Terminal City Read Online Free PDF Page B

when the girl came to the hotel. It’s possible she was packed unconscious into a trunk or a crate,” Rocco continued. “Might even be fancy luggage. One, two, three guys—don’t know the size of the entourage. She died between two and three yesterday, and it’s possible someone was still in the room with her an hour later. So from three P.M. on, look for luggage going out, assuming no one found anything yet in a stairwell or closet. Am I right? So you can start them watching tape from three P.M. on. Like hawks, got that?”
    A uniformed cop ducked in from the hallway. He was a fresh face, reinforcements no doubt sent in from the Seventeenth Precinct after 8:00 P.M. “Excuse me, Lieutenant Correlli? My boss said to tell you that Commissioner Scully is on his way to the hotel. Stand-up press conference in the lobby at twenty-two hundred.”
    “Press conference my ass. Fifteen minutes? We got nothing to give them.”
    “It’s a zoo downstairs, Loo,” Mike said. “Gotta feed them something.”
    “You better tell me how your magic box works, Dr. Azeem,” Rocco said. “Make sure I understand it, capisce ?”
    Fareed Azeem cleared his throat and moved into position by the fireplace mantel, as though it was the front of a small classroom. “As you all know, the identification of blood at a crime scene can be difficult to detect and certainly hard to rely on to pinpoint the time the bleed occurred, without months of laboratory analysis.”
    “And this is what you’ve tried to do right there in the room?”
    “Yes, Lieutenant. The techniques currently in use are actually a century old. Instead, our project involves hyperspectral imaging—”
    “Explain that to me. I have to sell it to the media in a few minutes.”
    “Certainly. So this imaging is done by a liquid-crystal filter—a tunable filter—that can provide immediate results.”
    “How?” Mike said.
    “The filter isolates different wavelength bands within every color. And because blood changes color over time—from a bright crimson to a very dull brown—our device is able to put an exact age to a sample.”
    “This works in the UK? This wavelength band isolation?” Rocco asked. “Your murder teams use it?”
    Fareed looked at the floor. “I remind you that this is a prototype machine. We’re still field-testing it. We’ve had remarkable levels of accuracy at home.”
    “That’s what Johnny meant when he asked me if I was in for a forensic adventure,” I said.
    Rocco removed a cigarette and matches from his jacket pocket and lit it. “So I’m a test case? Let’s leave your best guess out of the equation.”
    “No smoking in here, Loo,” Pug said. “The manager reminded me.”
    “I’m fresh out of heartburn medication, McBride. This is all I’ve got to calm my nerves.”
    “Scully knows this is a crapshoot,” Mike said. “He’s gonna want to go with it.”
    “What got your inner circle access back, Chapman? Last I knew you were headed for the rubber gun squad.”
    Mike answered the lieutenant but looked at me. “It’s the latest thing, Loo, or hadn’t you heard? They try to rehabilitate miscreants these days. Give us a second chance. Were you hoping they’d administer a lethal injection?”
    Pug chuckled. “Yeah, a quart of vodka.”
    “It’s Scully himself who brought Mike into this,” Mercer said. “Once the medical examiner got word to him tonight that Professor Azeem was lecturing at Columbia this week and had this very promising device, he sent Mike to pick Azeem up and get him to you.”
    The Manhattan North Homicide offices were uptown, much closer to the Columbia University campus than the South detectives or even the hotel scene. Keith Scully and Mike Chapman went way back together. It made sense that Scully would find a way to ease one of his smartest detectives into action again. This couldn’t be Mike’s case to run with, because his official assignment was the North, but he would be a valuable asset to