The 17th Suspect (Women's Murder Club #17)(18)

My partner looked around the gray, dimly lit scene. “Where is everyone?” he said.

“My question exactly.”

We approached the beat cops and the small, restive crowd and exchanged introductions with officers Roger Peet and Donald Baskin from Central Station. Casey looked seasoned and unaffected, while Baskin looked green and anxious.

Casey said, “We just got here. We taped off the area as best we could but haven’t had a chance to secure any witnesses.”

I said, “I got a call more than a half hour ago. What took you so long to get here?”

Casey said, “Who are you again?”

I told him that I was from Homicide, and he understood that for the moment I outranked them. I asked, “Have your investigators given you their ETA?”

“We’re waiting for them. They’re on another case.”

“Did you call CSI?”

“For this?” Casey asked incredulously. “A hit on a vagrant?”

I snapped, “Call them. Do it now.” The two cops didn’t report to me, but that didn’t mean I’d stand by and watch them not do their jobs.

I walked over to the body of a woman who was splayed out faceup on the asphalt. She was wearing a hippy-style multicolored cloth coat over a long blue sweater and leggings with holes in them. Her hair was dark, and blood had puddled around her upper torso. It looked to me like she’d taken a couple of shots to the chest. So she’d seen the shooter. Had she known the person?

I turned back to Casey and asked, “What about bystanders? Did anyone see something? Say something?”

Baskin found his voice. “I talked to one guy who said he saw the doer. Described him as a tall white man wearing a nice coat.”

“You didn’t want to bring him in and get a statement?”

Casey said, “Shit, Sergeant. There were thirty-forty bums walking around when we got here. Until our backup showed up, it was the two of us trying to keep people from walking through the blood and stealing the victim’s stuff.”

I got it. It wasn’t their fault that they were virtually alone at this scene. But forty-five minutes had gone by since Cushing called me. Meaning the shooting could have gone down long before that.

I pressed on, regardless.

I asked Casey, “Was there any ID on the victim?”

“I didn’t actually pat her down. Mostly, I just checked to make sure she was dead.”

I told Casey and Baskin to expand the perimeter. As they looped crime scene tape around parking stanchions, then blocked off the bay end of the area with their cruiser, Conklin and I walked a few of the onlookers into the shelter of concrete building walls.

Someone in this crowd we’d gathered up might know something. Hell, for all we knew, one of them could be the shooter.





CHAPTER 25


AS CONKLIN TOOK statements, I called Brady and brought him up to date on the untethered murder scene on Pier 45.

“Four uniforms are here, Brady, and a half dozen homeless people. No investigators, no one here from CSI. We don’t have an ID on the victim. Conklin and I are doing interviews now.”

Brady said, “Do I need to tell you, you’re on Central’s turf?”

“I’m not looking for a war, but I had to step in, Lieu. This isn’t right.”

“I’ll put in a call to Central Homicide,” he said.

I rejoined Conklin and the individuals shifting around him at the side of the museum.

My partner said to me, “Sergeant, this is Bettina Strauss. She knew the victim. Ms. Strauss, tell the sergeant what you know.”

With that, Conklin took off with Officers Casey and Baskin to canvass the immediate area.

I said hello to Bettina Strauss. She looked to be forty, had piercings, and had tattoos on her neck and hands. She wore an old leather jacket over denim overalls and had a fluttering red chiffon scarf around her neck. Her face was red and swollen from crying.

“That’s Laura Russell,” she said of the victim. “She was the sweetest person. She wasn’t hard-core homeless. More like displaced. She used to teach third grade, I think. Got laid off last year, as I remember it, and she started, you know …” Strauss acted out guzzling from a bottle, then went on.

“She had a family, but she didn’t talk about them. I got the feeling she ran off, but I didn’t push her, you understand. We all have stories.”

I asked Strauss a slew of questions: Had she seen the shooting? Did she know who the shooter was or if there had been an incident before the shooting that had set the gunman off? Did she know anyone who wanted to hurt Laura?

She told me simply that she hadn’t been here when the shooting happened.

“Laura and I were going to meet here and then go over to Pier 39,” Strauss choked out between sobs, “but when I got here, oh, my God, she was on the ground. I shook her. I pressed on her chest.”

She showed me her bloody hands. Tears sprang from her eyes, and she covered her face with the crook of her arm.

I told Strauss that I was sorry, but still, I asked once more, “Do you have any idea who may have wanted to hurt Laura?”

“God, no. But someone is shooting people, Officer. Laura and I were both scared.”

“Bettina, if I want to show you pictures or ask you more questions, how can I find you again?”