"Not being a fan of coincidences, I'd say a call with that timing, two bodies with stab wounds, duct-taped to chairs… Derek Snow has to be related to Cassidy Towne, but how? And if Soleil wasn't complicit in her murder, is she feeling in some kind of danger herself?"
"Here's a nutty idea. Ask her."
"Yeah, and she'll be straight with me, too." And then she said, "But you know I will."
As Nikki headed north on First Avenue toward the OCME, Rook said, "With or without the lobby gunplay, I'm still going with the premise that Derek was a Cassidy tipster."
"Well, we're pulling his phone records, let's see if you're right." She blew air out between her teeth. "Sordid, isn't it? Thinking people are spying on you for cash. What you ate, what you drank, who you're sleeping with, all so Cassidy Towne can put it out to people in the Ledger."
"Most of it was true, though. She told me she got something wrong early on, right after she started her column, about Woody Allen having an affair with Meryl Streep. Her source said he was obsessed with her ever since Manhattan. Not true, totally blew it. The other papers pounced on it and called her the Towne Liar. From then on, she said if it wasn't true and verifiable-from two sources-she'd rather let someone else scoop her."
"Noble. For a scumbag."
"Yes, and none of us ever read those columns, do we? Come on, Nikki, the problem is if you take them seriously. They're like the sports section for peeping Toms, which is just about everybody."
"Not I," she said.
"Look, I agree with you that it's scummy. And not just because I am intimidated by your impeccable command of grammar. But, at the same time, she was only covering what people were doing. Nobody made Spitzer mount a call girl in over-the-calf socks. Or Russell Crowe toss a telephone at a hotel night manager. Or Soleil Gray blow a hole in a concierge's pants with a handgun."
"Right. But who says we have to know all that?"
"Then don't read it. But it doesn't make the secrets go away. You know, my mom's been putting together a night of Chekhov readings at the Westport Playhouse. She was rehearsing one last weekend, 'The Lady with the Little Dog.' There's a passage about this guy Gurov that I'm going to excerpt in my article about Cassidy. It goes something like 'He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all… full of relative truth… and another life running its course in secret.' "
"And your point?"
"My point, Detective, is that everybody's got a secret, and if you're in the public eye, you're fair game."
They stopped at the light and Nikki turned to him. He could see that for her this was more than just an abstract topic. "But what if you're not used to being in the public eye, or didn't choose to be there? I ended up with the world reading about my mother's murder. That's not a scandal, but it was private. You write stories about Bono, and Sarkozy, and Sir Richard Branson, right? They're equipped for all this intrusion, but does it make it any better that they need to be? Shouldn't some things be allowed to be kept private?"
He nodded. "I agree." And then he couldn't resist. "Which is why I will never again even write the word 'pineapples.' " "Going to give you plenty to reflect on here today, Detective Heat." Lauren Parry's formality with Nikki was only invoked when Heat's BFF was pulling her leg or prepping her for news beyond her workaday coroner reports. Heat could tell from her friend's face that there was no joke coming after that setup.
"What are we dealing with, ME Parry?" she said in matching attitude.
The medical examiner led Heat and Rook to Derek Snow's body on the table and picked up his chart. "As usual, the tox disclaimer notwithstanding, we have a cause of death from a single thoracic knife wound in the intercostal tissue between ribs, causing perforation of the left ventricle."
"Stabbed in the heart," said Rook. When Lauren gave him an eye roll, he shrugged. "You want layman's terms, or disclaimers about calling your physician after four hours, who's your guy?"
Nikki asked, "Did he also have signs of torture?"
Nodding, Lauren beckoned her closer to indicate the victim's left ear. "See the little blood flecks? Same as on Cassidy Towne. I took some ear canal shots for you."
"Dental picks?" said Heat.
"Don't need to explain it to you, do I?" The memory of being harassed herself by the Texan made Nikki wince involuntarily. Lauren said nothing, but put a hand on her shoulder in comfort. Then she took it off and said, "There's more." She flipped back the top page of the chart to indicate the matching adhesive remnants found on both Cassidy Towne and Derek Snow.
Rook said, "Little doubt we're dealing with the same killer, is there?"
"It gets more interesting."
"Wow." Rook rubbed his palms together. "This is like the late-night infomercials. 'But wait, there's more.' "
"You have no idea," said Lauren.
Nikki lifted the sheet to verify the scar on Derek's thigh. When she found it, she joined Rook and Lauren at the ME's lab bench, a stainless-steel surface laden with an array of macabre instruments that were part of dissecting and analyzing the dead. In the center of the long counter, a small white towel covered a tray. The ME set her chart down and folded back the towel halfway, exposing the blade of a plastic knife the color of dried Elmer's glue. "This is a polymer mold I made from Cassidy Towne's stab wound. The killer worked clean, an expert plunge and withdrawal, so I was able to make an excellent cast from her puncture."
Heat recognized it immediately, the arc of the edges coming together dead center at the tip, which was sharpened to a point, and, most distinctive, the fullers, those twin grooves running parallel the full length of the flat. "This was his knife. The Texan's," she said.
"A Robbins and Dudley Knuckle Knife, according to the catalog on the server," said Lauren Parry. "Exactly like"-she peeled back the remaining half of the towel-"this one here." Beside the first cast on the tray rested a mold of the identical blade.
"Get out," said Rook. "If this were a TV show, this is where they'd go to a commercial."
A slight smile showed at the corners of the ME's mouth. It wasn't often that she had the occasion to be a little theatrical, and she was obviously enjoying her moment. The dead ones didn't appreciate her work. "Well, if they ran a commercial now, you'd miss the biggest part."
"I don't know what could be bigger," said Nikki, looking over her shoulder at Derek Snow's corpse. "You just linked Cassidy Towne's exact murder weapon to Derek Snow."
"But I didn't." Lauren waited until both their faces clouded, puzzling. She pointed to the first blade replica. "This knife cast here? Taken from Cassidy Towne." Then she picked up the second one. "This knife cast here? I took from Esteban Padilla."
"No way!" Rook turned a circle and stomped a foot. "Coyote Man?"
All Nikki said was "Lauren…"
"Yup."
"The Texan stabbed Coyote Man, too?"
"Well," said Lauren, "his knife did, anyway."
Heat was still processing all this through the haze of her astonishment. "Whatever made you think to take a mold from Padilla?"
"The puncture on both victims had a lot of material displaced at the center, or what we call the neutral axis of the blade. It's negligible, but visible if you're looking. Soon as I saw the similarity, I ran the molds."
"You're a jock," said Nikki.
"Not done yet. When the molds matched, I ran one more test. Know that bloodstain you pointed out to me on the wallpaper at Cassidy Towne's brownstone? It wasn't hers. It was Esteban Padilla's. A perfect match."
"Best autopsy ever," said Rook. "I think I just peed myself a little. Seriously, I did."
Chapter Ten
Nikki was not about to let this wait for a meeting back in the bull pen. Momentum on this case was picking up, and even though she wasn't sure where her new clues would lead, she was going to ride it, and hard. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was only a few blocks north of the Derek Snow crime scene, so Heat got on her cell phone and called Ochoa to tell him she'd meet him and Raley in the East Village in five minutes for a briefing.