nodded. “A Dr. Ronald Lucette. Lived here with his wife, Sharon. She was down off the lobby getting her feet worked on or something.”
Stack looked at him. “Her feet? There a doctor’s office down there?”
“Naw, a beauty salon. You know, getting her nails painted, her toes depilatoried, maybe. Hell, I don’t know.”
“A pedicure,” Rica explained to the two of them. “Some women, they got the time and money, they get their feet looking good, calluses filed away, nails enameled by a pro, that kinda thing.”
Both men stared at her. “You ever had one?” Stack asked.
“No.”
“The doctor is in,” Fagin said, “if you want to go see him.”
Rica was starting to like Fagin.
He led the way into the kitchen. Almost everything there was soot-darkened or charred, and there was about an inch of black water on the floor. Some techs were still there, wearing rubber boots and exchanging notes. The ME was packing up to leave. Dr. Ronald Lucette, who Stack knew had been the recent center of attention, was a blackened mess on the floor. He was lying on his right side with his knees drawn up, his arms behind him, reminding Stack of those photographs of the remains of long-ago volcano victims in Pompeii. His grotesque, darkened head was thrown back, mouth gaping, as if he still might be able to draw some cool fresh air and reverse the process that had left him in such a state.
“The fire started right where he is,” Fagin told Stack and Rica. “Some sort of liquid accelerant was poured over and around him when he was on the floor tied up with something. Looks like cloth rather than rope or tape, but I couldn’t tell you what kind. As you can see, it was a nasty, greedy fire. These prewar buildings are what everyone wants to live in, but some of them, with their solid walls and floors, aren’t set up to support universal sprinkler systems.”
“Was there a smoke alarm in here?” Rica asked.
Fagin looked at her, then motioned over his right shoulder with his thumb. The smoke alarm was above the kitchen door, its round plastic lid dangling to reveal that the batteries had been removed.
“If you find the batteries, let us know,” Stack said. “There might be prints on them.” But he knew there was about as much chance of finding fingerprints on the batteries as there had been of finding prints on the umbrella left at the scene of Hugh Danner’s murder by burning.
“We already found the batteries,” one of the techs called over. “No prints of any kind.”
“The killer wear gloves?” Rica asked.
“That or the batteries were wiped,” the tech said. “We dusted what we could of the rest of the apartment. We’ll have to wait and see what we get other than the occupants’ prints.”
Stack looked at Fagin. “What about the wife with the neat feet?”
“She’s in the apartment next door. She just sits and stares.”
“I wouldn’t want to see what she sees,” Stack said.
He moved closer to the body and studied it from different angles.
Rica was peering over his shoulder. “Looks like the victim might have been bound with black cloth,” she said, “but it’s hard to know for sure, with everything in the place blackened.”
“The lab might be able to tell you the original color,” Fagin said. “Some dyes leave distinctive residues.”
Stack straightened up.
The ME had moved closer, a middle-aged woman with ragged blond hair and a lot of loose flesh around her neck. A victim of gravity. Stack didn’t think he’d seen her before.
“I can give you a preliminary autopsy report,” she said. “Death by burning; soot in his mouth and, I’d be willing to bet, in his lungs. Which means the poor bastard was alive when he was set on fire.”
“Like the last one,” Rica said.
The ME nodded. “That’s what I hear.”
“If somebody makes a habit of this,” Fagin said, “one of these days we won’t be able to get to a high-rise fire and contain it, and that’s everybody’s worst nightmare.”
“If it isn’t the worst,” Rica said, “it’s in the running. What are the odds of one of these buildings catching fire high up and collapsing like the World Trade Center towers?”
“Pretty slim,” Fagin said. “The WTC towers were struck by planes; then the fire was from thousands of gallons of jet fuel. And jet fuel burns at temperatures you wouldn’t believe, and for a long time. Nothing like that here. A high-rise fire like this, we generally use a defend-in-place strategy, usually don’t evacuate the whole building, just those people we think might be in some danger.” He got a look on his face Rica had seen before on New York firefighters, and on some cops. “Not like the World Trade Center at all,” he said in a different, softer voice.
Stack pulled a folded handkerchief from his pocket and wiped perspiration from his face. He wasn’t feeling so good, wondering if he and Rica and the building itself would ever smell like anything other than charred matter. He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pants pocket.
“Thanks for your input,” he said to everyone in the room. Then to Rica: “Let’s go next door and chat with the new widow.”
“Cheerful goddamn job,” one of the techs said, as Stack and Rica were leaving.
In the hall they passed the paramedics on their way to remove the body. Two hefty guys chomping gum and discussing the merits of different Italian restaurants, their emotions and discipline to duty on two different tracks. Doing their job with linguini on their minds; and when the body bag zipper rasped closed, their job was well on its way to being over for the evening. Stack and Rica, on the other hand, were knocking on an apartment door so they could talk to a woman married to ashes. One body with so many different meanings. Death sure was selective in its impact.
An expensively groomed woman in her fifties, whose only flaw was that she appeared to have been crying, opened the door. After Stack and Rica identified themselves, she led them to another woman slumped in a corner of a cream-colored brocade sofa that looked as if it cost more than a car.
Sharon Lucette was a tiny, attractive blonde in her forties. Her blue blouse was stained with tears. Her dark slacks were rolled up at the ankles and there were wads of cotton stuck between her bare toes, the nails of which were a brilliant crimson that Rica would describe as blood-red. She had been wearing sandals, but they were upside down on the carpet. Next to them were two red-stained cotton wads. When the neighbor who’d ushered in Stack and Rica introduced them to Sharon as police detectives, Sharon wailed.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Lucette,” Stack said soothingly. “We won’t bedevil you at a time like this. Believe me, we know it isn’t easy.” He moved closer and touched her quaking shoulder. “It’s one hell of a world sometimes, the things it can throw at you when you least expect it. An old cop knows that if he knows nothing else.”
When the grief-tortured woman stopped sobbing and looked up at Stack, Rica saw that half her hairdo was perfectly
