The Deadhouse Read Online Free

to look like the eighties around here."
    Homicide cops had a tradition of betting on the number of murder
cases they expected to occur before the end of the year. Hector kept
track of the field, since choices had to be made by late summer. If
there were open slots left, prosecutors were invited to kick in before
the night of the party.
    "So far, we've only had three hundred sixty-two in Manhattan this
year. I just missed by six bodies back in eighty-eight. Total was seven
sixty-four, can you believe it? And these wimps think they're
overworked now when they're carrying a handful of investigations."
    Chapman had left his overcoat in the super's office and emerged
holding an oversize flashlight. He held out his right hand to Hector
and asked the guys if the Crime Scene Unit had finished its work.
    "Hard to make this a crime scene. Super was selling it to the first
guys who responded as an accident. Peterson pulled in every chit he
could think of to get Crime Scene to come over and give it a look, sort
of unofficially. They're treating it as a suspicious death, not a
homicide yet. Not every day you get a broad who lays down and rolls out
her front door into an elevator shaft just hours after somebody else
paid a lot of money to have her knocked off," Hector opined. "They took
some photos of the body before she was scooped out. You could look. All
you're gonna see is some dark stains."
    Lieutenant Peterson, the veteran detective who ran the Homicide
Squad, could get the Crime Scene Unit to do almost anything he
requested. He had the best instincts in the business when it came to
death investigation, and the finest track record in the department for
solving cases. When he asked for backup, men knew he wouldn't be
wasting their efforts.
    Mike squatted and pointed the beam into the dark shaft. I rested one
hand on his shoulder and looked in over his head. "You want to step
aside, blondie? I know you think you give off quite a glow yourself,
but you're blocking the little bit of help that seventy-five-watter is
shining down at me from over your head."
    I straightened up and stepped back.
    "Hector, anybody get down here and scrape some of this crap up? It's
impossible to tell what's blood and what's oil from the works, just by
looking." Mike was standing, too.
    "Yeah, that's all been done."
    "They dust for prints?" I asked.
    "Nobody even knew what parts of the building to include in the
scene, Alex. We don't know if she had been dead for one hour or four by
the time she was found. In the meantime, one super, two handymen, and a
bunch of teenagers had been all over this area. They didn't know who
she was, so they couldn't figure out which floor she'd dropped from or
which elevator button she'd pushed. Sure, they went up and down all
twenty-two landings, dusting for latents, looking for signs of a
struggle, canvassing to see if anyone was at home who heard any noise.
Pretty futile runaround so far. You go try that other elevator bank.
It's not impossible that she just missed her footing and went off into
a swan dive. You'll see, these things are on their last legs."
    "Anyone been inside her apartment yet?"
    "Waiting on that now. Peterson sent someone down to the morgue to
get the keys they found on the body. Emergency Services is on their way
back with a ram. Whoever gets here first, that's how we're going in."
    "Super doesn't have a key?"
    "Nope. She didn't trust nobody with nothin', is what he says."
    That would be Lola. Chapman motioned to me to follow him back up the
staircase to the lobby. There was a pair of stuffed armchairs against
the wall, covered in a dreary tapestry fabric, sorely in need of
reupholstering, and we sat opposite each other in them while he told me
about his conversation with the lieutenant.
    "Loo's really ripped. The commissioner's sticking with the accident
story. It certainly can't be Ivan who had anything to do with this,
they figure, since he was already under. That's what Peterson took me
inside to tell