Judging Time

by Glass, Leslie

  The elevator door opened and Mike swaggered out with his leather jacket on. "I hear you're looking for me."

  Where did he hear that? April swung around, irritated that she'd waited too long to get out to the lab without him.

  * * *

  They took an unmarked gray unit, and April was glad to let Mike drive slowly through the dirty slush. He was thoughtful, didn't offer his opinion of her boss, Iriarte, or the surveillance officer who'd lost their suspect, or anything else about the failures in the precinct where she worked. She was grateful for that. Then he spoke.

  "Look, April, I know how you feel about me. I see how it is with your boss. Now I guess it was stupid to think I could charge into your new house, into a big case like this, and there'd be no repercussions for you."

  She was touched by his sensitivity, didn't trust her voice to reply.

  "Pretty dumb, huh?"

  "Hey, it's not your fault. You didn't know."

  "Wasn't a hard one. We never liked strangers in our cases."

  She couldn't help smiling. "Is this an apology?"

  "Maybe. The problem is, it wouldn't look good for either of us if I backed off now. We'd have a mess and no sure way to clear the case. We'd both be fucked for sure, no pun intended. We've got to work together on this one, are you agreed?"

  "I agree we have to solve it, yes. Do we have to work together every minute? No."

  Mike fell silent. After a while he changed the subject. "I checked with security in Liberty's building. Guess what?"

  "Liberty isn't on the videotape going out on the night of the murder or last night, either," April said.

  "Worse than that."

  "He isn't on the videotape coming in on the night of the murder."

  "Nope. Guess again."

  "Why do I have to guess? Why don't you just tell me?"

  "You're no fun."

  "I know." Nothing new there.

  "So, there's no videotape."

  "Someone took it?" April prompted.

  "Uh-uh. There hasn't been a videotape in a year. It was too expensive to run it. There'd never been a robbery in the building, and the constant spying was getting some of the people in the building in trouble."

  "Nose picking or affairs?"

  "Whatever. The board voted to stop the twenty-four-hour-a-day filming. Now a guy sits in the screening room from eight a.m. when the building opens to six p.m. when it closes. Inside the building complex the residents can go anywhere. But delivery people can't go up in the elevators unescorted after that."

  "So security is only for nonresidents. Liberty must have known that."

  Mike shrugged. "It's how he got out unseen last night. Must have gone downstairs into the basement and walked out through the garage. He didn't take his car because it was stolen the day before the murder. The garage attendants confirmed that Jefferson took it the fifth, not the week before as he told us."

  "We've been looking for witnesses who saw Liberty leaving the scene. Maybe it's time to check for someone who saw his car on the scene."

  Mike nodded. He cut the motor, and they left the car double-parked in front of the Police Academy building. Upstairs, Ducci was standing by the wired window, watching the street when April and Mike strode into his lab. Glowering, he pushed up a white cuff on his blue shirt and made a big show of tapping the dial of his heavy gold watch. It was 9:43.

  "What took you so long?" he demanded.

  "Haven't you noticed we've got weather and traffic conditions out there?" April replied, smiling a little at Ducci's sudden hurry to get them there after three days of putting them off.

  "We've always got weather and traffic," Ducci grumbled. He liberated a Snickers bar from his pocket and tore at the wrapper.

  "So what's up?" April asked.

  "What's up is very big. 1 didn't want to talk about it on the phone. Have a seat." Ducci chewed off half a chocolate bar, then rolled Nanci's vacant chair over for April.

  Mike had to move Lola the skull and a pile of files from the chair next to Ducci's desk, which was piled with bloody clothes from the Liberty case. Mike looked around for a clear surface, couldn't find one, finally put the files and the skull on the floor by his feet.

  "You know, they're making these things fat free now," Ducci mused, holding up the rest of the candy bar. "Little bitty things. Now who would go for something like that?" The second half disappeared into his mouth, and he chewed angrily.

  Merrill's sweater dress and Tor's cashmere coat and sweater had been carefully dried to preserve the shape of the stains. Now they were spread out across Ducci's desk with their tags dangling. Of all the pieces taken as evidence from the bodies and the crime scene, these were the items that held Ducci's interest at the moment. April guessed it was something about them that made him angry, not the idea of fat-free candy.

  Mike's booted foot bobbed impatiently, knocking over the skull.

  "Watch that," Ducci growled.

  "Sorry, Lola," Mike muttered. He pulled on his mustache. "So give."

  "Rosa fucked up." Ducci looked from one to the other. "I didn't want to rush over to Malcolm Abraham with this, you know how he is about Rosa Washington."

  "No, we don't know. How is he about her?"

  "Oh, you know those Jews and their guilt about the blacks, always pushing for them. He loves her, defends her to the death, know what 1 mean? He brought her in, brought her along—first black woman deputy medical examiner and all that. 1 wouldn't say she's totally incompetent, but—" Ducci shrugged.

  "I didn't get the feeling she was incompetent," April said.

  "Neither did I," Mike agreed. "Did she make some kind of mistake?"

  Ducci was on a track of his own. "There's no way Abraham won't try to gloss this over. And believe me, what I have here doesn't make you guys look too good, either. This whole thing makes me sick." He opened his desk drawer and reached in for another candy bar to console himself.

  "You know those things are going to kill you some day," April said, wishing he'd get on with it. What mistake?

  "Sure, I'll die of constipation." Ducci took a bite, then offered them the rest of the bar. "Want some?"

  "Mi Dios!" Mike burst out. "You going to tell us the mistake, or what?"

  "Okay, okay. Remember, during Petersen's autopsy how old Rosa kept going on about coroners in the Midwest not being MDs and how that messed up all their reports on cause of death, because they'd look at wounds and bruise patterns on a body and not have the faintest idea how they got there or what story they told?"

  "So?" Mike demanded.

  "Well, look at this." Ducci made a space on his desk and spread out Tor Petersen's cashmere cable-knit sweater, turned inside out.

  April and Mike bent their heads to the place Ducci indicated with the sharp ends of a lab tweezer. In the middle of the chest portion of the sweater, he pointed to a hole so small it looked as if it could have come from a single bite of a hungry moth. The hole could barely be seen. They glanced at each other. Ducci was losing his marbles.

  "Now look." Ducci held up a magnifying glass.

  With the hole in the cashmere magnified ten times, they saw that the broken strands of yarn were stiff, discolored, and salted with white dots.

  "Now look in here." Ducci snatched up the sweater and tossed it aside. First he made Mike and April peer through the microscope in his lab. On the slide magnified several hundred times, the white dots were boulders and no longer white..

  Then Ducci marched them into another lab and showed an even closer look through the highest powered microscope. They looked at each other again, no longer sure what they were looking at.

  Ducci, however, thought it was big. He held his fingers to his lips, commanding silence in front of the other scientists they had to pass to get back to his lab. His jaw was rigid with tension, his round choirboy's face and tiny mouth set with outrage. He closed the door.

  "And I stood there yapping with her. And you stood there yapping with her. And we all missed it."
Ducci collapsed into his chair, disgusted with them all.

  Okay, so there was a little hole in the sweater. April looked for help from Mike.

  Ducci glowered at her. "I thought you took forensic science at John Jay."

  "Obviously not enough," she said softly. "What about you, Mike? Do you get it?"

  "Yeah, sure," he said vaguely. There was a hole in the sweater.

  "All right, I'll lay it out for you dummies." He angrily arranged the photographs of Tor Petersen's body—from the murder scene, then both clothed and naked during the autopsy. Then did the same with Merrill's.

  "What's missing?"

  Mike studied the photos, then replied, "In Petersen's autopsy, the ultraviolets."

  "Yes!" Ducci punched the air.

  "Oh, Jesus." April reached for two of the photos; Merrill Liberty naked on the autopsy table after the techs had washed her body and the wound in her throat was clearly visible. And the photo of Tor Petersen naked on the autopsy table. The tiny round spot in the middle of Petersen's chest that Ducci had pointed out at the time was no bigger than a mosquito bite. It was just an indentation that did not even have the redness of a recent injury. In the photo, the spot was marked with an arrow and a ruler.

  If there was a hole in the sweater in exactly the same place, and the discoloration in the yarn was blood, then the mark on Petersen's chest was no mosquito bite. It was a puncture of some sort. In the middle of his chest, below his sternum. Odd.

  "Jesus Christ, do they still have the body?" Mike asked.

  Ducci shook his head. "His wife had him removed and cremated yesterday."

  "His wife did? Are you sure? They never release bodies that fast." April frowned. "Who would have given the okay on that?"

  Ducci shook his head.

  So that's why Daphne called the ME just after Petersen died. This was not looking good for Daphne.

  ' They burned him. That's all I can tell you." Ducci touched the photo of the dead man with one finger. "Poor guy."

  Mike pointed at the rest of the clothes. "So what do you think happened?"

  "What happened was Petersen came out of the restaurant first, right? You said the woman went to the kitchen to talk to the chef."

  "Yes, both the manager and the chef confirmed that."

  "So Petersen comes out. Somebody he knows comes over, says hello. Maybe he's a little drunk, a little stoned. The person sticks a sharp instrument into his heart and down he goes. Out Merrill Liberty comes, sees her boyfriend on the ground, runs over to help him. The killer may be surprised to see her, but doesn't do her in the heart. Why not—?"

  "Maybe she's not the intended victim," April said slowly.

  "Right. She doesn't have to look like she's had a heart attack. Guy gets scared and efficiently stabs her in the throat. Blood all over the place. Looks like she was the intended victim." Ducci spread out the back of Tor's coat. Right in the middle large areas of bloodstains still retained their reddish tinge. "She bled on Petersen's back. That means he had to go down first."

  Next Ducci displayed Merrill's dress, now stiff with the pints of blood that had spilled out on it. "Now, why so much blood for her and only maybe a drop or two of blood for him?"

  April opened her mouth to speak, but Ducci held up his hand. "I asked a heart doc I know if there was any way I could stab somebody in the heart without any bleeding outside the body. Know what he said?"

  "Piece of cake," Mike said sarcastically.

  "Now don't get snotty. He said if he were going to kill somebody, his first choice would be throwing him off a boat in the ocean. No witnesses." Ducci brushed his hands together and smiled.

  "Now his second choice is a bit more sophisticated but he was pretty sure it would fool most medical examiners working today. Washington was right about one thing. Not many are really well trained."

  "Yeah, genius, so what is it?"

  "A very thin sharp instrument carefully inserted between the ribs into the heart. The entry wound would almost completely close up when the instrument was removed. The heart would be pierced and massive internal bleeding would result in almost instant death."

  "That's some imagination your friend has. But he forgot one thing. Killing like that would mean he'd have to pierce the lung to get to the heart. A pierce like that would collapse the lung, and Petersen's lung was not collapsed." Mike tried to be kind. "So hey, you think a doctor's involved?"

  "Don't make fun. I'm sure there's a way to do it if you think about it a little. Anyway, take a look at the widow. See how she is with pins and needles. If she can't sew herself, maybe her boyfriend's a doctor."

  "How do you want to handle this thing with the

  ME?" Mike turned to April, but Ducci answered the question.

  "Get the killer, then we'll worry about the details." He looked proud of himself. "The real fuckup is this. Rosa didn't turn on the ultraviolet lights. If she had, we would have seen the wound more clearly, with the lint and fibers from his T-shirt stuck in it. Without the ultras, we didn't see it."

  "You lost me again," April murmured. "What T-shirt?"

  "Petersen was wearing a T-shirt when he got his little body pierce. The fibers from the T-shirt are in the severed yarn of the sweater. Don't you people listen? But there was no T-shirt on his body at the time of the autopsy."

  "So where's the T-shirt with the hole in it?"

  "That's the hundred-and-fifty-rnillion-dollar question." Ducci's smile was not a friendly one. April gathered he wouldn't mind seeing Rosa Washington take a very big fall.

  25

  Mike drove uptown on First Avenue, through the Twenties and past the New York University Medical Center complex in the Thirties, where the medical examiner's building was set apart.

  "Jesus, it's cold. My hands are frozen." April chaffed her hands. "What a day. What do you think, is Ducci a crackpot or are we in trouble?"

  "He is and he isn't. But either way, we are."

  "In trouble?"

  Mike smiled. "Ducci may be right that Petersen died before the Liberty woman. He may not be right that Petersen was murdered."

  "You don't buy the sharp-stick-in-the-heart story?"

  "I saw Petersen's body and the Liberty woman's body, and so did you. The hole in the woman's throat was a hole. The wound on Petersen's chest didn't look like a hole. It wasn't red like a fresh injury, and there was no dried blood around it. Not any. It looked old to me."

  "But the chest is a different part of the body from the throat," April pointed out. "Ducci said when the weapon was removed from the chest, the skin would close up around it. That wouldn't happen on the neck."

  "Maybe. But it looked old. And there's no chance for a second autopsy."

  "What about the hole in the sweater?"

  "There's a hole in the sweater at the site of Petersen's tiny wound—that could have been made days, weeks, or even months before he died—and in the severed yarn fibers is lint from a T-shirt that the victim was not wearing at the time of his autopsy. So one could argue he was not wearing it at the time of his death. One could also argue that the chest injury— whatever its nature—also occurred sometime in the past."

  "Many would argue that," April agreed.

  "If Petersen was wearing a T-shirt at the time of his death, the T-shirt would have bloodstains on it— maybe not pints of blood, but some—and there would be a corresponding hole in the shirt that would be hard to miss."

  "But he wasn't wearing a T-shirt."

  "Or if someone wanted to make Petersen's death look like a heart attack, he'd also have to make the T-shirt disappear." Mike crossed on Fifty-seventh Street where the huge Christmas snowflake still presided over the crosswalk of Fifty-seventh and Fifth, forcing cheer out of a thousand tiny white lights. More white lights sparkled on the bare branches of the trees lining the avenue.

  "No matter how this gets resolved, it's going to be bad. Liberty's taken off. Why would he do that if he weren't guilty of something?"

  April's eyes burned. She f
elt lousy because they hadn't gotten anywhere with Liberty yesterday, and because of the way they were being treated by her boss. She was also troubled by the things Ducci told them. "What if Liberty was having an affair with the Petersen woman, they planned the murders together, and now she's trying to get him to take the fall?" she mused.

  "Oy, the bitch." Mike turned up Madison, then left on Sixtieth. At Fifth Avenue even more white lights twinkled on the dozen Christmas trees still stuck in several levels of the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. The only yellow lights were those that cast an eerie glow from the thirty-foot menorah in Central Park at Fifty-ninth Street, right across from Daphne Petersen's building.

  Now April's throat felt raw. Everyone working the case had messed up. Most of all she had. The Chinese god of messing up was hovering over her. She could feel his hot dragon's breath on her neck, in Iriarte's dashed hopes for her, in Mike's too. Dean Kiang would not think well of her either. He needed a solid case to prosecute. She'd be exiled to Ozone Park, put back in uniform. Her mother would gloat and make her life a misery, and she'd never get laid by anybody.

  Mike stopped the car.

  "Well, look at that." April sat up in her seat.

  Daphne Petersen was hurrying up Fifth Avenue toward the spot where Mike had parked. She was wearing a huge black mink coat that swirled around her like a furry tent. Daphne was talking animatedly to a tall and strikingly handsome young man in a silver warm-up suit. The guy had bronze hair curling around his tanned neck and face and looked like an underwear ad with his clothes on.

  "She looks cold. Let's take her for a ride," Mike suggested.

  "Good idea." April opened the car door and got out, heedless of the traffic surging around her.

  Mike swore as she headed around the front of the car.

  There was a lake at the curb. April hurdled it, landing just north of Daphne Petersen on the sidewalk. The woman gave a little squeak and sprang back with surprising agility. The minute Daphne sidestepped, the underwear ad took her place, moving in quickly to attack April. Mike was out of the car when the man grabbed April by the arm and swung her around back toward the street. Her feet got tangled up in a dance step she hadn't seen coming, but she had the presence of mind to signal Mike to take it easy. No one was supposed to touch a police officer, and now Mike was coming on like a SWAT team to save her. The man swung April around to take her down in the icy lake on Fifth Avenue. But April shifted her weight at the last moment and tossed him away from her.