"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.
31
Except 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.