Page 77 of Stay Awake
“Why?”
“It’s been open season around here lately. We’re getting homicides every day. There’s no time to deal with unsolveds right now. Plus, it was Krause’s case. When he moved to Queens, it was given to another senior detective. He’s on leave right now, which is why you’re talking to me.”
“You were Krause’s partner?” Lavelle asked.
“Briefly. We didn’t see eye to eye.”
“I bet you didn’t,” Lavelle said. “Why the interest in this case?”
“Because I think we screwed it up,” said Regan, not mincing words.
“Why?”
He let Lavelle and Halliday flick through the pages of the files while he recounted the basic facts of the case and the investigation.
“It was a double murder,” he said. “Liv Reese’s boyfriend, Marco Reggio, and her best friend, Amy Decker, were killed. Liv Reese was the only survivor. She suffered a near-fatal knife wound. Amy Decker was a doctor finishing her internship at Bellevue. Originally from Wisconsin. She was killed a couple of weeks after her twenty-seventh birthday. Reggio was an ex-finance guy turned entrepreneur. Age thirty-four. They were having an affair behind Liv Reese’s back. In fact they were in bed together when they were killed.”
“Do you think Liv Reese killed them?” Halliday asked, looking up from the file.
“The way Krause saw it, Liv Reese caught them in bed together. Killed them both and then stabbed herself. Murder-suicide. She covered it up by calling nine-one-one and pretending she’d been attacked.”
“Why would she call nine-one-one if it was a murder-suicide? She didn’t need to worry about covering it up if she was dead,” Halliday pointed out.
“Exactly,” said Regan. “There are other inconsistencies, as you’ll see in the files. It didn’t help that her recollections of the murders were almost nonexistent.”
“She didn’t remember anything at all?”
“She barely had a pulse when the paramedics reached her. She was in a coma for almost two weeks. When she came out of it, she remembered almost nothing about the murder. She did have flashbacks months later, but her recollections weren’t consistent with the evidence.”
“How so?”
“For example, she had a flashback about shoes covered in blood, except there was no blood trail on the carpet.”
Halliday shuffled through the crime scene photos. She paused tolook at a ghoulish photo of Amy Decker and Marco Reggio. They were sitting in bed, naked, with a bloodied sheet at their waists. Both had been stabbed in their torsos, much the way that Ted Cole had been stabbed.
She handed the photo to Lavelle. He nodded. It was uncanny. A single stab wound. Same location. Similar MO to the Ted Cole killing.
“It sounds as if you didn’t agree with Krause that Reese did it?” Lavelle asked.
“Krause believed it was an open-shut case; jealous girlfriend stabs cheating boyfriend and his lover who happened to be her best friend. Jealousy and betrayal, prime motives for murder.”
“It is a convincing scenario,” said Lavelle.
“I agree. Amy Decker’s family thought so, too. But the anomalies bothered me. I carried out my own inquiries after hours. The more I learned, the less sure I was that Liv Reese had done it.”
“Why?” Halliday asked.
“I consulted with a top forensic expert on knife wounds. He told me there was no way the stab wound in Liv Reese’s torso was self-inflicted. She’s left-handed. The wound would have been made by someone who was right-handed due to the angle the blade penetrated the body.”
“Forensic experts can be wrong,” said Halliday.
“There were other leads that we never followed up on. Potential suspects.”
“Like who?”
“An artist whose exhibition Liv Reese reviewed. Have you ever heard of Zee?”
Halliday nodded. Lavelle shook his head.
