“Detective Gold?”
She turned at the sound of Pawlowski’s voice, still feeling embarrassed. “Sorry about that,” she said.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes, I just saw someone…or I thought I saw someone I knew. But I was wrong.”
Pawlowski nodded, looking over Ava’s shoulder at the handful of people moving about the sidewalk. “But you’re okay? You’re sure? You looked like you saw a ghost or something there for a second.”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
But that was far from the truth. Something about thinking she’d seen Frank had stirred something in her. While she knew it wasn’t an absolutely certainty that this case would be officially closed if they went back to the precinct and spoke with Miller, she felt like there was a very good chance. And as far as she was concerned, there were far too many open ends and coincidences in this case for her to comfortably make the assumption that Alfred Perkins had killed himself.
And deeper down, where honesty sometimes hid away out of fear of being ignored, there was another truth: she didn’t want Frank to think she’d be a failure without him.
What haven’t we done?she thought.What steps have we not covered?
The answer came to her easily enough but she was pretty sure it, too, would turn out to be a dead end.
“What?” Pawlowski asked. “What is it?”
“Let’s wait to head back to the precinct. I think there’s another stop we need to make.”
“Gold, I amnotclimbing those stairs at the Chrysler Building again.”
“No, not the Chrysler Building. We never bothered going to the coroner. And as far as I could tell from the initial report, neither did anyone else.”
“At the risk of sounding cruel, I’m not sure there’s any point,” Pawlowski said. “I’d imagine that after a fall from that height, there wouldn’t be much of a body to look over.”
“And you might be right. But I have to make sure we’ve checked everything before we go back to the precinct with our tails between our legs.”
Pawlowski considered it for a moment, going so far as to rub at her forehead as if trying her best to push away an oncoming headache. “My God, Gold. You don’t like to lose, do you?”
“I don’t. But it’s more than that. It’s…”
She wasn’t sure how to explain it. It came down to justice, she supposed. Even if they kept pushing and found at the end of the day that Perkinshadkilled himself, at least then she’dknow.She could rest comfortably knowing she’d tried everything she could to prove otherwise. But as the case currently stood, that was not a position she was ready to take.
“I know,” Pawlowski said. “We have to at least try. But…you know not to expect much, right?”
“Right.”
Ava glanced back at the man she’d mistaken for Frank. He was at the end of the block now, starting to cross the street. And as she watched him, she saw an approaching cab. She stepped to the edge of the street and began to flag it down, suddenly very anxious to get to their next stop along the course of this case.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Ava had fully expected to visit the coroner’s office and have them tell her that there was simply nothing to pull any sort of evidence from. What she hadn’t expected was the look of utter bewilderment from the coroner. After telling him why they were there, the coroner looked at her with an expression a child might give an adult if they’d been asked why they liked sweets.
“You’re really asking me if there was any evidence on the body?”
The coroner was a middle-aged man with a completely bald head. He was also rather tall, so when he gave his perplexed look, he did it in a way that made it appear as if he was looking down on Ava and Pawlowski.
“Yes, anything at all,” Ava said.
They were sitting in his office, a cluttered and very small room. Ava wasn’t sure, but she thought Pawlowski seemed relieved to know that they wouldn’t be looking at any examination tables.
“There was nothing,” the coroner said. “Now, I did end up removing a few items from the body, mind you: fragments of glass, a small piece of metal from the hood of the car he slammed into. The body itself, though, has been delivered to a university upstate. They’re wanting to study the skeleton in order to get a better glimpse at how the spine responds to such a fall.” He shook his head, frowned, and added: “Though I don’t know that they’re going to be able to tell much of anything.”
“That bad?” Pawlowski asked.