AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 6
After putting all fighters back into their respective corners, D-A-A-D had to make a call from his bedroom.
“Hey, Chief. It’s Mike,” I said to Fabretti.
“Mike, please tell me some good news on this jumper,” he said. “My boss keeps calling me every five minutes.”
“Okay, here we go,” I said, putting my beer on my nightstand as I fished out my notepad. “Seven o’clock yesterday, a thirty-something male in a dark silk suit checks into the Index House Hotel under the name of Pete Mitchell, pays in cash, and shows them ID.”
“What do you mean, under the name of?”
“Turns out, this ID, a Delaware driver’s license, is a fake. There actually are a number of Pete Mitchells who live in Delaware, but based on age alone, it’s pretty clear that none of them are our dead guy. His license is a good fake, though.”
“Oh, here we go. No ID. An actual suicide whodunit?” Fabretti said.
“That’s not all. This guy gets a room, drops off his stuff, comes back down and has a drink at the bar. About ten minutes after that, he goes to the restroom and blows chunks. Then he goes up to the roof through the stairwell, and they find him the next morning in the worksite beside the hotel.”
“What?”
“Exactly. Weird, but it gets weirder. In a drawer in his room, there’s one of those fanny packs. The fake ID is in the pack along with a ton of cash in twenties and fifties, almost ten grand altogether. Beside the pack is a box of condoms in a CVS bag and that’s it. No luggage, no deodorant, no tighty-whities. Nothing.”
“So you’re saying our guy is some kind of John Doe?”
“Yep. Even the Pete Mitchell name seems like a fake. I looked it up online. It’s the name of Tom Cruise’s character in Top Gun.”
“How does this make sense? He’s a drug dealer or something? Grabs some prophylactics and hits the Big Apple for a night in funky town but instead jumps off the roof? Is that the way you’re leaning? He jumped, right?”
“I’m about seventy-five percent there. But with this guy’s fishy ID and the dough in his room and the fact there’s no video on the roof, we can’t be positive yet.”
“Medical examiner run his prints?”
“In process. Still waiting to hear. You know latent prints at the ME’s office. It’s a bottleneck unless they get some heat. Especially if it looks like a suicide.”
“All right, I’ll make some calls there. Hit me the second you hear about the prints. By the way, how does the press look on this one? Any more rabid than usual?”
I frowned as I held my phone. This is the kind of stuff I’m always leery of in Major Case. I am
a cop, I felt like reminding him. My job is to solve homicides, not to do PR errand-boy work for politicians and the rich, connected people who financed their campaigns.
“Not that I really noticed, Chief,” I fibbed, and hung up.
Chapter 7
At ten fifteen the next morning, I walked through the front doors of the office of the Chief Medical Examiner on East 26th and First Avenue.
With its low ceiling and rows of stark blue metal tables, the autopsy room at the back of the first floor always reminded me of a pool hall—the least-fun game hall of all time.
The tables were thankfully empty this morning. Doing my best not to peek into the lab’s scales and buckets and glass-doored fridges, I crossed the white-tiled room to the office of Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Clarissa Linder.
Dr. Linder was a genial, nice-looking woman with short dark-blond hair. I’d worked cases with her before. Before becoming an ME, she had a lucrative pediatrician practice on the Upper East Side. But when she’d turned forty, inspired to do something more challenging, she had traded in Band-Aids and lollipops for psycho killers and floaters.
Her door was open and she was standing behind her desk, thumbing at the Fitbit on her wrist.
“You have one of these stupid fitness things, Mike?” she said. “They’re addictive. If you have nine hundred steps, you find yourself walking in circles around the room just to get to a thousand.”
“No, I don’t,” I said, and sat in the chair in front of her desk. “But I’m certainly no stranger to walking around in circles. Speaking of which, what’s going on with Mr. Mitchell? Or I suppose Mr. Doe is probably more appropriate. Unless we’ve heard from latent prints?”
She raised an eyebrow as she handed me her file.
