Desperate Measures

42

Muldoon and Calabrese went downtown to the morgue and found the ME working on Priscilla Scott’s cadaver.

“Anything?” he asked.

“I found a bullet,” the ME replied. “It’s a nine-millimeter round, Federal Personal Defense, Hydra-Shok — a hollow point.”

“I’d like to run it over to ballistics,” Muldoon said.

The ME handed him a small, zippered plastic bag containing the slug. “Good luck. Hollow points expand, and the tip of the knife blade hit it, too. In short, it’s a mess. Don’t count on it to seal a conviction.”

“You’re such a pessimist, Doc,” Muldoon said, pocketing the round.

“Sign the chain-of-custody log,” the ME said, then went back to his work.

“I’m going over to ballistics,” Muldoon said to Calabrese. “I want you to go back to your desk, start googling and making calls to find out if Trask used a car service around six o’clock, and if so, where did it pick him up and drop him off. If the name doesn’t register, try his description and if he paid in cash.”

“Jesus, there must be two hundred car services,” Calabrese moaned.

“That’s why you’re doing it instead of me,” Muldoon replied. “Now get on it.”

Muldoon found a woman still working in the ballistics lab and showed her the squashed bullet. “It’s a Federal Hydra-Shok,” he said, and explained the circumstances of the shooting.

“I can fire one into the tank, purely for comparison, but it’s not going to come out looking anything like that. I’d have to fire it into a side of beef with the same floor material under it, and even then, it would just be hoping for the best. I’ll put your slug under my scope, though, and see what we come up with.”

Muldoon handed her Trask’s 9mm. “Try firing it from this. I’ll wait.”

Muldoon was nearly finished with the Post when the tech came back and handed him the two slugs, each tagged, and the Beretta. “The best I can tell you is that your weapon could have fired the murder slug, but any identifying marks have been obliterated by the slug’s expansion. The knife point didn’t help, either. Sorry about that.”

“You can only do what you can do,” Muldoon said, sighing. He went back to the precinct and found Calabrese asleep with his head on his desk. Muldoon drew a cup of cold water from the cooler, drank half of it, then poured the rest into Calabrese’s ear.

“What the fuck?” Calabrese yelled, raising a laugh or two in the squad room.

“I trust you have succeeded in your task,” Muldoon said.

“As a matter of fact, I have, sort of,” Calabrese said, sticking a tissue into his ear.

“Really? Let’s hear it.”

“Well, Trask has an account with Carey Limousine, but he didn’t use them. He went halfway down the list and found a service, then ordered a pickup in front of Bloomingdale’s, half a dozen blocks from Clarke’s. He was dropped off at the Château Madison hotel on Madison Avenue and went inside. The car waited there for twenty minutes before he came back, then dropped him two blocks from his apartment. The driver says he never got a good enough look at his fare to describe him.”

“Right,” Muldoon said. “Of course, the Château has a side-street entrance on Sixty-eighth, so he could have walked straight from the front door and out of there, walked the two and a half blocks to Scott’s apartment building, committed the murder, then walked back to the Château and out the front door, then to the drop-off.”

Calabrese beamed at him. “We got him, right?”

“We got him, wrong!” Muldoon said. “That’s too thin for a prosecutor to get a conviction.”

“How about the ballistics?”

“All they could tell me is that the bullet could have come from Trask’s Beretta. The round was a hollow point, which spreads out on contact, so there were no identifying marks good enough.”

“Which leaves us where?”

“Outside, in the cold,” Muldoon said. “All our evidence is circumstantial. If you could call it evidence. Trask coulda hired the car, he coulda taken the route we think he did, he coulda shot the woman, then knifed her. Coulda doesn’t cut it.”

“You explain it to the lieutenant,” Calabrese said.

“I figured.”

Stone and Dino had dinner at P. J. Clarke’s.

“So?” Stone asked.

“So, what?”

“So where is the investigation into Cilla’s murder?”

“In a warm, sunny spot called ‘nowhere.’”

“Explain, please.”

Dino took him through Muldoon’s report to his lieutenant.

“None of that is exculpatory,” Stone pointed out.

“None of it is incriminating, either,” Dino replied. “In fact, young Detective Calabrese thinks you’re a better suspect than Trask.”

“Swell.”

“And he’s right.”

“So, Donald Trask is going to walk?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You may as well have.”

“You never know what will turn up. I mean, the guy doesn’t have a working alibi. We just need more evidence.”

“Didn’t your crime scene team come up with anything?”

“Sure they did: your fingerprints on the kitchen counter, the telephone, and, of course, the bar.”

“Horseshit,” Stone said.

“Listen, if you were investigating this murder, you would be your chief suspect.”

“Is this why you didn’t want anybody to know I’d called you, instead of nine-one-one?”

“You might say I could see this coming. I didn’t want my word to be the only thing clearing you.”

“But I’m cleared, anyway.”

“Don’t count on it. Muldoon and Calabrese are still investigating, and they might come up with more evidence.”

“Against me or Donald Trask?”

“Take your pick. You should relax in your personal certainty of your innocence.”

“That’s not going to carry any weight with Muldoon and, especially, Calabrese, who would love to hang this on me.”

“Remember when you were ambitious?” Dino asked. “It’s like that. Don’t worry, you’ll talk your way out of this eventually.”