Diamond Solitaire (Peter Diamond Book 2) by Lovesey Peter

Author:Lovesey, Peter [Lovesey, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781569477991
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2003-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

The two patrolmen first up the stairs had one thing, and one only, lodged in their brains: if this was murder, the scene had to be sealed until the Crime Scene Unit arrived. Having viewed the body, they didn’t go so far as to take off their shoes and tiptoe from the room, but they were pretty fastidious about avoiding contact with anything except the carpet. Such discipline ought to have sounded a warning bell for Diamond, but his mind was on other things. He followed them out and told them that something else had to be done, and urgently. He gave them descriptions of Naomi and the man in the leather jacket, and the white Buick, including its license number. The patrolmen seemed to take umbrage at this big, bluff Englishman issuing orders, so he changed to a more respectful approach. Patiently, more patiently than anyone who knew him would have credited, he repeated everything until one of them took the decision to transmit the message to Central that a murder suspect was at large with a seven-year-old Japanese girl believed to be mentally handicapped. He could do no more. The machine took over.

The scene of the killing became a honeypot for homicide detectives, the forensic team in white overalls, police photographers, the coroner’s assistant and the medical examiner. Procedural activity compartmentalized the horror of violent death and made it manageable.

For the next three hours Peter Diamond was put through the grinder by detectives.

Violent deaths were commonplace in New York, but the case of Minori Tanaka had unusual features. More than one of the interrogators commented that it was a cruel killing. Even murders have their scale of acceptability and a bullet through the head rates several points above a drowning. The tying of the victim’s hands was picked out as a particularly nasty feature. One officer commented that drowning may have been used because it was a relatively silent way to kill. It was true that the manager, De Wint, hadn’t heard anything to alert him. If Diamond hadn’t arrived and demanded to be let into the room, the body would have remained undiscovered until the next day.

The workover he was given was outrageous, in his opinion, considering who he was, and he told them so. Homicide were unrepentant. As an ex-detective he’d conducted himself, in the words of one lieutenant, like Winnie the Pooh in a James Bond movie. While he didn’t accept the comparison, he pretended to see it their way after a couple of hours of being shouted at.

He was driven to the 26th Precinct station house to assemble a photofit of Leather-jacket; a task he’d often demanded of witnesses himself, without appreciating how difficult it was to arrive at a likeness. Afterwards, they got him to look through photos of known criminals. A fruitless exercise that had to be gone through.

By eleven that evening there was still no news of the Buick except that it was identified as a stolen car, taken from a street in Queens early that morning.

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