City of Fear. Alafair Burke

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      ‘I take it this case belongs to the two of you?’

      ‘What have you got so far?’ Rogan asked.

      ‘Well, I can tell you the vic wasn’t killed here.’

      Rogan’s lips set into a line of disappointment. All crime scenes were important. Any could yield evidence. But it was the primary crime scene that was most likely to yield blood, saliva, semen, hair, fibers, and fingerprints – all of the physical evidence that jurors increasingly insisted upon, now that the fictional world of the multiple CSI shows had become ingrained in the minds of ordinary people.

      Mariah pointed to a male officer who was photographing the dirt in front of him. ‘We’ve got a whole bunch of footprints in the area in front of her body – all with treads, consistent with athletic shoes. But fortunately, our runners didn’t crowd the body. They gave her some space. Closer in to the corpse, we’ve got another set of footprints – smooth bottomed, not likely an athletic shoe – pointing into and then away from the body. One guy. He carried her in, dropped her, then walked out.’

      ‘Any chance you’re going to tell us the shoe is one of a kind,’ Rogan said, ‘custom-made at the foot of the Swiss Alps?’

      Mariah smiled and shook her head. ‘It looks like any footprint you’d see on a Ballroom Dancing 101 instruction chart. Oval toe, square heel. No markings. About as generic as it gets.’

      ‘How do you know she didn’t walk over here with him, then he walks out alone?’ Rogan asked.

      ‘Chelsea was wearing high heels,’ Ellie said.

      ‘Lucky for us.’ Mariah walked a few feet to a blue plastic storage bin resting on the ground just beyond the yellow crime tape. She reached in and pulled out a larger baggie containing a pair of high-heeled sandals. Ellie recognized them as the shoes Chelsea had been wearing that morning.

      ‘These bad boys would have left behind an imprint like a big exclamation point.’

      ‘Anything else?’ Rogan asked.

      ‘We picked up a bunch of garbage lying around – Coke cans, cigarette butts, that kind of crap. We’ll look for prints. Have you guys talked to the ME yet?’

      ‘Next stop,’ Rogan said.

      ‘Well, I’ve got one piece of good news for you. I took the shoes, but the ME took the clothes. But before they carried the vic away to the bus, I dusted her shirt. I pulled one latent off the underside of the top button of her blouse.’

      ‘Chances are, she was the one to leave it behind.’

      Mariah nodded. ‘Probably, but that’s not the best part.’ She paused to make sure she had their full attention. ‘When I was working on her blouse, I saw a stain that may or may not have been seminal fluid.’

      Rogan rubbed his palms together. ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about.’

      ‘Don’t go getting too excited. The girl could’ve dripped a smoothie on herself, for all I know. I can run the print in a couple of hours, see if there’s a match in the database. The stain – I can tell you within a day or so whether it’s bodily fluid or Tasti-Delite. But if it’s the former, it’ll take a good couple of weeks before we get DNA back.’

      ‘But the fingerprint in a couple of hours?’

      ‘End of the day at the latest.’

      ‘Call my cell, all right?’ Rogan gave her his card.

      ‘No problem. And congrats on landing Jeffrey James here, Hatcher. He’s a good egg.’

      More than five miles north, a man exited the 6 train at 103rd Street and Lexington. He kept his head down and his hands in his pockets, focusing on each step as he tried to ignore the steady push of harried subway riders hoping to catch a waiting train.

      He hated the proximity to other people that was required by mass transportation. The eye contact. The bumps. The pressing of sweaty bodies against one another in the rush of squeezing onto the train before the doors closed. The name – mass transportation – said it all. The transport of the masses. Moving through narrow turnstiles like cattle moving through the sorting gates. Moo, cow, moo.

      His hatred of the subway was part of the reason he paid for a car and two garage parking spots, one near home, one near work. But today his car was on West Eleventh Street for complete interior detailing – rugs vacuumed, mats shampooed, every surface hand-polished. He had worked quickly last night on that desolate Tribeca corner outside the Holland Tunnel, but he’d nevertheless been careful, strangling the girl in the front seat, then moving the body to the carefully draped plastic tarp in his trunk for the cutting. Now, for a mere hundred bucks, any trace of the girl would be gone from his Taurus.

      He walked briskly up Lexington Avenue to the familiar brick building at 105th Street. He used his security key to open the front door. No doorman. No elevators, which meant no cameras. No electronic entry system that tracked the residents’ comings and goings. Those were the kinds of luxuries that could cost you big-time down the road.

      He climbed the stairs to his third-floor apartment. Used one key on the auxiliary mortise dead latch. Heard the metal tumble from the block cylinder. Used another key on the dead bolt. Inserted the same key into the doorknob. Then he was home.

      He did a quick protective sweep of the apartment. Living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, two closets. Everything was in place. He checked the light on his answering machine. No calls.

      He rolled the brown leather ottoman away from its matching chair and pushed it against the living room wall. Then he took a seat on the floor – back against the ottoman, legs crossed in front of him – and carefully pulled up six wood parquet tiles, stacking them neatly to his left as he went, one through six. He worked his index finger into a crevice in the subfloor. It took three tries before he popped up the rectangular piece of removable particleboard. That was how perfectly he had cut it to fit – like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, disappearing into the rest of the world around it.

      He propped the particleboard carefully against the sofa, then took a deep breath. He reached in and removed two ziplock bags. He placed both on the floor in front of him. He didn’t dare remove the contents of the one on the right – too much of a danger that it wouldn’t all make it back in. He allowed himself to open the one on the left and remove a single earring and a small plastic card.

      The earring was a chandelier of crystal and red beads dangling from a simple gold hook. The plastic rectangle was an Indiana driver’s license. It had been in the girl’s teeny-tiny purse, along with a lipstick, a cell phone, a hotel key, and a credit card. Name: Jennifer Green. According to the date of birth, she was twenty-four years old.

      The license probably wasn’t real. She hadn’t said she was from Indiana, and girls like that often had reasons for using fake names and IDs. Not to mention, he realized now, that the photograph was too good – too posed, too pretty – to have originated with any Department of Motor Vehicles.

      The girl’s credit card had been in yet another name, and the thought had crossed his mind it might have been stolen. He’d tossed it in a garbage can along the FDR, along with the tarp and the girl’s pants.

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