Read Online Death Dance by Linda Fairstein - Free Book Online

"No one's mentioned it
to me,"" the agent said. "But we haven't exactly been concerned about
him, to tell you the truth."
    Mercer opened the door and signaled to Mike and me to come out
into the hallway. I had seen him at crime scenes and hospital bedsides,
in courtrooms and prison holding pens. There was no facial expression
of Mercer's that I couldn't read. This one broadcast bad news.
    "It's Natalya," I said.
    "Let's get up there before the whole area is compromised," he
said, shaking his head.
    "If you hadn't ramped up this search like you did, Mike? They
wouldn't have found her till summer."
    "Where?"
    "You'd have to know this place as well as the guys who built
it."
    Mike started walking to the bank of elevators behind stage
right. "What floor?"
    "They're up on six. Like a roof—"
    "The roof's on ten," Mike said, a fact seared in the memory of
a ten-year-old boy.
    "It's an enclosure then, with a walkway that leads outside,
over a great square pit. It's where the air-conditioning units
are—with fans bigger than I am."
    What better to mute the sounds of a final struggle.
    We were there in less than four minutes, precinct detectives
and uniformed rookies stepping aside and pressing their backs against
the dirty gray walls as they saw Mike Chapman approach, everything
about him signifying the arrival of a homicide cop who had come to take
over control of the grim corridor.
    The closer we got to the rampart that led outside, the bellow
from the giant rotors made it more impossible to hear conversation. The
pipes seemed to be vibrating as the monstrous blades circulated air and
blew it up at us.
    "What's the drop?" Mike asked a janitor who had apparently
made the discovery and was standing closest to the opening.
    "Thirty feet, easy."
    Mike stepped down onto the rim of the fan pit—a
platform a couple of feet wide—and was followed by Mercer,
who held out a hand for me. I wanted to clutch one of the black pipes
to steady myself, but knew they might hold trace evidence of value.
    I glanced over the edge and at first saw only the blackness
below. It took seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dark as my body
braced against the roaring blasts from the giant fan blades.
    Even as the soot whirled around me, I could see the flash of a
white tulle costume lifting with the current, revealing the motionless,
broken body of Natalya Galinova, wedged into the remote corner of the
filthy air shaft.

----
6

     
    The janitor led us down to the third floor, through the
electrical shop and the multistory paint bridges where crews of workers
were constructing scenery, back to the interior point within the
building where the air shaft bottomed out.
    Only Mike, Mercer, and I entered the narrow passageway. The
air circulation system had been turned off at Mike's direction and he
led us in to check for any signs of life while we waited for someone
from the medical examiner's office to make the decision about how to
move Talya.
    Mike kneeled at the wire-mesh cage, shining a torch-size
flashlight into the hole, trying to get as close to her body as he
could.
    I flinched when the beam found Talya's head. Not much of it
was intact. It didn't matter how many corpses I'd seen. The moment
never got easier.
    Mike was talking to Mercer, framing a description like the
ones he'd heard week after week as he stood witness at the autopsy
table in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. "Probably a circular
fracture of the cranial vault. Can you see that split through the
hairline?"
    The long, fine strands of Talya's hair were plastered against
her scalp. She had gone into the shaft headfirst, it appeared, her neck
twisted under the weight of her slim body.
    The skull was actually split in pieces, looking like the
blood-stained map of an intersection of five major highways.
    Mercer differentiated the injury from a depressed skull
fracture, the kind that occurs when an object crushes a small area of
the head. "Must have been alive when she was thrown