“It’s not mine, then,” Alyssa said. “I’ve never been in Hannah Krekorian’s apartment. And I didn’t kill my father.”
“No,” Gregor agreed, “you didn’t kill your father. There was a possibility you had, of course, but the earring takes care of that. What’s important here is that you know who killed your father. Just the way you knew who killed your stepmother more than four years ago.”
“No,” Alyssa said, being very earnest. “I don’t know. I really don’t, Mr. Demarkian. I have no idea.”
“Mr. Donahue,” Gregor said, “may I have the briefcase, please?”
Russell Donahue hurried forward with the briefcase, which was nothing more than a couple of thin sheets of leather fastened together, capable of holding half a dozen sheets of thin paper and no more. Gregor took it, laying it down on the coffee table. Then he opened it up and extracted two sheets of tracing paper. Both sheets of tracing paper had the same drawing on them. The drawings looked like this:
“From the beginning of this case,” Gregor said, “from the beginning, that is, the death of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard, the unanswered and seemingly unanswerable question has always been: What was the weapon? Eventually this became a question of what was the weapon in all three murders. The dagger was never more than a continual ruse by the murderer. It was a piece of luck, sitting there on the wall like that after Jacqueline was killed. It wasn’t planned. It didn’t need to be planned. If the dagger hadn’t existed, no weapon of any kind would ever have been discovered. Because the weapon wasn’t a weapon.”
“Wonderful,” James Hazzard said. “You talk just like a detective in a book. Do you write fiction for a living?”
“If I did, I would have caught on to this much more quickly,” Gregor answered. “You know, sometimes, in a case of murder, you have to know everything, every small and particular detail, before you can arrive at the solution. A friend of mine gives me fiction to read, Mr. Hazzard, in which that is almost always the detective’s predicament. Before he can pronounce himself satisfied, before he can emerge triumphantly into the light with the solution in his hand, he must clear up a thousand small details and find the rationale for a hundred thousand random acts—except, of course, that in books nothing is ever truly random. In real life, on the other hand, a great deal is random. Many things happen in a murder case that are in no way connected to the murder at all. And as for the murderer…” Gregor shrugged. “It’s nice to know all the whys and wherefores, but it isn’t always necessary. In real life you sometimes find that all you need is one small piece of definite evidence.”
James Hazzard leaned over and stared at the tracing paper. “And this is it?” he asked dubiously.
“These,” Gregor said, “are copies of the drawings made by the medical examiner’s office of the cross-sections of the wounds caused by the weapon entering the bodies of both Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard and Paul Hazzard. The one from Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body is on the left. The one from Paul Hazzard’s body is on the right. I also have the cross-section taken from the wound in Candida DeWitt’s body. I’ll get it out for you if you like. There won’t be any significant difference.”
Alyssa shuddered. “I think we’ve had enough wounds. Can they really get pictures like this out of flesh? God, that sounds awful.”
Gregor moved the tracing paper around. “Cross-sections have become fairly common in stabbing cases over the past few years. They weren’t so common when your stepmother died, but the medical examiner at the time was very disturbed by the case. He was disturbed by the wound and by the fact that that dagger was being promoted as the weapon. I don’t blame him for being disturbed. He showed more common sense than almost anybody else assigned to the case. Look at that wall up there.” Gregor gestured at the weapons wall. “There have to be a hundred weapons up here at least, some of them large, some of them extremely colorful. I’ve said it before. If you were going to grab a weapon from this wall in the heat of an argument and kill somebody with it, it wouldn’t be a small hand weapon on an inconvenient bracket you’d have to reach around to get to. No, there is only one explanation for the recurring presence of that dagger, and that is that it came in handy once—meaning immediately after the death of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard—because in a lot of ways it resembled the actual murder weapon.”
“The dagger resembled the actual murder weapon,” James repeated. He looked dazed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian, but I’ve always thought that dagger was a very odd-looking thing. I don’t think it looks like anything else at all.”