“Dude is seriously dead,” Paulie said, coming forward to look at the body with the detached curiosity Mike had become accustomed to from crime scene techs. “Check it out. There’s a syringe in his thigh.”
“Stay with the dead guy. I need to make sure there’s no one here.” She cleared the small dining room, the modern efficiency kitchen, down the hall into the one bedroom, her breathing steady, her Glock at the ready. She took only a quick look. The bedroom seemed undisturbed, nothing messy lying around. Nothing obvious had happened in here. She walked into the decent-size single bathroom—it was wrecked.
A lacquer painting of brilliant red poppies hung drunkenly on the wall, and the contents of York’s makeup bag were spilled on the countertop. Bottles were tipped over on the vanity. The blue bathroom rug was shoved into a corner, and a bottle of room spray was on the floor. The shower curtain was open wide. This was clearly where the struggle with her murderer began.
She called the ME and more CSU people. They were in for a long night.
Mike remembered Elaine had been dressed in business clothes but no shoes. She tried to work up the scene in her head: Elaine returning home from a long day’s work, leaving the man in the living room to take it easy, slipping off her shoes, rubbing her feet a bit, then heading for the shower. Or the man was hiding in the bathroom, leaping out at her. She fought for her life; they struggled back into the living room. She somehow turned the needle back on him, and he got her gun from her and shot her with it. That didn’t work. The dead guy was big, didn’t look at all helpless. Elaine was only five-foot-six or so; he would have overpowered her in a second.
There had to have been a third person involved. A person who murdered them both. She was sure of it.
Mike walked backward from the bathroom to the living room, eyeing the overturned chair, sofa pillows on the floor, a broken glass near the ottoman. The struggle ended here, with the body. So the man had fought the murderer. He’d died, and Elaine had ended up in the river. Whatever the actual scenario, the murderer had been smart and strong and fast. He’d murdered both a big man and a trained cop. He must have left believing Elaine York dead, only she hadn’t been dead, not yet, not until she’d wandered into the East River.
Paulie stood over the victim. “Find anything?”
“A trail of broken and overturned stuff. Bathroom’s totaled.”
“Come look at this, Mike.”
“What do you have?”
“Initially I thought his face was just congested, but look at how red his skin is. And look at the corners of his mouth, that black stuff.” Paulie bent close to the body and sniffed. “Hmm. You try.”
Smelling a dead guy’s breath didn’t rank high on her list of fun things to do, but she leaned down and breathed in. Patchouli. Garlic, maybe onions. And death, the smell of death.
“Am I supposed to smell something special?”
“Almonds.”
Her head jerked up. “You’re thinking cyanide?”
“Yeah. Whatever, I’d still steer clear if I were you. I’ve seen a cyanide poisoning before; it looked like this.”
Mike said, “Rigor has passed. I’d say he’s been dead awhile, maybe a day.” She slipped on nitrile gloves and pulled the dead man’s wallet out of his back pocket. “According to the driver’s license, this is Vladimir Kochen, and he lives in Brighton Beach.”
Paulie scratched his neck. “Not to make assumptions, but you know a lot of the Russians out there are mobbed up.”