"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."