"Oh. That."
Oh. That . . .
"Blood work'll tell."
Then she noticed a major blunt-object trauma to Calvert's temple. That wound hadn't bled much, which suggested that his heart had stopped beating soon after the skull had been crushed.
"No, Rhyme, looks like the cutting was postmortem."
She vaguely heard the criminalist's voice talking to his aide, telling Thom to write this on the evidence chart. He was saying something else but she wasn't paying any attention. The sight of the victim gripped her hard and wouldn't let go. But this was as she wanted it. Yes, she could give up the dead--the way all crime scene cops had to do--and in a moment she would. But death, she felt, deserved a moment of stillness. Sachs did this not out of any sense of spirituality, though, or abstract respect for the dead; no, it was for herself, so that her heart would resist hardening to stone, a process that happened all too frequently in this calling.
She realized that Rhyme was talking to her. "What?" she asked.
"I was wondering, any weapons?"
"No sign of them. But I haven't searched yet."
A sergeant and a uniformed officer joined Sellitto in the doorway. "Been talking to the neighbors," one of them said. Nodding toward the body then doing a double take. She guessed he hadn't seen the carnage up close yet. "Vic was a nice, quiet guy. Everybody liked him. Gay but not into rough trade or anything. Hadn't been seeing anybody for a while."
Sachs nodded then said into her mike, "Doesn't sound like he knew the killer, Rhyme."
"We didn't think that was likely now, did we?" the criminalist said. "The Conjurer's got a different agenda--whatever the hell it is."
"What line of work?" she asked the officers.
"Makeup artist and stylist for one of the theaters on Broadway. We found his case in the alley. You know, hair spray, makeup, brushes."
Sachs wondered if Calvert had ever been hired by commercial photographers and, if so, if he'd worked on her when she'd been with the Chantelle modeling agency on Madison Avenue. Unlike many photographers and the ad agency account people, makeup artists treated models as if they were human beings. An account exec might offer, "All right, let's get her painted and see what she looks like," and the makeup artist would mutter, "Excuse me, I didn't know she was a picket fence."
An Asian-American detective from the Ninth Precinct, which covered this part of town, walked up to the doorway, hanging up his cell phone. "How 'bout this one, huh?" he asked breezily.
"How 'bout it," Sellitto muttered. "Any idea how he got away? The vic called nine-one-one himself. Your respondings must've got to the scene in ten minutes."
"Six," the detective said.
A sergeant said, "We rolled up silent and covered all the doors and windows. When we got inside, the body was still warm. I'm talking
ninety-eight point six. We did a door-to-door but no sign of the doer."
"Wits?"
The sergeant nodded. "The only person in the hall when we got here was this old lady. She was the one let us in. When she gets back we'll talk to her. Maybe she got a look at him."
"She left?" Sellitto asked.
"Yeah."
Rhyme had heard. "You know who it was, don't you?"
"Goddamn," the policewoman snapped.
The detective said, "No, it's okay. We left cards under everybody's door. She'll call us back."
"No, she won't," Sachs said, sighing. "That was the doer."
"Her?" the sergeant asked, his voice high. He laughed.
"She wasn't a her," Sachs explained. "She only looked like an old lady."