up.
“Let’s see. How bad is it?” Jason addressed his attention to the wound first.
“It’s nothing, just a scratch.” Impatiently, Clara grabbed the paper towels from him and pressed them to her hand, her attention fixed on the item on her desk.
“What’s that?” Jason leaned over.
Shocked, Clara was staring at the message, on hospital stationery, that lay under the now-bloodied scalpel and condom. In words sliced and pasted together from newspaper cutouts it said: YOU’LL PAY FOR THE BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS.
“This is really sick.”
Yes, it was, and very cleverly done. “How’s your hand?”
Clara shook her head, uninterested in the gash. “Look at this mess—my desk, my suit, everything.”
“I think we’d better call the police.”
“No! I’m going to have to deal with it.” Clara checked her watch and pushed her chair back. “Jason, I’d like to talk further with you, but I must get myself cleaned up.” Her eyes measured him coolly, then she added, “Look, I’d like you to keep this in confidence for the time being.”
Jason shook his head. “Does this have anything to do with the Cowles death?”
“No!” Clara’s eyes shot down to the smeared blood on her hands. “No!” she cried again. “No, absolutely not. This is—”
“Clara, someone is obviously trying to hurt you. You’re going to have to bring the police into the picture.”
“I can handle it. I don’t want the police involved in this.” Her expression hardened. “This isn’t going to happen again.”
“You know who it is?”
“I have a good idea.” With no sign of repugnance, she removed the device that had cut her and the stained message below it, slid them into the top drawer of her desk. Surprisingly, no blood had fallen on the Cowles file. She held it out to Jason. “Thank you for coming. I’m counting on you,” she said, handing him the file, then rising to walk him to the door.
Once again, Jason was taken aback. “But what are you going to do about this?” he asked. He gestured to her swaddled hand. Blood had soaked through the wad of towels. One drop soon slid down her wrist, toward her pale green cuff.
“I’m going to take care of it,” she said.
Jason had to leave. He had a patient waiting. But all morning he worried about whose blood was on Clara’s hands.
twenty-four
On Thursday, a match came in for the second set of fingerprints found in Raymond Cowles’s apartment. The ID slid out of the fax machine downstairs in the precinct around one P.M. A female uniform brought it up to the squad room and handed it to Sanchez.
April was on the phone with Lorna Cowles, who had already called and been put off twice that day.
“Ray died
Mike read the fax and swiveled in his chair to face April. He waved it in her face. She ignored him.
“Look, Mrs. Cowles. I have reason to believe we’ll have the postmortem report this afternoon.”
“Will you know who killed him then?” Lorna shrilled. On each of the three previous days April had told her there was no reason to believe anybody had killed him. But Lorna still wasn’t buying it. Maybe the insurance company wouldn’t pay up on a suicide. April couldn’t get a fix on Lorna. But who knew—maybe she was just piqued because her husband had jilted her for a man.
“I told you Ray was a devout Christian,” Lorna went on when April didn’t answer. “He couldn’t have killed himself; suicide was against everything he believed.”
“Well, look, that’s not for me to say. All I can tell you is I expect to have the M.E.’s report by the end of the day. I can let you know then.” She hung up.
“Look who our little computer check came up with.”
April took the fax from Mike and read it.
“Tom White?” she said, frowning.
“You know him?” Mike asked. “He was printed as an A.D.A.”
April wrinkled her nose. An Assistant District Attorney and a suicide that could be murder. She had just been getting to think nothing in this life could surprise her.
Mike looked smug. “Nice, huh?”
“An A.D.A. was with Raymond the night he died?”
“Looks like it.” Mike had a wolfish grin on his face.
“I don’t know him, do you?” April said. They worked with a lot of the D.A.s, knew many of them pretty well.
“Nope, but he didn’t come in to chat with us. That’s interesting, don’t you think?”
“You going to talk with him?”
“Yes. Want to come along?”
“No, you boys might do better alone. I’ll go down to the M.E.’s office to get the autopsy report.” April reached in her drawer for her shoulder bag.
“What makes you think it’s ready?”
April knew it was ready because someone in the M.E.’s office had promised her it would be finished around now. She shrugged. “I have a feeling it’s ready.”
Nothing got past him. He smiled. “Fine, I’ll give you a ride.”
A quick check of the D.A.’s office indicated that Thomas Neale White had moved into the private sector two years ago. The D.A.’s office was happy to give out the information that Thomas N. White was currently employed at Unified Agencies in the tower at Forty-second and Lexington. That just happened to be the insurance company that had employed Raymond Cowles and which had carried his life insurance policy.
The huge agency occupied five floors. On White’s floor there was no receptionist. The elevator hall was separated from the banks of offices on two sides by a locked glass door. If you didn’t happen to have a plastic card to slip into the lock, you couldn’t get in. There was a phone by the door for people to call, but there was no operator to give assistance. The phone was useful only if you knew the extension of the person you were visiting. Mike didn’t.
He’d located Tom White’s floor on the directory in the lobby. Upstairs he played with the phone by the glass door to no avail for a few minutes before somebody came out. Then he caught the door before it closed and went in. On the other side of the glass door there were miles of desks with no identifying names on them. There were no names by the doors of the offices extending along the corridors, either. It seemed that the people who ran the place didn’t want anybody to know who worked there.
Mike stopped at the first desk he came to and asked for Tom White.
“Last door on the left,” the woman replied without looking up.
At 2:07 P.M. Sanchez found the former assistant district attorney in his office. Tom White was a thin, dark- haired, youngish man as regular and conservative-looking as they come, with a gray suit, white shirt, navy-and- white-striped tie, and short haircut. White sat at his desk with his back to the window, motionless and staring at an untouched thick sandwich on a paper plate. From the smell of it, the white pasty stuff inside was tunafish.
The office was decorated with law books and files. The nondescript credenza and bookcase were loaded with them. So was the desk and one of the two chairs. The door was open. Mike wandered in.
White looked up. “Cop,” he said wearily as if he saw hundreds of plainclothes detectives every day.
