Keith DeCandido: Four Walls

"Vic's name is Maria Campagna," Angell said without preamble. "She works here part-time. She was one of the ones who closed last night. Two other girls found her when they opened this morning." She smiled. "And now you know everything I do-I only just got here."

One of the uniforms came out through the glass door. Lindsay briefly felt the enticing cool breeze from the air-conditioned interior.

The uniform's collars had "50" pins on them, indicating his home base of the five-oh, which Lindsay knew was the local precinct. He was tall, barrel-chested, crew cut, and was pale except for his nose, which was bright red with sunburn. His name tag read O'MALLEY.

"How you doin', angel face?" he said with a grin.

Angell winced. "Deej, what'd I tell you about calling me that?"

Still grinning, O'Malley said, "That you'd shoot me. But I've seen your range scores, I ain't worried."

Shaking her head, Angell said, "Detective Bonasera, Detective Monroe, this jackass is D. J. O'Malley. We were at the two-four together back in the day. Deej, these two are from the crime lab."

O'Malley nodded. "You guys work with Mac Taylor, right?"

"Yeah," Stella said. "You know him?"

"Nah, just heard about his getting reamed over that scumbucket Dobson. Glad he got off."

"Us, too," Stella said with a nod.

"So," Angell said, "who're the players?"

O'Malley didn't take out his notebook, which surprised Lindsay. "Dina and Jeanie found the bodies. Dina's the big one, Jeanie's the skinny hottie. The old fart's Sal, he owns the place, and the cute blonde's Annie-she closed with Maria last night."

Stella frowned. "These people have last names?"

"Probably." O'Malley shrugged. "Me and Bats come here all the time. I know all these people-including the vic. She was a good kid-always knew how much milk to put in my coffee." He turned to Stella and Lindsay. "Nobody touched anything, so you two're all set."

Lindsay nodded, wondering why O'Malley's partner was nicknamed "Bats."

"Let's get out of the oven," Stella said, moving toward the bakery entrance. O'Malley jumped to grab the door and hold it open for them. Chivalry right after describing the women inside in terms of how good they looked. Lindsay sighed-but she'd been in law enforcement long enough that the contradiction didn't surprise her.

As Lindsay walked through the door O'Malley was holding, she noticed the bakery's hours stencilled on the glass. Sunday to Thursday 7 A.M. to 11 P.M., Friday and Saturday 7 A.M. to midnight.

As soon as they entered the bakery, Lindsay felt goose bumps on her flesh as the air-conditioning evaporated the sweat on her forehead and neck. She closed her eyes and enjoyed the sensation for a second as the door shut behind O'Malley.

When she opened them, O'Malley was pointing at the corner behind where the two display units met. "Body's over there."

Lindsay followed Stella around the counter facing the door. The owner, a large man with a bulbous nose, liver spots all over his skin, and thin white hair, was muttering something in an accented voice-Italian, she assumed. He was standing by the staircase, near the table at which the three young women-Dina, Jeanie, and Annie-were seated. All three had bloodshot eyes, indicating that they'd been crying, and Annie still was. She was the only one of the three not wearing makeup-the other two looked like raccoons thanks to smudged mascara. Standing next to the owner was another uniform from the five-oh with a nametag reading WAYNE, which went some way toward explaining the nickname. Lindsay wondered if his first name was Bruce.

As she passed by the young woman, she heard Annie mutter that it should've been her.

Angell spoke to the owner while Lindsay and Stella went to check the body. They came around the corner and stepped up onto a boardwalk-like set of wooden slats that put the people behind the counter a little higher up than the customers. Lindsay saw the logic: all the employees here seemed to be young women, who tended to be shorter than men, and it didn't do to serve the public when the counter only came up to your chin.

Lindsay stepped up onto the riser and looked down at the body.

Kelly lying on the floor, a stunned look on her blood-covered face …

She looked away, forcing the image out of her head.

"You okay?" Stella put a hand on her shoulder.

Nodding quickly, Lindsay said, "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine." She reached into her bag and took out her Nikon D200 digital camera, flipping the strap over her neck.

Then she looked at the body again.

This time, to her relief, she didn't see Kelly. She saw Maria Campagna, a skinny young woman with short dark hair. She was lying on the riser, legs bent, knees pointing toward the back wall, her back flat on the riser, her head turned in the opposite direction from her knees, her arms splayed on either side of her. She was wearing a white T-shirt with the words SAN FRANCISCO HERE I COME stencilled on the front, hip-hugger blue jeans, brown leather sandals, and no socks. Her fingernails and toenails were both painted purple, the polish chipped here and there, indicating that she'd applied it at least a day or two ago.

After taking a deep breath through her nose and letting it out slowly through her mouth-a method her former psychiatrist had suggested and that had allowed Lindsay to keep it together on more than one occasion-she raised the camera to her face. She set up Maria's-rather, the victim's -face in the center of the viewer and started clicking pictures. That was something Mac had told her shortly after she joined his team: that it was easier to work a scene when you thought about the victim or the body, not a name. There was time enough to think about who they were later, but when you were doing the scene, you focused on what happened, not who it happened to.

She heard Angell say, "Officer Wayne, could you please take everyone except for Mr. Belluso upstairs? I need to talk to each of you in turn, starting with Mr. Belluso."

"Sure," Wayne said. "Ladies?"

Lindsay heard the shuffle of feet up the wooden staircase at the center of the bakery, but she didn't look, focused as she was on photographing the body. She made sure to get images of the body as a whole, then from every angle, then close-ups.

Stella stood behind her, taking in the scene from a distance while Lindsay took her pictures.

After taking a close shot of the victim's eyes, Lindsay said, "Petechial hemorrhaging around the eyes."

Nodding, Stella said, "Probably strangled." She moved in closer and looked down. "Lots of scuff marks on the riser, but that's to be expected. She could've been killed here, or she could've been dragged around back here." Stella got down on her knees. "Just eyeballing it, there's trace up the ying-yang here. Good thing we brought a lot of envelopes."

"Have fun," Lindsay muttered as she continued snapping photographs. Collecting trace at a scene like this-one that had been tramped over and used a great deal-was incredibly frustrating, because ninety-nine percent of what you picked up was stuff that was supposed to be there. The crime lab's job was to find that one percent that didn't belong.

To make their job even tougher, if the killer was Mr. Belluso or anybody who worked there, they'd have left trace evidence all over the place, but none of it would be indicative of guilt in this crime.

But that part was Angell's problem. Lindsay's job right now was to document the body.

Stella had pulled out her tweezers and put on her rubber gloves, and was now bagging and tagging things she picked up off the floor. In a place like this, most of the trace was going to be organic, and Lindsay was now counting the microseconds until Stella asked her for a hand. As it was, she was thrilled that she hadn't simply been asked to do it all in the first place. As the newest member of the team, scut work like that had almost always fallen on her. She still recalled her first case, which involved digging through tiger dung looking for body parts. Took weeks to get the smell out of her hair. Lindsay viewed it as a sign of progress that Stella was no longer treating her like a rookie.