Free The Kills by Linda Fairstein Page A

noticed the Vineyard posters in my office. The
windows were intact.
    I stepped
off the curb at the rear of the car, keys in hand. Mercer went around in front
to open the door for me.
    "Looks
like I'm your transportation for the evening," he said, taking the keys
out of my hand. "Your car's in dry dock, Alex. Someone slashed your two
front tires."
    8
    There is
a cruel invasion of privacy that attends a death by violence.
    Mercer
and I sat in a small cubicle adjacent to the autopsy theater in the office of
the chief medical examiner, Chet Kirschner. The brilliant pathologist had finished
his work for the day, and was taking us through the Queenie Ransome homicide
findings.
    The
strong odor of formalin was exaggerated by the closeness of the room. I coughed
to clear my dry throat, listening to Kirschner's voice, which was so oddly comforting
in these starkly clinical circumstances.
    I stared
at close-ups of the nude corpse, taken in her home by a Crime Scene Unit
detective, shuffling them around on the table in front of me.
    "There
are two different scenarios you want to think about here," he told us,
after describing what McQueen Ransome's body had revealed to him. "You
remember the old Park Plaza cases?"
    Both
Mercer and I recognized the name. The building had been a flophouse on the West
Side of Manhattan, a dilapidated single-room-occupancy hotel that was home to
dozens of senior citizens living on welfare. Throughout a two-year period,
several of the octogenarians had died without any suspicion of foul play.
    "The
first five women had no relatives in the city to raise any concerns, no
property of any value, and histories of illness that allowed their physicians
to certify their deaths as occurring from natural causes."
    "They
weren't even autopsied?" I asked.
    Kirschner
shook his head. "The sixth one was slightly different. Mildred Vargas. She
owned a television set, and it was missing from her room when her body was
found. We did a postmortem, even though there were no signs of a struggle, and
we wound up with unexpected evidence that there had been a sexual
assault."
    "What
killed her?" Mercer wanted to know.
    "She
was suffocated. Smothered with a pillow."
    Exactly
what Mike said had happened to Queenie.
    "I
got an order to exhume the other bodies and autopsy them," Kirschner said.
    Mercer
remembered the outcome. "All five had been raped."
    "And
smothered. No external signs of injury. Just the internal bruising, and the
minute petechial hemorrhages in their eyes that the physicians missed in each
case."
    Hallmarks
of an asphyxial death, the tiny red pinpoint markers were quiet indicators of
strangulation and suffocation, blood vessels bursting in eyes as they were
deprived of oxygen.
    Kirschner
straightened his lean body and rested an elbow atop a file cabinet. "That
killer made a specialty of getting in and out of apartments with no visible
signs of forced entry. He even took the time to re-dress three of his victims,
so the sexual assault was not the least bit obvious. Chapman's looking to link
McQueen Ransome's death to those cases."
    "Do
you have DNA in any of those?"
    "In
all of them, actually. Our own databank linked them to each other after the
exhumation and examination."
    "Has
the profile been uploaded to Albany and CODIS?"
    The
medical examiner's local databank could match unsolved cases to each other
because of evidence taken from a crime scene or victim's body. The profile
would be sent on to Albany, and a computer would scan the results against
convicted offenders in the New York State databank, who were mandated,
according to category of criminal offense, to submit blood or saliva samples
for the profiling of their DNA. CODIS, the Combined DNA Identification System,
was capable of linking unsolved cases in one jurisdiction to a burglar, rapist,
or killer anywhere in the entire country.
    "Four
months ago. We're still waiting for a cold hit."
    "But
there's no DNA in this case?"
    "Not
on the body. I told Chapman