"He probably didn't. There wasn't an urn in the house. What's your point?"
April sipped her delicious tea. "Just picking up strange vibes. Bernardino didn't mention any of this to me." She shrugged. Not that they'd been that close. She shook her head, sorry now that she hadn't asked a few more questions.
"What else?" Mike asked.
"He donated some money. Nothing big. I'm not all the way through it. A little here, a little there. If he hid big money in offshore banks or in Switzerland, those records aren't in here. And you didn't find any in the house. He was a fastidious guy. Where are they?"
Mike added a new point. "We located a bunch of files from old cases. It looks like he made copies of the ones that interested him."
"No kidding, which ones?" April was surprised. They weren't supposed to do that.
"We took about a dozen boxes of paper out of there. No recent bank stuff. You can take a look."
"I'd like to." She could probably guess which cases from her time with him continued to niggle at him. But she returned to the money question. "Why move cash out of the country if he was relocating to Florida?"
"There's an explanation for everything. We've got Stevens working on the computer. He'll recover whatever was in it."
But that took time, a lot of time. April changed the subject again. "I went to see Jack Devereaux last night. His girlfriend gave me chicken soup."
"Always full of surprises. You didn't mention it."
April smiled. "I must have forgotten."
"Uh-huh. Did he give you anything?"
"Just that he had the impression the killer was shorter than him, and young."
"What about you? Has your memory come back with your voice?"
"No." She looked down at her hands. "Lo siento," she said softly.
"Too bad." Mike's face remained neutral. He didn't say that sorry wasn't good enough. He leaned over and doodled on her bare thigh with one finger and didn't have to say what he was thinking now. April ignored it. There was going to be no love this morning. She felt terrible. How could she not remember almost dying? And they had work to do.
"Who's watching them?" she asked about Jack and Lisa.
"McBeel. He's good."
"Well, whoever he is, I didn't see him. If the killer thinks Jack got a look at him, he's at risk."
"I know," Mike said. "You, too."
"I carry a gun." April dismissed it. "Listen, this is important. Someone's been calling their house, bothering them."
"On what subject?" Now Mike was interested.
"Something about a promise."
"What kind of a promise?"
"Jack told me they have an unlisted number, so it has to be someone who knows them. So let's get started on the phone numbers right away."
"We're working Bernardino's phone, too. How about you? Anybody funny calling you?" he asked, draining the last of his coffee.
"No. You're unlisted." April finished her tea. "And Jack did remember one other thing. He told me the killer smelled like Icy Hot."
"What?" Mike let the mug clatter on the coffee table.
"It's like Tiger Balm, you know, that liniment for sore muscles. Watch that mug; it's going to go over."
Mike clapped his hands. "Oh, boy." He jumped up, almost knocking the mug over a second time. "Oh, boy. Get dressed. We're going to the labs."
"What about the viewing?" They'd planned to waylay Bill Bernardino at the funeral home.
Mike brushed it aside. "When I talked to Gloss, he told me that Bernardino's body smelled like spearmint. So we've been looking for a chewing-gum connection. We checked his house, everywhere. We needed to nail that odor down, see how it fit. Way to go, querida!" He patted her shoulder.
"Why didn't you ask me? I could have told you that Bernardino didn't chew gum." Bernardino used to stick an unlit cigarette in his mouth and suck on the filter for hours at a time. A disgusting habit.
"Icy Hot is eucalyptus, camphor, that sort of smell. Spearmint is something else," she said slowly. She didn't want him distracted. He promised they'd take aim at Bill and Kathy at the viewing, try to get on the money trail.
"He's a medical examiner. His sniffer's probably all messed up," Mike said.
April lifted a shoulder. Bernardino's body smelled of spearmint. The killer smelled of Icy Hot. Were they the same? She herself remembered camphor emanating from the skin of an old opponent over twenty years ago, when she was a little girl and regularly got slammed to the mat. That odor mixed with the intense feeling of shame at being knocked down again and again became her symbol of resolve: one punch, one kill. Memory of the karate mantra prickled the back of her neck.
"This may be our break," Mike urged.
"Okay." Even in the cleanest crime scene the killer nearly always left something of himself behind. It was worth a try. She took the mugs into the kitchen and dumped them in the sink, reminding herself to tell him they had to do a lot more to find that mastiff walker. And they had to start checking the dojos for people who liked to hurt. They had to get on it right away.
Twenty-three
They settled for April's aging white Chrysler Le Baron because the muffler of Mike's even more ancient red Camaro was making too much noise in the quiet Queens neighborhoods even for him. His pained surrender to the girlie car was not appeased even when she put the top down and insisted that he drive. Behind the wheel Mike looked like a movie star with his shiny black hair and dark sunglasses. They both needed new cars, but neither thought about it now. They were saving for a house of their own like Bernardino's in Westchester, also for a big wedding and maybe a baby. For months, on weekend days off they'd been house hunting. They were looking for just the right area, just the right place. But things came up, and lately they hadn't had the time they needed to finish the job. They didn't mention this lost weekend. The sun shone down on their heads and the air was sweet in their faces. They were detectives first. Murder took precedence over everything else.
April sat in the passenger seat, brooding about Bernardino's children. Her gut feeling was that Bill had taken, or been given, the missing money, and Kathy didn't know anything about it. The niggling certainty that the brother was cheating a trusting sister wouldn't go away. This kind of playing favorites happened in Chinese families, in Irish families, in Jewish families. In all families. Relatives ganged up against each other-and the IRS. Every time April thought of the way her own parents had tricked her into a thirty-year mortgage debt on their own house, her adrenaline spiked with rage. And she didn't even have a sibling to worry about. But was Bill a killer, too? Was he?
It was not a long trip from Forest Hills to Kew Gardens, where the state-of-the-art police labs were located in an unmarked brick building on the back side of a commercial street. At eleven on this balmy Saturday morning the facility that handled all the physical evidence from crimes in the five boroughs was not exactly abuzz with activity. Except for the CSU unit, which was open for business around the clock, it was always pretty quiet here on a weekend. These post-9/11 days, however, personnel was down to a skeleton crew. Retirement of specialists who hadn't yet been replaced had taken its toll.
April and Mike exchanged pleasantries with the sergeant on duty in the cage that kept people from wandering in and out with unauthorized materials. They submitted to a routine search, signed in, and were admitted. Inside, they threaded their way to the back of the building, where they knew Bernardino's car was in the loading bay.
"Anybody home?" Mike called out when they got there.
No answer, but the victim was a sorry sight. The late-model navy Ford Taurus was dirty and smudged from various fingerprinting and other tests. The trunk was open and the inside of it dismantled. The glove compartment was open and disassembled, too. The backseat was out of the car on the floor, and some car parts were missing altogether. Even the owner wouldn't have recognized his vehicle now.