Papa Jack Chapter 74

Esposito points across the bullpen as Captain Montgomery returns from his coffee break. "He's had his cup of joe. You gonna go talk to him?"

"I thought we were both going. Partners to the end and all that," Ryan responds. "Besides, you're the one familiar with Newsome and Captain Jackson. I've never even been to the 54th. After all the life or death situations you told me you dealt with in Afghanistan, talking to Montgomery about getting some help from his buddy Jackson should be a piece of cake for you."

"I'd rather have a doughnut," Esposito retorts. "But let's go."

Montgomery stares over his desk at the two detectives entering his office. "I hope you're here to report some progress on the Donnelly murder."

"Not exactly, Sir," Ryan admits. "But we might be able to make some if you help us out." He pokes his elbow in Esposito's side.

"Um, we believe that the Carlton Snodgrass homicide, a case Detective Newsome at the 54th is working on, might be related, Captain," Esposito continues. "But Detective Newsome can be a little tight with his information. We were wondering if…."

"You could ask Captain Jackson to give him a nudge," Ryan interjects.

"And why do you two think Newsome's case has anything to do with the Donnelly murder?" Montgomery questions.

"The initials of the victim, Sir," Ryan replies. "They correspond to a source Donnelly mentioned having."

"Mentioned to whom?" Montgomery presses.

Ryan draws in a breath. "Castle."

"We went to check in on Beckett," Esposito hurriedly explains. "Castle was there."

"And the subject just popped up," Ryan finishes.

"The subject just popped up," Montgomery repeats. "Right. And I don't suppose you two have any better leads to follow."

"No, Sir," Ryan confesses.

Montgomery palms his rapidly receding hairline. "I got another call from 1PP this morning. They want more action on this case. So, if the only way we'll get anything is if you check out this Snodgrass, I'll talk to Jackson about Newsome. Still, if you two don't want to be on report review for the next six weeks, you'd better show me some progress. Am I making myself clear?"

"Yes, Sir!" the partners chorus.

"Then go! Get out of here!" Montgomery orders.

"Yes, Sir!" The detectives trot for the door.

In the conference room at the 54th, Detective Everett Newsome tosses files in front of Ryan and Esposito. "Carlton Snodgrass was an accountant at Lofner and Peters, a large importing company specializing in home goods. Snodgrass was unmarried and was not known to have a girlfriend or a boyfriend. He lived alone and was obsessed with mathematical puzzles. A couple of his co-workers suspected he might have OCD or mild autism, but he was never formally diagnosed. He mostly kept to himself, but if he discovered anything he considered to be an error, even if it had little or no impact on the books, he reported it to a supervisor. He got agitated if any irregularities he found weren't corrected. That behavior didn't make him popular with his co-workers.

"Snodgrass' body was discovered by a maintenance worker who had entered the apartment to fix a dripping faucet Snodgrass had complained about. According to the coroner, Snodgrass had been killed in the early evening the night before. That would have been not long after he returned from work. The window leading from the kitchen to the fire escape had been forced open, apparently by the killer. Cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. The weapon was a heavy iron skillet apparently belonging to Snodgrass. His prints were on it, and it was the only pan in the apartment. The killer apparently grabbed it as an untraceable weapon of opportunity. The only identifiable prints in the apartment were from the maintenance worker and Snodgrass himself. Chances are the killer wore gloves. No other identifiable DNA, either.

"I investigated any co-workers Snodgrass had been seen to argue with. They all had alibis for the TOD. Snodgrass had a laptop computer in his apartment, but our tech guy hasn't been able to get anything off of it. It's password-protected and has some form of encryption I don't understand – something about random numbers.

"I also checked Snodgrass' Metro card. Almost everything on it was consistent with commuting back and forth to work. Still, he took several trips to the Pelham Parkway Station, but we haven't found anyone in the area he might have visited. Both his parents are deceased, and he had no siblings. As far as his neighbors or anyone who worked with him could tell us, he had no friends either. So, if you guys think you can find anything pointing to the killer, good luck."

"Did you find any evidence that Snodgrass ever met with Eric Donnelly?" Ryan asks.

"Not Eric Donnelly or anyone else he didn't work with," Newsome declares. "The man was no social butterfly. From what was in his apartment, he spent his time away from work on his computer or doing puzzles. He had shelves of puzzle books and boxes of puzzles. He also had a weird stuffed lizard. But he didn't have any of Donnelly's books. There was no sign he'd ever heard of him."

"But you don't know who Snodgrass might have met near Pelham Parkway," Esposito points out.

"That's right," Newsome concedes. "I don't."

"Damn!" Esposito exclaims, sliding behind the wheel of the unit he and Ryan share. "I was hoping that Newsome got lazy and missed something. But aside from whatever Snodgrass was doing up at Pelham Parkway, Newsome covered everything."

"But if Snodgrass was meeting someone, that would have been a good place to do it," Ryan figures. "When I was in school, taking the subway up there was great for a cheap date. There's the park, the Botanical Gardens – ooh, and the Bronx Zoo. Maybe Snodgrass liked the zoo. Newsome said he had a stuffed lizard. Maybe he got it there."

"But what would any of that have to do with Donnelly?" Esposito wonders.

"Castle said Donnelly implied he had a whistleblower," Ryan recalls. "Snodgrass worked for an importer, the kind that would bring in fancy knives. And Snodgrass loved puzzles. He was obsessed with mathematical ones. Maybe one of the puzzles he solved was how Lofner and Peters was covering up the importation of counterfeit knives. He was enough of a computer guy to encrypt his laptop. He could have run a search for someone to talk to about the counterfeiting and found Eric Donnelly. They could have met at the zoo and talked while they stared at the animals. No one would have been the wiser."

"No one except the murderer," Esposito says. "So, who could have known that Snodgrass was talking to Donnelly?"

"It had to have been someone from Lofner and Peters," Ryan asserts. "Whoever it was would have figured out that Snodgrass would detect the coverup. Maybe the murderer followed Snodgrass or had him tailed. Then the killer saw him talking to Donnelly. Keeping the secret meant taking out both of them. So the murderer kills Snodgrass, then gets to know Donnelly well enough to be let into his apartment, and kills him, too. That the Chef's Edge knife would point to other suspects would be a bonus."

"Which still takes us back to who got to know Donnelly well enough to kill him," Esposito says.

"Yeah," Ryan agrees, "but now we have a new suspect pool, and it can't be very big. Our killer has to work for Lofner and Peters and have been able to figure out what Snodgrass was doing."

A grin breaks out on Esposito's face. "And maybe looks a little like Lorna Charles and likes to wear running clothes."

"Yeah, Ryan agrees, "that would narrow it down a lot."