Free Heart of a Killer by David Rosenfelt Page A

Reggie was an idiot, or that Reggie didn’t know what he was talking about, or that I should stop wasting his time with this bullshit. What he said was, “Yeah.”
    “More importantly, I looked at the discovery, including the murder book.”
    “So?” he asked, though he knew where I was going.
    “I saw your reports; you had doubts that Sheryl was guilty. I think that’s why you agreed to meet me this morning.”
    He seemed to run through his mind where to go with this, and then he asked, “You know that thing you attorneys have, where you take an oath to keep things in confidence, and you pretend you have integrity?”
    I smiled. “I’m vaguely familiar with it.”
    “Well, you better keep what I tell you in confidence, because if you don’t, you won’t get disbarred. You’ll get dis-balled.”
    I smiled an uncomfortable smile. “You have my word.”
    “Good. It’s true that I was never sure she did it; none of the pieces fit.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, for one, the victim was lying facedown, which means she had to lift his head from behind, reach around, and slice him.”
    “She couldn’t have done it from the side?”
    He shook his head. “Not in the direction it was done. I could explain that, but take my word for it. Also, the autopsy showed there were indentations on his back from the killer’s knees. But for her to have done it the way the evidence showed wouldn’t make sense anyway.”
    “Why is that?”
    “Couple of things. One, she risked waking him up by doing it that way, which would not have gone well for her. Two, if she was an enraged, battered wife, she would be far more likely to plunge the knife into his back a bunch of times. The way this was done was surgical; not a crime of passion at all. More like an execution.”
    “Anything else?”
    He nodded. “There was no blood on her. She would have had to be very, very careful to avoid the blood; it was everywhere. And why go to all that trouble if she was going to call 911 and confess?”
    “Maybe she’s squeamish.”
    “Squeamish people don’t slit throats. They put poison in coffee. And the victim had a gun in his pocket, a thirty-eight. It was unregistered.”
    “So?”
    “So he was a used-car salesman. Why did he need to carry an unregistered handgun? Plus he had a fake ID in his wallet, a professional job.”
    I wanted to sound like I knew what I was talking about, like I had some insight. But I was impressed at the way this was pouring out of Novack, with little prompting. Either he had amazing powers of recall, or he had been thinking about this over the years. “So?”
    “This guy wasn’t getting carded in bars; why would he have a fake ID?”
    “Did you do anything about this at the time?”
    His stare was the reason the phrase “If looks could kill” was invented. “You may find this hard to understand, but police have a tendency to use their time and resources to solve crimes that haven’t already been solved. It’s not a whodunit when somebody has already said, ‘I done it.’”
    “Why would she confess if she didn’t do it?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. I’ll ask her the next time we have a client conference.”
    I decided to ignore the insult and get to the real reason why I was there. “I need your help.”
    He just stared at me, waiting.
    “I don’t have any money, and Sheryl sure as hell doesn’t. So I can’t hire any investigators.”
    Still just stared, waiting.
    “So I was wondering if you could conduct at least some of the investigation you didn’t conduct back then,” I said, and then softened it with, “Not that you should have, I mean, back then.”
    “I’ll get back to you,” he said, and then walked back to his car. I had no idea what his intentions were, or what he was going to get back to me with.
    So I went to meet with my boss, which would probably be a lot like meeting with my parents.
    Probably worse.

 
    Jamie Wagner’s question had gotten under Novack’s