Page 36 of The Writer
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“THAT WENT WELL,” Cordova mutters when they’re back at their desks.
Declan is pacing in slow circles. He feels like the world is closing in on him. All of this bullshit is coming to a head. “She’s engineering all this. You know she’s behind it.” He jabs a finger at Cordova’s chest. “You know she is. You know me. ”
“Dec, I—”
“I didn’t plant that book. I didn’t kill David Morrow. You might not be sure about that, and Daniels and the rest of the world might not believe me either, but I know I didn’t do those things. That means it’s her. Her and Hoffman. Nothing else makes sense. They’re creating this elaborate smoke screen, and the rest of you are buying into it! Hanging me out to dry rather than seeing the truth!”
“You need to calm down.”
Declan knows how crazy he sounds but doesn’t care. “She knew we’d visit that bookstore. She knew we’d eventually end up in that basement office. She left that copy of the book there for no other reason than to spook us. How long ago do you think she did that? How long has she been planning all this?”
“Her prints weren’t on the book, Dec,” Cordova tells him. “I had CSU check when they dusted the condom wrapper. It could be some—”
“Come on, that’s no coincidence.” Declan groans. “It was her handwriting on that page.”
“You some handwriting expert now? How do you know?”
“I know.”
Cordova’s lips form a thin line, then he says, “Look, Daniels is right. The video is circumstantial. We don’t know what was in the bag Hoffman handed her, we don’t know what she was wearing under her coat.”
“Bullshit.”
“We can’t prove it,” Cordova says. “We can’t prove it any more than you can prove she left that book. There’s zero proof. Just speculation. Circumstantial, that’s all any of it is. The only hard evidence is—”
“Is on me, yeah.” Declan waves that off. “Blood she somehow stole. A knife she definitely stole.”
“No proof of that either.”
Declan turns on him. “You seriously think I snuck into Morrow’s apartment to kill her and killed the husband instead when he got in the way? All to keep some fabricated garbage about the Maggie Marshall case from coming out? Come on, man. Denise Morrow’s event schedule is no secret. It’s on her website. She’s easy enough to find. If I’d really wanted to kill her, I’d have gone to the bookstore, not her apartment. Maybe got her at some other appearance. It would be stupid to try and take her out at home. You seriously think I’d kill the husband, panic, and leave my target alive? Leave a witness? I’m a homicide detective, I see this shit every day. You don’t think I’d plan a little better than that? Hell, if I wanted her dead, I wouldn’t use a knife. I’d go see Pooch over in Hunts Point and buy a gun, use that. Or I’d hire some random banger to take her out. Plenty of them around there. Why would I get my hands dirty?”
Hunts Point is arguably the worst neighborhood in the city. You walk in there, you’ve got a one-in-twenty-two chance of becoming the victim of anything from a mugging to sexual assault. Prostitutes and dealers litter the corners. Pooch runs the Southside Posse. He pays the smaller kids to squirm down into the storm drains and retrieve discarded guns, then he resells them. One of his many enterprises.
“This is three-card monte, remember? I’m just another card in the deck,” Declan says. “We get in her head, we solve this.”
Cordova presses his hands together and rests his chin on top of his fingers, thinking. Considering everything Declan just said. “Okay, let’s… let’s backtrack. We know Denise Morrow was researching the Maggie Marshall case from the start of it, right? Didn’t you say there was something in the book about that?”
“She starts the book with the trial. She was there.”
“And she specifically talks about you? Claims you were somehow guilty?”
I’d soon learn Detective Declan Shaw had a very good reason for feeling guilty. That, too, as much as everything else, was fact.
“Yeah. In the first line about me. But it’s a book, right? Who knows what she knew and when. Whatever she got, she got from Harrison. We’ve got to pull Harrison’s financials. You know he’s on Denise Morrow’s payroll. Has to be. We find one payment from her to him, and this all starts to make sense.”
“It wouldn’t change anything. You find payments between those two, all it proves is he was willing to share information for the right price; it doesn’t take the spotlight off you.”
“What if it was the other way around?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Maybe we’re thinking about this backward,” Declan says. “What if she pointed Harrison at me instead of the other way around? We don’t know what put Harrison on this. Why not her?”
“That’s still not a crime. How would she even come up with that?”
“You know how.” Declan is thinking about what she wrote in that book: What goes around…
“Lucero?” Cordova says.
“She was probably talking to him early on, right? Maybe as far back as the trial. Maybe before that. She needs details for her story, and he gives her one. Tells her the cops set him up. Tells her how. She takes that to Harrison and he runs with it.”
“Even if that’s true, how does it help us here? Besides,” Cordova says, “that doesn’t track. Didn’t you say she had Harrison’s name and number written on a newspaper clipping that said IAU was looking at you? That means she got his contact info after the story broke.”
Declan takes out his phone and scrolls back through his photos until he finds the ones he took down in the evidence locker. Cordova’s right—the name and number are written in the margins of an article from the Times titled “Detective in the Maggie Marshall Case Under Internal Investigation.”
Cordova squints and leans in closer. “Can I see that?”
Declan hands him the phone, and he pinches the image and zooms in on the handwriting. “Why is there a line through Harrison’s name?”
“A what?” Declan never noticed a line, but now he sees it, faint, like the flick of a pen.
“Did you dial the number?”
Declan shakes his head.
Cordova keys the number in on his desk phone. It rings three times before a harsh male voice answers: “Daniels.”
Cordova hangs up without a word.