Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (13 page)

“Here’s the best part,” said Mallory. “If our perp was only cleaning up a loose end, there were easier ways to kill Albert Costello. But he can’t have another murder on that street, right? That won’t fit the pattern. So Costello gets tossed in the river. A staged suicide gets an obit in the papers, and then it’s forgotten. But now the old man’s gone viral. Over a hundred thousand hits on this video.”

Riker was liking this more and more. “If our guy’s Internet-savvy, his head’s exploding right now.” And if he was a computer illiterate? No problem. A televised media circus was guaranteed. Then their killer could watch his mistake expand into a broadcast-news miniseries with a catchy theme song.

—

JONAH HAD FINISHED
his breakfast of saltines, but with a spread of peanut butter this morning. His stomach was less queasy, and it was easier to keep his crackers down.

He sat on the couch across the room from the talk of traffic patterns on the television set. Now the volume was turned off, a cue for more conversation from the man seated beside him.

Early lessons of Aunt Angie: Sometimes people talked with only their faces and their eyes.
Be careful what you say to them with yours.

He knew what she had meant by that. Back when they had lived with his grandmother, emotion would rearrange his face. He had tried not to give away his fear. Granny
liked
that too much. Whenever he had been left alone with the old woman, when he felt her hands on him, he would smile and say her magic words,
Pray with me.
And the meanness would turn to pain-free rants of
Praise the Lord,
while he waited for the sound of bells to climb the stairs, a jingling that would say to him,
Hold on! I’m coming!
Aunt Angie was coming to carry him away.

But not this time.

Jonah knew his face was showing only curiosity, and it was genuine. He wondered what
this
monster’s magic words might be.

A click, a fume of smoke, a sigh, and Cigarette Man said, “I still can’t wrap my head around the idea of
seein’
nothin’. How do
you
know, anyway? How
could
you know what nothin’ looks like?”

Jonah found the man’s voice calm enough, reasonable. There was nothing to be afraid of yet. “Ask me anything about eyes. Yours. Mine. I got it wired.”

This was not quite true. There were still bridges to cross. In his preschool days, he had spent hours sitting on Aunt Angie’s lap while she plugged all his questions into a computer at the public library. His curiosity had continued after she left him, but now he had a computer that could talk and listen. Sometimes at night, alone in his room, he would ask for a link, and his electronic oracle would guide him to a room in the ether were other explorers gathered, those who wanted to know what blindness was like—or what it was like to see. Building bridges in the night.

“I know how
your
eyes work,” said Jonah. “They don’t
show
you anything. They’re a one-way road of data. They can only feed the brain raw information. Then the brain sends it to three different places and makes it into pictures of what’s right in front of you. If the brain gets scrambled, so does the picture. Every day, every time you open your eyes, you’re going on faith.”

“Naw, I know what I see.”

“You see in your dreams, right? You think that stuff’s real? No, it’s all lies from the same picture factory inside your head. It lies to you when you’re asleep. And when you’re awake?
Tell
me you never saw something that just couldn’t be there.”

Jonah could feel the silence. It was cold. It was bad. And this conversation was so over. He had said the wrong thing, but what?

Cigarette Man turned on the television’s volume in the middle of a
broadcaster’s sentence about a drowned man. Then the TV voice was killed. And there was a sound of rapid tapping. Typing? Yes, the man was working at a keyboard on his lap and mumbling obscenities in the long stream of a single breath. The tapping stopped. The laptop sang.

Jonah knew that old tune.
Row, row, row your
—

“Damn it!” ended a string of curse words, and the laptop was closed with a hard slap on the lid. Heavy feet stalked away. The panting from the low-lying mouth-breather was dying off as the dog also left the room, toenails clicking, trailing its master over a patch of uncarpeted floor.

After a slow count of ten, a distant door slammed, and Jonah rose from the couch with a plan to walk the walls and find another door, one that would let him out of this place. His hands outstretched, only five steps across the room, the dog’s toenails came clipping back to him across hard floor. Then only wheezing as the dog traveled over the rug.

The animal growled. The boy backed up to the sofa and sat down.

The pit bull was in front of him. Hot breath snuffing one of the sneakers. Slobbering on it. The jaws closed on it—and
squeezed.
Jonah stiffened. His crackers were creeping up his throat. He waited for the teeth to penetrate the leather, but now his foot was pulled straight out and shaken in the dog’s teeth. Frenzied, furious, the animal tugged at the sneaker and pulled it free. Jonah’s naked foot dangled in the air. He dared not move or draw a breath, though he followed the dog’s heavy breathing as it trailed off, but not far.

And now the chomp-down noise of the pit bull biting into the running shoe that stank of a foot.

Chewing it.

Loving
it.

—

RIKER LEANED
against the door frame and said to his boss, “We got good news—and
good
news.”

Mallory stepped into the lieutenant’s office to lay a sheet of paper on his desk. “That’s Albert Costello’s bloodwork.”

Suspicious, Jack Coffey stared at the report from the Medical Examiner’s Office. “We got the old man’s body back from Jersey? That was quick.” Too quick.

“No,” said Riker. “That’s from an old sample. After Albert got mugged, he spent a few days in a hospital. They took a vial of his blood in the emergency room.”

“But it was never tested.” Mallory moved toward the television set in the corner. “Dr. Slope had the blood sample picked up last night. It’s positive for the livestock drug—a match to the carjack victim in Jersey.”

“There was no date-rape drug in Albert’s system,” said Riker. “But we figure that’s ’cause the old guy was on the original hit list—before our perp screwed up and killed the nun. So Albert only got the injection to drop him. Nothin’ to wipe his memory.”

“And that’s why he had to die.” Mallory picked up the remote control for the muted TV set in the corner. It was tuned in to the city news channel. “We know the killer spent time with him yesterday. He’d want to know if Costello remembered anything about the botched hit.” She pulled out her gold pocket watch, a hand-me-down from three generations of police in the Markowitz line. In times of trouble with the boss, she used this prop to remind him that she was from a family of cop royalty. But today she actually seemed to have an interest in the time.

Jack Coffey knew she was planning some kind of a bomb for him, and now his eyes were trained on the TV screen. “Very nice,” he said. “In
theory.
So you got a tie to the carjack lady, but nothing connects to the body dump at Gracie Mansion. All four of ’em were drug-free.”

“Sure they were,” she said. “Three of them were kept alive long enough for the drugs to clear their systems. He didn’t need any drugs for the nun. She died a minute after she met him.” And now, in the
tone of
Oh, and by the way,
she added, “We need a warrant to search Gracie Mansion.”

Oh,
right.
“Not a shot in hell. I know what happened between you and the chief of
D
s. So I’m guessing Goddard’s behind a memo from the deputy commissioner.” Coffey tapped his laptop, the source of the memo. “An email was sent to Heller, and he copied it to me. It says the mansion’s interior is off-limits to the CSU.” And this had surprised the man in charge of the Crime Scene Unit—since he had never planned to send his CSI’s inside, not until he saw that
KEEP OUT
sign among his morning emails.

“That sounds like the chief’s work,” said Mallory, “but you won’t be butting heads with Goddard anymore.”

Riker chimed in with “That’s the
other
good news.”

On this cue, Mallory closed her pocket watch and turned on the volume for the television as an anchorman said, “—aired earlier this morning.”

Jack Coffey watched a recycled news clip of reporters outside One Police Plaza, the headquarters of the NYPD. On camera, a reporter spoke to his anchorman, saying that the chief of detectives was unavailable for comment on the Gracie Mansion murders. “Chief Goddard is currently on vacation in parts unknown . . . for an undetermined time.”

How dirty could the mayor be to run the chief of
D
s out of town? Well,
this
could open the door to Gracie Mansion. Just the smell of it would kill objections from higher-ups in the NYPD. “Okay, you’ll get that warrant.” Obtaining it would fall to the district attorney, an elected official, not a mayoral appointment—and the DA hated that little prick, Andrew Polk. “It might not happen today.” It would still require careful judge-trawling to snag a magistrate who would sign off on a search of the mayor’s residence.

—

IGNATIUS
—call-me-Iggy-or-lose-your-teeth—Conroy stubbed out his cigarette. He stared at the cell phone in his hand, willing it
not
to ring. But then it did, and he held it to his ear, saying, “Yeah!” He detected happy-shit notes in his partner’s voice, even before Gail Rawly got to the good part, the news that their mutual client had nothing but praise for Iggy’s work. The nun was “—an inspired choice.”

And Iggy relaxed his grip on the cell phone. Gail and the client had made no connection to the bizarre drowning party for Albert Costello, a man from the neighborhood of the nun’s murder.

Even better, the client had promised Gail another payday, a big one—given certain conditions. “The boy?” Iggy covered the phone with his hand.
Steady
. He lifted it to his ear, and his voice was icy when he said, “Yeah, the kid’s still alive. . . . Yeah, yeah. . . . How many days? . . . Okay, tell him it’s doable.” He was going to get paid for cleaning up his own mess.

Iggy walked back to the living room and found the boy on the sofa, eyes wide. Scared. Shaking. And the dog was chomping on one of the kid’s sneakers.

Damn mutt
. “Gimme that!”

The pit bull opened its jaws to drop the new chew toy on the rug. Now the old dog stared at its front paws, unwilling to meet Iggy’s eyes, knowing it had done wrong. Iggy picked up the sneaker, wet with saliva. He crossed the room to grab the boy’s right hand and jerk him out of his little trance of shock. “What did I
tell
you?” He slammed the sneaker into the boy’s palm. “Didn’t I tell you not to
move
if I wasn’t around?”

This talky kid was flat out of words.

“You know what a pit bull can do to you?
Do
you? Maybe next time it’ll go for your throat. Maybe your nose, or you lose an ear.” And now Iggy was done with life lessons on blood and guts. “Lunchtime, kid. Enough with the crackers. Barbecued burgers. How’s that sound?”

When he had led the boy out the back door to the patio, Iggy handed him today’s newspaper with front-page photos of the nun and her nephew. “Just hold that for a sec, okay?” Iggy knelt down so the camera-phone image would give up no other background than blue sky.

Click.
The picture was taken, proof for the client that Jonah Quill was still alive. And—
click
—it was sent off to Iggy’s partner.

Even the photo of a dead nun had worked as proof of life—with her eyes open and that damn smile, a first in his career—dead meat that could smile at him.

These pictures he took, they had nothing to do with kidnap for ransom—so said his partner, who was too smart to ever touch a job like that. The photos only guaranteed a space of days between kills. And Gail Rawly had sworn that this murder scheme could never net a ransom payday for the client.

If that was true—what was the client’s game?

Well, he had to be lousy with cash to pay for these hits, and rich dudes lived on different planets. Yeah, Gail was right. Who would pay good money to ransom strangers? The client had not picked out the targets. He had only named streets in four different neighborhoods, and that would rule out an insurance scam, too. All the other contract kills in Iggy’s career could be put down to love, hate or greed.

But not this one—and that worried him.

His profession dated back to Shakespeare’s time, and Iggy believed this because he had read it on the Internet. Murder for hire was old, but the element of random kills—
that
was new.

Iggy distrusted all things new and different.

—

“
BAD NEWS
.”

Samuel Tucker had just concluded a phone conversation with a
former college classmate, a fund of
gorgeous
information from the District Attorney’s Office. He spoke to the back of his employer’s Armani suit. “The Crime Scene Unit’s coming back.” Andrew Polk stood before the library window overlooking the river and the freshly mowed front lawn. Gone was every sign that four corpses had ever matted down the grass.

The mayor’s voice had only a trace of annoyance as he asked, “When?”

“Tomorrow. But this time, they have a search warrant. They want a look around
inside
the mansion
.
” The aide said this to the air. The mayor had fled the room.

Tuck found his boss in the kitchen, standing before the open door of the refrigerator. No doubt His Honor had noticed that the ice cream was gone—and so were the four small parcels that had previously been in the freezer compartment, hidden beneath and behind other items that now lay scattered on the floor at his feet. The refrigerator door swung shut, and its shiny chrome was a funhouse mirror that enlarged Mayor Polk’s gaping mouth to a wide screaming hole.