Judging Time

24

April finished telling Jason's answering machine she urgently needed his profile of Liberty, hung up, and stared out the window in the top half of her office door. All she could see was the wall above the desks opposite her. The ancient off-white paint, mottled with dirt and cracked in a thousand places, had probably yellowed with disgust long before she was born. In the corner of the ceiling nearest Iriarte's office, craters had formed in the cracks from a water leak that must have recurred numerous times in the last several decades. The next leak would certainly bring that section of the ceiling down on the desk below it, which was Skye's. April couldn't help feeling deeply hurt by the way Iriarte had spoken to her. She wondered if she'd still be assigned in the precinct when the ceiling collapsed.

She had closed the door to recover from the humiliating scene in the lieutenant's office and to study the desk-sized sheet she'd made on Monday to fill in the twenty-four hours before and after the deaths of Merrill Liberty and Tor Petersen. Three days later there still were far too many blanks about the victims' backgrounds and the three suspects they had. The goal was always to have a game plan for an investigation and follow it in as orderly a fashion as possible. But with constantly shifting circumstances, the race against time, and the many variables in the personalities of those workmg the case, chaos nearly always prevailed. It was often luck more than anything else that determined the outcome. Of the three suspects, it was Liberty who was cracking first. As Mike said, it might mean a break in the case and it might not.

From where April sat she could not see Hagedorn on the phone, but she could just hear his plaintive voice.

"That's all you can come up with? What about Motor Vehicle, anything there? Come on, give me a break. You mean the guy never had a speeding ticket?" His voice perked up. "Yeah, car theft, that's more like it. When?"

He burst out, "The fifth of January! You telling me our man boosted a car on January fifth? How come we don't know about it . .. ? Getouttahere, he reported his car stolen?"

April pushed some air through her nose. What a jerk. They already knew that. She couldn't stop thinking about Mike. She wanted to talk to him about yesterday morning, try to explain how she felt, knew she couldn't. Sometimes you had to do the right thing and let go. She flipped the pages of her notebook to get her thoughts back on track. On top of everything else Hagedorn was beginning to seriously irritate her. He'd just get hold of an idea and push it around on his plate until he could find the right position for it, then look for facts to back up his theory. She'd heard that scientists did that, too, so you could never believe the conclusions of any scientific study. Sometimes April thought there was no one in the world who told the truth.

She sighed. A pertinent item had been left out of that morning's temper tantrum in Iriarte's office. A woman jogger had been beaten almost to death during an attempted rape in Central Park last night at around seven. She was the second victim in six months. The first had died of her massive head injuries. This second attack had occurred in the 20th Precinct, behind the playground at Eighty-first Street and Central Park West. A highly populated area even in winter because dog walkers went into the park there. If April were still in the Two-O, she'd be working that case instead of the Merrill Liberty case.

On the other side of her door Hagedorn was still whining on the phone. It made her wonder why Iriarte hadn't given him the jogger case. There was good reason for him to be on it. The victim in the case last summer, by the oddest coincidence, had lived in the Park Century, the building where Liberty lived. That investigation had been handled out of Midtown North. The killer was still out there somewhere, and the detectives in the Two-O wanted the files on that case to see if there was a link to this one. With Margaret Mary Joyce now a lieutenant, Sergeant Sanchez and herself all gone from the squad, April figured the Two-O would now need help for almost anything. But Iriarte had assigned two detectives who'd been questioning street people in the Liberty case and not Hagedorn, probably because Hagedorn was good with computers. April's gaze returned to the crater in the ceiling. She told herself to focus on what had gone wrong with her and Mike's investigation of Liberty yesterday instead of what had gone wrong with them personally.

It had been the day of Merrill Liberty's funeral, and they were surprised to find Liberty at home. He was wearing the same clothes he'd worn on the night of the murders. He was unshaven and seemed dazed. After opening his apartment door to her and Mike, Liberty turned his back on them to return to the area in the great open space that served as the dining room, where he must have been seated alone at his long and gleaming ebony dining table. April had been fascinated by that table. It was a graceful oval large enough for twelve. The surface was as shiny as new Chinese black lacquer. Eight matching ebony chairs with shiny white satin seats were placed at wide intervals around it. Four more were positioned against the wall. Liberty sat at the head of the table like a chairman of the board, a man of expensive black and white tastes. There was nothing to eat or drink on the table, and

there were no board members around him now. A solitary laptop computer, sitting in the end curve of the oval, was keeping him company. He had hurried back to it.

When the two detectives followed him through the arch designating the room change from entrance hall to dining room, he punched a button, removing a document from the screen; then he shut down the computer for good measure. April took a position on one side of him. She unbuttoned her coat and glanced at Mike, who stood on the other side. They could see each other, but Liberty could see only one of them at a time. He was vague. He ran his fingers over the keyboard of the computer. The keys made a clicking sound, as if he were typing the answers to their questions. Without looking at them, he'd told them they could search the apartment and do whatever they had to do. He told them what he'd worn to Chicago. The coat was in the closet, the suit was on the chair in the bedroom. The shoes were in the closet. He said he hadn't been watching the clock so he didn't know exactly what time he got home, went to bed. He said he didn't go out after he returned home. He talked about the stolen car and Wally Jefferson. He was convinced there was a tie-in between him and the murders. He couldn't be specific about why.

April didn't know much about football, but she'd seen Liberty on TV once or twice. On TV he was striking, a big, handsome man with black hair, the kind of jawline Jason Frank and the Kennedys had, and a powerfully focused gaze that made the viewer feel he was completely at ease in front of the camera.

Yesterday, he'd looked gray, internally soft, as if the structure of his body were no longer sound and inside he'd melted down to nothing. Still, he'd been annoyed by their running the route from the apartment to the restaurant a number of times. He said it was a futile exercise, since there was a camera in every elevator and cameras in the stairways. If he'd left his apartment on the night of the murder—if he'd gone

out either way—the person manning the cameras in the security room would have seen him. He seemed very sure that could not have happened.

And then Liberty's eyes had become very sharp. "Why are you doing this to me?" he demanded.

"There's nothing personal about it," Mike replied. "We do it to everybody."

Liberty tried to stare Mike down with his sharp, intelligent eyes. "Do you believe I could have killed my own wife?"

"You mean, did you have the means and opportunity?" Mike shifted his mouth around in his face as he inhaled and slowly exhaled a few times. Finally the shoulder with the gun under it jerked in a half shrug. "All we're missing here is the motive." And a witness, he didn't say.

"Why do you think Daphne Petersen is accusing me on TV?" Liberty's voice became harsh.

"Why do you think?" Mike replied.

"You don't have to go any further than her for a motive. She had a reason to kill Tor. I don't have a reason to hurt anyone."

"She certainly appears to have a lot to gain with her husband dead. Be assured that we're investigating her movements on the night of the murder, as well as yours," Mike had told him.

"She may not have done it directly."

"We're aware of that."

"So, you don't take the TV appearance at face value." He looked from one to the other.

"Frankly, I don't watch TV. What about you, April?"

April shook her head. "If Daphne did kill her husband, it was a dumb move to point her finger at you. But I don't see why she would have killed your wife, do you?"

"No." He said no, but he looked uneasy.

"Did you ever hit your wife, Mr. Liberty?" Mike asked.

"No." Still uneasy.

"Your neighbors say you fought a lot."

"My wife was very volatile. She was going through a bad period. It happens to the best people."

"You want to tell us about that?"

Liberty's eyes had filled with tears. He shook his head. April made a note to check with Emma again, talk to Merrill's doctor. Mike did not press him on the point.

"She couldn't have children," April said softly.

"How do you know?" He looked surprised.

"Just a guess." No reason to tell him she knew the autopsy report. It had not been the time to ask Liberty about the couple's sexual difficulties. Merrill's doctor might be able to answer that.

The phone rang in April's office. She picked up. It was Ducci, telling her to find her boyfriend and get over to the lab right away. She didn't have the energy to tell him she had a new one now.

April wanted to get to the lab and hear what Ducci had to say, but along with everything else, she had a domestic case on the burner and had to send out a team to make an arrest. Early morning was not when husbands usually got drunk and beat up their wives, but it was a good time to make an arrest. The couple in question had been in trouble before. This time when the wife got out of the hospital, she decided to press charges. There was no way the guy couid avoid going down today. Ducci's information had to wait.

April went downstairs to meet Carmella Perez, the officer assigned to domestic cases. Perez was probably a few years older than April but looked about fifteen because she didn't have a lot of beef on her body. She was almost razor-sharp all over except for smoothly rounded cheeks that set off a delicate nose and mouth and soft brown eyes. Clearly her favorite feature, though, was the thick, curly black hair that hung halfway down her back in a shiny curtain.

Since the time last summer when an officer had died trying to arrest a guy in a domestic dispute, nobody was allowed to go in alone on a domestic. Last summer a guy on a rampage had thrown a large mirror across the room at the officer trying to subdue him. A shard hit him, severed an artery in his groin, and the young cop, father of two, had bled to death before he reached the hospital.

It was unusually quiet by the front desk where April and Carmella waited for two uniforms. All the news vans that had been stationed there for several days after the Liberty murder had now moved up to the Two-O to cover the jogger case. So had a number of officers and detectives. Except for Hagedorn, who was stuck to his computer, all the other detectives were out in the field. The dozens of other cases they had were on the back burner, except for Jocelyn Kohlbe, who, in her latest beating at the hands of her husband, had sustained four broken ribs, a broken arm, numerous bruises about the head and neck, and a shattered eardrum.

April looked Carmella over, always more worried about the females in bad situations than the men. April figured her fear for other female cops had to come from really old prejudices little girls were taught about not being able to take care of themselves. Or maybe she had some semblance of a maternal instinct, after all. It pissed off the female uniforms when she screwed up her face to assess their equipment and moods before they went out, just as Skinny Dragon Mother did each time she went out.

There were a lot of supposed-tos and not-supposed-tos in the department. You were absolutely not supposed to go out on the street or on an arrest without a bulletproof vest on. Occasionally they had a problem with a female officer—usually one of the young ones— who didn't want to wear her vest because she thought it made her look fat. It wasn't April's job to make sure they were wearing their vests, had all their equipment, and the batteries worked in their flashlights, but when females were working her cases, she couldn't help looking for violations. When one jumped out at her, she screamed the way a mother did at a kid running out the back door into the rain without a coat on. She didn't like to think she had a maternal instinct, so she assumed she just didn't want to feel guilty for the rest of her life if something happened to one of them on her watch.

Carmella Perez. Too skinny. Possibly didn't eat meat, or anything else. April noticed four or five holes, but no earrings in her ears, no rings on her fingers. So far so good. The watch with a large round dial looked too heavy for her slender wrist. It read 9:07. Carmella wore a red-and-black-plaid flannel shirt with a black turtleneck, her vest and her gun under it. April knew that even if it got really cold Carmella would keep her jacket unzipped so she could get at her gun. They'd talked guns at lunch once, so April knew Carmella still carried the old .38 Chief's Special and took good care of it. She told April she'd tried a automatic at the range once and couldn't get over how light and easy it was to grip. But then the gun jammed when she pulled the trigger and that was it for her. In the department you still had to buy your own gun, and she wasn't taking any chances laying down big money for a weapon that might fail her when she needed it. She was taking some chances with the hair, though. April wrinkled her nose.

Carmella's eyes flashed. "What chu looking at?" She took the attitude position with one foot splayed and a hand on the opposite hip.

She was an inch or two taller than April, maybe five eight. The extra inches she got with her heavy winter boots put her at about five ten. April jerked her chin up at the hair.

"Anybody ever tell you you could get your scalp ripped off?"

"With Bobby here to protect me?" Carmella laughed as a white uniform about five five with his shoes on chugged up grinning and raised a hand to pet her hair as if it were a friendly animal he hadn't seen in a while. She slapped the hand away.

April ignored the horseplay. "Make me happy. Put the hair up. Our lady may be in a loving mood this morning and feel the need to protect her man."

"Shit happens," Bobby agreed, hitching at his belt as if the rise was too short in his uniform trousers.

"Nah, this one's my buddy. She won't give me no trouble." Now Carmella was grinning.

Still struggling with his balls, Bobby did a quick knee bend and hitched at his pants some more.

Carmella watched, speculating. "You all twisted up again, Bobby?"

"Yeah, you want to help me out?"

Now April was getting annoyed. These two were pushing al her buttons and knew it. Sometimes when you went to arrest a batterer, it was the wife who went berserk pulling a cop's hair, hitting him with a frying pan, biting. Horseplay might calm these two down, but it was dangerous.

Bobby's partner, a guy they called DodQ, showed up. "Ready?"

"Put up the hair," April said.

"Sure." Carmella wrapped a scarf around her neck.

"She says 'sure,' but she'll only take it down later in the car." Bobby grabbed a handful and tweaked the hair.

Carmella punched his arm.

"It's trouble all around. Put it up, and keep it up," April warned.

Carmella's cheerful expression soured, and April knew she'd made an enemy. A perfect Chinese person knew how to get her way without giving offense. A perfect American didn't give a shit. April wasn't perfect in either culture. She turned away, suddenly depressed. "Go on, safe landing," she muttered.

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.