Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (17 page)

“I interviewed the mother,” said Mallory. “When Angie was a kid, there was no after-school job. DuPont lied about that, too. So this kid’s hustling johns for close to seven years. Her first arrest was a freebie, that much was true. An idiot cop just handed her over to the priest. She wasn’t much older in that mug shot—the
only
arrest on record. She never gets jailed again? Any idea of the odds on that? That’s how I
know
Angie had a steady customer. Half her brother’s college tuition came from a church scholarship. Angie paid the rest in cash. Then there’s the free day care for the nephew. Not a bad haul for a kid hooker.”

“So the steady customer could only be Father DuPont?” Yes, he could see that she was wedded to this theory. Unlike sainted clergy and hookers with golden hearts, a child-molesting priest was one cliché she was willing to believe in, and never would Mallory own a blind spot—her bias against the church. “All right.” He raised both hands in mock surrender. “Let’s say Father DuPont left out the part about ravaging a little girl.”

Oh, Mallory
liked
that.

“Right,” she said. “But if he really wanted sympathy for a hooker, he would’ve thrown that in. It’s not like a dead nun could file a police complaint.”

Excellent reasoning. But now for the caveat that would anger her again. “Would you ever believe he’d confess to child molestation . . . unless he was hiding something worse . . . like a link to her murder and a kidnapped boy? That priest might be a better liar than you think.”

Better than
she
was?

No, that was definitely unacceptable. He could see that in the slight jut of her jaw, but before she could speak, Charles said, “DuPont’s not shielding anyone, least of all himself.
Logic,
Mallory. Take his whole sorry story, truth
and
lies. This is his game—every word out of his mouth to one purpose. He can’t have you believing Angie was a trashy fit to everyone’s idea of a prostitute . . . even if she was. He needs you to be on
her
side . . . and the boy’s. So he made a false confession of bad acts—because he’s a man of deep conscience.”

Mallory stared at Charles, as if she had just found him guilty of all the priest’s supposed crimes. “You
like
DuPont. . . . I have to wonder why.”

Oh, fine.
Now
he
was suspect in a conspiracy to thwart her. Did this surprise him? Well, no. It took suspicion on the grand scale, a truly gifted paranoid, to make such a leap. She was all that and more—so cold when she rose from the table and walked away, the back of her accusing him.

Of what?

—

CHARLES BUTLER
punched an inoffensive down pillow.

The hour was late, but his eyes were wide open, and a book lay on the far side of the room where he had flung it in a bibliophile’s act of heresy—and frustration.

He turned out the light.

Over the course of a lie-awake night, he mangled his bedsheets and gave more thought to all the evidence Mallory had laid out for him. On balance, he considered his own counterpoints, which contained no such factual basis, only supposition and poker tells. And then, upon reconsidering paranoia as an aspect of her final words, he sat bolt upright in bed.

She
knew!

Mallory had worked it out, but how?

Before setting him up for her parting shot, there must have been a point when she suspected him of—

No, wait.

Perhaps he was only being paranoid.

—

THE MOON WAS RIDING HIGH
over Iggy Conroy’s house. Ma’s old knee-high troll crouched in its place on the front lawn. It was not like other people’s garden gnomes. The eyes were dark sockets, the mouth set in a snarl, and its pose was a forever-waiting game, waiting for the thing to spring at him, to
get
him. Only one garden shop sold them on special order from a twisted artist, who must believe that there was a market for tense, ugly lawn decorations.

Armed with a sledgehammer, Iggy came up behind the little stone man and—
Bang!
—the head went rolling off to his left.
Bang!
The torso broke into pieces, dropping an arm here, an arm there. Lowering his hammer and holding the handle like a golf club, he made a mighty swing, and a crooked leg broke in two, half of it flying across the grass. He should have done this years ago, after Ma was dead and long past missing the scary little dude with the pointed ears.

Iggy laid himself down on the dew-wet lawn. No sooner had he closed his eyes than he felt a great weight on his chest. Hard to breathe. His ribs hurt so bad
.

The troll was on top of him, whole again, straddling him, squeezing his sides with stone thighs. But Iggy could not lift his hands to fend it off; he had gone to stone himself. He could only watch. Ribs aching, close to breaking. Heart beating wild. Sipping air, all that he could get, then nothing, not a breath. Panic time! And then—

Everything changed.

He was back in his bed. The pain was gone.
Pain
in a damn
dream!
Gone was the garden gnome. Only a nightmare. That little stone freak was still out there on the front lawn, still all of a piece and crouching in the dark.

Iggy rose from the mattress and walked through the rooms of his house, turning on all the lights.

 
  
9

The shingled red roof sloped down to eaves of floral lacework. Tulips were carved into the window shutters and the front door. And the air was thick with the scent of roses. Iggy Conroy’s house of flowers was neither too big nor too small, but just right, as Ma used to say, parroting
Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Most of her old sayings had come from scarier fairy tales, and the land was decorated with small statues of creatures from his childhood nightmares. They crouched behind bushes and trees, lying in wait for bad children, so said Ma.

He had no firm count on the number of garden gnomes she had acquired. All these years later, he could still be surprised to find one hiding in the foliage. They looked alike, evil little bastards with nasty mouths, and they were widely spaced around the property to create the illusion that there was only one ugly stone man who moved about on his own. And so, this pale-yellow stucco house would have fit well in the neighborhood of the Brothers Grimm.

A long driveway wound through encroaching woodland, and it was a fight to keep the creep of foliage from reclaiming that dirt road. Every summer, Iggy fought back with a machete, hacking off new growth that would scratch the paint on his van if he allowed it
to live. Most people in the area hired out this work, but he liked his privacy.

Like mother, like son.

Even before the move to the country, Ma had always favored pit bulls to ensure her own peace and quiet. One day, while out walking, she had met fellow churchgoers, the elderly couple on the next plot of land. They had stopped her on the road to ask the name of her dog. “Silly question,” she had said to them. “Who names a weapon?” After that, all the neighbors had learned not to stop by. Separated by acres of land, they probably believed that his mother still lived here, though her church attendance had slacked off in the nine years since her death.

Angie had been the only visitor in all that time—and now her nephew, who sat in an armchair only a few feet away from the discarded machete that oozed with the blood of young plants. Iggy wiped sweat from his face and sipped his beer as he watched the boy’s blind fingers tracing the raised pattern on the chair’s upholstery.

And when the kid had figured it out, he said, “A tulip.”

“Yeah, they’re all over the place.” In every room, there were vases holding plastic tulips and wooden ones, and some were made of silk. “My mother was never much good with live flowers.” They had always died on her. With the onset of dementia near the end of her days, Moira Conroy had believed that this was her dark power over all living things. “But Ma was a fool for tulips.”

And with Angie it was roses.

Any burglar to survive the dog’s welcome might believe that a woman lived here. This feminine construct was more than shelter to Iggy—this illusion of the women and their company.

The boy was real, but he would not live long.

Neither would the dog. It was aging badly, its breathing labored. That mutt should have been put down years ago, but Iggy was resistant to change.

—

KATHY MALLORY
disliked change of any kind. Riker watched her struggle with the new position of her desk telephone. A clerk had just moved it in order to set down a stack of files, and now Mallory was stalled, just staring at it. Or was this an act? Did she know her partner was watching her, waiting for her to put the desktop back in crazy-perfect order?

Still
waiting?

She was the grand master of tension in all things, large and small. It pissed him off, and it fascinated him. Most mornings, hungover and sick, Riker was tempted to follow his old dream of alcohol poisoning by too much bourbon for breakfast, but Mallory was his reason for showing up to work sober and wondering what she would do to him next. He could also give her credit for keeping him alive during her childhood of driving him up the walls.

On
this
morning, he reached across his facing desk to pick up her telephone and restore it to the corner position, neatly aligned with the edges of the wood.

She rewarded him with a smile that said,
Sucker
.

And
now
the day could begin.

Detective Janos ambled past them, followed by three children—a gorilla leading a parade of baby ducks.

—

DETECTIVE JANOS
had given some thought to this venue. The lunchroom of Special Crimes had a twelve-tier snack machine, a magnet for kids—but not
these
three. They were not in a candy kind of mood today, nor were they cheerful about escaping their morning classes. This was Jonah Quill’s hangout crew, nice enough kids, not a bratty bone among them, and this spoke well for their kidnapped friend.

The room was warm, but the two boys and the girl had not
removed their school blazers or even loosened their neckties. They sat up straight in their chairs, the very picture of well-behaved innocence—as if they already knew that they had been caught doing something wrong.

“I know you kids talked to a dozen cops uptown,” said the detective. “But sometimes you remember stuff later on.” He looked down at his notes on their previous interviews. “So . . . your friend Jonah ditched school at the front door? Just turned around and left?” The trio of twelve-year-olds nodded in unison, which told him this question had been asked and answered more than once before.

“Here’s the problem, kids.” They were
liars.
“The janitor saw Jonah leave school that morning. So I guess he made it through the front door, huh? Maybe I only think that ’cause he was last seen wearing a red T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. His school clothes were stuffed in his locker . . . and
somebody
left a note on the secretary’s desk.” He opened a manila file and plucked out his copy of the typewritten text. “This says Jonah was home sick on the day he disappeared. It’s got his uncle’s signature—but the uncle never signed it.” And this excellent forgery had provided all the weight necessary for a kidnap theory on day one. “We don’t suspect Jonah. Blind kids—they’re not much good at copying signatures.”

The two boys were toughing it out, but the little girl with a thousand freckles cried. Janos, a sucker for little women in tears, handed her a tissue. So ladylike, the small redhead dabbed her face dry and then blew her nose—a great honking blow, not at all dainty, and the detective rather admired it. But Lucinda was not the prime suspect. Janos favored the smallest child, who would not meet his eyes, and now Michael, called Mickey, cracked wide open.

“
I
did it! I
had
to. If Jonah didn’t show up for attendance, the school would’ve called his uncle, like, six seconds later. Mr. Quill’s a total freak for security.”

“It was a very
good
forgery. That’s what I hear from our guy in
Documents.” And this eased Mickey’s distress even before Janos said, “You’re not in trouble. So what did Jonah tell you about—”

“I don’t know where he was going that day. I
swear
it.”

“Okay, I believe you.” And the other two had ceased to squirm. He also believed all three of them when they said that Jonah had never mentioned Angie Quill. His best friends never knew he had an aunt? This fact was worth a quick line in the detective’s notebook, and he underscored it. Now, on to a fast game of show-and-tell. Holding up a wand of white fiberglass casing, Janos flicked his wrist to extend it to the full length of a white cane with smudge marks where it had been dusted for fingerprints. “How well does Jonah get along without—”

“Most of the time, he keeps it in his knapsack,” said Garth, the tallest one, who already had the solid build of the man he could one day become.

And the small forger chimed in. “Jonah mapped the whole school.” Mickey tapped his temple. “Mapped it in his head. He can find his locker in a hallway full of them.
Never
gets the wrong one.”

“He’s good at tricks like that,” said the girl. Lucinda was so obviously Jonah’s girl. “First time you meet him, you can’t tell he’s blind. He fooled every substitute teacher he ever had.”

The detective jotted down a note. “Does he do that all the time—pretending he can see?”

“No,” she said. “And he doesn’t pretend for the subs. It just takes them a while to catch on. He doesn’t wear dark glasses, hardly ever uses the cane. And he’s got no trouble finding his way around the classrooms.”

So . . . an independent kid. Janos tapped his pencil on the tabletop, wondering how to phrase the next question. “Would you say he’s a smart kid?”