Wilde Lake(9)

“Do you think it was a deliberate attempt to obscure the time of death?”

“Maybe. Or maybe she turned her thermostat down to sixty-two degrees every night to save money and the killer left the door open in his haste to get away. We’re taking fingerprints from there and the sliding door where we think he entered.”

“The one he left open?”

“No, there are two bedrooms off the balcony, each with its own entrance. Let me show you.”

The apartment is nicer, inside, than Lu expected. The Grove’s bones are substantial. Superior, in fact, to the apartments and town houses built in Columbia two decades later. The floors are a well-maintained herringbone, and the layout indicates an expectation of gracious living not seen in newer apartments. A large kitchen, separated from a full dining room by a swinging door. Pocket doors between the dining and living rooms. The two bedrooms share a terrace overlooking what was once a garden—and maybe it still will be, come spring. Everything looks desolate this time of year.

“We think he entered here,” Mike says, showing Lu the sliding door in the smaller bedroom. “It was locked from the inside, but there are marks. It wouldn’t be hard to force it. He comes in, then goes to the master bedroom.”

They follow in the intruder’s footsteps, down the little hall. The woman who lived here didn’t have particularly good taste, but nor was it bad. There’s an arid quality to the decor, it’s as if she studied catalogs and tried to replicate the rooms exactly, down to the placement of tchotchkes. The hallway, for example, has framed copies of those French liquor ads, obviously reproductions. The decorative items seem impersonal, too, chosen to fill space. Yet it is the home of a house-proud woman, meticulously kept. Any dust that has settled here is subsequent to her death. Lu stops, puts a pin in her feelings, files them away. Faces, names, she forgets. But once she begins to translate a victim’s life into a story, it is with her forever. Mary McNally, a waitress, reliable and well liked, if not well known at her place of work. If it hadn’t been for her conscientious reputation, imagine how long she might have remained in her bedroom, staining a carpet she probably never so much as spilled a glass of water on.

“Is that blood or melted snow in her hair?”

“It’s all blood. Although not that much from the blow that actually killed her. She was struck from behind, then choked. That’s the cause of death, strangulation. But the body was moved—we’re pretty sure of that because she’s facedown—and all the damage to the face was done postmortem. I mean, the perp almost took it off. Do you want to see?”

Want? No, she doesn’t want to see it. She needs to see. Assuming there is an arrest—and there better be, the good citizens of Howard County will expect justice for one of their own, a nice lady minding her own business—a jury will inspect photographs. She has to feel the revulsion they will feel.

She does. It’s one of the more shocking things she’s been asked to see in her professional life and—well, what’s the line from that stupid song that was on the radio in her teens? “Never Been to Me”? She’s seen some things a woman ain’t supposed to see.

But Mike Hunt’s eyes are on her, so she keeps her voice steady. “Weapon?”

“We haven’t found it. We’re canvassing the area, hoping he tossed it on his way out.”

“Are you using ‘he’ generically, or because it seems probable that a man did this?”

Hunt shrugs, indifferent to pronouns. Men can afford to be.

“We found a ticket stub in her purse, for the 10 P.M. showing of The Theory of Everything at that movie theater at Snowden Square. That was December thirty-first. She had a week off, December thirty-first through yesterday. So we know she was alive December thirty-first. It’s possible she was killed that night when she came in. Hung up her coat, headed back to the bedroom, surprised the guy.”

“This seems like an unlikely target for a burglary.”

“A junkie might have figured the place to be empty because of the holidays, thought it a good opportunity to grab a few things to fence. No tree, no decorations. But nothing was taken except whatever cash she had in her billfold. Assuming she had cash in her billfold. She has a jar of coins in her room—at least $50 to $100 in there, I’m guessing. Heavy to carry, but junkies can be superhuman when it suits them. And you see the iPad next to her bed, on the stand. So if it started as a burglary, the guy got distracted. Let’s hope for a hit on the fingerprints.”

Lu continues to move through the apartment, trying to absorb every detail she can about the dead woman. The boss at the Silver Diner told Mike Hunt that she was originally from upstate New York, had moved to Maryland for a man, but he had been out of the picture for years. No boyfriend. No real friends, but she seemed content. There was family, back in New York. A mom, sisters. But she didn’t visit them at Christmastime because it was so cold. The cold had begun to bother her a lot. She talked about moving to Florida, near Panama City. There’s always a job for a good waitress in resort towns, she told her boss, but you got to pick one where there’s work year-round. Or where the seasonal work is so good you can survive the slack months.

Lu will interview the boss herself at some point, nail down more details. Her father once said a murder trial is a biography. The more jurors know about the victim, the more they care about avenging the death. Make the dead live, her father said. He famously did it with no body once, only a shoe. He concocted an entire person from a plaid sandal with one drop of blood on it.