“Tell me what you know,” she said.
With years in the street and an orderly mind, he didn’t need to consult notes. “Harbor Unit hauled him out of the drink about an hour ago. A pilot for the helicopter service that leases the pier spotted him on approach and radioed it in.” Nikki could see the small blue airport shuttle chopper tied down on the pad at the end of the wharf, farther out in the channel. “Harbor said they’d been on the lookout for a floater. Middle of the night, a motorist called Bridges and Tunnels to say he saw somebody go off the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“Kersplat,” said Rook, getting a reproachful glance from Nikki.
“The eyewit says he wasn’t alone, someone was up there with him.”
“Did he say there was a struggle, or was Damon a jumper and somebody tried to stop him?”
“Unclear. Detective Rhymer is en route to get that statement now. Should be a solid witness, though. A cardiologist driving in for an early surgery at Downtown Hospital. Opie will brace the doc soon as he finishes his operation.”
Like Nikki, Rook must have also been thinking of suicide and the apology text she’d received at four-fifteen A.M. “What time did this come down?” he asked.
“About four-thirty.”
“Let’s go check in with Lauren,” said Heat, and she started to walk out onto the pier. Feller and Rook kept up and she asked, “Any note on him?”
“No but one thing you need to know, and it’s big. He’d been shot.”
That stopped Nikki in her tracks. The other two stopped with her. Rook said, “I wonder if he was shot by the sniper who tried to get you last night.”
Detective Feller said, “Definitely not.”
“You sound mighty certain,” said Heat.
“Because I am. Detective, I know who shot him.”
“You know who shot Carter Damon?” Feller nodded. “Who?”
“You.”
SEVENTEEN
The two bullet holes in Carter Damon had Nikki Heat’s name on them. The medical examiner had already cut the shirt off his corpse, and both upper-body entry wounds matched with the rounds she’d put in him the night of Don’s killing.
Lauren Parry squatted in a catcher’s stance on the deck of the pier, where his body had been placed by the Harbor Unit, and indicated the wounds with the tip of her stick pen, beginning with the one in the left side of his neck where it met the shoulder. “Let’s start with this one here.”
“That’s from the shot I got off through the passenger window of the taxi.”
“When I do the postmortem, my money says this one was nearly fatal. You were on the curb, as I recall from your Shooting Incident Report, so this would have come down at an angle, probably getting awfully close to the subclavian vein or the jugular, or both. If you’d outright hit one of those, he’d have died in minutes, if that long. So, I’m thinking a tiny nick, and assume he did a lot of slow bleeding over the past few days. But I’ll know better down in B-Twenty-three,” she said, referring to the autopsy room number.
Heat knelt on one knee beside her and pointed to the second wound, the one on his chest. “What are those marks around the entry hole?”
“Good eye. Those marks you see are from sutures. They must have torn open when he hit the water coming off the bridge.” She put her face an inch from the wound. “Uh-huh. I see thread fragments.”
“But we checked ERs,” said Nikki. “No reports of him, anywhere.”
Rook said, “Are you saying this guy stitched himself up? Talk about macho. Take that, Chuck Norris.”
Lauren said, “I highly doubt he did this himself. This is a professional-looking job.” Then, when she saw Nikki duck over the other bullet hole, she added, “I couldn’t see any evidence of work done on the other wound.”
“Why one and not the other?” asked Detective Feller.