Thomas Perry - The Butcher's Boy

Elizabeth sat quietly and felt a wave of weariness come over her. Ventura seemed to be far behind her now, receding into some impassable distance composed of complications rather than mere time and space. For a while the Ventura case had begun to look hopeful, she thought. No, not hopeful, really, but so peculiar that there had to be something to it. She promised herself she wasn’t going to forget about it. But now there was this. It would have to be gotten through somehow before she could start learning about her own killer. She was surprised to find herself thinking of him in those terms, but now that she had, she accepted it. That was what he was—her own. Her first.

“So WHAT WOULD YOU like us to do while we’re waiting for the lab work?” asked Hart.

“That’s one of the things we were trying to decide when you arrived. We’ve asked for everything Washington could send us on the Senator—friends, enemies, habits, even old news stories. It’ll take time for them to dig it out, though, and it probably won’t give us anything we didn’t get from Claremont’s assistant hours ago. The best we can do at the moment is probably to put together as much of the background as we can, and figure out what to do if that toxic substance turns out to be arsenic, say, or cyanide. It might be best if you just went to your hotel and got some rest. No use all of us sitting here.”

“Or maybe to the Senator’s hotel,” said Hart. “I suppose it’s still being held pretty close by the local police. Would we step on their toes if we went over to take a look?”

“No,” said Lang. “That’s part of the deal. Joe, can you take them over? I’ll call you if the lab work comes in.”

Hart and Mistretta waited at the doorway for Elizabeth to go first, but then Mistretta edged out in front, striding down the hallway and struggling into his coat. They followed him down the stairs and along an unfamiliar back corridor that opened on a parking lot with only about a dozen cars scattered at varying distances from the building, looking forlorn and stranded. A light snow had begun to fall.

As Mistretta turned out of the lot and drove down the side street toward the Constellation Hotel, Elizabeth said, “Joe, where do you think this case will end up? Murder?”

“When you see the room you’ll be able to make up your own mind, Elizabeth,” said Mistretta. “But I won’t hedge, because an hour from now you’ll have reached the same conclusion anyway. The door was locked from inside, the window was locked from inside, there is no reason to believe anybody saw the Senator from midnight until 8:00 A.M. I think before the night is over we’ll have a lab report that the toxic substance was some kind of poison you can buy over the counter. And I think tomorrow by noon we’ll have a confidential report from the Senator’s doctors at Bethesda Naval Medical Center saying he had terminal cancer, or an even more confidential report that he was being blackmailed, or something of that sort. Because whatever happened to him, the chances are pretty good that he did it to himself. And if I have to make an early call, I’ll go with the odds every time.”

Elizabeth thought about this for a few seconds, and then Mistretta added, “And it was poison.”

“So?” she asked. “Unusual, I’ll admit, but it happens.”

“True,” he said. “But it’s hard to find a poison that doesn’t leave the victim feeling pretty awful for an hour or two before he dies. And if he doesn’t expect to feel that way he picks up a phone and calls somebody.”

The hotel room looked as though it had been the scene of some unusually messy kind of mechanical failure. Every smooth surface was covered with a thin film of greasy black dust. The bedclothes were churned into a pile at the foot of the bed. On the rug in the center of the floor was the chalked silhouette of a human form, caught in an attitude suggesting a grotesque dance.

Elizabeth found an empty spot in the room and stood, looking around without touching anything. It was hard to imagine what the place had been like when it was occupied by living people. The police had apparently looked at everything, dusted the whole room for fingerprints, taken everything that was movable back to the laboratory for study.

Her trained mind shifted into its analytical mode and concentrated on the elements before her. The absent cups and glasses were taken care of; the body; Claremont’s luggage. She looked into the closet. His clothes were gone too. All that was left, really, were the four walls and furniture, covered with fingerprint dust. She walked to the bathroom. The U-shaped trap was gone from beneath the sink; the drainpipe ended abruptly a foot below the fixture. Even the toilet had been tampered with: the tank cover was on the floor covered with the ubiquitous black dust.

“This isn’t doing me much good,” said Elizabeth. “It doesn’t look like a hotel room anymore.”

“I know what you mean,” said Mistretta. “If there ever was anything to find in here, it’ll turn up in the lab reports. The forensics people were in here for six hours. It looks like they’ve covered everything.”

“Do you mind if we try something else?”

“Why not?” said Mistretta. “Until the final autopsy report comes in, anything’s as good as anything else.”

“Then I’d like to see another room like this one. The best thing would be an empty one on this corridor,” said Elizabeth.

“Good idea,” said Hart. He had been silent the whole time, walking around the room making notes on a pocket pad, tearing off sheets, and stuffing them into his pockets.

“Take your pick,” said Mistretta. “They’ve closed off the whole floor for the time being. They’re all empty.”

They tried the next room, but it was torn up too.

“The assistant’s room?” asked Hart.

“Right,” said Mistretta, who closed the door and led them to the next one.

Inside, Elizabeth’s imagination felt comfortable again. The room was designed to be exactly the same as the Senator’s, but it still had that peculiar air of suspension that hotel rooms seemed to have, as though somebody had been there so recently that if you turned your head quickly some relic or remnant of their personal lives would be visible for an instant. She walked around the room, opening drawers, peering into the closet, finally, focusing her attention on the bathroom. Everything gleamed with a precarious expectancy that made her want to open the seals and move things around, like walking on fresh snow. But her mind moved for her, counting and calculating and remembering.

When she returned to the bedroom Hart was kneeling in the open doorway scrutinizing the locks. He said, to nobody in particular, “Not much to stop anybody if the deadbolt wasn’t in.”

Mistretta said, “No good. The assistant says their bags were with them from the time they left the airport, and they didn’t go out after they got here. When he left the Senator threw the bolt. In the morning they had to call the maintenance man with an electromagnetic gizmo to open it up. That didn’t work either because the fit was too tight, so they drilled it.”

Elizabeth wondered why she hadn’t seen that, but apparently Hart hadn’t either. It wasn’t much comfort, she realized, as she walked to the window.

Mistretta saw her fiddling with the latch and said, “That’s been checked too. There’s a little wear on the molding, but the lock is working perfectly. No prints on the inside handle, and no handle on the outside.”

Elizabeth went out onto the balcony. It was really night now and an icy wind clutched at her hair and the skirt of her coat. She looked around at the identical balconies, beside her and above and below. No, it was probably too farfetched. Four floors below her was the parking lot, where the cars were only shiny-colored rectangles with no depth to them. Somebody who wanted to kill a senator could do it in a thousand ways that didn’t involve swinging on a rope that high up in the cold. Might as well ask, anyway.