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
