Eyes of Justice

by Lis Wiehl

  “I don’t know his name. He’s got a weird vibe, so I stay away from him. I think he and Rick met here at the club. He’s tall and thin. And there’s something wrong with the left side of his face.” She put her fingers on her cheek and dragged it down. “Like he was in an accident or something. Oh, and he’s bald.”

  Bald. Ophelia remembered what Nicole and Allison had told her about the bald man Roland Baxter had seen with Cassidy the night she died. Had Rick and his bald friend gone over there together and killed her? Maybe they were both cops trying to cover up the truth about the planted gun.

  “So he’s a cop like Rick?”

  Angel shook her head. “I don’t think so. He doesn’t seem like one.”

  “And he’s a regular customer?”

  “He’s been coming in for a week or two. But I haven’t seen him in the last few days. The first time I saw him, I tried to get him to buy me a drink, but he brushed me—and every other girl—off. It wasn’t like he was gay. It was more like we were beneath him.” Angel opened her eyes wide. “When, hello, he’s at Diamonds. He’s got these really intense eyes, but when he looks at you, it’s like he’s looking right through you. Like you’re nothing. But for some reason, he likes Rick. And Rick loves to talk about being a cop. The first night they started talking, Rick ended up telling all these stories. He was really chatty. But then all of a sudden he was wasted, even though he was only on his third drink. He could hardly walk. That’s not like him, but I figured he might have been drinking before he got here. A little party before the party, and the drinks don’t cost ten bucks.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I had to go back onstage, but the bald dude took Rick’s keys away and told me he would help him get home.”

  Ophelia leaned forward. “And all this happened on Wednesday?”

  “No. It was a few days before.”

  “Oh.” So much for the idea that had glimmered in front of her for a moment.

  “But on Wednesday, Rick got pretty drunk again. I was onstage, and he and that bald dude were talking, but when I came down again, the bald dude was gone and Rick was already slurring his words. He must have had a couple of drinks while I was up there.” She grimaced. “Maybe he was just trying to work up his courage to do what he—to do what he did.”

  The idea was back. “Have you ever seen someone who’s been given a roofie?”

  “What? Like the date rape drug?”

  Ophelia nodded. Flunitrazepam, nicknamed roofie because its trade name was Rohypnol, could induce short-term amnesia in sufficient doses. Someone given a roofie would be unable to remember events they experienced while they were under its influence. It could explain Rick’s sudden drunkenness. And Allison and Nicole had told her that he claimed to have been having trouble with blackouts.

  “Once,” Angel said. “Some creepy customer slipped it in the drink of this girl, Cinnamon, but we always watch each other’s backs. When she started staggering we got her off the floor and away from him.” Angel’s expression changed. “Wait—are you thinking this bald dude slipped Rick one?” She narrowed her eyes, considering. “You know what? You might just be right. But why . . .” She let her voice trail off.

  Ophelia didn’t answer. She was still turning things over. What if the bald man had drugged Rick and then manipulated him to be on the scene when Cassidy was killed? Maybe even held Cassidy while urging Rick to stab her? That could explain why she had been both strangled and stabbed.

  “Would you be willing to testify about this to a grand jury?”

  Angel’s eyes widened. “I don’t really want to get involved. Especially not when there are cops. They have ways of getting back at you.”

  “Just think about it, okay?”

  Instead of answering, Angel said, “I am dying for a cigarette.” She went to one of the lockers, spun the combination, and pulled out her purse. “We can’t smoke in here. I’ll be right back.”

  Ophelia considered offering to go with her, but the thought of cigarette smoke made her gag. Instead she sat with her eyes closed, rubbing her temples and trying to block out all the sensations. She needed to get home where she could be alone. Too many people, too much noise, too many expressions she couldn’t read, too many comments that weren’t plain.

  Ophelia waited five minutes, ten. It was only after twenty minutes that she realized the girl wasn’t coming back.

  Angel was gone. Probably for good.

  CHAPTER 22

  When Nic got up, she found an e-mail summarizing Ophelia’s evening at Diamonds. A dancer had seen Rick with a man at the club late in the afternoon the day Cassidy was killed. While the description was vague—“bald,” “intense eyes,” “droop on the left side of his face”—it still sounded eerily like the same man Roland had seen Cassidy with later that evening. One theory Ophelia had was that the bald man was another cop, and that together he and Rick had gone after Cassidy once she started asking about a throw-down gun.

  Ophelia also had another theory. The dancer had reported that on Wednesday evening, as well as on an earlier one, Rick had become unusually inebriated. Ophelia wondered if someone had slipped him roofies.

  That could explain Rick’s blackouts. Nic had even heard stories of criminals who took roofies before committing a big crime, craving the calm it gave them, as well as the chemical blankness that would swallow any memory of what they had done so they couldn’t give themselves away when questioned about it later.

  On her way to work, Nic kept turning over the new pieces of information. Maybe they didn’t mean anything. The connections were tenuous. Eyewitnesses were often wrong. She kept coming back to one certainty. Bald man or no bald man, roofies or no roofies, one thing was for sure. Rick had been the one who stabbed Cassidy.

  Did the bald man even matter?

  But of course he did. Nothing could take away Rick’s culpability, but that didn’t mean the bald man might not also bear some responsibility for what had happened.

  By midmorning Nic couldn’t take her seesawing thoughts any longer. She picked up her cell phone and called Jensen.

  “It’s Nicole Hedges.”

  “Yes?” His voice was edged with suspicion.

  “Look, can I come talk to you?”

  There was a long pause. “What? Why do you even think I would say yes?”

  “There’re a few things you should know.”

  “Sorry. I don’t think I’m interested.”

  “Look, I’m sorry for getting off on the wrong foot with you, all right? But what I’ve learned could change things. Maybe even help your friend.” Nic wasn’t going to say Cassidy’s or Rick’s name out loud, not in her open-air cubicle, not when she had specifically been warned off the case. But then again, Bond would want to see justice done. If she had to, Nicole could always fall back on that as a defense.

  “I’ll give you five minutes,” Jensen said grudgingly. “No more. And this had better be good.”

  Fifteen minutes later the detective sat with arms folded while Nic told him about Roland Baxter. He had seen Roland cut his throat at Cassidy’s funeral.

  What Jensen didn’t know about was the bald man Roland had seen with Cassidy and the stripper had seen with Rick. As he listened to Nic, Jensen’s arms loosened. He put his hands on his thighs and leaned forward.

  “What if the two of them acted together?” Nic said. “Did the lab find anyone’s fingerprints on the knife besides Rick’s?”

  “On the murder weapon, they just found partial prints from Rick. No one else. The knife even matches ones from his apartment. Hers are Wüsthofs, and his was one of those J. A. Henckels.”

  “Wait—so Rick brought the knife with him?”

  Jensen nodded.

  Nic tried to imagine how that had worked. Earlier she had thought that if the knife proved to be Rick’s it would show premeditation, but now she thought of another consideration. “It’s a hundred degrees. People are wearing as little as they can get away with. It’s not like he coul
d have hidden it inside a coat.”

  “He could have carried it inside something,” Jensen said. “A backpack or even a grocery bag.”

  “Where else were Rick’s fingerprints found?”

  “They weren’t. Not really. On a drinking glass next to the sink and the murder weapon. That’s it.”

  Nic thought back to the scene. “What about the garbage can that was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor? Whose prints were on that?”

  Opening up a file drawer, Jensen pulled out a fat blue binder. Nic recognized it as the murder book—a record of the investigation of Cassidy’s death that would include crime scene photographs and sketches, evidence documentation, the autopsy report, transcripts of the investigators’ notes, and witness interviews. Basically, it was a complete paper trail of a murder investigation.

  Jensen leafed through it. “The only prints on the garbage can belonged to Cassidy.”

  “No one else? Even someone you can’t identify?”

  “No.” He tapped his index finger against his lips.

  “Okay,” she said, thinking out loud. “Say Rick acted alone and not under the influence of anything but alcohol. Rick goes to Diamonds, then he goes home, then he decides to visit Cassidy and bring his own knife with him. Which means the murder was not a spur-ofthe-moment thing.”

  Jensen didn’t agree or disagree, just watched her with hooded eyes.

  “Sometime that night, before he stuffs Cassidy’s body under the sink, Rick moves the garbage can, but he’s careful not to leave prints on it. Or on the doors or windowsills or cupboard knobs or anything else in her condo but a single glass. Which means he was more than likely wearing gloves. Again that points to premeditation.”

  Jensen’s mouth opened, but Nic didn’t let him speak.

  “Except there’s one problem with that scenario. Why did Rick stab her without gloves? Why did he leave the knife right next to her body? Those are the actions of someone panicking. Who doesn’t have any plan.” Nic shook her head. “It would make sense if Rick wore the gloves the whole time, or if he never wore them. Discarding them only for the moment when he murdered her makes no sense. No sense at all.”

  “Maybe we just haven’t thought of the right explanation,” Jensen said.

  “Even if this bald guy went over there with him and they acted together, it still doesn’t explain the evidence. Rick should have touched more things or none at all.” She pointed at the binder. “Can I look?”

  When he nodded, she stood and looked over Jensen’s shoulder as he paged past the crime scene photos, first the establishing photos of various rooms of the condo, then the closeups of various pieces of evidence.

  Nic put out her hand. “Wait. Go back through the photos of the drinking glasses again.”

  There were six in the book. All tall, all made of clear glass, a common style you would see in anyone’s kitchen.

  She pointed at the third one. “And this is the one that showed Rick’s fingerprints, right?”

  He looked at her, at the glass, back at her. “Yeah.”

  “Look at them again.”

  Jensen’s eyes narrowed. He paged back and forth until he spotted the difference. “The bottom of the glass with Rick’s print is a lot thicker than the others.”

  “It could be a coincidence.” She played devil’s advocate. “We all break glasses and replace them with glasses that look similar but may not be identical.”

  “Yeah, but remember that case in New York about twenty years ago? Where the trooper lifted fingerprints from the interrogation room and then put them on evidence cards and claimed they came from the scene of the murder?” Something like hope sparked in Jensen’s voice. Flipping past other photographs of evidence, he paged ahead to the fingerprint section. Cassidy’s prints were in there—taken at the autopsy—as well as Nic’s and Allison’s. All as elimination prints. There was also a card with Rick’s prints.

  Each item that had been dusted had then been photographed before the lift tape was applied. After the tape lifted the print, it had been placed on a lift card. The criminalist had then drawn a picture on the other side of the lift card to show orientation, and the card was marked on the print side as to which side was up.

  Nic bent over Jensen’s shoulder as he compared the prints taken from the glass with Rick’s prints. She wasn’t a fingerprint examiner, but she did have a trained eye, and she couldn’t see any difference. The prints on the glass seemed to belong to Rick. If they had been faked somehow, whoever had done it hadn’t left behind any clues.

  Jensen lifted his head with a sigh.

  “What about the knife?” Nic asked.

  He turned back. The black smooth polymer handle of the knife had been dusted with silver powder so that the prints would show up against the surface. The partial fingerprints were on the right-hand side of the knife, if the knife was pointing up and away from the viewer.

  Nic knew that the prints had been scanned and inputted into IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which could compare them to the fingerprints of the nearly seventy million people in its database. However, the system was not as automated as it appeared on TV. Instead of spitting out an instant match, once the prints on the knife had been scanned, IAFIS would have provided a human print examiner with a list of candidates whose fingerprints were the closest matches to the latent prints on the knife. The latent examiner would then compare the two images on-screen and decide if there really was a match.

  The prints had matched, but still something seemed off to Nic. She made a fist, looked down at her hand, twisted it back and forth, looked back up. “Is there a kitchen around here?”

  Back out in her car, Nic called Allison. “Do you have a minute? I want to come by and show you something.”

  “I have a few minutes but then I have to leave for an appointment. Can’t you just tell me on the phone?”

  “It won’t take very long.” Nic could feel her heart beating in her ears. “But it’s important. And you’ll understand better if I can show you in person.”

  Ten minutes later Nic was in Allison’s office and pulling something from her purse. She didn’t know if she would have been able to get it past the security guards and the metal detector if she hadn’t been an FBI agent. As it was, it had taken a bit of talking.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a knife.”

  Allison’s brow creased. “It’s a table knife.”

  It was a battered stainless steel piece of silverware Nic had found in the police break room. “It doesn’t matter what kind of knife it is. The principle is the same.” She handed it to Allison. “Now stand up and hold it like you’re going to stab me in the belly.”

  Allison winced, but did as she was told. She gripped the knife so that the sharp side was pointing up and so were her fingers. Her thumb rested on the thick heel at the bottom. She looked up at Nic with wide eyes. “Okay.”

  “Look down and remember exactly where your fingertips are on the handle. Now hold the knife as if you’re going to chop onions.”

  Turning the knife over, Allison shifted her grip so that her fingers were pointing down and her thumb rested on top of the handle. She turned it back and forth, holding it both ways. “My fingers end up on the other side of the handle. But what if he stabbed down with the knife?”

  “The only way he could reach her heart was to thrust it up.” Nic pushed her fingers into her abdomen, just below the ribs. “But it doesn’t matter anyway. Try it.”

  Allison raised the knife as if she was going to stab down with it, but she had to flip the knife, placing her pinky finger where her index had been. “Okay, we’ve established that each way of holding the knife is different.” She looked from the knife to Nic. “But why does it matter?”

  “I went to talk to Jensen about the bald man, and we ended up looking at the murder book. The prints on the knife are Rick’s. But he couldn’t have made them holding the knife when it stabbed Cassidy. It looks lik
e he was using the knife as it was intended—to chop vegetables.”

  “How come no one else figured this out before?”

  “It’s the print examiner’s job to match the prints on the knife with the prints on the card. And they do match. But they’re only partials, so it wasn’t immediately obvious that they were on the wrong side of the handle. Jensen and I only noticed it today. And the knife itself doesn’t match Cassidy’s knives. But it does match Rick’s. So it was brought there.”

  Allison’s brow creased. “Someone planted the knife?”

  “More than that. It really was used to kill her. It has Cassidy’s blood on it. And it matches the wound they saw on the autopsy. I think someone took Rick’s knife from his kitchen and used it to kill her. That’s probably why she was strangled and only stabbed when she was dying or dead. When I first heard it, I thought it was overkill. That Rick was so angry he needed to kill her twice. But now I think the only reason she was stabbed was to frame Rick for the crime. That’s why the prints are only partials. The real murderer took Rick’s knife and then used it when he was wearing gloves.”

  “The real murderer?” Allison asked.

  “The bald guy.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Allison parked in front of Oregon Federal, her mind whirling. Was Rick really innocent? She had hated to leave Nicole, but she was already late for the meeting with Lindsay and the loan officer.

  She saw that Lindsay was waiting for her, peering out the floor-to-ceiling window of the lobby, her hand shading her eyes. It was time for Allison to be the big sister. The mystery of what had happened to Cassidy could, sadly, wait.

  Part of Allison had been afraid that Lindsay would be a no-show, nap through it, miss the bus. Part of her had even been afraid that Lindsay would snap under all the expectations being piled on her—by Lindsay herself, most of all—and she would disappear again into the streets. It wouldn’t be the first time she had left behind shattered dreams and broken promises.

  Now Lindsay smiled, lifted her hand away from her eyes, and gave her a little wave. Looking a little relieved herself, as if she’d had her own doubts about whether Allison would show.