They congregated in Nickolas's office again at the beginning of the shift that night and tried to decide what to do. Esmerelda Lowenstein had now been dead for thirty-six hours, and they needed to form a full-on plan of attack before the media got into a frenzied froth that usually ended with them asking why the police weren't doing their job and finding a killer.

"We're better off than we were last night." Nickolas sat behind his desk and actually sounded hopeful. "Dennis Tyler and Zucker are both sending up red flags through all of us, so we have people we can start on tonight. Dennis Tyler is out on bond, but considering his nightly habits of the last eighteen years, I don't think it'll be hard to find him. So, what do we want to do tonight?"

"I'm going to go over the medical examiner's report." Kendall waved a manilla file in the air. "It landed on my desk right before I got here."

"Emilie and I want to bring Zucker in here for questioning. We think we may have better luck if he's not in his fortress of bad taste." Patrick pointed a finger at Emilie when Nickolas gave him a look. "Her phrase. Not mine."

Nickolas nodded. "Okay. We have a starting point for tonight. Good. Yell if anything new comes up that I need to be aware of. If you need me, I'll be shackled to my desk dealing with other cases."

They left Nickolas's office, Kendall veering towards his desk while Emilie and Patrick headed for the door. Patrick waited until they were getting in the car in the garage before he gave Emilie a thorough once-over and nodded. "You had sex."

Emilie didn't look up from buckling her seatbelt. "And?"

"And I saw the way Kendall grabbed onto you this morning. He was either hoping to lose his hand when you snapped it off, or whatever he was asking was important enough in his own mind to touch you." Patrick started the car.

"All you have is speculation."

"I have the teeth marks next to your ear." Patrick reached out and touched near the top of Emilie's neck, where there were, in fact, teeth marks. "You might want to wear your hair down tonight."

Emilie flipped down the visor mirror and inspected her neck. "Shit." She quickly unbraided her hair and adjusted it so it fell over her shoulder and hid the offending bite.

"You might want to warn Kendall about that next time."

"Shut up, Patrick."

He pulled out of the garage and headed west towards *Tallywackers*. "So you slept with him." Emilie remained silent as she watched traffic out of the window. "Are you going to do it again?" More silence. "Was it nice?"

Emilie turned away from the window and gave Patrick a look. "If you want excruciating detail, I can give it to you, and I will. If you don't, I suggest you stop asking questions."

Patrick grinned. "Fine. Fine. But, seriously, are you going to do it again? You're partying in a dark gray area, here."

"Dark gray?"

"You're not supposed to date the people you work directly with, but I'm going to assume this isn't dating because I've never known you to date. I'm not sure what the rules say about meaningless sex, but I bet it's frowned upon."

Emilie shrugged. "I get frowned upon a lot. I can handle this."

"I don't doubt that you can." Patrick pulled into the *Tallywackers* parking lot. "Just watch your back, okay?"

"I always do." Emilie got out of the car and immediately changed the subject to a topic that actually needed to be discussing. "Do you want me to go in and get him? Dennis Tyler is probably in his usual hole, and if he sees you escort Zucker out it'll totally blow any repoire you had with the guy."

"Dennis Tyler is going to be to busy trying to play grab ass to look up when we walk in or out. I'll be fine. If all else fails, I'll start a fight with you over how unfair it is that you're dragging such an upright citizen down to the police station for no reason."

Emilie snorted. "Great. Bad guy again."

"But you play it so well." Patrick held open the door to the club and waved Emilie in ahead of him. They flashed their badges at the bouncer who was checking IDs, an he took a step back, letting them through without question. They walked striaght to Zucker's office, and Emilie opened the door without knocking.

Zucker sat in his desk chair, pants around his ankles and a woman's head between his legs. Because of the music vibrating the building, neither Zucker nor his friend had heard them come in. Emilie slammed the door as hard as she could and watched with satisfaction as Zucker and the woman both jumped and looked towards them in shock. The satisfaction evaporated when Emilie and Patrick got a good look at the woman.

It was Stacy Carter.

*

The medical examiner's report was dry at best. At worst, it was making Kendall fall asleep. He shut the folder with a sigh and tapped his fingers on it.

~Esmerelda Tabitha Lowenstein.
Aged 23.
Dead from blunt force trauma to the back of the head at the base of the skull.~

Kendall had already known all that.

~Contusions on the upper insides of her thighs.~

He was betting that those contusions were consistent with a woman who spent eight hours a night jumping up and sliding down a large metal pole.

~Abrasion to the palm of her left hand.~

Kendall wasn't sure what that was, but he was betting it wasn't a defensive wound. He had made a note of it in his notebook anyway to check with the medical examiner on.

~Vaginal walls show signs of intercourse. No semen was detected. No sign of forced intercourse.~

Kendall had made a note about that as well. She'd had sex, but it hadn't been forced. He wondered if Esmerelda had somehow been convinced into sex with either Dennis Tyler or Zucker.

He stood up and grabbed his coat, tucking the file under his arm as he walked quickly to Nickolas's office. Nickolas was in with three other detectives and a woman that Kendall vaguely recognized as a recent aquisition to the DA's office. He turned in the other direction and went for the door, stopping briefly at Tara's desk. "Tell the Lieutenant I'm at the Medical Examiner's office and if anyone calls, I'm on my cell."

"Okay. Bring me back something sweet."

"I'll be back later."

"Like I said."

Kendall gave her a grin and left the squadroom. He decided against the hassle of getting a car out of the motor pool and headed instead for the subway. The Medical Examiner's office was centrally located in the city and was up three stops from the precinct.

A slightly harrid receptionist managed a hurried smile for Kendall. "Hey, Detective."

"Hi. Who do I talk to about the Esmerelda Lowenstein case?"

The receptionist paused in her file stacking and checked the computer. "Dr. Lindan. She should be somewhere in the morgue right now. I show she's about to do another autospy in a few minutes."

"Thanks." Kendall headed for the elevator that would take him down to the basement morgue. He knew Dr. Lindan a little better than he would have liked. She was the woman who had done Angelica's autopsy so that the death could be ruled a homicide. He hoped she wouldn't bring it up.

The morgue was quiet when he got down there, most of the movement restricted to doctors and orderlys walking by quietly in their booties, the swishing noises on the tile were soothing somehow. Dr. Lindan was easy to find. She was young, she short, and she had bright purple hair. It had been Big Bird Yellow the last time Kendall had seen her. She also had a photographic memory, which made her the medical examiner everyone wanted to have follow-up questions for. "Hey, Doc."

She looked up from where she was making her Y-incision. "Detective Layton, good to see you." She looked back down and finished her cut. "If you need me for another body, you're going to have to wait in line."

"I have a couple of questions on the Esmerelda Lowenstein autopsy."

"Do I need to pull her body to double-check my work?"

"No. I just have a couple of questions."

Dr. Lindan gestured with her scapel. "Go ahead."

Kendall gestured to the body. "Are you sure I'm not interrupting?"

"Nah. This guy will wait a few minutes. He's got no where to go." Dr. Lindan set her scapel down and reached for the rib cracker. "Mind if I work while we talk?"

"No." Kendall looked down at his notebook. "You made a note in the file that Esmerelda had contustions on her upper inner thighs."

"Yeah."

"Are they consistent with a woman who pole dances for a living?"

"Could have been."

"Could they have been from someone's hands digging into her legs?"

Dr. Lindan shook her head. "Bruises like would have been smaller and shaped a little further apart than the ones I found." She cracked the sternum open.

Kendall looked away as she grabbed the rib seperator. He could stand the sight of a lot of disgusting things, but he'd never been able to handle the rib seperator. "What about the abrasion on her left hand?"

"The palm burn?"

"Yeah."

Dr. Lindan shrugged. "It could have been caused by any number of things. Judging by the fact that she was hit on the back of the head, I'm going to guess it wasn't a defensive wound. It may have been a work-related accident, she may have slipped on the stage, she could have fallen on the sidewalk on the ice."

"Did you find anything in the wound?"

"Nope. It was a couple of days old. It'd been cleaned and taken care of."

Kendall made the note in his notebook. "Could she have sustained it in a fight?"

"Sure. But like I said, it could have been any number of things." Dr. Lindan looked up from her work. "I've got to start recording this. Are we finished?"

"Yeah. Thanks. Nice hair."

She nodded. "My pleasure. Oh, before I forget, I heard about your girlfriend's plea. It blows."

Kendall clenched his jaw hard. He thought he heard his teeth creak. "Yeah." He closed his notebook. "See you later, Doc."

"Bye."

*

Stacy Carter looked like a blonde deer in headlights. She sat back on her substanial stiletto heels and stared up at Emilie and Patrick in obvious shock. "What's going on?" Her voice was much less breathy than it had been in the hospital the day before.

Emilie gave her a withering look. "Glad to see you're feeling better, Stacy."

Zucker was captured in his chair. If he tried to get up, he would trip over both Stacy Carter and his pants. He tried to be menacing anyway. "What the *hell* are you doing here? This is a place of business. Haven't you heard of knocking?"

"Haven't you heard of proper employee/employer relations?" Patrick motioned Stacy Carter to stand up. "Pull your pants up, Mr. Zucker. We want to talk to you."

"I'm in the middle of something!" He looked frantically at Stacy Carter than back at Emilie and Patrick. "You have no right to barge in here!"

"Believe me, if I knew it was going to be hanging out, I would have knocked." Emilie caught hold of Stacy Carter's arm. "You're coming with us."

Stacy Carter's eyes, if possible, got wider. "Where?"

"We need you to make a formal statement of events yesterday morning."

"I did that yesterday!"

"No, yesterday you gave us a stoned statement of events. It's not the same."

Patrick walked around the desk and gestured to Zucker's pants, which were still around his ankles. "We need a statement from you as well."

"I talked to another detective last night."

"Did you miss my partner's explanation of a sworn statement? You have to come down to the police station and write it and sign it." Patrick blatantly looked down at Zucker's still open pants. "Stand up, zip it up, button it up, and get moving."

Zucker finally seemed to get blood back to his brain and stood up, straightening his pants and smoothing down his shirt after he tucked it in. "Fine. How long will it take?"

"As long as it takes." Patrick took a step back. "After you." He smiled as Zucker glared and walked past him.

Stacy Carter was already in the backseat of the car when Patrick got outside with Zucker. Emilie was standing beside the car smoking a cigarette. "We ready?"

Patrick opened the door for Zucker. "No talking." He closed the door and looked over at Emilie. "Ready when you are."