Toward the top, Will slowed his pace, stopping where Aleesha Monroe’s body had been found. Blood stained the stairs, despite the fact that someone had obviously tried to clean up the marks.
“She died here,” Michael told him, stopping on the landing to catch his breath.
Will knelt to look at the pattern, the bloody ghost of the handprint climbing the stairs. The crime scene photos were bad enough, but there was something eerie about being in this place where the woman had died.
“I don’t think he meant for her to die,” Michael said.
Will looked up, thinking the man had said this at least twice before. “Why is that?”
“She rolled onto her back.” He indicated the outline where Monroe had lain. “The blood must have pooled and she choked to death.” He waited a second, looking down at the bloody stairs. “It’s sad, but it happens.”
Will didn’t think he’d ever had a case where this had happened before, but he nodded as if people accidentally died this way all of the time. He asked, “What do you think happened?”
Michael squinted up the stairs as if he could see it all unfolding. “I’m guessing they were in the apartment when some kind of dispute broke out. The john left and maybe she didn’t want him to. They scuffled here,” he indicated the steps, “then it went bad.”
“Was the door locked or unlocked when the first cop got here?”
“Unlocked.”
Will played the scene in his mind, thinking Michael’s scenario was as likely as any. “Do you have the key?”
“Yep.” Michael took a plastic bag out of his pocket. He unrolled it and showed Will a key with a red tag. “It was in her purse.”
“Did you find anything else?”
“Makeup, couple of dollars and some lint.”
“Let’s go,” Will said, continuing up the stairs. He could feel the hair on the back of his neck standing up as they got closer to the top. Will had never been one to believe in ghosts and goblins, but there was no denying that a murder scene had a certain feel to it, an energy that told you violent death had occurred.
“Here we go,” Michael said, slicing the yellow police tape with the edge of the key. He unlocked the door. “After you.”
Aleesha Monroe had obviously not been rich, but from the looks of her apartment, she had taken great care of her few nice things. Besides the small bathroom, there were only two rooms in the apartment, a bedroom in one and a kitchen/living room space in the other. What struck Will was that the place was surprisingly clean. No dirty dishes were decaying in the sink and the same stink that hung out in the hall didn’t seem to permeate the walls.
Will asked Michael, “This is how it looked when you got here?”
“Yep.”
Michael’s team had already tossed the place two nights ago. The fact that he now stood back by the door, leaning against the frame, indicated clearly that he thought this was a waste of time.
Will ignored this message as he walked carefully around the room, looking for anything unusual. The kitchen was an efficiency with a single cabinet and only two drawers for storage. One was used for silverware, the other contained the usual household items that found their way into the junk drawer: a couple of pens, an array of receipts and a ring of keys that probably had outlived the doors they opened.
He stopped at a plant by the window. The soil was bone dry; the plant was dead. The glass table by the couch was sparkling clean, the matching coffee table just as pristine. There was a neat stack of magazines beside an ashtray that had obviously been wiped out. There didn’t seem to be any dust on the floor or for that matter any indication that an addict had lived here. Will had been into many a junkie’s home and knew how they lived. Heroin was especially bad. Smack heads were like sick animals who had stopped grooming, and their surroundings generally reflected this.
Will saw telltale signs of black dusting powder on the doorjambs and windowsills, but he still asked, “Did you find many fingerprints?”
“About sixty thousand,” Michael said.
“Not on the glass tables?”
Michael was looking out into the hall as if he’d heard a noise. “She must’a brought her johns up here. There was enough DNA on the sheets to clone an entire village.”
Will walked into the bedroom, making a mental note to follow up on the question. He checked the drawers, noting that the clothes hadn’t been rifled through. The closet was packed with clothes, an old Hoover tucked in between boxes of shoes. The vacuum’s bag was empty. The scene-of-crime techs had removed it for closer examination. They had probably taken the sheets off the bed, too. Monroe’s mattress was bare, a bloodstain flowering out from the center.
Michael stood in the bedroom door. He obviously thought he could anticipate Will’s next question. “Menstrual blood, Pete says. She must have been on the rag.”
Will was silent, continuing his search in the bedroom, still thinking about the clean glass tables. He could hear Michael walking around in the other room, impatient. Will followed the black dusting powder where the crime scene techs had looked for fingerprints on all the usual surfaces: the edge of the nightstand, the doorknobs, the small chest that held mostly T-shirts and jeans. They must have checked the tables in the other room. The absence of dust indicated that the glass had been clean of prints.
Michael asked, “Did you see the story in the paper this morning?”
“No,” Will admitted. For obvious reasons, he got most of his news from the television.
“Monroe was the second story after some scandal over at the hospital.”
Will got on his hands and knees, checking under the bed. “Did you release her name yet?”
“Can’t until we find next of kin.” Michael added, “We’re holding back on the tongue thing, too.”
Will sat back on his heels, looking around the room. “She didn’t list her parents on any of her arrests?”
“Just Baby G.”
He opened the drawer in the bedside table. Empty. “No address book?”
“She didn’t have a telephone—no land line, no cell.”
“That’s odd.”
“Everything costs money. Either you got it or you don’t.” Michael was still watching Will. “Mind if I ask you what you think you’re gonna find?”
“I just want a feel of the place,” Will answered, though he was getting plenty more than that. Either Aleesha Monroe was the Mr. Clean of hookers or someone had taken great care to scrub down her apartment.
Will stood and walked back into the main room. Michael was at the front door again, arms folded across his chest. Why hadn’t he noticed that the apartment had been cleaned? Even an armchair detective with nothing but television cop shows for training would have picked up on this detail.
Will said, “Sink’s been scrubbed clean.” The sponge was still damp and when he held it to his nose, he caught the strong odor of bleach.
“You sniffing that for a reason?” Michael asked. He was watching Will carefully, no longer casually leaning against the doorjamb.
Will dropped the sponge back in the sink. “She have any money stashed in here?” he asked, purposefully avoiding Michael’s question.
“It’s in the log.”