professor, and she left her job in NYU's English department for a position at Purdue. He was at a job interview at the Indianapolis DMV late in the afternoon, so unless he went straight from the interview to the airport, boarded a flight to New York and went straight from LaGuardia to Riverdale, I don't think he's our killer."

Mac leaned forward in his chair. "All right, what do we know? I mean, know for sure."

Stella started counting off items on her fingers. "We know that Morgenstern went into Belluso's right before closing, which is around when Maria died, and that he and Maria were alone together. We know that there was a black poly/cotton fiber on Maria and that Morgenstern was wearing a black poly/cotton sweatshirt."

"The fiber," Lindsay added, "was a match for Morgenstern's shirt, but it's also a match for one of my sweatshirts. It's not definitive."

Nodding, Stella went on: "We know he has a printer that could've been used to write the love letters DelVecchio brought us. And we know that he was previously arrested for rape."

"But that was a false arrest," Mac said.

"Yeah," Angell said. "I dug into the case file a little, just to be sure that there wasn't any wiggle room, and I talked to the guy at the five-two who handled it. It really was a case of mistaken ID. Morgenstern matched enough of the description to bring him in, but only that. The cops at the five-two went a little overboard. But the DNA proved it wasn't Morgenstern-and that's why he has a nice house on Cambridge Avenue now." That last was said with a bitter smile. "So we've got, what? Anything?"

"Nothing we can make an arrest on," Mac said.

"Which means we're nowhere," Angell said. "We can't go near Morgenstern unless we have something solid. Leaving aside his lawyer, if we arrest somebody who successfully sued the city for false arrest, we'll be in for a PR nightmare." Before Mac could say anything, Angell said, "I know, I know, but I got a message on my voice mail from Sinclair's office reminding me that we've already falsely arrested Jack Morgenstern once and that it might not be such a hot idea to do it again. I really don't like being on the chief of detectives' radar, and I'd like to get off it as soon as possible, please."

Mac fumed for a second, then softened. Stella knew that his initial response to PR considerations was "Who gives a damn?" His primary interest was the work. Everything else would take care of itself, as long as the work was done right. Stella knew that the world didn't actually work like that-and so did Mac, really-but that didn't mean either of them had to like it.

And there was also the unspoken part of what Angell said: I don't want to go through what you just went through.

Finally, Mac just said, "I don't blame you. So where do we go from here?"

An idea that had been percolating in the back of Stella's mind burbled to the front. "I'd like to go back to Belluso's," she said. "The place has a steady stream of regulars, and whoever killed Maria had to be one of those regulars. It was somebody who was let in as the place was closing, and someone who would've been able to get behind the counter. Morgenstern wasn't the only regular, after all. I'd like to see who else comes in there." Then she smiled. "Besides, it's been way too long since I've had a good cannoli."

Rubbing his chin, Mac nodded. "All right. It certainly couldn't hurt."

Angell said, "It's not like we've got much of anything else."

"Okay. I'll head up there now," Stella said.

She rose from the chair in Mac's office. It wasn't much, but maybe she'd find something. Worst case, she spent an afternoon sitting in an Italian-style cafй, and she could think of worse ways to spend an afternoon.

After Stella, Lindsay, and Angell left Mac's office, Sheldon and Danny came in. They sat on the sofa while Mac himself leaned against the front of his desk. "What've you got?" Mac asked.

"We played around with Danny's favorite toy," Sheldon said, "and figured out a scenario whereby someone could've knocked Washburne's body off the weight bench in the hustle and bustle after Barker was stabbed. Based on Washburne's weight and the positioning of everything, and assuming the guy was moving at a certain speed, it works."

"So you're saying it's likely that Melendez didn't hit Washburne with the weight?"

"I dunno about likely, Mac," Danny said, "but if the wound really was postmortem, it had to've happened one of two ways. One is that Melendez went to the trouble of knocking him off the bench-"

"Or," Mac said, "he fell off when he died."

"Yeah," Sheldon said, "but wouldn't somebody have noticed? Washburne was a well-liked member of the prison community, wasn't he?"

Mac nodded. "That's why Melendez got a stomach full of fists this morning. So you're saying that the only way he could've died without anybody noticing right away was if he died on the bench and didn't move?"

Nodding, Sheldon said, "It fits the evidence-not to mention the COD."

"And," Danny added, "since nobody noticed, and then Barker got shivved, it all fits. Barker gets cut, there's blood all over the place, people run around like headless chickens, and bam! Somebody bumps into Washburne and sends him to the ground-with a detour to the weight to crack his skull open."

Flack walked in, knocking politely on the glass door as he opened it. "This a private party?"

"Come on in, Don," Mac said. "We were just talking about the Washburne case."

"Well, I gotta get back down there in a little bit to process Mulroney for Barker's murder. Our little gay-basher's gonna find out what life is like in max security." That last was said with a feral grin that Flack only reserved for perps getting what they deserved. Mac understood the sentiment.

"He'll go to pretrial holding first, won't he?" Mac asked.

"Maybe-depends on the mood of the DA's office. But they got everything, so it's up to them." He looked at Danny. "Thanks for gettin' the file over so fast."

"No problem." Danny shrugged. "Not sure how much good it'll do, since the guy confessed."

"Evidence never hurts," Mac said.

Sheldon folded his arms, a thoughtful look on his face. "Doesn't always help, either, Mac. I mean, we've got plenty of evidence to tell us what happened, but we still don't have the faintest idea what killed Malik Washburne."

"Yeah." Mac walked around his desk and sat down. "Let's go over what we know. Washburne died from his throat closing up, which was an allergic reaction to-something."

Danny asked, "He have anything in his stomach?"

Mac shook his head. "Some digested food, but for someone to react to a food allergy, it would have to be right when they eat it, not hours later."

"And tox just turned up the Klonopin?" Sheldon asked.

"Which he's been on for weeks." Mac shook his head.

Sheldon unfolded one arm and gestured to the air with it. "What if somebody injected him with something? Maybe something we couldn't detect. If there's a puncture mark-"

"There isn't," Mac said. "Peyton checked."

With a sigh, Sheldon turned to Danny. "It's good when your replacement's as talented as you are, right?"

Mac managed a half-smile, then grew serious again. "Besides, there's no opportunity. How would someone get a syringe into the yard?"

Danny shrugged. "Mulroney managed to sneak in a shiv."

"Yes, but that was a clumsily put-together weapon, using material Mulroney had on hand. A syringe with something in it that would kill Washburne instantly would be a lot harder to get in the first place, much less take into the yard."

"Besides," Flack said, "after the stabbing, everybody in that yard was searched, and you guys went over the scene. No syringe."

Sheldon shook his head. "It's too bad he'd been on the Klonopin so long."

Frowning, Mac asked, "Why?"

"Well, an allergic reaction to Klonopin could potentially cause your throat to close up. It fits the evidence."

"What gets me," Flack said, "is that he was on it in the first place."

Cursing himself for not seeing it sooner, Mac stood up. "Of course. Washburne became a Muslim because of its proscription against mind-altering substances like alcohol-and drugs. He wouldn't take anything like Klonopin willingly."

"Yeah, but Mac-he's in prison. Hell, Terry and I were just talkin' about this yesterday-these guys try all the tricks in the world to get outta takin' their meds, but the COs usually nail 'em. If Washburne was prescribed the drugs, he'd be takin' 'em."

And then it all fell together for Mac. He walked around his desk. "C'mon."

"What?" Flack looked bewildered.

"I'll explain on the way. You've got to get to RHCF to process Mulroney, and I'm going with you."

The other men stood up as well, though they all seemed just as confused. Danny said, "I don't get it, Mac, what's-"

"I know what killed Malik Washburne," Mac said, turning around in the doorway. "Let's go, Don."

As he and Flack left a confused Sheldon and Danny behind, Mac put in a call to Peyton. He needed her to run a particular blood test…