Page 7 of The Writer
CHAPTER SEVEN
TEN MINUTES LATER, when Declan clicks off the transcriber app, he finds Cordova standing behind him, a glum look on his face.
Declan slips his phone back into his pocket. “Do I want to hear what that business with IAU was about?”
“You do not,” Cordova tells him. “I wish I didn’t have to hear about it either. I’ll fill you in later.” He glances around. “Where is she?”
“Guest room with CSU and Hunter.”
Unlike Declan, who’s in a T-shirt and jeans, Cordova is wearing a sports jacket, matching pants, and a tie. Old-school NYPD. The man has even been known to wear a fedora, although he catches shit for it. They’re four hours off the clock, but he looks freshly shaven. Fucking Cordova. The notebook he pulls from his breast pocket is new; Declan doesn’t have to see it up close to know that. Cordova keeps a stack of them on hand and starts fresh with each case. “David Morrow. Thirty-nine years old. Cardiologist over at Mercy. Brought in seven hundred and ninety thousand last year before taxes, which is about two hundred K higher than the average for New York. Seems aboveboard; he’s just good. Brings the hospital a lot of out-of-state business. Married to Denise Morrow, writer, wed sixteen years ago. They own this place as well as a lake house in the Catskills. No mortgages. No outstanding debt. At least that we’ve found. I’ve got the folks in financial digging deeper.” He takes a few tentative steps closer and stops several paces from David Morrow’s body, letting out a low whistle. “We’ve got ourselves an overachiever. How many stab wounds you count?”
“Six obvious. Maybe more. Tough to say with all the blood,” Declan says. “Best I can tell, the assailant clipped the heart a couple of times but kept going. Maybe he didn’t go down, or the attacker was in some kind of rage. This is telling, though.” He kneels and, using the tip of a pencil, turns Morrow’s left palm toward Cordova. “Not a single defensive wound. Nothing on the other hand either.”
Cordova considers that, then looks down the hall to the front door. “That’s, what, at least twenty feet?”
“Twenty-three. I measured.”
He knows what Cordova is thinking. It’s the condition of the lock; he keeps going back there too. If (and it’s a big if ) someone tried to pick it, he didn’t succeed. It’s possible David Morrow heard him trying, maybe opened the door, surprised the guy. But in that scenario, the altercation would have happened near the door, not twenty-three feet away. There would be a high probability of defensive wounds, and David Morrow has none. The theory doesn’t track.
“He knew his attacker,” Cordova mutters.
“You think?” Declan stands, jerks his thumb toward the back bedroom. “Come on, Cordova, it’s clear what this is.”
“Doesn’t mean we don’t have to prove it.”
“She was covered in blood.”
“She’ll say she tried to revive him.”
“She hasn’t shed a tear. Her makeup looks damn near perfect.”
“They make waterproof makeup. You haven’t heard the 911 call yet. She sounds plenty upset there. That’s what the jury will hear. What they’ll remember when they go to deliberate. She’ll get some expert to testify she was in shock when we got here. They’ll explain it all as some form of break, detachment.”
“Whose side you on?” Declan frowns.
“I’m just pointing out what we’ll be up against as this thing progresses.”
Declan isn’t in the mood to go down the what-if rabbit hole. Cordova tends to approach these things like he’s playing chess—he maps out his opponents’ next three moves and thinks through some counter. The problem with that is most of those moves never happen and he ends up wasting time and energy on nothing. Best to keep him on task. “What did the doorman say? You pull the cam footage?”
Cordova nods and flips a page in his notebook. “This is one of the most private buildings in New York. It’s technically three different buildings, three separate sections, each with its own lobby. You can’t get from one section to the other from the inside; you have to go down to street level, exit, and reenter at the appropriate lobby. The lobby you entered when you arrived serves only a handful of apartments, and her nearest neighbors are in Switzerland until the end of the month. David here got home at four forty p.m. Nobody else comes up until the wife gets home at nine twenty p.m.” Cordova’s face goes grim. “She dials 911 at nine thirty-one p.m., eleven minutes after she passed through the lobby, and first responders arrive at nine thirty-seven p.m. That’s a full seventeen minutes of the wife’s time unaccounted for. It takes two minutes tops to get here from downstairs. If she killed him and staged all this, she had fifteen minutes.”
“That’s plenty of time,” Declan tells him. “Her story just doesn’t jibe. Even if someone got in here and she stumbled into a robbery gone wrong, no way she waits eleven minutes to call for help, says the perp is still inside, then sits here and waits for us to show… come on. This is about as clear as it gets. She got home, killed him right here, mucked up the door and lock, opened the terrace door, and dialed. That’s the only thing that makes sense.” Declan gestures to the bookshelf. “You know what she does for a living, right? True-crime author. Hell, with that pedigree, she should’ve done a better job of staging.”
Cordova takes a long, hard stare down the length of the apartment, past the open kitchen and living room, toward the bedrooms in the back. Muted light streams in from floor-to-ceiling windows that offer sweeping views of Central Park. “Place like this goes for… what? Ten million? Fifteen? That her motive, money? They have no real debt, remember.”
Behind them, the apartment door swings open. A wiry little man pushes past Hernandez and steps inside. His ratlike eyes quickly take in Declan and Cordova, the body on the floor. Then he actually has the balls to remove his coat and hang it on the rack. Hernandez grabs him by the shoulder and tells him, “You can’t be in here!”
He twists out of Hernandez’s grip. “I got a call—”
Declan gets between him and the body. “And you are?”
“Geller Hoffman. I’m… a friend.”
Declan has never met the man, but he knows the name. Hoffman is one of the city’s most prominent defense attorneys. The squirrelly little fucker is notorious for putting criminals back on the street, providing they can afford him. Just last week, he made headlines for defending John Cornelli in a racketeering case brought by the feds. The mobster should have gone away for ten years, minimum. Instead, he got six months in a federal country club. Cordova knows who he is too; it’s all over his face. “Who called you?”
Hoffman gestures toward the flashing panel on the wall. “The alarm company. I’m on the Morrows’ security list. When Denise and David didn’t answer, they tracked me down.” He takes another step forward and freezes. “Christ, is that David?”
Cordova points. “I need you to step back.”
Hoffman doesn’t move. “Where the hell is Denise? Is she okay?”
“She’s fine,” Declan tells him. “They’re processing her down the hall.”
Hoffman’s eyes narrow. “Processing her?”
Before anyone can stop him, he goes stomping through the apartment, shouting her name.