A man on Park Avenue places a call to 911 at 7:14 a.m. His agitated voice reports that his wife has been murdered in her bed during the night.
The police arrive and find the woman lying in a pool of blood in her bed. There is a kitchen knife sticking out of her chest. The medical examiner estimates time of death to be approximately 3:30 a.m. The cause of death is obvious.
Detectives determine that there is no sign of forced entry. Neither the locks nor the security system have been tampered with.
Exhaustive fingerprint and DNA analysis leads to no one outside of the family.
The husband claims to have been asleep beside his wife when the murder took place. He claims he was not awakened during the night.
To the detectives and the ADA, it's a no-brainer. The husband is promptly arrested and charged with murder.
But is he really guilty? Who else could have done it?
There is a clue in the identity of the victim. She was a Russian diplomat, according to the NYPD. But, to the CIA, she was an agent of the Russian Federal Security Agency (FSB), successor entity to the dreaded KGB. There were rumors that she had been involved in several assassinations.
Although there was a huge motive for the slaying, the NYPD was unaware of the woman's clandestine activities.
Given the motive, the big mystery still remained: How did her killer accomplish the feat without entering the apartment?
The CIA could have helped solve the mystery if a copper had thought to ask them.
Back in 2007, the U.S. government invited creative scientists to submit a proposal for creating a shape-shifting military robot that could shrink and then reconfigure itself to normal height and shape. (Kind of like the old comic book hero, Plastic Man. Or like the liquid-state cyborg in the movie Terminator 2.)
According to the Department of Defense , the robot had to be able to "traverse arbitrary size/shape openings whose dimensions are much smaller than the robot itself...." It had to be constructed of flexible materials which allowed for size and shape changes and be able to "twist, crumple and bend like an octopus or insect."
As far out as this seemed in 2007, it was created and successfully tested within five years. Although classified as top secret, the project's essentials were stolen by Russian and Chinese spies. By 2013, all three countries had operational "ChemBots." Some were rumored to have been bootlegged to smaller countries and terrorist groups.
A secret CIA research team, studying the Russian spy's murder case, concluded that the killer was probably a ChemBot which entered the building as a human, took the elevator to the tenth floor, changed its shape to that of a snake, slithered under the door, reconfigured as a human inside the apartment, withdrew a knife from the kitchen and proceeded to stab the woman while holding a hand over her mouth to prevent the victim from screaming.
The ChemBot then did the reverse presto-change-o to exit the apartment and the building, with no one the wiser.
The police are unaware of all this. So are the ADA and the defense lawyers. In the meantime, the husband sits on death row, convicted of a murder he had slept through.
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