Bleeding Hearts(97)

“Do we? Do you have your lab reports back yet?”

“No,” Russell admitted. “But it couldn’t have been a coincidence, Mr. Demarkian. The weapon we found being just the right shape to make the wounds and all the rest of it—”

“There’s nothing coincidental about it,” Gregor said. “The only coincidence in this case happened when Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard died. Since then, we’ve been dealing with cold-blooded deliberation.”

“You sound like you know what’s going on,” Russell Donahue said in amazement. “You sound like you know who killed them.”

“That’s moot.” Gregor leaned toward the body again and pointed at the wound. “We’re going to need cross-sections, like the ones we’re having done on Paul Hazzard and the ones that were done when Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard died.”

“We’ll get them.”

Gregor pointed to a space just to the right of the puncture. “Pay particular attention to this. Look at that.”

“The dress is torn,” Russell Donahue said.

“The dress is slit,” Gregor corrected him. “There were slits like that in Paul Hazzard’s shirt last night. Not six of them, of course. It happens only when the force of the blow is particularly strong. It isn’t an edge that was deliberately designed to cut.”

“What are you talking about?” Russell Donahue demanded. “Mr. Demarkian, if you know who killed these two people, you have to tell me about it. You can’t just let whoever did these things wander around loose—”

“I don’t know who killed these two people,” Gregor said, “at least, not necessarily. What I know is what they were killed with. I held the murder weapon in my hands today. And it didn’t even occur to me.”

“Wait,” Russell said. “What you’re implying is that that dagger thing wasn’t used to kill Hazzard.”

“Of course it wasn’t. Why should it be?”

“For one thing, it fits the wound. For another thing, it was lying there next to Hazzard’s body.”

“It was lying there next to Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body too, but it wasn’t the murder weapon.”

“When it was lying next to Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body, it didn’t have blood on it.”

“Have you ever seen the cross-section drawings from the original Hazzard case?”

Russell Donahue shook his head. Gregor stood up and looked around. There was a long, low couch in the middle of the room with a coffee table in front of it, facing the fireplace. There were a pair of delicate-looking end tables with lamps on them. There was a bookcase whose second shelf was a backlit display space holding ornamental china. There was nothing suitable to write on. Candida DeWitt had not been overly fond of furniture.

Gregor searched through the pockets of his coat until he came up with paper and a Bic ball-point pen. His pockets were always full of Bic ball-point pens. The paper was the envelope he had received his last overdue notice from the library in. He walked over to the nearest wall and plastered the envelope against it.

“Take a look at this,” he said. “The cross-section of the wound found in Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard’s body looked like this.” He drew carefully on one side of the envelope.

“So?” Russell Donahue demanded, studying what Gregor had done.

“Now look at this,” Gregor said. “This is approximately what the outline of the dagger looks like.”

“Be careful not to get ink on the wall.”

Gregor ignored him and drew.

“There,” he said when he was finished. “Look at that.”

“I am looking at it. They’re near enough to identical—”

“No, they’re not,” Gregor insisted. “Look, that’s the mistake everybody has been making, right from the beginning. Everybody’s been so impressed with the points of comparison, they’ve failed to notice the obvious. Which is that these two drawings are nowhere near identical. And neither are the real things on which they’re based.”

“I don’t think you can count the fact that the dagger is longer than the wound is deep,” Russell Donahue objected. “Assuming your representation is accurate. I mean, the murderer wouldn’t have been able to get the entire dagger into the wound—”

“Of course he wouldn’t have. That’s not what I mean.”

“You mean that little thingy over on the left side.”

“Exactly.”

“There are a lot of reasons why that might not have shown up in the wound,” Russell said. “I’m not pretending to know everything there is to know about forensics—”