Judging Time (23 page)

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 and her gun under it. April knew that even if it got really cold Carmella would keep her jacket unzipped so she could get at her gun. They'd talked guns at lunch once, so April knew Carmella still carried the old .38 Chief's Special and took good care of it. She told April she'd tried a automatic at the range once and couldn't get over how light and easy it was to grip. But then the gun jammed when she pulled the trigger and that was it for her. In the department you still had to buy your own gun, and she wasn't taking any chances laying down big money for a weapon that might fail her when she needed it. She was taking some chances with the hair, though. April wrinkled her nose.

Carmella's eyes flashed. "What chu looking at?" She took the attitude position with one foot splayed and a hand on the opposite hip.

She was an inch or two taller than April, maybe five eight. The extra inches she got with her heavy winter boots put her at about five ten. April jerked her chin up at the hair.

"Anybody ever tell you you could get your scalp ripped off?"

"With Bobby here to protect me?" Carmella laughed as a white uniform about five five with his shoes on chugged up grinning and raised a hand to pet her hair as if it were a friendly animal he hadn't seen in a while. She slapped the hand away.

April ignored the horseplay. "Make me happy. Put the hair up. Our lady may be in a loving mood this morning and feel the need to protect her man."

"Shit happens," Bobby agreed, hitching at his belt as if the rise was too short in his uniform trousers.

"Nah, this one's my buddy. She won't give me no trouble." Now Carmella was grinning.

Still struggling with his balls, Bobby did a quick knee bend and hitched at his pants some more.

Carmella watched, speculating. "You all twisted up again, Bobby?"

"Yeah, you want to help me out?"

Now April was getting annoyed. These two were pushing al her buttons and knew it. Sometimes when you went to arrest a batterer, it was the wife who went berserk pulling a cop's hair, hitting him with a frying pan, biting. Horseplay might calm these two down, but it was dangerous.

Bobby's partner, a guy they called DodQ, showed up. "Ready?"

"Put up the hair," April said.

"Sure." Carmella wrapped a scarf around her neck.

"She says 'sure,' but she'll only take it down later in the car." Bobby grabbed a handful and tweaked the hair.

Carmella punched his arm.

"It's trouble all around. Put it up, and keep it up," April warned.

Carmella's cheerful expression soured, and April knew she'd made an enemy. A perfect Chinese person knew how to get her way without giving offense. A perfect American didn't give a shit. April wasn't perfect in either culture. She turned away, suddenly depressed. "Go on, safe landing," she muttered.

The elevator door opened and Mike swaggered out with his leather jacket on. "I hear you're looking for me."

Where did he hear that? April swung around, irritated that she'd waited too long to get out to the lab without him.

* * *

They took an unmarked gray unit, and April was glad to let Mike drive slowly through the dirty slush. He was thoughtful, didn't offer his opinion of her boss, Iriarte, or the surveillance officer who'd lost their suspect, or anything else about the failures in the precinct where she worked. She was grateful for that. Then he spoke.

"Look, April, I know how you feel about me. I see how it is with your boss. Now I guess it was stupid to think I could charge into your new house, into a big case like this, and there'd be no repercussions for you."

She was touched by his sensitivity, didn't trust her voice to reply.

"Pretty dumb, huh?"

"Hey, it's not your fault. You didn't know."

"Wasn't a hard one. We never liked strangers in our cases."

She couldn't help smiling. "Is this an apology?"

"Maybe. The problem is, it wouldn't look good for either of us if I backed off now. We'd have a mess and no sure way to clear the case. We'd both be fucked for sure, no pun intended. We've got to work together on this one, are you agreed?"

"I agree we have to solve it, yes. Do we have to work together every minute? No."

Mike fell silent. After a while he changed the subject. "I checked with security in Liberty's building. Guess what?"

"Liberty isn't on the videotape going out on the night of the murder or last night, either," April said.

"Worse than that."

"He isn't on the videotape coming in on the night of the murder."

"Nope. Guess again."

"Why do I have to guess? Why don't you just tell me?"

"You're no fun."

"I know." Nothing new there.

"So, there's no videotape."

"Someone took it?" April prompted.

"Uh-uh. There hasn't been a videotape in a year. It was too expensive to run it. There'd never been a robbery in the building, and the constant spying was getting some of the people in the building in trouble."

"Nose picking or affairs?"

"Whatever. The board voted to stop the twenty-four-hour-a-day filming. Now a guy sits in the screening room from eight a.m. when the building opens to six p.m. when it closes. Inside the building complex the residents can go anywhere. But delivery people can't go up in the elevators unescorted after that."

"So security is only for nonresidents. Liberty must have known that."

Mike shrugged. "It's how he got out unseen last night. Must have gone downstairs into the basement and walked out through the garage. He didn't take his car because it was stolen the day before the murder. The garage attendants confirmed that Jefferson took it the fifth, not the week before as he told us."

"We've been looking for witnesses who saw Liberty leaving the scene. Maybe it's time to check for someone who saw his car on the scene."

Mike nodded. He cut the motor, and they left the car double-parked in front of the Police Academy building. Upstairs, Ducci was standing by the wired window, watching the street when April and Mike strode into his lab. Glowering, he pushed up a white cuff on his blue shirt and made a big show of tapping the dial of his heavy gold watch. It was 9:43.

"What took you so long?" he demanded.

"Haven't you noticed we've got weather and traffic conditions out there?" April replied, smiling a little at Ducci's sudden hurry to get them there after three days of putting them off.

"We've always got weather and traffic," Ducci grumbled. He liberated a Snickers bar from his pocket and tore at the wrapper.

"So what's up?" April asked.

"What's up is very big. 1 didn't want to talk about it on the phone. Have a seat." Ducci chewed off half a chocolate bar, then rolled Nanci's vacant chair over for April.

Mike had to move Lola the skull and a pile of files from the chair next to Ducci's desk, which was piled with bloody clothes from the Liberty case. Mike looked around for a clear surface, couldn't find one, finally put the files and the skull on the floor by his feet.

"You know, they're making these things fat free now," Ducci mused, holding up the rest of the candy bar. "Little bitty things. Now who would go for something like that?" The second half disappeared into his mouth, and he chewed angrily.

Merrill's sweater dress and Tor's cashmere coat and sweater had been carefully dried to preserve the shape of the stains. Now they were spread out across Ducci's desk with their tags dangling. Of all the pieces taken as evidence from the bodies and the crime scene, these were the items that held Ducci's interest at the moment. April guessed it was something about them that made him angry, not the idea of fat-free candy.

Mike's booted foot bobbed impatiently, knocking over the skull.

"Watch that," Ducci growled.

"Sorry, Lola," Mike muttered. He pulled on his mustache. "So give."

"Rosa fucked up." Ducci looked from one to the other.
"I
didn't want to rush over to Malcolm Abraham with this, you know how he is about Rosa Washington."

"No, we don't know. How is he about her?"

"Oh, you know those Jews and their guilt about the blacks, always pushing for them. He loves her, defends her to the death, know what 1 mean? He brought her in, brought her along—first black woman deputy medical examiner and all that. 1 wouldn't say she's
totally
incompetent, but—" Ducci shrugged.