Dead Certain

“They need you to look at the knife.”
     

CHAPTER 22
     
    Somehow it was worse, knowing beforehand exactly what I was going to see, and yet, strangely enough, it was Claudia herself who gave me the strength to do it. I kept thinking of her composure in the emergency room on the night when I brought Bill Delius in, the calmness of her demeanor, the measured “please” that preceded every request even as she struggled to save my client’s life. The least I could do was try to hold myself to the same standard tonight. I owed her that much.
    Claudia’s body still lay on the floor of the butler’s pantry. I could see it just beyond the door, and it held me in a primitive kind of paradoxical fascination. I could hardly bear to look at it, and yet I could hardly force myself to look away.
    Everyone had cleared out except for Blades and Kowalczyk. Now that he’d been here awhile, I could see the questions forming on Kowalczyk’s face. Most cops were ruled by Occam’s razor, the scientific principle that states that the simplest explanation fitting the facts is probably the right one. I could tell the whole thing bothered him— not just the murder, but Claudia, me, the apartment. By now Blades had filled him in on who I was and what I was worth. I could tell he saw me as a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit and that it bothered him.
    They wanted to know if I recognized the knife.
    I took a deep breath, determined not to disgrace myself, and slowly made my way to the butler’s pantry. Blades took me by the elbow and steered me around the blood, which had darkened in the hours since I’d stupidly blundered through it. I crouched down beside my dead friend and tried not to look at anything besides the knife. It was hard. There were little things I hadn’t noticed before—the hemostat clipped to the drawstring of her scrub pants, the piece of rubber tubing that peeked out of the breast pocket. Somehow as they’d gone about their work, the police had managed to knock her glasses askew. My hands itched to straighten them.
    Of the knife all that was visible was the black wooden handle and about a quarter inch of blade. Whoever had killed her had done their best to ram the knife in to the hilt. Judging from the diameter of the handle and the width of the blade, I could tell that it was a paring knife. It had entered the right side of her neck, roughly an inch and a half below the ear. I forced myself to lean over her body and look, but the tip of the blade did not show through on the other side.
    I stood back up and went back to the kitchen counter. All the knives were in their places in the wooden block except for one.
    “It looks like whoever did it just took one of the knives from here,” I said. “I couldn’t tell you for sure without seeing the whole thing, but it looks like the smallest one of the set.”
    “Pretty fancy cooking knives and not much else in this kitchen,” observed Kowalczyk. “Have you had them long?”
    “About a year,” I said. “They were a gift from a patient of Claudia’s when she was still a resident, a German woman who came from a little town called Solingen that’s famous for their knives.”
    “It looks like he must have come in through that window,” said Kowalczyk with a nod toward the shards of broken glass that lay in the bottom of the sink. From his voice it sounded like he’d already made up his mind about what had happened and was relating an established fact. “He must have thought the place was empty, but when he found Dr. Stein at home, he grabbed the knife from the counter and killed her. Then he took off through the front door without taking anything.”
    “He couldn’t have come in through that window,”
    I said automatically, noticing the broken pane for the first time.
    “Why not?” countered Kowalczyk, obviously taken aback. “All the rest of them have burglar grates across them. He picked that one because it’s the only one that doesn’t.”
    “Don’t you want to know why it doesn’t have a burglar grille?” I asked.
    “Okay, I’ll bite,” offered Blades, looking up from his notebook. “Why?”
    “I’ll show you,” I said, happy for the chance to get out of the kitchen, away from the body of the woman who had been my best friend. I opened the back door of the apartment and led the detectives out onto the small, dark landing that held the enclosure where we kept the trash. From the landing, stairs ran up and down connecting all