A light rain began, and I pulled my collar up and tucked the files into the folds of my overcoat to keep them dry. The sidewalk hummed with commuters, shoppers, joggers, vendors, street performers, and people talking loudly on their cell phones. I didn’t hear any of it, or really see it. Nor did I see stone columns lining the front of the court building, or the yellow cabs lined up outside, their drivers hanging out of their windows arguing over who was first in line for pickup. None of it came directly within my view, yet I was aware of all of it, but only on the most basic level. My head was still in the prosecution file.
There was reference in the file to the existence of two DVDs that hadn’t yet been served on the defense, but there were statements from detectives who had watched them and wanted to get their commentary noted for evidentiary purposes. The first DVD, according to the cop’s statement, was from a traffic camera on Central Park West that captured the RTC. A drunk driver plowed into David’s Bugatti, head-on. When police attended the scene, they saw the firearm in the passenger footwell of the supercar. Child said the gun wasn’t his. The cop, Phil Jones, said that he smelled the gun and detected an odor from it, as if it had been recently fired. There was no license for the gun, and they arrested Child, put him in lockup. Then later they matched his address to the reports of the body found in an apartment—his apartment. I could tell that the cops, in their statements, were hinting that if Child’s car hadn’t been hit by that drunk driver, he might have gotten away clean and had a chance to dispose of the murder weapon.
As it was, fate made sure that he got caught.
Being a relatively new billionaire, Child owned an apartment in Central Park Eleven, the most expensive apartment building in the United States. The building actually sat on Central Park West, but they’d decided to christen the place Central Park Eleven. His apartment spread over more square footage than a basketball court and enjoyed a wide, wraparound balcony with the best views of the park in Manhattan. The statement from his neighbor, a Hollywood movie director named Gershbaum, began by explaining that he owned the adjoining apartment on the twenty-fifth floor and at that height, in the tower above the main block, there were only two apartments per floor. He said he was in his apartment, watching footage from a movie he was shooting that day, when he thought he heard gunfire. At first he wasn’t sure. He thought it might have been a car backfiring on the street, so he opened his balcony door and leaned over the railing to check. That’s when he saw the window exploding in the apartment next to him. Scared him so bad he damn near fell over his own railing. He called building security from his panic room and waited. Security were outside his door in four minutes. Gershbaum told the guard what he’d seen and showed him the glass on the next balcony. The first security guard to enter the apartment found Clara’s body in the kitchen.
I didn’t need to recall the guard’s description of what he saw. A photograph of the body at the scene had already burned itself into my mind. She’d had blond hair, cut into a short bob. Her hair was no longer blond; now it was a mass of bloody tissue. Simply clothed in a white tee over dark blue jeans, feet bare. Her body lay facedown in the kitchen, head turned slightly to the right. Both arms by her sides. People are rarely shot as they lie facedown on the floor. And most people who get shot don’t die instantly, and their arms reach out, reflexively, to break their fall as they go down from the kinetic force of the bullet. Clara’s arms had not moved to break her fall. The rational explanation for that could be that she was dead before her body hit the polished white tiles.
The medical examiner stated that Clara had been shot multiple times—most of the shots were to the head. There were two bullet entry wounds in the center of her back, thirteen millimeters apart. The remainder of the shots were to the back of her head. From the way her body was positioned, providing it had not been moved postmortem, my take on it was she’d first been shot in the head, then dropped. Two in the spine to make sure she was down, and then the killer unloaded into the back of her head. The ME couldn’t confirm the number of shots to the head, as there was little of her skull left intact. A CSI’s statement confirmed that beneath Clara’s face, the tiles were broken and the cement held what had become a ball of mangled rounds.
On his reading of the scene, the killer had fired twice into her back, then spent the rest of the clip with shots to the back of her head.
Then reloaded.
The second clip had then been emptied into what remained of her skull.
A rage shooting. That pointed to a suspect who knew the victim well, and I guessed this is what the DA’s office would run with for motive. Along with the rest of the crime scene photographs was a picture of Clara, taken from her Reeler account. She was with another woman, about her age, but not as pretty. They were sitting on barstools, showing off their new, matching tattoos. A purple daisy on their respective right wrists. Drinks sat behind them, and they were facing away from the bar. Clara looked as if she was giggling. She had been naturally beautiful, her skin clear and bright, and her eyes had an effervescent aspect.
For a moment I thought of the young girl that I’d failed so miserably when I’d set her attacker free.
I felt a growing heat in my stomach. My hands felt heavy and ready to fly. That feeling came to me sometimes, when I wanted to hurt someone. For Clara, all I could do was make sure that her killer could never do that to someone else again. Seeing that same tattoo in the crime scene photos, on her upturned, lifeless wrist, I couldn’t help but think that some part of her soul stayed behind, to watch, to wail at the life taken, and to judge. Again, I thought about David Child; could he lie that well? Well enough to fool me—a guy who could spot a tell on a mannequin? I didn’t believe that he could, but the evidence against Child just got worse and worse, the more I read.
If you were a tenant in Central Park Eleven, you got a key to your apartment and an electronic fob. The fob operated the elevators in the building and turned off your security alarm, which came as standard for your accommodation. Building security had Child’s comings and goings logged, to the minute, from his fob. At 19:46 he entered his apartment with Clara; seventeen minutes later Child’s fob was registered using the elevator to exit the building, alone. He was the last person to leave the apartment. Four minutes after that, the security guards were at Gershbaum’s apartment, and then they discovered Clara’s body in David Child’s empty apartment. The apartment that he’d left just minutes before.
A cop viewed the building’s security camera recordings and saw Child entering and leaving the apartment. He wore an oversized green hooded top, baggy gray sweatpants, and a pair of red Nikes. I checked the description of Child from the first DVD, which held security footage from the car accident. He wore the same clothes.
Preliminary forensics revealed that Child’s hands and clothes were covered in gunshot residue. This wasn’t a case of secondary transfer, like brushing up against someone who’d just fired a pistol, or walking around in a firing range. It looked like he’d taken a bath in GSR; the concentrations found on his hands, clothes, and face were consistent with him having fired a gun multiple times.
During police questioning, Child said he’d never seen the gun before the cop showed it to him, allegedly having found it on the floor of David’s Bugatti. He’d told them he didn’t own a gun and he’d never fired a gun in his life.
Shell casings found in the apartment were to be tested by ballistics, and reports should be ready soon. However, given the similar caliber, and preliminary findings, it looked as though the gun in Child’s car was the murder weapon.
The gun was a Ruger LCP.