Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (12 page)

Gail smiled at her. “Soon.” He held up one finger to say,
Daddy has just one more thing to do.
And it might be best if she did not listen in while he discussed a little boy’s murder with Iggy.

“No!” The princess would not be put off. She stamped her little foot. She had
spoken.

—

IGGY CONROY
cast a bulky shadow by lamplight as he lowered the boy’s limp body to an armchair. The drug should have worn off by now. This kid ought to be wide awake. The man ran a hand over the stubble of his shaved head. Aw, he must have gotten the dose wrong again. He lifted one shoulder in a hell-with-it shrug.

For the first three hits, the ones kept alive for a while, it had been a simple storage problem. At the client’s request, they had gone three days without food or water, and Iggy had no problem with details like that. They were not his pets.

He called them meat.

And he never talked to the meat. He had no need to know all its little hopes and dreams. But this kid was a wild card with no instructions. Iggy watched the boy’s shallow breathing. Would it live or die?

The boy’s head lifted. Fingers curled, and one blue-jeaned leg stretched out. The eyes were opening. What for? Why open its eyes if it really
was
blind?

—

“
YOU LOOK JUST LIKE HER
,” said the man with cigarette breath.

Jonah had awakened in a different room. Not a basement. No dampness here, no smell of dank walls or mildew. Exploring fingers rounded the thick arms of an upholstered chair. One of his sneakers was gone,
and there was carpet under the one bare foot. A wave of nausea came on with stomach cramps as the fog in his brain slowly cleared—and then she was dead again. Aunt Angie died every time he opened his eyes.

“Hear me, kid? I said you look just like the nun.” The voice was raised, but not at the level of speaking to the hard of hearing. Jonah knew that pitch. It was like the man was talking on the telephone to someone in another place—where all the blind people lived.

You killed her, you freak!

Jonah, don’t say that out loud. Don’t take him on.
That’s what Aunt Angie would say. He could not believe that she would never talk to him again. It was too hard on him. And so he played her voice in his head, off and on like a radio—until the touch memory of her skin, so cold in death, just skittered away.

And now it was time for a little terror, a sound that did not belong to Cigarette Man. It was low to the ground and nearby. Jonah’s fingers dug into the padded arms of the chair, and he turned his face down toward the mouth-breather, the wheezer on the floor. “What kind of dog is it?”

“Pit bull. How’d you know it was there?”

The subtle heat of a hand waved in front of Jonah’s face, grazing his nose. “I heard the breathing. . . . I know that dog smell.”

Dogs like that—they can go off on you for no reason.
Aunt Angie had said this before, when he was small, when she was teaching him to navigate the sidewalk with a cane. She had never wanted him to be afraid of the street, only wary of what he reached out to touch with his bite-size fingers.

“As long as I’m around,” said Cigarette Man, “the dog won’t hurt you. And if I’m not here? Don’t move. That’s important, kid. It won’t attack if you don’t move . . . if you’re real quiet.”

The dog was an
it?
Most people’s pets were
him
s or
her
s. Cold metal was pressed into Jonah’s hand. Round. A can. A tickle of carbonation in his fingers.

“It’s okay, kid. No knockout drug this time. Just soda.” He put something else on the palm of the other hand. “And crackers. Little bites, okay? Your stomach’s been empty for days. You wolf ’em down, it’ll make you sick.”

Jonah traced the tiny bumps of crystals on the crackers, and he said, “Saltines.”

“You see a lot for a blind kid. . . . What’s it like? Is it all black . . . like when you turn out the lights?”

“I was
born
blind. I’ve got no way to know what black looks like.” Aunt Angie would tell him to tone down the anger, and he tried. And he failed. Hatred ate everything inside of him. He loved her so much—and this freak
killed
her!

“Not a dumb question, kid. You gotta see somethin.’ Even nothin’ looks like somethin.’”

This might top the list of stupid things asked about his blindness. What did nothing look like? “I can help you with that,” said Jonah. “Close your eyes.”
You freak!

“Okay, they’re shut tight.”

“So tell me . . . what can you see . . . out of your
asshole?”

Right about now, Aunt Angie should scream,
Shut up! Don’t make him mad!
But there was no anger to the man when he said, “That’s a good one, kid.” The voice had moved to a different place in the room. Jonah heard a click of the cigarette lighter, and now a familiar static.

“Do blind people—”

“—watch TV? Yeah,” said Jonah, his mouth crammed full of crackers, “all the time.”

—

SHE WATCHED LIEUTENANT COFFEY
enter the lunchroom to wolf down a late meal from a take-out carton. He ate fast, but a lot could be accomplished in fifteen minutes or so.

Mallory turned off the desk lamp in his office and opened the blinds by a crack so she would see him coming. When his laptop had been powered up, the detective entered the password, the one he believed would keep her out of his business. There were no new entries since she had last hacked in from her own computer.

She already had the stats for the lieutenant’s cell phone and landline. The chief of detectives had not yet called to complain about her insubordination. No contact at all. Though there were other communications to interest her, some of them handwritten notes to read by the glow of the laptop screen. The desk phone rang. The chief’s name and number appeared on a lighted bar of text. She picked up the receiver—and waited—and finally the caller said, “Jack?”

“Can I take a message?”

“Mallory.”
Goddard’s tone conveyed more than disappointment. He did not want to talk to
her
—
anyone
but her.

Before she could lose him to a hang up, she said, “The mayor lied about the ransom demands.”

“Forget that! It’s a dead end.
Officially
a dead end. Got that, kid? So there won’t be any more visits to Gracie Mansion.”

With no emotion, no inflection, she said, “I know why the killer cut out the hearts. . . . They’re not trophies.” And by the silence, she could tell that the chief had no ideas of his own or he would have shouted her down. He was waiting on her next words.

She
let
him wait, let him
hang.

Seconds ticked by. Close to a minute. The phone went dead, but not with the sound of his usual slam-down to end all his dealings with underlings. No, this call ended with the quiet click of a receiver gently lowered to its cradle, and she could read much into that.

Apparently, the chief had worked it out.

Did it scare him much? Oh,
yes.

 
  
6

Riker remembered when this small space had been occupied by a Xerox machine, a supply cabinet, and one old glitch-ridden desktop computer that had been abandoned here after its last breakdown. Over years of invasion, this place had been packed with technology, most of it alien.

Now it was the geek room. One large monitor had pride of place on the back wall, and three small ones lined a console of switches, slots and a keyboard. The computer screens were dark, but there
was
light; tiny points of it winked and blinked from the walls of stacked electronic gadgets that Riker could not name. It was all he could do to keep up with new models of laptops and cell phones. He seldom entered this room alone, and this morning, working on only four hours of sleep, he could not lose the idea that the machines were watching him, talking about him.

This was Mallory’s domain, hers even when she had been much shorter, when he was still allowed to call her Kathy and sometimes You Brat, Punk Kid and other terms of endearment for a child. This had been her playpen in the after-school hours until Lou Markowitz’s workday ended and he drove his foster child home to Brooklyn. The old man had thought it a bad idea to let his little darling wander among
innocent people on the sidewalks of Manhattan—so many unprotected purses and pockets. One day, while Lou was on midget duty—cop lingo for watching the kid—he had thrown Kathy in here with a challenge to get the old crap computer back in working order. The city would give him no money for a good one, but the squad’s slush fund might cover a few new parts.

This little room had expanded into a universe of potential for a child with a natural bent for computers and online robbery. According to her foster father, the baby bandit had been almost giddy that day. So appealing was the idea of stealing pricey toys from the police, brand-new computers, a gang of them, via bogus electronic purchase orders. She had freely given all her loot to Lou—or Hey Cop, as she had called him then—with no bills to pay, not on hacker’s goods.
Surprise!
And so a little girl had hung the old man’s pension out in the breeze for a few nervous years of awaiting a summons from Internal Affairs.

Riker had first heard of the geek room when Kathy was in elementary school. He had been a captain then and on his way to a falling-down drunk who would soon fall from grace and rank. He had come to Special Crimes as a visitor on that day, kicking back, feet up on his best friend’s desk, just talking shop, when a detective had come in with a message for the squad’s commander. “Lou? The kid wants to see you . . . in her
office.”
And Lou Markowitz had laughed until tears squirted from his eyes.

Where was the grown-up Mallory this morning?

Riker read a line of digital numbers on one of her machines that gave him the time to the millisecond, and it was now five past nine. It was rare for the punctuality fanatic to be late by so much as a minute, and this put him on guard. And then he saw her. If not for her reflection in the dark computer screen, he would never have known she was coming up behind him to stop his heart with one hand, one poke of a finger or a word.

Not gonna jump
this
time.
Without turning his head, he asked, “Whatcha got?”

“I found Albert Costello,” said Mallory.

“Where?”

“Don’t tell him.” Lieutenant Coffey’s voice came from the doorway. “Don’t ruin it. He’s gotta
see
it.” Riker spun the chair around to face the boss, who now pointed to a computer, saying, “She found him in there.”

—

TWO MORE DETECTIVES
had entered the geek room to stand, shoulders squeezed to shoulders, behind Mallory’s chair with Lieutenant Coffey and Riker.

“That’s Albert Costello in the Hudson River,” she said, as the image of a floating body filled the wide-screen computer monitor.

“He was pulled out by three kids on a speedboat,” said Jack Coffey, for the benefit of the other men, who had not yet seen this feed. “Driving drunk out of their minds. One of them was so smashed he lowered the anchor. Then, the other two boys noticed it was slowing down the boat. So . . . up comes the anchor, and up comes Albert.”

The video had not picked up any conversation from the high-school boys in the boat, but there
was
a sound track. As the detectives watched the corpse being pulled aboard like a great floppy fish, they listened to the a cappella lyrics of an old children’s song sung in rounds,
Row, Row, Row Your Boat.
Albert’s body was seated at the back, and, with help from his new friends, the dead man waved to the viewers.

“No rigor yet,” said Detective Gonzales.

“That comes later,” said Jack Coffey, “after the kids pose him at the other end of the boat. Albert was in full rigor when the ME’s crew got to the pier. They had to pry the old man loose. He had a death grip on the steering wheel and a beer bottle in the other hand . . . while smoking a cigarette . . . while
dead.”

“Well, that’s the way
I
wanna go out,” said Riker.

All the while, the voices on the sound track sang in the sweet, pure notes of young tenors, each line of lyrics riding over the last and the next, blending in perfect three-part harmony, the end of the song forever chasing its beginning.

“I bet their parents sobered ’em up real fast,” said Gonzales. “No way those little punks could make that sound track three sheets to the wind.”

All through the video, the boys sang,
“Row, row, row your boat—”

They took turns posing for cell-phone pictures, mementos of each one of them with arms wrapped round their good buddy, the drowned man.

“
—
gently down the stream—”

One boy put a cigarette in Albert’s mouth, and then the youngster thoughtfully relit it when the corpse lacked sufficient breath to keep the butt burning.

“—merrily, merrily, merrily merrily—”

Another boy forced the old man’s lips into a surprisingly lifelike grin. Finally, Albert Costello looked like he was enjoying the party, and they propped him up behind the wheel.

“
—
Life is but a dream.”

Now these ancient lyrics were followed by new and obscene improvisations that praised the stamina of the old man’s genitalia and his ability to hold his liquor despite the infirmity of death.

“Ya know?” said Riker. “They don’t sing bad.”

“There’s a reason for that,” said Mallory. “These kids hooked up at their local church when they were ten-year-olds.”

“Choirboys?”

“Yeah,” said Lieutenant Coffey. “Ya gotta love it.”

And Riker did.
Good for you, Albert
. Not a bad sendoff for a lonely old man.