Judging Time (30 page)

"Keep eating those candy bars and it won't be for long." Nanci laughed.

"This is for you, Ducci, nobody else. And you, Nanci, if you care to listen. Daphne Petersen called to speak to Rosa Washington the day after the murder. I was there when she called. Rosa wasn't there so she left a message. Today, Daphne was the first person to get her husband's tox report. And then there's the fact that Petersen's body was cremated in record time. She almost lost her cookies when I told her her husband's undershirt was not on him at the time of his autopsy."

"Who arc you suspecting, the Petersen woman or our good doctor of maybe more than just sloppy work?"

April shook her head. "I did a little checking on Daphne Petersen. She came to this country twelve years ago, when she was eighteen, worked as a manicurist in several upscale beauty salons, sang in a cocktail bar at night. No priors, no driver's license. She met Petersen when she did his nails. He married her. She was number three and a step down from his usual style of wife. She might have killed him if she lhought the fairy tale was over."

Ducci scratched the side of his face. "We still don't have a homicide on her husband, and if we don't have a homicide, we don't have a case against the Petersen woman, you following me?"

"Of course, I know that," April groaned.

"So if you want to pursue this line—and I'm not saying you should or you shouldn't—you have to prove there was a homicide on a body whose death report says otherwise and that is no longer with us for further examination."

"Well, Ducci, you brought it up. I'm having trouble letting it go now."

"I didn't say you should or shouldn't. Just be careful. It's the kind of thing that can backfire." He pointed to the sweater. "Was this just for background or do you want me to do something with it?"

The black hair that Daphne Petersen had insisted belonged to Petersen's girlfriend, but actually looked to April just like Daphne's, was stuck to the ribbing of the sweater. April picked it off and handed it to Ducci, shaking her head. "Probably unconnected."

"What's your hypothesis?" Ducci rummaged around his desk for a plastic envelope.

"The widow claims it's the hair of Petersen's girlfriend. Didn't you find a similar one on his body?" April asked.
_.

"Oh, yeah, it's around here somewhere. Yeah, interesting hair. It was relaxed and straightened." Ducci squinted at the hair April had given him. "Yeah, remarkably like this. You have any more? I'll need to make some slides of it."

"No more at the moment. Why so interesting?"

"Remember that case with the Jane Doe prostitutes?" Ducci found an envelope for the hair, labeled it, and sat back in his chair.

Nanci nodded vigorously. "We did a big study on hair products. Those girls were well kept. Best makeup, hair products. You name it. Turned out they were Russian. We were able to identify them through their hair."

"Their hair was colored," Ducci went on, "then moisturized with Goldwell products. They're German, and so expensive only a few salons in the city use them. The madam of our three dead tarts had made sure her girls had the very best of everything—that is, until they ran into a little trouble with one of their diplomat customers."

"I remember." April took the next step. "So the hair on Petersen's body was colored with a Goldwell product?"

Ducci nodded.

"Are we looking for a Russian tart?"

"Ha-ha. No, models use them. Actresses. Singers."

"People who might once have worked in a beauty salon."

"Right. Get me a few strands of the widow's hair."

"I don't have probable cause to get a warrant for that."

"Then do it carefully. Going home now?"

"I wish I were." April was way off the chart now. Hours past go-home time. Iriarte had hoped they would clear the case in forty-eight hours. By Wednesday they'd failed that deadline. Now the lieutenant wanted it cleared in a week. It was Friday night. April figured she had two days to go before total disgrace.

Impatiently she waited for Ducci to give her the list of hairdresser salons that used Goldwell products. She bet that the name of the salon where Daphne Petersen had once worked was on it. She checked her watch; it was time to get going.

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xcept for the security guard at the loading dock and

three
or four scientists working late in the top-floor labs, the medical examiner's office building was shut down for the night. At 8:06, Rosa Washington emerged from the elevator. Without bothering to hit the light switches, she hurried down the murky hall to her office. She was wearing an immaculate green scrub suit, still starched and fresh, with matching booties over her sneakers. She had no surgical cap on her head or mask dangling around her neck. No footsteps sounded on the scuffed linoleum floor as she hurried along, absently rubbing her palms together.

No one looking at her would have been able to tell that Rosa felt anxious. Her sculpted features were frozen in their customary expression of unflappable serenity. She always had a set look on her face, the same one every day no matter who approached her with what request or question. The expression gave her the appearance of being on a higher plane than mere mortals, as if she could not be touched by earthly trouble. Some people thought she was arrogant and the distance she kept from the horrors of her job, attitude. Others were certain she was a deeply spiritual person, someone who reached beyond the grave to heaven itself with every dissection she made. And still others were convinced she was not very bright.

Rosa herself didn't care what people said about her. There had been so many speculations about so many aspects of her and her life for so many years she was no longer interested what the latest rumor about her entailed. Many years ago when she was just twelve, she had learned from a song—and from the death of the sixth-grade guinea pig (gutted with a kitchen knife while it was spending a school holiday with the family)—to hold her head up high and find a way of explaining the unexplainable. She also learned to keep walking in the direction she wanted to go no matter what happened. With such a strategy, she'd always been able to outdistance prejudice and envy.

Her office door was partly open. She saw the haven of her desk with its neat pile of files, and the desk lamp angled the way she'd left it hours ago, beaming light on her appointment book and her blotter. She rushed inside, ready to collapse in her desk chair, safe and exhausted after a long, demanding day.

"Hi, I'm glad I caught you. I was afraid you'd left."

The calm, soft voice came from behind her. Rosa whirled around, stifling a scream. "Sweet Jesus, you half scared me to death," she sputtered at the Chinese cop, who was sitting in a chair behind the door on the dark side of the room.

"What are you doing over there in the dark?" Rosa forced herself to slow down as she continued on to her desk. There, a quick check proved that her appointment book still had its rubberband holding it closed. But who knew what the cop would have looked through when she was in there ... for how long? Rosa hoisted the briefcase that had been sitting on the floor to the desktop and dropped the appointment book inside. She rubbed her hands together, then sniffed them for chemical smell. Without looking at the cop, she allowed herself to collapse in her chair, willing calm and peace into her troubled soul.

After a moment she let her eyes drift over to the cop. What was April Woo doing here? Rosa looked for an answer in the Asian features and failed; April's face was expressionless, as still and empty as that of a corpse recently deprived of life. Rosa didn't see such complete emptiness in the living very often. It felt eerie to her. It reminded Rosa of her mother, who'd been beaten nearly to death every Saturday night of her life by her husband, Rosa's father, without complaining, until Rosa stopped the attacks when she was twelve.

The images of the bruises on her mother's body, the dead look in her mother's eyes, the sound of her mother weeping while she was raped and the groans when she was kicked, punched, and slammed against the wall had always acted as the inspiration for Rosa's work. It was her mother's blank-faced pain that drove Rosa to look unflinchingly at the most horrible of human damage and decay, day after day, so she could tell the world how and when that damage had occurred. Rosa's mother used to tell Rosa the secret of survival was to whisper to herself, "I am still and free at my center."

Rosa took in the long slender skirt, the silk scarf, and the well-tailored jacket of the Chinese detective and wondered what kind she was. She'd known only two Chinese detectives. One had worked in Harlem and was terrified of the dead at any stage of decomposition. She considered him a wimp. The other had been fired for corruption. She didn't figure April for being scared or corrupt.

"So what are you doing here, Sergeant Woo?" she said, smiling and striving to speak as softly as April had.

April sighed. "It's been a long day. We've got trouble with this Liberty case. I need some help."

"I could use some help, too," Rosa said. "You know poor Malcolm is in the hospital."

"Still?" April adjusted her coat over the back of her chair.

It was clear to Rosa that she'd been there long enough to get comfortable.
_.

"Yeah. His doctors can't find out what kind of pneumonia he has. We have better labs here." She snorted with disgust.

"You have a heavy load?"

Rosa glanced down at her hands, rubbed them quickly together. "Nothing I can't handle. How long have you been here?"

"Five minutes. The guard downstairs said you hadn't left yet, but he didn't know where you were. Not operating, by the look and smell of you."

Rosa's eyes caught the butt of April's gun sticking from the holster at her waist. "No, I always change after every procedure. Can't risk contamination, you know." She sniffed her hands again, couldn't seem to help it. They smelled bad.

"Yourself or the customers?"

Rosa smiled. "My patients, you could say. I'm a bit of a nut about cleanliness. Can't place too high a premium on every level of professionalism, you know." She rubbed her hands, wishing she could wash them again.

"So I've heard. That's why I'm here. Someone from your office called Petersen's widow this morning with information about Petersen's tox report. How come?"

Rosa shook her head. Her hair, hanging loose and unencumbered by a surgical cap, brushed her shoulders. "No one from here would ever give out information before the detectives on the case got it."

"Well, Mrs. Petersen said she was informed her husband died of a cocaine overdose. That was news to us."

"He didn't die of an overdose. The report did come in, and Petersen had high levels of cocaine in his blood and urine. It was even in his hair. But I could have told you that during the autopsy. You walked out before I finished. You missed the head, remember?"

"What did you find, a bullet in his brain?"

"Very funny, Woo."

This was the second reference to the mistake in an autopsy report made by the ME's office less than a year ago. The report was on a man who'd been a flier from a seventh-floor window. The ME's report, hers in fact, gave the fall as the cause of death. The police, however, had found bloodstains all over the roo
m
from which the man had fallen. They'd requested a second look at the body. Dr. Abraham performed the second autopsy. He found a bullet lodged in the man's skull. It turned out the gunshot wound, not the fall from the window, had killed him. Rosa's face registered no anger. She'd come to terms with that blunder.

"What I found, Sergeant, if you'd bothered to read my report, was a septum so badly damaged by cocaine use that had the man lived, he would have needed surgery fairly soon to prevent his nose from collapsing." Rosa reported this in her haughtiest voice.

"I have not seen your report, Doctor. It hasn't come in to our office yet. Are you saying now that Petersen died of a drug overdose?"

"I think I stated clearly enough in the death report that Petersen's cause of death was a perforated infarction. A massive heart attack to you." Rosa checked her watch. It was late. She wanted to end this and go home.

"Are you certain the perforation couldn't have been caused by something else?" The cop shifted suddenly to new ground with the soft voice of a practiced interrogator.

Air whooshed out of Rosa's mouth as anger finally overtook her and she furiously rejected the possibility. "Not a chance. Why do you suggest such a thing?"

"I don't know, maybe it was something Petersen's widow said that got me thinking, and this whole question of the cocaine. Could somebody have given him bad shit?"

"Bad shit? As far as I'm concerned, it's all bad shit. You have any idea how badly damaged that guy was? It was amazing he could still walk around." Rosa shook her head.

"The other thing is Petersen's widow stands to inherit something like a hundred million dollars on her husband's timely death. She had a strong motive, and if he was such a hopeless addict, maybe she helped him along."

Rosa laughed. "That ditz I saw on TV?"

"Money can be a pretty powerful motivator, don't you think?"

Rosa finally sank into her chair. "God, this is heavy. 1 don't know, maybe for some people. We each have our weakness. For Petersen it was the nose candy. He died because of it. For some people it's love of money, for others it's just love. What is it for you, Woo?"

April shook her head. "I wouldn't kill for anything, except to save a life."

"I didn't mean that. 1 meant what's your weakness?"

"Face," April replied without hesitation.

Rosa smiled. "Me, too. 1 don't like being dissed by anybody. So you now think you're working a homicide angle here. That would be a pretty big diss to me, you know. That would hurt pretty bad. 1 don't know how I'd handle that."

"It's just a thought," April murmured. "So, you don't think it's a possibility?"