reports. Heat could tell from her friend's face that there was no joke coming after that setup.
'What are we dealing with, ME Parry?' she said in matching attitude.
The medical examiner led Heat and Rook to Derek Snow's body on the table and picked up his chart. 'As usual, the tox disclaimer notwithstanding, we have a cause of death from a single thoracic knife wound in the intercostal tissue between ribs, causing perforation of the left ventricle.'
'Stabbed in the heart,' said Rook. When Lauren gave him an eye roll, he shrugged. 'You want layman's terms, or disclaimers about calling your physician after four hours, who's your guy?'
Nikki asked, 'Did he also have signs of torture?'
Nodding, Lauren beckoned her closer to indicate the victim's left ear. 'See the little blood flecks? Same as on Cassidy Towne. I took some ear canal shots for you.'
'Dental picks?' said Heat.
'Don't need to explain it to you, do I?' The memory of being harassed herself by the Texan made Nikki wince involuntarily. Lauren said nothing, but put a hand on her shoulder in comfort. Then she took it off and said, 'There's more.' She flipped back the top page of the chart to indicate the matching adhesive remnants found on both Cassidy Towne and Derek Snow.
Rook said, 'Little doubt we're dealing with the same killer, is there?'
'It gets more interesting.'
'Wow.' Rook rubbed his palms together. 'This is like the late-night infomercials. 'But wait, there's more.' '
'You have no idea,' said Lauren.
Nikki lifted the sheet to verify the scar on Derek's thigh. When she found it, she joined Rook and Lauren at the ME's lab bench, a stainless-steel surface laden with an array of macabre instruments that were part of dissecting and analyzing the dead. In the center of the long counter, a small white towel covered a tray. The ME set her chart down and folded back the towel halfway, exposing the blade of a plastic knife the color of dried Elmer's glue. 'This is a polymer mold I made from Cassidy Towne's stab wound. The killer worked clean, an expert plunge and withdrawal, so I was able to make an excellent cast from her puncture.'
Heat recognized it immediately, the arc of the edges coming together dead center at the tip, which was sharpened to a point, and, most distinctive, the fullers, those twin grooves running parallel the full length of the flat. 'This was his knife. The Texan's,' she said.
'A Robbins and Dudley Knuckle Knife, according to the catalog on the server,' said Lauren Parry. 'Exactly like'-she peeled back the remaining half of the towel-'this one here.' Beside the first cast on the tray rested a mold of the identical blade.
'Get out,' said Rook. 'If this were a TV show, this is where they'd go to a commercial.'
A slight smile showed at the corners of the ME's mouth. It wasn't often that she had the occasion to be a little theatrical, and she was obviously enjoying her moment. The dead ones didn't appreciate her work. 'Well, if they ran a commercial now, you'd miss the biggest part.'
'I don't know what could be bigger,' said Nikki, looking over her shoulder at Derek Snow's corpse. 'You just linked Cassidy Towne's exact murder weapon to Derek Snow.'
'But I didn't.' Lauren waited until both their faces clouded, puzzling. She pointed to the first blade replica. 'This knife cast here? Taken from Cassidy Towne.' Then she picked up the second one. 'This knife cast here? I took from Esteban Padilla.'
'No way!' Rook turned a circle and stomped a foot. 'Coyote Man?'
All Nikki said was 'Lauren…'
'Yup.'
'The Texan stabbed Coyote Man, too?'
'Well,' said Lauren, 'his knife did, anyway.'
Heat was still processing all this through the haze of her astonishment. 'Whatever made you think to take a mold from Padilla?'
'The puncture on both victims had a lot of material displaced at the center, or what we call the neutral axis of the blade. It's negligible, but visible if you're looking. Soon as I saw the similarity, I ran the molds.'
'You're a jock,' said Nikki.
'Not done yet. When the molds matched, I ran one more test. Know that bloodstain you pointed out to me on the wallpaper at Cassidy Towne's brownstone? It wasn't hers. It was Esteban Padilla's. A perfect match.'
'Best autopsy ever,' said Rook. 'I think I just peed myself a little. Seriously, I did.'
Chapter Ten
Nikki was not about to let this wait for a meeting back in the bull pen. Momentum on this case was picking up, and even though she wasn't sure where her new clues would lead, she was going to ride it, and hard. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was only a few blocks north of the Derek Snow crime scene, so Heat got on her cell phone and called Ochoa to tell him she'd meet him and Raley in the East Village in five minutes for a briefing.
'You sound pumped. Did you get a confirm that Snow had the same killer as our gossip lady?' Ochoa asked.
She looked over at Rook, riding shotgun with her down Second Avenue and said, in her best infomercial announcer voice, 'But wait, there's more.'
The two detectives were out canvassing Derek Snow's neighborhood when she reached Ochoa, so instead of going to his apartment, they made a plan to meet up at Mud Coffee just off Second. Traffic flow on East 9th was one way the wrong way for her, so Heat bypassed it, pulled into a loading zone on St. Mark's Place, tossed her placard on the dash, and walked it. Rook was a marathon and 10-K runner, but he had to work to keep pace with Nikki.
Mud Coffee was a storefront on a block that had one foot in the old New York City of custom tailor shops, one-of-a-kind dress boutiques, and a Ukrainian soul food restaurant. The other foot was in the newer, more gentrified Manhattan of upscale skin spas, sake bars, and an Eileen Fisher. Raley and Ochoa were waiting at the outside bench with four coffees when they arrived.
'Usually, it's too crowded to score any outdoor seating here,' said Raley. 'Might have something to do with people's aversion to smelling Le Gar-bahge.' Talks between the city and the union had broken off the night before, and a fresh layer of trash had been added to every sidewalk in the borough.
Rook side-glanced to the hedgerow of trash bags lining the curb six feet away. 'Getting so I don't even smell it anymore.'
'Maybe from spending too much time with your gossip queen,' said Ochoa. Instead of a comeback, he got a maybe nod from Rook.
Detective Heat was unable to resist employing Lauren Parry's flair for the dramatic as she stepped out the information she had just gotten at OCME: the Derek Snow cause of death; the cast of the knife used on Cassidy Towne matching the one the Texan attacked her with; and then the kicker-Cassidy Towne's blade cast matching the one that gave Esteban Padilla his mortal wound.
Even cops who thought they had seen and heard it all could be surprised once in a while. This was the second time this case had managed to bring the vets up short. When Heat finished her story, the air was full of whispered holy craps and f-bombs.
'So,' Nikki said when it seemed they had taken it in, 'setting aside the fireworks, the significance of this forensic news is that we still have a professional killer but we've added a third vic.'
'Man, Coyote Man.' Ochoa shook his head, still on it, still absorbing the scope of it all. 'OK, so if that was Padilla's blood on her wallpaper, what was his deal? Was he with the killer, maybe one of the crew tearing the place up? Something went wrong with the posse?'
Raley picked it right up. 'Or was Padilla a Good Samaritan, passing by, heard her scream, and got into something over his head?'
'Or,' said Rook, 'was he a part of this in a way we can't even see yet? He was a produce driver, right? Did he service Richmond Vergennes's restaurants, perhaps delivering fresh fruits and vegetables and some sweet lovin' on
