“You have no idea,” said Lauren.
Nikki lifted the sheet to verify the scar on Derek’s thigh. When she found it, she joined Rook and Lauren at the ME’s lab bench, a stainless-steel surface laden with an array of macabre instruments that were part of dissecting and analyzing the dead. In the center of the long counter, a small white towel covered a tray. The ME set her chart down and folded back the towel halfway, exposing the blade of a plastic knife the color of dried Elmer’s glue. “This is a polymer mold I made from Cassidy Towne’s stab wound. The killer worked clean, an expert plunge and withdrawal, so I was able to make an excellent cast from her puncture.”
Heat recognized it immediately, the arc of the edges coming together dead center at the tip, which was sharpened to a point, and, most distinctive, the fullers, those twin grooves running parallel the full length of the flat. “This was his knife. The Texan’s,” she said.
“A Robbins and Dudley Knuckle Knife, according to the catalog on the server,” said Lauren Parry. “Exactly like”—she peeled back the remaining half of the towel—“this one here.” Beside the first cast on the tray rested a mold of the identical blade.
“Get out,” said Rook. “If this were a TV show, this is where they’d go to a commercial.”
A slight smile showed at the corners of the ME’s mouth. It wasn’t often that she had the occasion to be a little theatrical, and she was obviously enjoying her moment. The dead ones didn’t appreciate her work. “Well, if they ran a commercial now, you’d miss the biggest part.”
“I don’t know what could be bigger,” said Nikki, looking over her shoulder at Derek Snow’s corpse. “You just linked Cassidy Towne’s exact murder weapon to Derek Snow.”
“But I didn’t.” Lauren waited until both their faces clouded, puzzling. She pointed to the first blade replica. “This knife cast here? Taken from Cassidy Towne.” Then she picked up the second one. “This knife cast here? I took from Esteban Padilla.”
“No way!” Rook turned a circle and stomped a foot. “Coyote Man?”
All Nikki said was “Lauren . . .”
“Yup.”
“The Texan stabbed Coyote Man, too?”
“Well,” said Lauren, “his knife did, anyway.”
Heat was still processing all this through the haze of her astonishment. “Whatever made you think to take a mold from Padilla?”
“The puncture on both victims had a lot of material displaced at the center, or what we call the neutral axis of the blade. It’s negligible, but visible if you’re looking. Soon as I saw the similarity, I ran the molds.”
“You’re a jock,” said Nikki.
“Not done yet. When the molds matched, I ran one more test. Know that bloodstain you pointed out to me on the wallpaper at Cassidy Towne’s brownstone? It wasn’t hers. It was Esteban Padilla’s. A perfect match.”
“Best autopsy ever,” said Rook. “I think I just peed myself a little. Seriously, I did.”
Chapter Ten
Nikki was not about to let this wait for a meeting back in the bull pen. Momentum on this case was picking up, and even though she wasn’t sure where her new clues would lead, she was going to ride it, and hard. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was only a few blocks north of the Derek Snow crime scene, so Heat got on her cell phone and called Ochoa to tell him she’d meet him and Raley in the East Village in five minutes for a briefing.
“You sound pumped. Did you get a confirm that Snow had the same killer as our gossip lady?” Ochoa asked.