“DeSoto admitted killing Bex Hassett?”

“Don’t get ahead of me, Coop.” Mike squinted at the words as though he were trying to decipher them. “Says he knew her from the park. She’d been hanging out with his homeboys for a couple of weeks. Not involved with any of them. But that night Reuben came on to her-tried to have sex with her. She’d been drinking. But beer, he says-only beer.”

“No mention of brandy? Wasn’t her DNA on the Courvoisier bottle?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t sound like that beverage was within Reuben’s budget. Says he tried to hook up with her but she refused. Not drunk at all-just a few pops of brew. Says he actually got on top of her and tried to penetrate.” Mike looked up at me as he asked, “Wouldn’t that have left some kind of physical evidence?”

“It should have. Unless she was so intoxicated that she wasn’t able to offer any resistance. Her muscles would have been so relaxed you’d have no internal injury either. But you’d expect to find some of his pubic hair on her body or clothing, even if he didn’t complete the act. There really should have been some kind of trace evidence if what he admitted is true.”

“Yeah, well, either Reuben was hallucinating or the ME needs a refresher course.”

“What’s wrong?”

Mike slapped the folder closed and picked up the second one that I had left on the desk. “Reuben-the guy who’s been the suspect for more than ten years while this case was sitting on a shelf collecting dust? He claims he killed Bex Hassett all right. Reuben says he choked her to death with a ribbon that he pulled out of her hair when she started to scream.”

“But the pictures of her neck-?”

“You can tell from that lousy Polaroid what those marks are on her throat? There’s no mention of any ribbon in the crime scene report and the autopsy doesn’t say a thing about any kind of ligature.”

I was trying to get us on our way. “So?”

“So you shouldn’t have stopped reading the file halfway through. Listen to this. Reuben had himself an abogado because of a burglary case he had pending. He skips back to the DR and the lawyer writes a letter to the commish, claiming the kid’s confession was coerced. That’s why the dick probably stopped investigating.”

“Why?”

“The lawyer also made a complaint to the CCRB. It was probably easier for the detective to just let it go rather than cloud his pension hearing with litigation over the fact that maybe he beat the crap out of Reuben and wound up with a phony confession,” Mike said, pacing the short room back and forth, worked up by the prospect of bad policing in the still-unsolved murder case.

The Civilian Complaint Review Board could have put intense pressure on the department if there was evidence that an officer had used physical force to get an admission.

“So you don’t like Reuben as the killer?”

“You’ve got the day off from court tomorrow,” Mike said. “I’ll be at the cemetery with Brendan Quillian. Call the morgue and have them pull everything on the Hassett autopsy. Get your hands on the physical evidence, if they can find it. This report says there was a speck of blood on the top of the zipper of Bex’s sweater.”

“Could be hers, don’t you think?”

“She didn’t bleed, according to the autopsy. The report says Bex had abrasions, not lacerations.”

“But they did DNA,” I said.

“Not on that bit of blood. There wasn’t enough of it for analysis at the time. Back then, a bloodstain had to be the size of a quarter for the lab to work it up. Maybe the perp nicked his finger on a rough edge of the metal.”

Bex Hassett’s death had occurred when the methodology of DNA had been more primitive, requiring far larger samples of fluid. In the last several years, the shift in technique to STRs-short tandem repeats-meant that the smallest droplets of blood could now be amplified, copying the unique genetic profile until there was enough of it to be mapped and identified.

“I promise you when the trial is over, I’ll jump-start this one for you,” I said. “Save some of your energy for the witness stand.”

I opened the door and turned the light switch off and on to get Mike’s attention.

“It doesn’t interest you that the Quillians make a guest appearance in the case file after all?” he asked. “I knew I could get those eyebrows of yours up a few inches.”

“What’d I miss? Trish told us the cops came to the house. She and Bex were great friends.”

“Yeah, but the fact is, the reason the police knocked on the door is that they were looking for Brendan.”

Mike spread out some papers on the desk and started tapping his fingers as he examined them.

“Why? What have you got?”

“Phone records. Over here are three months of them from Bex Hassett’s house, right through the time she was killed. Every now and then, looks like someone was placing calls to Brendan Quillian’s cell phone. Long conversations-four or five minutes each.”

I walked over to stand beside Mike. I could see that certain numbers had been circled in red ink.

He read to me from the detective’s report. “Says Mrs. Hassett and her sons deny making any calls. Outgoing volume seems to be heaviest in the month before Bex began spending her nights in the park. No way to track her comings and goings, which days she’d actually been in and out of the house.”

“Is there an interview with Brendan?” I asked with renewed interest in the old case.

“Where’s your sense of romance, Coop? Wouldn’t you figure Brendan was on a honeymoon somewhere? Bex was murdered a week after he got married,” he said, pursing his lips. “Forgot about that myself. That’s why the cops went to the house, hoping to talk to him because of the phone activity. I was beginning to lick my chops.”

“How about Duke? Didn’t they question him?”

Mike brushed his hair off his forehead and read on. “Mrs. Quillian was interviewed. Talked to two of her other sons at the house and spoke with Trish, too. Brendan was out of the country and his mother didn’t know where he was or how to reach him. Double-check that honeymoon story with Amanda’s family, will you, blondie? And Duke Quillian was a patient at Sloan-Kettering. He was being treated for cancer. The detective checked that out. Has a phone number at the hospital, too.”

“Hey, it was a long shot anyway,” I said.

“Maybe not as long as you think. You got a date tonight? You didn’t even look at this set of phone records.” Mike was leaning against the desktop, shoving another page of numbers under my nose. “The detective was obviously interested in Brendan-interested enough to subpoena his cell phone information.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“The last phone call made from Brendan Quillian’s cell phone the day before his wedding. It’s to the Hassetts’ phone number. Mrs. Hassett told the detective Brendan had called there looking for her daughter, Bex.”

“I know it’s an old case. I wouldn’t be begging you for help if I could walk into the morgue and chat up the guy who did the autopsy,” I said at eight fifteen on Monday morning to Jerry Genco, the forensic pathologist who had testified for me last week. I had called him from my desk. “Your Bronx office handled it.”

“The doc who performed the postmortem is dead,” he said. “Natural causes. He was an old-timer back then. No way you can talk to him, Alex.”

“I’m not as interested in him as I am in the homicide victim. There are some anomalies in the investigative file, and Mike Chapman thinks it would be useful to look at the physical evidence again. He doesn’t think the police work was kosher-doesn’t like the suspect they were looking at. Wants to check the original ME’s notes and photos-they’re not in the detective’s records.”

“You two are killing me. Agita, that’s going to be the cause of death. Agita by prosecutorial pressure to the gut. What’s Mike after?”