"Oh, yeah, the jumper," April said.
Dr. Washington ignored the remark.
"But that's not the case here," Mike said quickly, shooting April a quizzical look.
"Oh, no. This guy died of a heart attack. Doesn't mean I won't find he had prostate cancer or something else, though."
"Well, I've about had it, then," Mike said. "How about you, Duke?"
"Yeah, thanks."
April accompanied the two men to the door, then peeled off to the ladies' locker room. "Don't you dare leave without me," she said. "I'll meet you in five."
"What'd she have to go and bring up the jumper for?" Mike muttered.
Ducci laughed. "Probably has her reasons."
Mike gazed after her, wondering if his mother could be right about April after all.
The dust and fiber department in the police lab was a long narrow room with three windows on one side and sea green porcelain tiles halfway up the wall on the other. The floor was a grungy gray-green linoleum that hadn't known a shine since the day it was laid. Years ago, the room served as a dust and fiber lab for one scientist. Now there were supposed to be three dust and fiber people to cover all the felonies in New York City, but one had retired six months ago in fear of losing his vision after twenty years of focusing his whole being into the eye of a microscope. He hadn't been replaced.
These days Fernando Ducci, who'd started as a patrolman thirty years ago, and Nanci Castor, a thin-faced civilian with a good blond dye job who'd just hit forty and didn't look it, manned the microscopes alone. Since very few crimes could be committed without the perpetrator taking something from the scene away with him and leaving something of himself behind, Ducci and Castor thought theirs was the most important job in law enforcement. They had to identify and match those physical traces that could prove a suspect had been at the scene of a crime: a snag from a victim's jacket in the backseat of the suspect's car, a spot of oil from the suspect's basement on the murder victim's sleeve, a clump of asphalt from the suspect's driveway on the robbery victim's front porch. A hair with an unusual dye found in a cap by the body of a murder victim that matched the hair of a suspect who said he'd never been near the murder victim.
Ducci and Nanci went through the items collected by the criminologists in the Crime Scene Unit. They searched for connections that were more subtle than fingerprints and DNA, for the means to make a match between disparate people who might live far away from each other but who were somehow linked by a deadly crime.
Nanci was out when Mike, Ducci, and April returned from the ME's office only a few blocks uptown. Mike picked up the skull on Ducci's guest chair and examined it briefly before setting it on the desk. The skull sitting there the last time Mike had visited Dust and Fiber had had a bullet hole in it and buck teeth with many cavities. This skull had no bullet hole and perfect teeth.
"What happened to Roberto?" Mike asked, meaning the old skull.
"Someone stole him. He was a gift, you know, from the Guatemalan police." Ducci's slicked-back, shiny black hair did not move as he shook his head sadly at what the world had come to. Then he sank into his desk chair. In a dark suit, black-and-purple silk tie, blue shirt with white collar and cuffs, Ducci was an anomaly. His mouth was small and puckered with concern. His face was round and unlined. Except for the winged eyebrows flecked with gray, he still looked like the choirboy he'd been forty-five years ago. He opened the side drawer of his desk that was filled with Snickers bars and took three out.
"How about some lunch?" He offered the first to April. She shook her head, still very quiet.
"Queasy?"
She shook her head again. Just not hungry. Mike gestured to the chair. "Sit down."
"So who's this?" he asked about the new skull.
"I think she's Asian, look at that set of teeth. Now, there's a woman who didn't eat sugar. I think I'll call her Lola." He peeled open the paper on one of the Snickers bars.
Mike's mustache twitched as the scent of chocolate suddenly mixed with the chemical and death smells that recently had lodged in his sinuses.
Ducci pushed a candy bar across the desk. "Come on, I'm paying."
"Uh, no thanks."
"You two. Can't enjoy a party." Ducci took a huge bite of his and chewed happily. "Don't ever say I don't buy you lunch," he said with his mouth full.
"If you bought us a food lunch, we'd eat it, right, April?" Mike glanced at April. She didn't look good.
"Oh, come on, this is food. Take. It'll do you good." Ducci finished the first bar, shrugged, started on the second.
Mike swallowed a rising tide of stomach acid. "We've gotta go in a minute," he muttered. "Any thoughts before we leave?"
Ducci threw the candy wrappers in his wastebasket and brushed his hands together, cleaning up for business.
"Well, remember Rosa said the Liberty woman was struck just once. The site of the wound was barely above the clavicle. There were no hesitation marks on the neck or chest. Her injury was a direct hit to the carotid artery, and the victim bled to death. Probably fairly quickly."
Ducci put his hand to his mouth and rubbed his pink lips with his fingers. "We're still drying out her stuff. I haven't even got all his things. So it will be a while before I've done my analysis. The thing is, I can't picture what happened." Absently he stroked Lola's uninjured skull.
Mike sucked on his mustache. "No hesitation marks. So she wasn't threatened or tormented. No bruises, nothing under her fingernails or his. So neither fought back."
"Maybe there wasn't time," Ducci murmured.
"Maybe they weren't afraid," Mike said. He glanced at April again. She wasn't talking.
"Someone they knew."
"Yeah. Quite possibly it was someone they knew." Mike tapped a pencil on the desk. "April, are you all right?"
"Sure."
"Mike, I get the feeling it was an accident," Ducci said.
"Oh, yeah? How do you see that? You think a friend showed up, just happened to be carrying an ice pick. And this person who just happens to be carrying an ice pick meets his two pals coming out of the restaurant on a night when their driver was not waiting on the street. So what's the scenario, Duke? This friend greets them, then strikes the woman a lethal blow. And this blow occurs in a very special place—"
Ducci nodded, demonstrating the sites with his hands. "Higher in the neck the thyroid and trachea cartilage is in front of the carotid artery. A person would have to slit the throat with a knife or a razor to get to it. Where this guy strikes is where the carotid artery has turned the corner and is in the very front, the most exposed place. No knife or razor was necessary."
Mike scowled. "Then how do you see accident here?' "
"It was too direct a hit, but not a professional hit. A professional wouldn't use an ice pick, too uncertain.
He'd have to get too close to the victim and would never go for one and not the other. Nah, this person struck once and took off, probably in terror. . . ."
"How about somebody saw him?"
"Well, that might be your man Patrice. But accident keeps coming to mind. You know what jealousy and rage is like. They lose their minds, keep stabbing away, killing the victim over and over. This just isn't that."
"One homicide, one bum ticker. The DA's going to go crazy with this, huh, April?"
" Yes, he is," she said, opening her mouth for the first time.
"You're looking for someone who knew them real well," Ducci said.
"How about the wife?" April said.
"Why would she kill Merrill Liberty if her husband was already dead of a heart attack?" Mike said.
"Petersen didn't have the heart attack until the killer arrived. Maybe Daphne intended to kill him, but he died of shock before she got to it. Stranger things have happened."