Стюарт Вудс - Desperate Measures

“Had the waiter served you before?”

“I don’t recall that he has.”

“What time did you leave Clarke’s?”

“After six, I guess. It was raining, and I couldn’t find a cab, so I walked home.”

“And what time did you arrive?”

“Six-thirtyish. The network news was just coming on when I got upstairs.”

“What was the lead story on the news?”

“I wasn’t listening all that closely. The flu epidemic, I think. I was making myself a drink.”

“Did you have a drink before your burger at Clarke’s?”

“No, I was hungry. I ordered a beer and drank that with my burger.”

“Did you make any detours on the way home? Anything at all?”

“No, I told you, it was raining. I was getting wet, so I hurried.”

“Do you mind if I take a picture of you?” Muldoon asked, producing his iPhone. He snapped one before Trask could reply.

“Okay, before we go any further, I want to know what this is about,” Trask said.

“It’s about your wife.”

“I don’t have a wife.”

“All right, your ex-wife, Priscilla Scott. When was the last time you saw her?”

“At our divorce hearing. There were plenty of witnesses.”

“To your knowledge, did Ms. Scott have a will, and are you mentioned in it?”

“Yes and yes. We both did new wills a couple of years ago. Why are we talking about wills? Has something happened to her?”

“Yes, she’s deceased, I’m afraid.”

Trask’s eyebrows went up; it was the first emotion he’d shown. “Jesus, was she in an accident?”

“No, she was murdered.”

“You’re kidding me!”

“I am not, sir. She was found by a dinner guest with a knife in her chest.”

Trask gulped. “Was her dinner guest named Barrington?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because if he was there, he’s the one who killed her.”

“Mr. Trask, do you own any guns?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they?”

“In my safe.”

“May I see them, please?”

Trask walked over to a bookcase and moved some books aside, revealing a safe. He punched in a code, opened it, and stood back. “There you go.”

Muldoon walked over to the safe, removed each weapon, sniffed its barrel, and then set it on the bookshelf. “Mr. Trask, do you have a New York City gun license?”

“I do.”

“May I see it, please?”

Trask found his wallet and handed him the license.

Muldoon handed it back. “This Beretta has been fired recently,” he said.

“I went to the range at lunchtime today.”

Muldoon nodded at Calabrese, meaning, Note that .

“Do you mind if I take the Beretta with me?” he asked.

“What for?”

“Just to have it looked at. Don’t worry, we’ll return it to you in good order.”

“Okay, sure, why not?”

Muldoon pocketed the pistol and turned to go. There was a coatrack in the hall with a raincoat hanging from it. He made a point of running his hand over it as they passed. “Thank you and good night, Mr. Trask.”

“Don’t mention it.”

The door closed firmly behind them, and the chain rattled.

“Why didn’t you pull his license?” Calabrese asked.

“Because the Beretta has been registered, so we have no excuse. I’ve got the gun, though. If he’s our guy, then he thinks we won’t find the bullet. And by the way, his raincoat is a little damp, but not as wet as it would get walking here from Clarke’s. Let’s run over there and see if anybody recognizes him from his photograph.”

They did so, and nobody did.

Muldoon and Calabrese went downtown to the morgue and found the ME working on Priscilla Scott’s cadaver.

“Anything?” he asked.

“I found a bullet,” the ME replied. “It’s a nine-millimeter round, Federal Personal Defense, Hydra-Shok — a hollow point.”

“I’d like to run it over to ballistics,” Muldoon said.

The ME handed him a small, zippered plastic bag containing the slug. “Good luck. Hollow points expand, and the tip of the knife blade hit it, too. In short, it’s a mess. Don’t count on it to seal a conviction.”

“You’re such a pessimist, Doc,” Muldoon said, pocketing the round.

“Sign the chain-of-custody log,” the ME said, then went back to his work.

“I’m going over to ballistics,” Muldoon said to Calabrese. “I want you to go back to your desk, start googling and making calls to find out if Trask used a car service around six o’clock, and if so, where did it pick him up and drop him off. If the name doesn’t register, try his description and if he paid in cash.”

“Jesus, there must be two hundred car services,” Calabrese moaned.

“That’s why you’re doing it instead of me,” Muldoon replied. “Now get on it.”

Muldoon found a woman still working in the ballistics lab and showed her the squashed bullet. “It’s a Federal Hydra-Shok,” he said, and explained the circumstances of the shooting.

“I can fire one into the tank, purely for comparison, but it’s not going to come out looking anything like that. I’d have to fire it into a side of beef with the same floor material under it, and even then, it would just be hoping for the best. I’ll put your slug under my scope, though, and see what we come up with.”

Muldoon handed her Trask’s 9mm. “Try firing it from this. I’ll wait.”

Muldoon was nearly finished with the Post when the tech came back and handed him the two slugs, each tagged, and the Beretta. “The best I can tell you is that your weapon could have fired the murder slug, but any identifying marks have been obliterated by the slug’s expansion. The knife point didn’t help, either. Sorry about that.”

“You can only do what you can do,” Muldoon said, sighing. He went back to the precinct and found Calabrese asleep with his head on his desk. Muldoon drew a cup of cold water from the cooler, drank half of it, then poured the rest into Calabrese’s ear.

“What the fuck?” Calabrese yelled, raising a laugh or two in the squad room.

“I trust you have succeeded in your task,” Muldoon said.

“As a matter of fact, I have, sort of,” Calabrese said, sticking a tissue into his ear.

“Really? Let’s hear it.”

“Well, Trask has an account with Carey Limousine, but he didn’t use them. He went halfway down the list and found a service, then ordered a pickup in front of Bloomingdale’s, half a dozen blocks from Clarke’s. He was dropped off at the Château Madison hotel on Madison Avenue and went inside. The car waited there for twenty minutes before he came back, then dropped him two blocks from his apartment. The driver says he never got a good enough look at his fare to describe him.”

“Right,” Muldoon said. “Of course, the Château has a side-street entrance on Sixty-eighth, so he could have walked straight from the front door and out of there, walked the two and a half blocks to Scott’s apartment building, committed the murder, then walked back to the Château and out the front door, then to the drop-off.”

Calabrese beamed at him. “We got him, right?”

“We got him, wrong!” Muldoon said. “That’s too thin for a prosecutor to get a conviction.”

“How about the ballistics?”

“All they could tell me is that the bullet could have come from Trask’s Beretta. The round was a hollow point, which spreads out on contact, so there were no identifying marks good enough.”

“Which leaves us where?”

“Outside, in the cold,” Muldoon said. “All our evidence is circumstantial. If you could call it evidence. Trask coulda hired the car, he coulda taken the route we think he did, he coulda shot the woman, then knifed her. Coulda doesn’t cut it.”