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.
25
Mike drove uptown on First Avenue, through the Twenties and past the New York University Medical Center complex in the Thirties, where the medical examiner's building was set apart.
'Jesus, it's cold. My hands are frozen.' April chaffed her hands. 'What a day. What do you think, is Ducci a crackpot or are we in trouble?'
'He is and he isn't. But either way, we are.'
'In trouble?'
Mike smiled. 'Ducci may be right that Petersen died before the Liberty woman. He may not be right that Petersen was murdered.'
'You don't buy the sharp-stick-in-the-heart story?'
'I saw Petersen's body and the Liberty woman's body, and so did you. The hole in the woman's throat was a hole. The wound on Petersen's chest didn't look like a hole. It wasn't red like a fresh injury, and there was no dried blood around it. Not any. It looked old to me.'
'But the chest is a different part of the body from the throat,' April pointed out. 'Ducci said when the weapon was removed from the chest, the skin would close up around it. That wouldn't happen on the neck.'
'Maybe. But it looked old. And there's no chance for a second autopsy.'
'What about the hole in the sweater?'
'There's a hole in the sweater at the site of Petersen's tiny wound—that could have been made days, weeks, or even months before he died—and in the severed yarn fibers is lint from a T-shirt that the victim was not wearing at the time of his autopsy. So one could argue he was not wearing it at the time of his death. One could also argue that the chest injury— whatever its nature—also occurred sometime in the past.'
'Many would argue that,' April agreed.
'If Petersen was wearing a T-shirt at the time of his death, the T-shirt would have bloodstains on it— maybe not pints of blood, but some—and there would be a corresponding hole in the shirt that would be hard to miss.'
'But he wasn't wearing a T-shirt.'
'Or if someone wanted to make Petersen's death look like a heart attack, he'd also have to make the T-shirt disappear.' Mike crossed on Fifty-seventh Street where the huge Christmas snowflake still presided over the crosswalk of Fifty-seventh and Fifth, forcing cheer out of a thousand tiny white lights. More white lights sparkled on the bare branches of the trees lining the avenue.
'No matter how this gets resolved, it's going to be bad. Liberty's taken off. Why would he do that if he weren't guilty of something?'
April's eyes burned. She felt lousy because they hadn't gotten anywhere with Liberty yesterday, and because of the way they were being treated by her boss. She was also troubled by the things Ducci told them. 'What if Liberty was having an affair with the Petersen woman, they planned the murders together, and now she's trying to get him to take the fall?' she mused.
'Oy, the bitch.' Mike turned up Madison, then left on Sixtieth. At Fifth Avenue even more white lights twinkled on the dozen Christmas trees still stuck in several levels of the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. The only yellow lights were those that cast an eerie glow from the thirty-foot menorah in Central Park at Fifty-ninth Street, right across from Daphne Petersen's building.
Now April's throat felt raw. Everyone working the case had messed up. Most of all she had. The Chinese god of messing up was hovering over her. She could feel his hot dragon's breath on her neck, in Iriarte's dashed hopes for her, in Mike's too. Dean Kiang would not think well of her either. He needed a solid case to prosecute. She'd be exiled to Ozone Park, put back in uniform. Her mother would gloat and make her life a misery, and she'd never get laid by anybody.
Mike stopped the car.
'Well, look at that.' April sat up in her seat.
Daphne Petersen was hurrying up Fifth Avenue toward the spot where Mike had parked. She was wearing a huge black mink coat that swirled around her like a furry tent. Daphne was talking animatedly to a tall and strikingly handsome young man in a silver warm-up suit. The guy had bronze hair curling around his tanned neck and face and looked like an underwear ad with his clothes on.
'She looks cold. Let's take her for a ride,' Mike suggested.
'Good idea.' April opened the car door and got out, heedless of the traffic surging around her.
Mike swore as she headed around the front of the car.
There was a lake at the curb. April hurdled it, landing just north of Daphne Petersen on the sidewalk. The woman gave a little squeak and sprang back with surprising agility. The minute Daphne sidestepped, the underwear ad took her place, moving in quickly to attack April. Mike was out of the car when the man grabbed April by the arm and swung her around back toward the street. Her feet got tangled up in a dance step she hadn't seen coming, but she had the presence of mind to signal Mike to take it easy. No one was supposed to touch a police officer, and now Mike was coming on like a SWAT team to save her. The man swung April around to take her down in the icy lake on Fifth Avenue. But April shifted her weight at the last moment and tossed him away from her.
The man screamed as his feet left the sidewalk and he landed hard in front of their parked car, splashing filthy water on Daphne Petersen's leopard-topped boots.
Daphne stamped the boots on the sidewalk, yelling at April. 'Are you mad?' Her piercing English shriek drew the doormen out of the Pierre.
'What's going on?' The one with the top hat tried for some authority.
Daphne ignored him. 'Are you mad?' she continued screaming at April, who stood next to her, a little surprised by her ability to send a six-footer flying into the gutter.
'What do you think you're doing? You scared me to death. Giorgio, honey, are you all right?' Daphne put out her hand to the man with his butt in the street but did not advance close enough to touch him or get her feet wet.
He was sputtering in some foreign language as Mike. pulled him to his feet.
'Ow, beetch, crazy beetch.'
'Hey, watch that, buddy,' Mike said. 'You just assaulted a police officer.' He rubbed his wet gloves together, then smacked one against the other. 'You could go to jail for that.'
'No way. I didn't do nothing.' The man held his hands palms up. 'She—'
'You assaulted a police officer. I saw you.'
'Oh, for Christ's sake.' Daphne Petersen turned to Mike. 'The woman practically jumped on me. We thought she was one of those antifur people.'
'What-?' April demanded.
'Can't you hear? We thought you were going to throw red paint at me.'
'Crazy beetch.' The handsome man didn't have much of a vocabulary. He was combing his fingers through his hair, managing to appear both peeved and injured.
Daphne shot him a scathing look. 'Oh, shut up, Giorgio.'
'Who's he?' Mike jerked a thumb at the bronze hair.
Daphne sniffed. 'Just my trainer.'
