The Tenth Case

30

Washing his hands in the men's room sink, Jaywalker happened to look up and catch his reflection in the mirror. Neither the full-length crack in the glass nor the accumu lation of city grime and cigarette tar could diminish the breadth of the grin on his face. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and silently thanked his I-know-there's-noGod-but-just-in-case-I'm-wrong for having granted the night's reprieve. Anyone who thought you spelled relief with the brand name of an antacid had it all wrong. Relief was making it to eight o'clock without a conviction. Relief was making it to the men's room without a catastrophe.

When Jaywalker opened his eyes, the grin was still there. It was still there as he checked the paper towel dis penser, with, as Detective Bonfiglio might have put it, negative results. It was still there as he shook his hands dry, or at least tried his best to. It was still there when he opened the door, stepped out into the hallway and found himself face-to-face with Samara.

"What's so funny?" she wanted to know.

"Nothing," he said. "Everything. We're alive. We're coming back tomorrow. Somebody in that jury room still believes in you."

"And you?" she asked, looking up into his eyes, cutting off all escape routes, leaving him no place to hide. "Do you still believe in me?"

"Yes," he said, "I still believe in you."

"Do you mean that? I mean really, r eally mean it?"

"Of course I do."

Could there possibly have been another answer?

Still her eyes wouldn't let go of his. It was as though she was testing him, challenging his faith in her innocence. He readied himself for whatever might come next. Would she ask him to take an oath, perhaps, or to repeat Samara didn't do it twenty times over?

What she actually did say took him by surprise. "Then come home with me." And the way she said it, it wasn't quite a command, yet it wasn't simply a question, either. It was something halfway in between. It was a request, he decided, a request with the please left out, lest it sound too much like begging. And, as before, there could be only one possible answer.

"Yes," said Jaywalker, "I'll come home with you."

It was raining out on Centre Street, an icy rain that turned to sleet even as they stood there, waiting for a cab.

"C'mon," Jaywalker said to Samara, and they bent into the sleet and began walking uptown, arms locked together. At Canal Street, a little old Korean woman was huddled in a doorway, hawking umbrellas. "Faw dolla, faw dolla."

Jaywalker reached into his side pocket for four singles. It was a New York thing, knowing never to carry your money in your wallet. Walking up to the woman, he asked, "Is there any chance this one's going to last longer than the one you sold me two weeks ago?"

"Three dolla."

"Deal."

The sleet was coming down even harder, and by now the pavement had a coating of slush on it. Even huddled tightly together underneath their three-dolla special, Samara and Jaywalker were getting pelted. And still there were no cabs in sight. Another New York thing.

So they ducked down into the subway and rode the Lex ington Avenue local uptown, the about-to-be-convicted "billionheiress" and her about-to-be-suspended lawyer.

By the time they emerged at Sixty-eighth Street, the sleet had changed over again, this time to snow. It was a wet, heavy snow, lit up by the streetlamps like soggy corn flakes, but it was better than what had preceded it. Jay walker wrapped one arm around Samara's shoulders, leav ing the other to carry both his briefcase and the umbrella, an easy enough task if it had had two hands attached to it. He pondered the situation for a moment. The trial was all but over, he knew, and with one day left on his ticket, chances were he would have no more use for the briefcase. Then again, life could be funny, and one of the best parts about it was that you never knew for sure. So, at the next corner, he tossed the umbrella into a wire trash can.

"Hey," said Samara, "you paid good money for that thing. I could've carried it."

"No point," Jaywalker explained. "Once they get wet, they're no good anymore. That's the whole idea. That woman back there on Canal Street? She's their vice presi dent in charge of market research. In two years she'll have enough money to buy Manhattan, dismantle it and ship it back home."

Samara laughed at the thought, a hearty laugh, totally free of self-consciousness. Like her tears on the witness stand, her frequent lapses into locker-room language and just about everything else about her, there was nothing re strained about her laughter, nothing contrived or con trolled. The tabloid writers who'd been so quick to tag her as a gold digger had gotten it all wrong. The truth was, she operated without a plan, Samara did. If something struck her as funny, she laughed at it like a child. If it struck her as sad, she bawled. And if it struck her as absurd, she came right out and said so, without measuring her words or both ering to pretty them up.

Her laughter now was infectious, downright contag ious. In spite of himself, or perhaps because of what the two of them had been through over the last couple of hours, Jaywalker found himself letting go and laughing right along with her. They laughed at his dumb remark, at the fact that they were laughing at it, at their dripping hair and their soaking clothes. They laughed because they were together. This time tomorrow she would be in jail and he'd no longer be a lawyer, but right now they were together, heading to her place for the night, and that was enough.

Or, as Samara would have so eloquently stated, fuck tomorrow.

When they reached her town house, Jaywalker noticed a gray Ford Crown Victoria idling across the street. There were two overfed white guys sitting in it, and the wind shield was fogged up where coffee containers sat on the dashboard. Tom Burke had evidently taken to heart Judge Sobel's suggestion of stationing detectives outside Samara's building. If Samara noticed them, she said noth ing. It took a cop to spot a cop, Jaywalker knew from his DEA days. Then again, Samara had done her share of flirting with the law, and not much got past her. Maybe she'd noticed them and just didn't care.

He let go of her just long enough for her to open the door to her town house. Once inside, they looked at each other in the light and began laughing all over again. They were completely covered with snow, both of them. Their cloth ing, their hair, their eyebrows, their eyelashes.

"You're going to look great when you're old and gray," said Jaywalker. He'd meant it as a compliment; he'd always loved the contrast of a young face, whether male or female, against a shock of gray hair. But all it earned from Samara was a sharp jab to the ribs. He caught her by the wrist, and found the other one, as well. They were tiny, so tiny he could completely circle his fingers around them. Drawing them against his chest, he wrapped his arms around her. All he'd meant to do was to immobilize her, to tie her hands up and prevent them from inflicting further damage. Or maybe not. But if he'd expected her to struggle, she surprised him once again. He felt her body go soft in his arms, and his reaction was to look down at her, at the precise moment she'd chosen to look up at him. Their eyes locked, and Jay walker found himself experiencing the same sensation he'd felt the very first time he'd seen her, and then the first time he'd seen her all over again, six years later. Only this time they weren't sitting across a desk in his office or squinting through wire-reinforced glass in a visiting room on Rikers Island. This time she was in his arms.

They peeled off each other's snow-caked clothes, drop ping them in a heap on the hallway floor. Almost as if there'd been preset ground rules, Samara stopped when she got to his boxer shorts, Jaywalker at her bra, her dentalfloss thong, and her electronic ankle bracelet. He didn't actually know it was a thong until she turned away from him and motioned him to follow as she began climbing the stairs. God, he thought, looking upward at her, whoever invented those things deserves a Nobel prize. And for the first time in his life, he was prepared to forgive Bill for having been rendered totally helpless in front of Monica. Well, perhaps not exactly in front of her.

They ended up in the den, or perhaps it was the study; Jaywalker couldn't remember. It was a modest-sized room, dominated by a huge fireplace, which in turn was sur rounded by an equally oversize U-shaped sectional sofa. There were logs laid in the fireplace, and he looked around for a book of matches. But she picked up what looked like a TV remote, pointed and clicked, and just like that, fire happened. It might not have been Jaywalker's weapon of choice, but it did the trick.

"So," she said, standing there in the firelight. "Is it after yet?"

"It's close enough," said Jaywalker.

Even as extended foreplay goes, seven and a half years is an awfully long time. With a buildup of that length, it would have been entirely understandable, indeed all but inevitable, that the reality would fall far short of the anticipation.

It didn't.

Finally going to bed with Samara turned out to exceed everything Jaywalker had imagined, hoped for and dreamed about in his wildest and most X-rated fantasies. If her bethonged backside had driven him crazy, so now did the rest of her. But there was more. Not only was she physi cally exquisite, she was, well, talented. So much so, in fact, that once or twice Jaywalker caught himself remembering the details of her past. But each time his hesitation proved to be only fleeting and soon evaporated. And if Samara didn't try to make him feel as though he were her first ever (a tall order if ever there'd been one), she somehow man aged to succeed in making him feel that he was her best ever, smothering any self-doubts he might have had with an unending barrage of kisses, touches, caresses, moans and all sorts of other stuff that in the end would leave him breathlessly begging for less. Totally forgotten were any concerns over the freshness of his breath, the size of his personal endowment or the satisfaction of Samara's needs; all three of those areas seemed to work out just fine, thank you. Suffice it to say that in spite of however great the an ticipation might have been, the experience itself proved to be anything but anticlimactic, both figuratively and literally. In fact, at one such moment, Samara was heard to remark, "That's three months off your life expectancy so far."

"Me?" Jaywalker gasped. "Then you've lost years. "

"It's not the same, silly. Don't you know anything? "

This from a woman twenty years his junior, sitting astride him totally naked, her small breasts framing a pair of out rageously pointed nipples. And already she was busy at work trying to deprive him of yet another month of his life.

At some point, when they'd been forced to come up for air, Samara caught Jaywalker pinching the bridge of his nose. "Headache?" she asked.

He nodded.

"I'm sure Barry left some aspirin here," she said. "Or some ibuprofen. He was a regular walking pharmacy."

"I can't take any of that stuff," said Jaywalker, who'd developed an allergy late in life. "My head blows up, and I look like a manatee."

"So what can we do for you?" she asked.

"You've done more than you can imagine."

"Seriously."

"Seriously? I guess I should eat something," he said. "It's been about a day and a half."

"And by something, you probably don't mean ice cream."

The thought of brain-freeze caused him to reach for the bridge of his nose again. "Probably not."

"Pizza?"

"You've got pizza?"

"No," said Samara. "But I've got a phone. This is New York, remember?"

At his insistence, they ordered not one but two medium pies. When the pizzas arrived thirty minutes later, they kept the plain one for themselves. The pepperoni, meatball and extra cheese, Jaywalker had redelivered to the gray Crown Victoria across the street.

"So what's a manatee?" Samara asked. They were sitting on the rug in front of the fire, eating pizza. Collec tively, they were down to an ankle bracelet.

"A manatee's a sea cow. And trust me, you wouldn't want me looking like one."

"I do trust you," she said. "And I'm sorry I didn't trust you enough to tell you about that other stabbing business, and about being Samantha Musgrove. I guess I thought that as long as I didn't tell anyone, it would be like the whole thing was just one long bad dream that had never really happened."

"Whatever made you pick Samara? I mean, Moss I can understand. Short and sweet, easy to remember. But Samara? "

"Do you know what a samara is?"

"No," he confessed.

It was her turn to teach. "A samara is the seedpod that grows on a maple tree. It has a pair of tiny little wings attached to it. When it leaves the tree, the wings catch the wind, and it flies far, far away, so it can begin a new life all on its own."

"Nice," said Jaywalker. "And you were only fourteen when you realized that was you?"

"I was a very old fourteen."

"So you were. Samara," he said, just to hear the sound of it. "Pretty name, Samara Moss."

"The Moss part was because I was hoping for a soft landing. It beat Musgrove, anyway."

Jaywalker nodded solemnly, or about as solemnly as a naked man eating pizza can nod. He couldn't be sure, but it felt like his headache was already beginning to melt away. Maybe it was a good idea to remember to eat some thing every day, he decided.

"Funny," said Samara, "in all these years, this is only the second time I've told anyone about it."

"About what?"

"The Samantha Musgrove stuff."

"I'm very honored," said Jaywalker, wiping a string of cheese off his chin with the back of his hand. "When was the first?"

"Eight years ago. Back when I believed in true love, sharing your innermost secrets, and all that till-death-do us-part crap."

Jaywalker had just taken another bite, and when his lower jaw dropped, so did a mouthful of pizza, not some thing to be advised when one happens to be both sitting and naked. The thing was, his ears had heard the words Samara had just said, but his brain was still struggling to make sense of them. "You told-"

She nodded.

"— Barry?"

"We were getting married," Samara said with an ex planatory shrug. "I thought I loved him. I figured he had a right to know."

"You told him about the whole thing?"

Another nod.

"The rape, the stabbing, even that your name had once been-"

"All of it."

"— Samantha Musgrove?"

"Yes."

"Musgrove, Musgrove," Jaywalker repeated. "Where have I heard that name before?"

"At the trial. It was my name, back in Indiana. That's what we've been talking about this whole time."

"I know, I know. But where else?"

"The Seconal," said Samara. "Remember the name of the doctor who prescribed it? The doctor who turned out not to exist? Samuel Musgrove. It's how as soon as I found the Seconal, I knew right away it had to be part of the frame-up. Only I couldn't tell you, not without going into the whole past-"

"Whoa."

"Whoa, what?"

"Who else besides Barry knew about the name Musgrove?"

She seemed to think for a minute, before saying, "No body."

"Are you sure?"

"Sure, I'm sure. Until Friday, when you told me Mr. Burke had found out about it, Barry was the only person I ever told."

Jaywalker jumped up and immediately began pacing the room, totally oblivious to his nakedness. The headache was back with a vengeance, pounding between his eyes and at his temples. Samara was staring at him as though he and his mind had suddenly parted company. But when she opened her mouth to say something, he held up a hand and shushed her.

Barry had known about the earlier stabbing, and about the name Samantha Musgrove. No one else had. Could Barry have ordered the Seconal, using the name Samuel Musgrove, to make it look as though Samara had done it? And if Barry had kept aspirin or ibuprofen at Samara's town house, as she said he had, that meant he'd spent time there. If he'd wanted to, he could have brought the Seconal there on one of his visits. He could have taken one of her knives, too.

"Tell me," Jaywalker said. "Did Barry have a key to this place?"

"He did once. So I guess so. Why?"

"What time is it?"

Samara got up, disappeared into another room and called out, "Two-fifteen."

"A phone," said Jaywalker. "I need a phone."

When she returned, she was wearing a robe. Apparently she preferred to have something on if he was going to flip out and she was going to have to take him to an emergency room. But she did have a cordless phone in one hand.

Jaywalker grabbed it and punched in a number. Funny, the old ones he could always remember. It was short-term memory he had a problem with, frequently forgetting his own number. Then again, he didn't call himself all that often.

"Unlisted subscriber information," a woman said.

"This is Detective Anthony Bonfiglio," said Jaywalker, "Twenty-first Squad Homicide, shield two-two-oh-five. I need an unlisted number for a Thomas Francis Burke. Stat."

He motioned Samara to bring him something to write with. She found a pen and a sheet of paper.

"I'm showing one Thomas F. Burke," said the woman, "five unlisted Thomas Burkes without middle names or initials, and three T. Burkes."

"I'll take them all."

She read him the listings. "I'll need a written confirma tion by seventeen hundred today," she told him. She gave him a fax number.

"You got it," said Jaywalker, not bothering to write down the number.

He spoke briefly with two Tom Burkes and three name less women, none of whom seemed too thrilled to have been woken at, as one of them so artfully put it, "three fucking o'clock in the fucking morning." But on the sixth try, he heard a familiar, if sleepy, voice.

"Tom, wake up, it's Jaywalker."

"Jesus. What time is it?"

"I don't know," Jaywalker lied. "A little after midnight."

"How did you get my number?"

"Ve haff our vays."

"What do you want?" Burke asked.

"I need you to get up and get dressed."

"Are you nuts?"

"Probably," Jaywalker conceded. "But I think I've just about got this case figured out."

"As I understand it," said Burke, "so does the jury."

"The jury doesn't have a clue. And neither have you or I, all this time. But when you meet me, I'm going to explain it to you."

"I'm sure you are," said Burke. "In court, at nine-thirty."

"Tom?"

There was silence on the other end, and for a moment Jay walker was afraid he'd blown it. Then he heard a "What?" that sounded somewhere between exasperated and resigned.

"Tom, you know I'd never fuck with you, right?"

"What time is it really?"

"Two-thirty, quarter of three. Something like that."

"You who'd never fuck with me."

"I need you to trust me on this, Tom. I need you to meet me at Barry's building as soon as you can. And, Tom?"

"Yes?"

"Bring your shield."

"My shield?"

"You know," said Jaywalker, "that phony tin the old man gives you guys, in case you get stopped for speeding or hitting on a hooker."

Burke showed up wearing a leather bomber jacket, jeans and a Yankee cap. But at least he was dry. Jaywalker had been forced to retrieve his soaking clothes from the pile he and Samara had created earlier in the evening. His coat had been so wet, however, that she had forced him to put on one of Barry's, even though the sleeves came to just below Jaywalker's elbows and the shoulders were so narrow that they threatened to cut off his blood supply. The guy must've been an absolute shrimp, he decided.

Burke wasn't alone. He'd managed to track down De tective Bonfiglio and bring him along, perhaps as a body guard, perhaps as a witness to Jaywalker's need for civil commitment.

"Evening, counselor," said the detective.

"Evening, Tony. By the way, you owe the Unlisted Sub scriber Operator a fax by seventeen hundred hours."

"Say what?"

"Never mind."

"Cut it out, girls," said Burke. Then, to Jaywalker, "This better be good."

"This is better than good," Jaywalker assured him. "This is absolutely unbelievable."

"That's exactly what I'm afraid of."

It turned out that Jose Lugo was working the midnightto-eight shift on the door, so they didn't need their shields after all. Which was just as well, because Jaywalker had bought his at a Times Square novelty shop. Lugo got hold of Anthony Mazzini, who, though groggy-eyed and grumbling, produced a passkey and, once the POLICE DEPART MENT DO NOT CROSS tape had been lifted away and the crime scene seal broken, let the three of them into Pent house A.

Once inside, it took them a few minutes to locate the circuit breakers and turn on the lights. It was immediately apparent that the tape and the seal had done their job. Nothing appeared to have been touched since Jaywalker's earlier visit.

"Okay," said Burke to Jaywalker. "Make like Charlie Chan. Explain to us what you think you've figured out."

"Sure," said Jaywalker, "I can do that. But remember, I said just about. I now know who killed Barry, but I'm still trying to figure out exactly how he managed to pull it off."

"He?" said Bonfiglio. "You mean to tell us your girl friend's a trannie?"

"Be nice, Tony," warned Jaywalker. "You can come off looking like a hero in this thing, or the genius who locked up an innocent woman and wouldn't let go. Your choice."

"I got a choice for you, dickhead."

"Hey," said Burke, "I said cut it out."

Jaywalker led them into the kitchen. The outline of Barry's body was still on the floor. A year and a half had passed, but he might just as well have died yesterday.

"Okay," said Jaywalker. "See this coat I'm wearing?" With some difficulty he raised his arms, to demonstrate how short the sleeves were on him.

"Yeah," said Bonfiglio, "it's a thing a beauty."

"It was Barry's," said Jaywalker. "He kept it at Sa mara's, along with a lot of other stuff. Clothes, medication, personal items. In other words, he stayed there from time to time. He had his own key. He had access."

Neither Burke nor Bonfiglio seemed overly impressed.

"Barry was dying from cancer," said Jaywalker. "He had an inoperable malignant tumor that was going to kill him in a matter of months, maybe even weeks. Samara thought Barry was a hypochondriac and bought his explanation that he had the flu. But Barry knew. And the thing is, he hated Samara. He hated the way she humiliated him by running around and seeing other men, and it drove him crazy to think that when he did die, she'd end up with half his estate. He even tried to get Alan Manheim to write her out of his will, but as Manheim explained to him, it wouldn't do any good, Samara would still get half, under equitable distribution."

"You sure that's the law?" asked Bonfiglio.

"That's the law," said Burke.

"So what does Barry do?" Jaywalker asked rhetorically. "He figures out a way to disinherit Samara. He takes out the life insurance policy himself. He tells Samara to sign the application, and like a good little girl, she does, without ever looking at it. A week or so later, when Bill Smythe gets the bill and asks Barry about it, Barry tells him to go ahead and pay the premium out of the joint account. Smythe does."

Jaywalker was pacing now, trying to put the pieces together. "Do you remember why Samara goes over to Barry's the evening of the murder?"

"To kill him?" was Bonfiglio's guess.

"He asked her to," said Burke.

"Right. And what happens?"

"They eat Chinks," said Bonfiglio.

"Forget what they ate. What happens next?"

"They get into a fight," said Bonfiglio.

"A shouting argument," said Burke.

"Exactly. Over some bullshit thing. Samara can't even recall what it was, only that Barry started it. That's im portant. Remember," said Jaywalker, "he knew how to push her buttons. And once they're arguing, Barry makes sure their voices are loud enough to be overheard and recognized."

Burke nodded, but only tentatively.

"Samara storms out, just like she said she did on the stand."

"And right about then," said Bonfiglio, "Spiderman crawls through the window an' offs Barry."

Jaywalker ignored the remark. It was actually working better this way, with the detective having cast himself as the sarcastic doubter and Burke forced to play the role of an impartial third person.

"Here's where it gets interesting," Jaywalker explained. "Barry downs a stiff drink and a couple of Seconals. Maybe he'd done that earlier, maybe he excuses himself for a moment and does it now. It doesn't matter. He takes a knife he swiped from Samara's some time ago."

"Bullshit," said Bonfiglio.

Jaywalker said nothing. Instead, he walked to a set of drawers and rummaged through them until he found a table knife with a rounded tip. He wasn't about to trust Bonfi glio with anything sharper. Handing it to the detective, he said, "Show us how you'd stab me in the heart, as many ways as you can. You know, from the front, the rear, the side, whatever."

"Fuck you."

"Do it," said Burke.

Bonfiglio scowled but did as he'd been told. He pro ceeded to mimic stabbing Jaywalker from the front, first with his right hand on the knife raised above him, then his left, and then both hands. He repeated the process underhanded. He walked around behind Jaywalker, grabbed him unneces sarily roughly around the neck and brought the knife to his chest that way. He tried a couple of other variations, as well.

"How many does that make?" Jaywalker asked.

"Ten, twelve," said Burke.

"What do they all have in common?"

Burke shrugged. Bonfiglio scowled, looking as though he wished he could play the game for real.

"Every single time you went to kill me," said Jaywalker, "you did it with the knife held so the blade was up and down. If Samara had stabbed Barry, that's how she would have done it, too. Anybody would have. That's how you knife someone. But if she'd done it that way, the blade would have gone in perpendicular to Barry's ribs and no doubt would have struck one of them, or even two. Only it didn't. How do we know that?"

"Hirsch," said Burke.

"Right. Hirsch was crystal-clear on that point. The blade went in flat. That's why it never hit a rib. Hard to do, unless…"

"Unless what?" It was actually Bonfiglio who asked the question.

"Unless," said Jaywalker, "you were feeling your ribs with the fingers of one hand to locate the soft spot, so you could get the blade in laterally, right between them."

There was an eerie silence in the room. Burke walked over to the chalk outline of the body on the floor, and looked down at it. "Interesting," he admitted. "But it doesn't begin to explain how he managed to get the knife to Samara's afterwards, hide it behind the toilet, come back here, collapse on the floor and die. Does it?"

"No," said Jaywalker, "but that's actually the easy part. Remember that word access. Barry had hidden those things days earlier. Weeks, maybe. He drew some of his own blood, or stuck a finger. Remember, the total amount on the knife, the blouse and the towel wasn't much at all. And the blood was dried. Those things could have been planted anytime. And he hid them where the blood would stay dry and intact. Sitting in the toilet tank, the logical place for Samara to hide them if she really wanted to be stupid enough to save them as souvenirs, the blood would have dissolved in the water. After a flush or two, it would have been history."

Burke was still far from being convinced. "So you con cede the knife was Samara's?"

"Absolutely," said Jaywalker.

"Yet you claim it wasn't the murder weapon. Or, as you'd like us to believe, the suicide weapon."

"Right."

At that point Jaywalker reached into one pocket of Barry's coat and, with considerable difficulty, withdrew the six knives he'd taken before leaving Samara's. The coat might have fit horribly, but it came in handy for his rabbitout-of-the-hat moment. Or, to be more precise, his steakknives-out-of-the-pocket moment.

"Voila!" he announced.

Burke paid close attention, while Bonfiglio pretended his best not to. But even he was watching.

"These are Samara's steak knives," said Jaywalker. "They come in sets of six or eight. Never an odd number, right? One of them ended up behind Samara's toilet tank. That makes seven, which leaves one. And that's the one that Barry used to kill himself with."

"And then ate?" Bonfiglio wanted to know.

"No," said Jaywalker, playing the straight man. "If he'd swallowed it, Hirsch would have found it."

"So where is it?" asked Burke and Bonfiglio in perfect tandem.

"I don't know," said Jaywalker.

"Great," said Bonfiglio. "You got everything figgered out but the kicker."

Burke's wrinkled forehead indicated he pretty much agreed. "You get over that hump," he said, "and maybe we've got something to talk about. But without it, I'm afraid…"

"I know," said Jaywalker. "And for the life of me, I can't figure out how Barry got rid of it. I know this much. With the alcohol and Seconal in him, he could've handled the pain, could even have pulled the knife out. You know, the way that Crocodile Hunter guy pulled the stingray thing out of his heart before dying. I figure Barry had a minute left at that point, certainly a half a minute, before he would have passed out and collapsed. So it's got to be here somewhere."

"We gave this place a thorough toss," said Bonfiglio. "The crime scene guys did, too. If there was a knife here, we woulda found it."

"Like you found the Seconal Barry planted in Samara's kitchen cabinet?"

"What Seconal?" Burke asked.

"Somebody phoned in a phony prescription a week or so before Barry's death. It was supposed to be for Samara, but she never knew anything about it. She found it among her spices and called me to come see it. Think about that for a minute. If it was hers, and if she'd used it to drug Barry before stabbing him, why would she bring it to my attention? Why wouldn't she just throw it away? What's more, the doctor who prescribed it doesn't exist. I was going to ask her about it at trial, but like a jerk, I decided against it. I was afraid that the name of the phantom doctor sounded too much like Samara Moss, her maiden name.

"Now get this," Jaywalker continued. "When Samara fled Indiana, she left the rape and the stabbing behind her. In the fourteen years since, she's never told a soul about it, or that her true name was Samantha Musgrove. Not even I knew about it. Nobody did. With one exception."

"Barry," said the chorus.

"Right. Now see if you can guess what the name of the phantom doctor was on the Seconal bottle."

When there were no takers, Jaywalker produced the bottle from the other pocket of Barry's coat and handed it to Burke.

"Samuel Musgrove, M.D.," read Burke.

"Bingo," said Jaywalker.

"Okay," said Burke, "so Barry could have done that, planted the Seconal. I'll give you that much. But let's get back to the eighth knife. Want to tell us where it is?"

"My guess is it's got to be right here, in the kitchen." He proceeded to divide the room into three, assigning them each a section to search. Jaywalker took the third that included the refrigerator and freezer, and the microwave. He gave Burke most of the cabinets. Bonfiglio ended up with the sink, the trash can, and the dishwasher, grumbling that they'd already been done, "with negative results."

They searched in silence for fifteen minutes.

Jaywalker came up dry.

So did Burke.

But sometimes one out of three can be good enough. When it happened, it happened quietly, with no fanfare. When Bonfiglio went to open the dishwasher, he found it was in the locked position, as though ready to run a load of dishes. But when he lifted the handle and opened it, it became clear that that wasn't the case.

Bonfiglio looked carefully. What he saw was a fairly full load of dishes, all of them clean. And there, down on the lower rack, inside the utensil holder among the spoons, forks and table knives, was the eighth steak knife. Barry Tannenbaum had done just as Jaywalker had figured. For tified on alcohol and Seconal, he'd found the soft spot between his ribs, plunged the knife into his chest and pulled it out. Then he'd placed it in the loaded, soaped and readyto-run dishwasher. All he had to do at that point was to close it and push the start button. Then he collapsed on the floor and bled to death.

"Nice work, detective," said Jaywalker, taking care to keep his voice free of sarcasm or irony. In the end, he knew, he'd be needing Bonfiglio on his side.

"Thanks," said the detective, the first suggestion of a hero's smile beginning to spread across his face.

"Absofuckinglutely unbelievable," said Burke.

"Don't say I didn't warn you," said Jaywalker.

The best part, of course, had been leaving it to Bonfi glio to find the knife. Having tried cases for two decades now, Jaywalker had come to learn a valuable lesson. Some times the very smartest thing you could do was to let the jurors solve the final piece of the puzzle themselves. So once Jaywalker had put it all together-with a slight assist from his wife, returning to him in a dream to nag him about unloading the dishwasher-he'd tucked it away and saved the moment of triumph for the detective.