Hearts of Sand(90)

“You didn’t tell me anything about it,” Gregor said.

“There wasn’t time to tell you,” Jason Battlesea said. “Let me see what I can find. Mike or Jack will have to have a copy around here somewhere.”

Battlesea disappeared down the corridor again, and Gregor and Andy looked at each other.

“Jesus Christ,” Andy said.

“I think this latest one blew all his corks,” Gregor said. “He wasn’t this bad when I got here.”

“I don’t want his blood type and his Social Security number,” Andy said. “I just want to see if there’s reasonable cause for me to back off for a bit and let you handle it. If the two murders are really as alike as you say, I can hold off a bit and see what happens. But if there’s any indication—”

“I’ve got them,” Jason Battlesea said, coming back down the corridor again with a sheaf of papers in his hand. “It’s just like I thought it was. Of course, the preliminary is the preliminary. Anything could happen when the autopsy comes back. Maybe the guy didn’t die of the stabbing at all. Maybe somebody poisoned him. But I’m not expecting that, and neither are you.”

Jason Battlesea took the papers and held them out.

“I don’t know who I’m supposed to be giving these to,” he said.

Andy took the papers out of Battlesea’s hand and looked at them blankly for a moment. Then he sat down in one of the plastic-covered chairs and spread them out on the seat of the chair next to him.

After another moment, he looked up and shook his head. “You can’t tell, can you?” he said. “I mean, there’s a lot of stuff here, a lot of detail, and it certainly looks like the two would have to be connected. But.”

Gregor held his hand out. “Can I look at those?”

“Sure.” Andy handed the papers over.

Jason Battlesea laughed. “You’re not going to get anything out of those that you don’t already know,” he said. “Kyle Westervan was stabbed in the back with a kitchen knife. Chapin Waring was stabbed in the back with a kitchen knife. Not the same kind of kitchen knife. Westervan got a chopper thin and three times as long. We’ve got the knives in evidence bags.”

Gregor nodded absently. “The angle-of-entry thing is interesting,” he said.

“I thought that, too,” Andy said. “What’s all that about?”

“Angle of entry?” Jason Battlesea asked.

Gregor waved the papers in the air. “Chapin Waring was murdered by being stabbed in the back by a knife that was going downward when it entered the body,” he said. “That’s in the ME’s final report summary, so I suppose that is a true finding and we can count on it. In the summary of the preliminary on the murder of Kyle Westervan, he was stabbed in the back by a knife going upward as it entered the body.”

“It could be a lot of things,” Andy said. “You can’t just assume that it was two different murderers—”

“I don’t assume it was two different murderers,” Gregor said. “I assume it was a result of the fact that Chapin Waring was a small woman and Kyle Westervan was a tall man.”

“So,” Andy said, “you think the issue is that Chapin Waring was a lot shorter than the person who killed her, and Kyle Westervan was a lot taller.”

“Chapin Waring didn’t have to be a lot shorter,” Gregor said, “but she did have to be shorter by at least a couple of inches. Kyle Westervan was, I think somebody said, about six-three. He was a lot taller than most people.”

“You could still have had a situation where the murderer was standing on something at one point and not standing on it at another point. There are ways to do things about height,” Andy said.

“I agree,” Gregor said. “But you’ve also got to account for the fact that nobody could have made that kind of stab wound—either of these kinds of stab wounds—without behind able to get right up behind the victim. It’s hard to see how that would have been possible if the murderer was carrying around a stepladder or standing on a bucket. And the murderer wasn’t going to get that close from behind unless the victim either didn’t know he was there, or didn’t think he had any reason for distrust.”

“You keep saying that,” Jason Battlesea said, “but people come up behind each other all the time.”

“Not like this, they don’t,” Gregor said. “It’s a natural instinct to feel the presence of somebody coming up right behind you, close enough to press against you. And if you look at the ME’s report on Chapin Waring, the murderer would have had to do just that. Come up behind Chapin Waring so that they were practically close enough to spoon. The murderer couldn’t have been more than half a step away. And I think we’re going to find that the same thing is true in the murder of Kyle Westervan. Whoever the murderer is, it’s somebody both Chapin Waring and Kyle Westervan knew, and somebody they both thought they had nothing to fear from.”