The homicide detective’s bull pen at the 20th precinct had six desks crowded into a space meant for four. There was barely space on the wall between two ranks of desks for Nikki Heat’s whiteboard: the whiteboard that was currently blank, as it was at the beginning of every investigation. She stuck a blown up copy of Margaret Winston’s driver’s licence photo in the top left corner and wrote her name under it.
Along the bottom of the board Heat drew a timeline for last evening, starting at six p.m., and ending at seven a.m. She put a squiggly line over the two hours from midnight to two a.m., and marked it TOD. She hoped that she’d be hearing from Lauren soon, to narrow that down somewhat. The end of the line was marked with “Johnstone finds body.”
Detective Ochoa stuck up a mug shot of an Hispanic man beside Margaret’s picture. “Her pimp, Miguel Chavez. Unfortunately, he’s got an air tight alibi. He’s awaiting trial in Rikers, for unrelated charges. He and another pimp got in fight over whose girls should be working which corners.”
“The canvas of bars and clubs Winston frequented hasn’t turned up anything,” said Raley. “A few bartenders recognized her, but they all said she hasn’t been in for a couple of weeks. Looks like she found someplace new to ply her trade. Maybe she was in someone else’s territory.”
“Could this be someone trying to send Chavez a message?” asked Rook. “Stay off my turf, or lose your source of income?”
“Maybe, but the guy he had the fight with has a pretty good alibi too,” said Ochoa. “He’s still in the hospital.”
Detective Raley put up a picture of their jogger. “Mr. Johnstone checks out too. He was at home with his wife, kids, and dog, all last night.”
“So we don’t have much of anything to go on.” Heat picked up the preliminary report from CSU, and quickly read through it. Based on the little bit of blood spatter at the scene, and other marks on the ground they had determined that Winston had been decapitated at the scene.
Rook had been reading over her shoulder. “Why would someone carry a body into Central Park, decapitate it there, and then leave, taking the head with them? That doesn’t make any kinda sense.”
“People who cut the heads off of corpses are already several kinds of crazy,” said Ochoa. “There’s no accounting for anything else that they may do.”
The phone on Nikki’s desk rang, and she picked it up. “Detective Heat.”
“Nik, it’s Lauren. If you’d like to come down, I’ve got a couple of things I’d like to show you about our victim.”
“I’ll be right there,” said Nikki, and she hung up her phone. “Dr. Parry has something for us.”
“We’ll run down anyone else Chavez might have a beef with,” said Raley.
“Which leaves me to accompany you to see our lovely Medical Examiner,” said Jameson Rook.
“If you must,” said Detective Heat.
The Medical Examiner’s office was in the basement of the precinct house, where it tended to stay cool even when the hottest days of the summer strained the building’s air conditioning. Margaret Winston’s headless body was laid out on an examining table.
Lauren skipped right over any preliminary chit-chat. “I managed to pin down the time of death a bit more precisely. I can now say with reasonable confidence that she died at about 1:30 a.m. plus or minus half an hour.”
“That’s good,” said Detective Heat, thinking that her squiggly TOD line just got cut in half.
“I can also tell you that she had unprotected sex, about two hours before she died.”
“Consensual?”
“No signs of recent bruising, or defensive wounds, but she’s got some marks that might be a week old.” Dr. Parry pointed to some yellowing bruises on Margaret Winston’s wrists, and ankles. “Looks like someone used some sort of restraints on her. Not ropes. It looks more like some sort of straps were used.”
“So, maybe she was into unsafe sex, in more ways than one,” said Rook.
Heat ignored him. “Will we get DNA for whoever she had sex with?”
“I’ve sent samples off to the lab, so we should be getting something back from them eventually, but they’ve got a two week backlog.”
“Anything else?” asked Heat.
“She has a cut, on her inner left thigh.” Lauren pointed to a thin red line there. “It’s about a week old, too, and had been sealed closed with medical glue, and bandaged.”
“Any idea what caused it?”
“A small, very sharp, blade,” said Dr. Parry. “Possibly a scalpel. The initial cut would have bled a lot. The cut hit a vein.”
“Suicide attempt?” asked Rook.
“I doubt it,” said Parry. “If you’re going to kill yourself by opening a vein, there are much better places to do it. To deliberately hit a vein, cutting there, would take some knowledge of anatomy. The vein that was cut wouldn’t bleed enough to kill her, even if left untreated.”
“What can you tell me about how her head was removed?” asked Detective Heat.
“It was done post mortem, by someone who is very strong, and using a knife with at least a twelve inch blade.”
“So, even Mick Dundee would think it was a real knife, then,” said Rook, which earned him a pair of annoyed glares.
Dr. Parry pointed to the severed neck. “It was done with two cuts.” She picked up a plastic ruler, to stand in for the knife. “They first started with a stab in from her left side, that drove the blade all the way through her neck, passing between her spine, and her esophagus.” She demonstrated with the ruler, stabbing it through the air an inch away from the stump of Margaret’s neck. “Then they pulled up, with enough force that her body was lifted clear of the ground, until the knife cut through the front two thirds of her neck.” Again, she demonstrated with the ruler.
“She would have fallen back to the ground,with her head folded back, and leaving the first wound gaping open. The second cut started from her right side, and they used a sawing action with their knife, to cut through the muscles, and tendons, and between her vertebrae.” This action too was demonstrated with the ruler.
“How long was she dead, before that?” asked Heat.
“The head was removed within minutes of her death. Lividity patterns don’t show any indication that the body had lain anywhere else, for any length of time,” said Dr Parry. “Probable cause of death is loss of blood, but most of the wound that caused it is in the missing part. She was already pretty much drained of blood before her head was removed.”
“Maybe there was something distinctive about the weapon they used to kill her, and they took the head to conceal it. A head is much easier to dispose of than an entire body,” said Rook. “Wrap it up in something, and you could dump it in any one of thousands of trash cans or dumpsters around the city. It might already be buried in a landfill somewhere.”
Detective Heat ignored him. “You said ‘most of the wound’.”
“There is one other interesting thing about our victim.” Dr. Parry pointed to Margaret Winston’s neck. “If you look here, just below the cut, you can see that something broke her skin, before she died. There are four shallow puncture wounds, following an arc. She traced them out with her finger, and continued around, tracing out a circle about two inches in diameter over the missing portion of her neck.
“Could it be a bite mark?” asked Detective Heat.
“Maybe, but I don’t know from what, but it definitely wasn’t human,” said Dr. Parry. “The punctures came from something sharper than human teeth.”
“It could have been a vampire!” said Rook. “That would account for the missing blood, and he took the head, with the bite mark, so we won’t be able to match up tooth impressions!”
“Get real, Rook,” said Detective Heat. “It was more likely a dog, or some other animal.”
“Rawlf the dog?” asked Rook. “Please tell me no. He was my favourite Muppet.”
“I’d need some tooth impressions to be sure, but they don’t look like any dog bite I’ve seen, either.” said Dr. Parry.
“Was there anything else?” asked Heat. “Did the tox-screen show anything?”
“No signs of recent illegal drug use. No signs of any IV drug use at all. Her blood alcohol level was .06, so she wasn’t exactly sober, but she wasn’t falling down drunk, either.”
They returned to the bull pen, and Detective Heat put Detective Raley onto getting the bite impression from Rawlf. “Tell Johnstone that there are some bite marks on the body, probably from a racoon, or something like that. We just need Rawlf’s impression so we can eliminate him. We really don’t think they came from him.” The second part of that had the advantage of being true.
She went to the whiteboard, and wrote “Why take the head?” under Margaret Winston’s name, followed by “? to remove evidence ?”
“Oh! He might have wanted a trophy, too!” said Rook.
She frowned at him, but added “? trophy ?” to the board.
Something had been bothering Nikki since Lauren had first shown them how Margaret’s head had been removed. “Ochoa? Wasn’t there a headless body found in Queens a few months ago? I want you to follow up with them, see if that decapitation matches what happened to our victim. If it does, get copies of all their reports, see if our victims had anything in common.”
Ochoa reached for his phone. “On it!”
“Now that you mention it, I remember something from when I stopped in Rome a few years ago, on my way back from Chechnya,” said Rook. “The Italian press was going on about a couple of headless bodies they’d found. Even took the headlines away from their Prime Minister’s bunga-bunga parties for a couple of days.”
Nikki looked at Ochoa.
“After I talk to Queens, I’ll call INTERPOL,” he said.
Nikki added another squiggly line to her timeline, centred two hours before the TOD line, and labelled it “sex with ?” She pointed Rook toward the file that they’d gotten from Vice, about Margaret’s earlier prostitution busts. “Have a look in there, see if Margaret had a regular hotel she took her Johns to.”
The hotel was one of the less seedy ones that rented rooms by the hour. The night manager wore a cheap suit, looked like he had showered in the past week, and smiled at Heat and Rook as they approached his caged desk. “So, do you want a room for an hour, or all night?”
Heat didn’t smile back as she flashed tin at him. “Neither. We’d like some information about one of your regular customers.” She showed him Margaret Winston’s photo.
He barely glanced at it. “Sorry, don’t recognize her.”
“Really? That’s strange, considering she’s been busted here, twice,” said Heat. “Take another look.”
“Look, Detective, we pride ourselves on our discretion. It’s how we keep our regular customers, regular, if you know what I mean. So unless you’ve got a warrant…”
“How many of your regulars would you keep if we parked a black-and-white out front, with officers taking pictures of everyone going in and out?”
“Geez, what did Peggy do, to warrant this kinda attention?”
“She got dead,” said Rook.
Heat shot him an annoyed look. You never wanted to give anything away to your witnesses that you didn’t have to.
“Ah, man, who’d wanna kill Peggy? She was a nice kid,” said the manager.
“So, maybe now you’ll tell us about the last time you saw her,” said Detective Heat, “since we’ve already established that you lied to us about knowing her.”
“Yeah, she was a regular,” said the manager. “Even had her own room, that I tried to keep open for her, if we weren’t too full.”
“And how did she pay for this unusual largess on your part?” asked Rook.
“We had an arrangement. She’d pay me under the table, in trade, if you know what I mean.”
“Did she make a payment last night?” asked Heat.
“Nyah, last night was Tuesday.”
“What’s Tuesday got to do with it?” asked Rook.
“She’s got a regular customer; she always comes in with him on Tuesdays. They’re usually here about about eight, leave around midnight. She doesn’t often come back again after that.”
“And was last night usual?” asked Heat.
“Yeah, pretty much. They might have left a bit earlier than usual, maybe 11:30.”
“Was he looking like a happy customer when he left?” asked Rook.
“As happy as he ever does,” said the manager.
“Can you describe him?”
“He’s an odd little duck. Looks like an accountant who’s afraid he’s going to get audited by the IRS, most of the time. Kinda short, maybe five-five, forty to forty-five, balding, with a comb-over. He’s usually wearing a cheap suit.”
“Hair, or eye colour?” asked Heat.
“Dark hair, going grey,” said the manager. “Can’t say as I ever noticed what colour his eyes are. He wears glasses, though: round ones, like Harry Potter.”
“Race?”
“White guy.”
“Did you ever hear a name?”
“I can get it for you.” The manager turned away, to the computer terminal on his desk. After a few mouse clicks, and a bit of typing, the printer beside it began to whir, and spat out a sheet of paper. He handed it to Detective Heat.
She looked at it in surprise. It was a copy of the bill for a room from last night.
Rook looked over her shoulder. “He paid by credit card?”
“Yeah, like I said: an odd duck.”
Nikki Heat rapped firmly on the apartment door. Jameson Rook looked back and forth, up and down the hallway. The building was well maintained: the carpet was old, and worn, but it was clean and had been vacuumed recently; the walls had been painted within the last couple of years; all the lights worked.
The muffled sound of a television coming from inside the apartment stopped, and a few seconds later someone asked “Who is it?” through the door.
Heat held up her badge by the peephole. “Police, Mr. Mallory. We’d like to talk to you.”
She heard multiple deadbolts being unlocked, and then the door opened a crack, with the safety chain still in place. “Can I see that badge again?” asked the man in the apartment.
Heat held it up where he could see it. After a couple of seconds the door closed and she heard the chain being released. The door opened again.
Stuart Mallory looked just as the hotel manager had described him. His picture should have been in the dictionary beside the entry for nebbish. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“Can we come in, Mr. Mallory?” asked Heat.
He looked back and forth between her, and Rook, and then said “I suppose so.” He stepped back from the door.
Heat and Rook entered the small bachelor apartment. It consisted of just two rooms. The main room was a combined bed, living, dining room with an attached kitchenette. An open doorway showed where the bathroom was. Another door looked like it might belong to a closet.
Most of the available wall space was taken up by book shelves, except for a rectangular area in which a flat screen TV sat, showing a paused scene from a show Nikki didn’t recognize.
The kitchenette was separated from the main room by a breakfast bar at which there were two stools. The counter was clear in front of one of them. The counter in front of the other stool had a collection of plastic boxes on it, each one with a label. There was a box for electric bills, another box for phone bills, a couple of boxes for different credit cards, and boxes for bank statements: all very neat and tidy.
There was a sofa facing the television that also looked like it was only ever used by one person. It had a pronounced sag in the spot that was best placed for television watching. The foot of a single bed was visible around the end of a screen. Every indication said that only one person lived here, and that he rarely, if ever, had visitors.
“Mr. Mallory, we’re here to talk to you about your relationship with Margaret Winston,” said Detective Heat.
“Peggy?” He glanced furtively around. Rook had started perusing the titles on his book shelves. “What about her?”
“Tell us about her,” said Detective Heat.
“What’s to tell? We meet once a week. We go to dinner, then to a hotel. We talk, she’s a good listener, and we…do things.”
Rook looked back from his position by the books. “What sort of things?”
“She’s a prostitute. We do the sorts of things that she accepts payment for.”
“For four hours?” asked Heat.
“I like to be able to pretend that there is more to our relationship than just sex. I like to take my time, talk, share some wine, progress slowly through levels of increasing physical intimacy.”
“Was there anything unusual about last night?”
“Not particularly. Peggy did seem a little distracted, maybe. She kinda rushed us through the denouement, if you will. We finished a little earlier than usual.”
“Did she give you any reason for that?” asked Heat.
“No. She just seemed a bit distracted, is all.”
“Did you notice anything unusual about her that night?”
“Not really… Oh, she had a bandage on her thigh. I asked what happened, and she just said she’d cut it on something. She didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Anything else?”
“Not that comes to mind.”
“You didn’t notice any bruising?”
“On her wrists and ankles,” said Mallory, “but there was nothing unusual about that. I’ve seen bruises there before. She told me that she charged extra for those sorts of games, so I never tried them with her. I’m not into that kind of thing.”
“Can you account for your whereabouts, following 11:30 last night?” asked Heat.
“We took a taxi from the hotel,” said Mallory. “It dropped her off somewhere in the East Village, then it brought me home, where I stayed until it was time to go to work this morning.”
“You shared a cab?” asked Rook. “Was that usual?”
“No, but Peggy knows which neighbourhood I live in. She asked if I could give her a lift, last night.”
“Has she ever been here, in your apartment?” asked Heat.
“No. Never. I would never allow that. She doesn’t even know which building I live in. What’s this about Detective? Has Peggy done something? Has something happened to her?”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to find someone else to spend your Tuesday evenings with, Mr. Mallory,” said Detective Heat. “Margaret Winston is dead.”
He staggered back, and dropped down into his spot on the sofa. “Dead? How? When?”
“Some time after you dropped her off, and we’re still investigating how it happened,” said Heat. “Do you remember the name of the cab company?”
Mallory rubbed his face. “Oh, ah, no … it was just a cab … just a moment.” He got up from the sofa, and went to a cardboard box on his bookshelf. He rummaged through it for second. “Yes, here it is.” He handed Detective Heat a receipt from the Sunshine Cab Company.
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