Page 88 of The Writer

Cordova holds up his hand and presses his thumb and pointer finger together. “Zero.”

“Exactly.”

Cordova runs his hand through his thinning hair. “You know, when I figured out the two of you were sleeping together, I honestly thought Declan killed David. Then I pulled the subway footage from across the street, and that drove it home—I was positive he did it. On the video recording, he comes rushing in, obviously distraught, and shoves something in a trashcan. Then he gets up on the platform and spends the next two hours thinking about jumping. He sure as hell looked like a man who’d just committed murder. I’m certain he entered this building that night at six thirty, just like that eyewitness said, but when he got to your apartment, I think he found your husband already dead.”

“Geller Hoffman killed my husband hours later.”

“Drop the bullshit. We both know he didn’t.”

“What we know,” Denise says, “is the medical examiner said my husband was murdered between eight thirty and nine thirty p.m. He couldn’t have been dead at six thirty p.m. You know as well as I do that with current techniques, MEs can be fairly precise about time of death.”

Cordova nods. “Yep. From what I’ve been told, if someone has been dead for less than five hours, MEs can use body temperature to narrow time of death to a window of forty-five minutes, sometimes less. In your husband’s case, the ME is very confident on TOD. Between eight thirty and nine thirty p.m. That means Declan couldn’t have killed him. He’s on video from six forty-seven p.m. until I called him to the scene just before ten. He didn’t leave the camera frame once. He’s even on there taking my call. It’s like he knew to stand exactly there. You were at that bookstore, also on video, with dozens of people watching you. But the thing is, even Geller Hoffman is off the hook if David died before eight thirty p.m. Hoffman had appointments until eight, and then he had to go kill Mia Gomez for you. I timed the ride from that alley to the bookstore in Tribeca. Works out perfectly if he left right after killing Mia, but it falls to shit if he came up here to kill David too.There’s no way he could have killed them both. He only did Mia Gomez.”

Denise walks back across the living room and leans on the couch. “So if it wasn’t Declan and it wasn’t Geller, who killed David?”

“You did.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

DENISE MORROW ISN’T FAZED. “You just said I couldn’t have killed David.”

“No, I said you couldn’t have killed him while you were at the bookstore between seven fifteen and nine twenty p.m. You did it much earlier.” Cordova motions toward the hallway with his gun. “Back bedroom.”

“Why?”

“Move. Now.” Cordova doesn’t wait for her to reply; he heads down the hall to the room where CSU brought Denise Morrow the night of the murder to process her and her clothing.

Although Denise is in the living room and could easily flee out the door or pick up her phone and call someone, he knows she won’t. He knows she’ll follow him; she can’t help herself.She needs to know what he knows. A moment later she proves him right. He’s standing next to the bed when she appears in the doorway, her hands clasped behind her back. Her cat is behind her, rubbing against the backs of her legs and purring loudly.

“Did you grab a knife? I’d be disappointed in you if you didn’t.”

Her left hand drops to her side, and he sees she’s holding a seven-inch santoku. “A girl’s gotta defend herself,” she says, “and it looks like you found my twenty-two.”

“You don’t need either,” he tells her. “This is just a—”

“A chat,” she says. “An exchange of information.”

“Exactly.”

To reinforce that point, Cordova slips his gun into the holster on his belt. He can get to it fast enough if he has to. Right now, he needs her to listen. “We found trace amounts of wool on David’s body. It was on his clothing, mixed in with the blood. That didn’t make sense. Nothing about this case made sense when I first looked at it, but that in particular, it’s been nagging at me. So when I broke in here tonight, I took a good look around.”

The bed is neatly made. He pats the thick duvet. “CSI set up shop right here, covered this bed with equipment. They probably spent six hours in this room. I can just imagine what was going through your head as you watched them. So close but completely unaware.”

He grips the duvet and tosses it aside, revealing a copper-colored wool blanket. He runs his fingers along the edge until he finds a power cord; it’s tucked neatly behind the bed frame. It’s not just a wool blanket; it’s aheatedwool blanket. Cordovastares at it for a moment. “I bet there’s trace on here, but we never bothered to look. Why would we? No reason to. Not in that initial search, anyway. By the time the medical examiner found the wool on David’s body, Geller Hoffman had circled the wagons; there was no way we could get back in here. No judge in his or her right mind would sign off on the warrant—not after that debacle at your arraignment.” He brushes the material, then looks at his fingertips. “I’m honestly surprised you kept it. Then again, with us unable to get back in your apartment for a second search, this might be the safest place for it.” He straightens up and faces her again. “After you killed David, you covered his body with this heated blanket and left it on him until you got back from the bookstore. That kept his body temp high enough to throw off the ME.”

She gently rotates the knife, her fingertips brushing the polished handle. “If that’s true, how did I kill David without getting his blood on me? Your people checked.”

The corner of Cordova’s mouth twitches. “At first I thought you’d handed off whatever you’d been wearing to Hoffman at the bookstore when you changed into the clothing he wore when he killed Mia, but that wouldn’t work. Stabbing someone is a messy business. There’s spatter. It doesn’t just get on your clothes—it gets on your skin, in your hair. CSI would have found that on you. Something would have been visible on the bookstore video footage. I watched it a dozen times and found nothing. Then I thought back to Declan. He’d been up here around six thirty p.m., right after you killed David. In the video we pulled from the subway station, Declan can be seen stuffing something into a trash can. It’s hard to tell for sure but it looks like one of those cheap plastic rain slickers they sell inthe museum gift shop across the street. You know, the kind that folds up small enough to stuff in your pocket. He throws away a package of wipes too, blue and white—Clorox, I think. Again, it’s hard to tell. The footage isn’t very clear. The city really needs to replace those cameras. Doesn’t really matter now because we didn’t pull the trash; it’s long gone, lost to a landfill somewhere. The video isn’t conclusive and the evidence is gone. The rain slicker—it covered up your clothing, had a hood to protect your hair, and the wipes took care of the rest.” He smirks, nods at the knife in her left hand. “Nice touch, stabbing David with your right. That must have been tough for a lefty. You were quick about it too, not a bit of hesitation. David didn’t have a single defensive wound.”

Denise Morrow is quiet for a long moment. “Nobody will believe I killed David for cheating with Jeff, Mia, or anyone. Nobody will believe any of this.”

“You killed David for a reason as old as time—it was cheaper than divorce.”

“We had a prenup.”

“Your prenup covered the assets you both had when you were married, which amounts to nearly nothing. It didn’t cover earnings while you were married. And let’s be honest—your book sales were shit until Mia Gomez started selling you intel, and you’d been married for years by then. You had millions of reasons for wanting David dead. Hell, even though he was a doctor, with the discrepancy in your incomes, he probably would have gotten alimony.”

There’s a flicker in her eyes, a crack; small, but there.

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