The Zero Hour Read Online Free PDF Page B

her missing, didn’t give a name. District office determined she lived alone, got the key from the apartment building supervisor. Who, by the way, wasn’t exactly grief-stricken about this. Wanted her out of the building.”
    “Well, now he’s got what he wants,” Sarah said with a grim half-smile. “Where’s the ME—what’s her name, Rena something?”
    “Rena Goldman.” Peter beckoned to a woman in her early forties, with long gray hair, horn-rimmed glasses, a long, pale face, no makeup. She wore a white lab coat. She and Sarah, both wearing surgical gloves, shook hands.
    “Do we know anything about time of death?” Sarah asked the medical examiner.
    “Lividity is fixed, so it’s at least eight hours, and she hasn’t been moved,” Rena Goldman said. She consulted a small, dog-eared spiral notebook. “No evidence of decomposition, but there wouldn’t be any in this cool weather. She’s out of rigor, so it’s got to be at least, say, twenty-four hours.”
    “Semen?”
    “I don’t see any, not at first glance anyway. I can tell you for certain in a couple of hours.”
    “No, there probably won’t be any,” Sarah said.
    “Why not?” Peter said.
    “Apart from the fact that Val always, but always, made her clients use condoms—”
    He interrupted: “But if it was a rape—”
    “No signs of that,” the medical examiner said.
    “No,” Sarah echoed. “And it sure wasn’t a client.”
    “Oh, come on,” Peter objected. “How the hell can you say that?”
    With a slightly chewed Blackwing pencil, Sarah pointed to a folded pair of glasses on the bedside end table. The frames were heavy and black and geeky.
    “She told me she never saw clients at her apartment. And she wasn’t wearing these when she was killed. They’re too ugly to wear regularly—I certainly never saw her in them. She wore contacts, but you can see she didn’t have them in, either.”
    “That’s right, now that you mention it,” Rena Goldman said.
    “Of course, it may have been a disgruntled client who tracked her down at home,” Sarah said. “But she wasn’t on a business call. She fought, didn’t she?”
    “Oh, yeah. Defense wounds on the body. Contusions on the arm, probably from warding off blows.” Goldman leaned toward the body and pointed a thin index finger at Valerie’s head. “Wound across the face. A curved laceration about half an inch wide, with diffuse abrasion and contusion approximately one inch around, extending from the temple to the zygoma.”
    “All right,” Sarah said. “What about the gunshot?”
    “Typical contact gunshot wound,” Peter said.
    Rena Goldman nodded and tucked a wisp of gray hair behind one ear.
    “The hair’s singed,” Peter said. “Probably a big gun, wasn’t it?”
    “I’d guess a .357,” the medical examiner said, “but that’s just a guess. Also, there’s stippling.” She was referring to fragments of gunpowder embedded around the point of entry, indicating that the gun was fired at close range.
    Sarah suddenly felt nauseated and was relieved that she had no more questions to ask. “Thanks,” she said.
    Rena Goldman nodded awkwardly, turned, and drifted away.
    In the “efficiency” kitchen area a few feet away, a handsome young black man, attired in a double-breasted Italian blue blazer and foulard tie, gingerly placed an empty beer can into a paper evidence bag. Peter’s partner, Sergeant Theodore Williams, was the best-dressed cop on the force. A few years younger than Peter but unquestionably the better homicide investigator.
    Next to him at the Formica kitchenette counter stood a tech from Latent Prints, a round-shouldered, older black man, delicately applying with a feather brush the fingerprint powder the techs liked to call “pixie dust” to a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. Sarah watched him lift a print from the bottle with a clear plastic Sirchie hinged lifter.
    “So who kills a call girl?” Peter asked. “A john?”
    “I doubt it,”