Judging Time (27 page)

"Dean." An embarrassed flush flared across April's cheeks as she let her hand drop.

Kiang grinned. "Thanks for coming, babe. Can't do lunch, though, I have . . ." He checked his watch. "Ten minutes." Smoothly, he led her into his office and closed the door.

April took a seat, still blushing. People had called her a lot of things in her life, but no one had ever called her "babe," or thought she was looking for a date. The sage says a perfect person does not show anger or hurt. A perfect person is like the earth, accepting of fire and thunder, earthquake and flood, uncomplaining. Surviving all. She did not protest being ' called "babe," which she believed was the name of a pig in a movie. Remembering Skinny Dragon's advice, she gave him a weak smile back.

Kiang sat down at his desk and put his feet up. He was extremely good-looking even with his feet in her

face. Taken for an idiot, April felt her heart banging away in her chest a lot faster than it had to. She wished she hadn't come.

"What can I do for you, sweetheart?" He made a telescope of his fingers and took a look at her through it.

Was it a Chinese thing for him not to admit he'd called her that morning? Or was it a male thing? April had come all the way downtown, past Chinatown, to the courts and prosecutor's office to talk to him. Kiang was the person with the greatest knowledge of the law, a higher authority than Ducci, than Mike, or Iriarte—even the CO of her precinct, whoever the new person was. But now that April was here, she didn't know where to start telling him her concerns. She'd met him over a dead body less than a week ago. Was she his sweetheart already? With men, sometimes it was hard to tell.

Suddenly Kiang put down the telescope and came down to earth. "I hear Liberty's taken off. What's going on?" he said seriously.

"Yes, he shook his surveillance sometime last night. We're trying to locate him." Ashamed of a failure that wasn't hers, April looked down at her hands. "But I didn't come about him."

"What then?"

"Sanchez and I had a meeting with Ducci this morning."

"So?" Kiang's face went blank at the mention of Sanchez.

April took a deep breath. "He's concerned about some irregularities coming out of the medical examiner's office."

"Yeah, like what?" Kiang twirled a pencil around two fingers.

"Someone from the ME's office called Mrs. Petersen and told her the tox reports on her husband."

"How do you know it was the ME's office?"

"The widow had the report before we did."

"What do they say?"

"I haven't seen them yet. They haven't come in. But somebody told Daphne Petersen that her husband had high enough levels of alcohol and cocaine in his body to cause his heart attack." April hesitated.

"Okay, I'll get someone to talk to Dr. Washington about the dripping faucet." Kiang glanced at his watch again, then dropped his feet to the floor.

"That's not the only thing," April murmured. "Dr. Washington didn't use the ultraviolets during Pet-ersen's autopsy."

"So—?" Kiang shrugged and began shoving files into his briefcase.

"Well, Ducci says the victims' clothing indicates that Petersen died first. Petersen collapsed, and Merrill bled on his back. Also, there's a tiny hole and traces of blood on the inside of Petersen's sweater."

Kiang dropped the briefcase with a thud. "What are you telling me, that Ducci thinks Petersen was a homicide?"

April inhaled sharply, thinking of Daphne Petersen and her bronze-headed stud. "It's not impossible that the killer made Petersen look as if he'd died of a drug-induced heart attack, and Dr. Washington missed—"

"Oh, give me a break, April. The killer made a bloody mess of Merrill Liberty. I saw the photos of Petersen. No wounds, no blood. Unless the labs come up with two DNA samples from what they've got . .." He glanced at his watch a third time.

April made a face at Dean's hurry to get out of there, wondering why he wasn't interested in the fact that Petersen had fallen first. She doubted this was a moment to bring up the question of the lint in the cashmere sweater from a T-shirt that wasn't on the body. Somehow, in this context, it might appear weak.

Kiang gave April a quick smile. "Hey, relax, baby. MEs make mistakes. You make mistakes. We all make mistakes. That doesn't mean we should complicate things unnecessarily by pointing them out. Frankly, this is the kind of conjecture that leads nowhere. It would confuse a jury and quite possibly lead to reasonable doubt in a cut-and-dried case."

"What if it isn't a cut-and-dried case?" With her index finger April worried a hangnail on her thumb.

Kiang started packing again. "Did you know I have an ulcer?"

"No. And frankly, I can't rule Petersen's wife out as the killer. She admitted he was planning to divorce her. He had another woman. She had a lot to gain."

Kiang nodded. "I saw the will, but we don't have a cause of death consistent with your theory."

April was silent as he clicked his briefcase closed.

"Look, this is the case of your life, baby. If you do this right, maybe you could get assigned down here, be a prosecutor's investigator. How about that? We could work together al the time." He reached out and patted her arm before leading the way out of the office.

"Show me your stuff. Bring in Liberty, huh, and then we'll have something to talk about."

They went downstairs in the elevator together. Then Kiang went off to court.

"Call me later, will you? Maybe we'll have dinner."

The wind was sharp and the air bitter cold as April turned to walk the two blocks south to One Police Plaza and the brick monolith that was police headquarters, where she'd left her car. Even in the cold, it was a long time before her sweat dried and her face stopped burning.

28

O
h shit, man, a visit to Staten Island? That's all I need today," Mike groaned when he got the call that Liberty's stolen Lincoln had turned up in such an inconvenient place.

"You want to see it as is, you go where it is. Otherwise we haul it away and you see it in the lot after we've finished with it."

"What's it look like?"

"A mess. Somebody got wiped in it. Trunk's splattered with blood and cocaine. Must have been quite a party."

"Body?"

"No body."

Mike sighed and looked at his watch, figuring up the three hours it would take to drive downtown, take the ferry to Staten Island, be picked up by a detective there, driven to look at the car, take the ferry back to pick up his own car in lower Manhattan, then return to the line he'd been investigating before the call about the car came in. What he'd intended to do was drive to Brooklyn to have a little chat with Patrice, Liberty's close associate, to see if Patrice knew where Liberty was, and if Liberty and his wife were dop-ers, too.

An hour and a half to get out there, and the car was indeed a mess. Brains and bits of bone all over the front. It looked to Mike like a gunshot wound to the head of the passenger in the front seat, but what was left of the head and the rest of the body was missing. In the trunk, more gore, and in the corners of the trunk, little spilled piles of white powder from what must have been a large stash.

"You look in the water for the body?" Mike asked the detective, a skinny Hispanic who looked about twelve. "Easiest to get rid of it out there." He pointed to the rocky shore past where the car was parked on a lonely stretch of road.

"Yeah, we looked, didn't see anything. Maybe in five, six days in this water it'll pop up for us."

"It's pretty cold for that time frame."

The detective shrugged. "Seen enough?"

Mike nodded. Now he had to change his plan. He suddenly thought there was a slight leak in one of his tires. When he got back to town, he picked up his car near the ferry and drove up Twelfth Avenue to visit a friend who used to have a little sideline at one of the big dealerships. Somehow the bits and pieces of newly stolen cars would end up in his possession for a brief period of time. Roger Pickard was part of a network that broke cars down and distributed the parts along to body and audio and car part shops in prime locations around the tristate area.

Within a matter of hours, a stolen car would be in pieces, headed in a dozen different directions and virtually impossible to trace. When a rash of cars stolen around the city, and even as far away as New Jersey and Westchester, were linked to new leases sold at the dealership where Roger serviced al models of the five makes of cars available there, Roger had insisted grand larceny was not in his line. He was encouraged to prove it by fingering some people who scared him a lot, but apparently less than Mike did. Roger now worked in a garage that serviced limos. He had been very helpful last year providing background material on the habits of some limo drivers whose murders Mike had been investigating.

The beefy mechanic was stuffed behind the wheel of a white superstretch Mercedes, playing with the audio wires when Mike drove into the garage too fast in his grubby-looking Camaro that hadn't been cleaned up in a long time. He stopped just short of clipping the Mercedes. Pickard stuck his big head out of the window but didn't attempt to get out of the car.

"Long time no see. I almost feel neglected. What's going on, Sergeant?"

"Hey, Roger." Mike got out and casually walked around the Mercedes. The car didn't have a nick or a scratch on its four miles of milky surface. He opened the back door and took an inventory of the inside. Four sofas, a couple of TVs, a bar. A sunroof that opened so that a dozen occupants could stand up and wave at admiring crowds. Two control panels for audio and visual with lots of buttons. The thing looked as if it could seat a football team. Mike finished walking around the Mercedes and glanced at the other limos in the garage. This took him a few more minutes.

"What can I do for you, rna man?" Finally Roger emerged from the driver's seat. He was a big man, thick all over with teak-colored skin and hair cut too short to curl. He smiled. "We're always looking for reliable drivers. Maybe you're interested."

"Maybe."

"You're still driving that old wreck. Looks real bad, man. Maybe you'd like a new car." Roger's grin widened.

"Maybe."

"What's up, man?"

Mike glanced around again. Roger seemed to be working on about a dozen cars. Town cars, stretch limos, a few exotics. The smell of lubricants, gas, oil, and leather intoxicated the air. "You all alone here?"

"Ah, Pancho is around somewhere." Roger didn't tum around to look for him.

"I've got a slow leak." Mike pointed at his right front tire. "Could you take a look at it for me?"

"It's an honor, man." Roger snickered as he rolled over a jack.

"You been following the Liberty case?" Mike asked casually.

"Who hasn't?"

"What can you tell me about it?"

Roger sniffed some air through his nose. Reference to nose candy, the dead white wife, or the pictures in the newspapers of the funeral without a grieving husband? Mike waited as Roger removed the nuts from the wheel and rocked it off.

"He came to fathers' day at my kid's school a few years back."

"No kidding."

Roger lifted the wheel and eased it into a tub of water without making waves, then slowly rolled it around.

"What do you want to know?"

"What kind of shape was his car in?"

"What makes you think I know?"

"You know everything about limos, Rog, rna man. You know which cars come with the boys to blow the gay gentlemen, and which ones supply the tarts. You also know who's got the medicine cabinets, and where they park for the parties."

"Nooooo, man, I don't know nothin' about that."

"I heard Liberty is a gay gentleman, what do you know about that?"

"I don't see no bubbles here. You sure about that leak?" Roger turned the tire over in the water.

"What about it?"

"No sir, no bubbles coming out of here. The man's straight as they come. I'd know that. I can
smell
it a mile away." He smiled. "Like I can smell you, man."

"What about snowflake?"

The smile faded. "You should have heard how he talked to those kids. He told them, 'Once you lose control of your body and your mind, you got nothin' left. Nothin'.' " Roger straightened up and lifted the tire out. "You didn't need me to tell you that.'"

"Liberty's car was nicked last week, just after New Year's. It showed up this morning with someone's brains spattered all over the front seat.' '

"Lord save us.' Roger bounced the tire to the ground and rolled it back to Mike's jacked-up Ca-maro. "You know who that somebody is?"

"I thought you might know."

"No, man. That's ugly stuff. I don't know nothing about nothing like that."

"I keep hearing that. You know Wally Jefferson?"

"Yeah, man, I know him." Pickard busied himself replacing the tire.

"He's the one who took the car out of Liberty's garage. He said he had permission to take it. Liberty says he's lying."

"Yeah, well, some drivers do that when the owners are out of town. One time a garage attendant took a limo home to impress his girlfriend, drove her around, did her in the backseat, had a few drinks from the bar, and totaled the thing an hour later." He shook his head.

"Now the other guy is a different story," he went on, suddenly voluble.

"What other guy?" Mike watched the wheel return to his car.

"That guy Petersen who died. Everybody knew he was deep into it. I heard on the news he died of a heart attack. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be bad shit." He gave Mike a shrewd look. "I wouldn't be surprised if it's all hushed up. Now what else do you want to know?"

Oh, just the names and addresses of Jefferson's friends and known associates, the exact nature of the coke connection to Merrill Liberty's death. Where Liberty's Lincoln had been on the night of her murder, what it had been used for, who the other dead person was, and when he (or she) had died. Mike also wanted to know how Liberty himself fit into it all.