Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (21 page)

Iggy climbed ten steps to stand on the stoop of a brownstone and read the names posted on a panel by the street door. He pretended to push a few buttons, and he mouthed words to no one on the silent intercoms. The bag of religious pamphlets slung over one shoulder gave him the perfect cover for this kind of reconnaissance. Few New Yorkers would buzz in a stranger peddling God off the street, and no one would find it odd if he never entered a single building. Four doors away, he found the buzzer labeled for Mrs. Quill, and his search was over. But then he went on to the next building, and the next, because there were cameras everywhere these days—and the cops
might
be watching.

—

DETECTIVE JANOS COULD ONLY LISTEN
. His eyes were on the clock as he patiently heard out Charles Butler’s lengthy report on what he had learned at the school. It was not good news for Jonah Quill.

Funny kid.

Good as dead.

Janos needed to end this conversation before his favorite shrink could ask any questions. He did not want to be the one to tell Charles that Mallory had locked him out of case details. “I gotta hang up. Thanks.”

Oh,
more
trouble. Jonah Quill’s girlfriend was hovering on the threshold of the stairwell door. Lucinda, a paragon of perfect attendance, was ditching class on the last day of school. By the looks of her, she carried a world of worry into the squad room.

The girl walked toward the only woman here, wrongly believing good things about that cop’s whole gender. And before Janos could sing out,
No, don’t,
Lucinda sat down in the chair by Mallory’s desk, announcing that she had come to make a confession. Janos hurried across the room to stand behind the schoolgirl, looming over her like a great hulking nanny.

After Mallory had made a cool appraisal of the twelve-year-old’s watering eyes and fidgeting signs of guilt, she asked, “Do you like chocolate?”

Yes, Lucinda did.

Janos trailed the two of them down the hall to the lunchroom, home of the snack machine and every kind of chocolate bar known to God and the NYPD. Mallory and Lucinda sat down at a table—for two. And he was not slow to take this hint that his company was unwanted. However, with great discretion, he made repeated walks past the open doorway.

Just checking in.

Over time, candy wrappers accumulated on the tabletop, and the young visitor was showing no indication of stress. No tears.

Janos went off to rethink Mallory for a while.

Another half hour passed before cop and child reappeared in the squad room. Lucinda was walking taller, even smiling as the two of
them approached the stairwell door, where a uniformed officer waited to take the little lady back to school.

Mallory watched the girl and her escort descend the stairs, and when they were out of earshot, she said, “You wondered why the kids didn’t know about Jonah’s aunt? His uncle told him not to tell anyone, but never said why. The boy only knew it was a secret. . . . But Jonah tells that girl
everything.”

“The uncle’s holding out on us?” Well, this shored up the theory that Angie had known her killer
.
Who hides having a nun in the family—unless the nun is in hiding? Harold Quill had become a constant fixture in the squad room. Janos and other cops had shared meals with the man, sympathized with him, all but held his damn hand while that miserable little
bastard
— “Excuse me. I have to go shoot a guy.” The detective was on his way to the lieutenant’s office, where Quill was making himself at home, watching the news channel on the boss’s TV. No one had ever seen Janos lose his temper. That was not his way. But
today,
this
minute
—

Mallory’s hand was on his arm, feather light but weight enough to restrain him. “Not now,” she said. “Let me pick your moment. We’ll do Uncle Harry up right. I know a way to carve out his guts and make him screaming crazy. . . . You’ll like it.”

Janos inclined his head, almost a courtly bow to her, the squad’s undisputed champion of retaliation.

—

“
YOU
’
RE RIGHT
,
KID
. Girls don’t play fair.” Foot-long hotdogs sizzled on the barbecue grill, and Iggy rolled them for an even burn. “Makes a guy nuts when they won’t even say what you done wrong. But when she called you a jerk? Hey, that’s just another way of callin’ you a guy. It ain’t a bad thing. It’s the cold shoulder that bugs
me.”
Done with his condolences on the issue of girlfriends, Iggy moved on to the other
woman in the boy’s life. “So, what about your aunt? She ever make you nuts with the silent treatment?”

It took the kid a while to come up with an answer to that one. He hung his head, just like the dog, a sure sign of guilt when he said, “No, she always talked to me. . . . But I don’t remember her laughing much. Even after we left Granny’s place, she was never all that happy. I think it was my fault . . . because she had to take me with her.”

For the first time, the boy did not seem anxious about silence. He only sat there with his thoughts, sad ones by the look of him. And then came a surprise to end that lag in the conversation. The kid was done with the subject of what girls want, and he was on to the next mystery of life—sudden death.

“What’s it like to murder people?”

—

LIEUTENANT COFFEY
stood at the center of the squad room, counting noses. Only one no-show. Damn Mallory. He had seen her in the building just a few minutes ago.

“Okay, guys.” Such tired guys. Some of them held their heads up with both hands. “We started out with a sick freak and random kills. Now we got four hearts labeled
proof of death
—big, bold letters.” And those hearts had surely passed through the mayor’s hands before they hit the water. Down at One Police Plaza, another squad, the one that
should
handle every kidnap for ransom, was disputing the whole idea that proof of death might have been preceded by proof of life and a demand for cash. “Major Case bowed out after we tied the kid to the body dump at the mansion. No help there.”

Candy-ass bastards.
Those downtown dicks would never ruin a perfect record for bringing every kidnap-for-ransom victim back alive—their house specialty. No, four corpses would have marred their scorecard.
Pricks.

Some of his men leaned on walls or furniture, but most of them sat at their desks, the easier to lie down their tired heads if their commander would only shut up.

“We’re still working the background check, boss.” Sanger was the only cop on the squad who wore diamonds. His earring and the pinkie ring were the bling of early years working undercover in Narcotics. And sometimes it seemed like this detective was competing with Mallory’s wardrobe, outshouting her expensive threads with loud colors like today’s war of a purple necktie and a green shirt.

And his hair was longer than hers.

“We still got zero connection between the victims,” said Sanger. “And none of them tie back to the mayor.”

This must be why Mallory had failed to show up for the briefing. She would not want to answer the question left hanging in the air:
Who pays ransom for strangers?

Gonzales the Doubter sang out, “I say the perp’s targeting the city.” This young man was the best set of muscles in the room, but his value to the squad was an ability to poke holes in every scenario for a crime. This made him Jack Coffey’s favorite whenever one of Mallory’s theories was on the table. “Hitting the city up for the ransom, that’s a good fit with killing random taxpayers.”

“Nice,” said Coffey, “but the mayor wouldn’t have any reason to keep that quiet, and he’s been holding out on us. So what else have we got? Any luck with the tattoo artist?”

“Yeah,” said Gonzales. “Me and Lonahan found the place where the nun got all that ink. We flashed Angie Quill’s old mug shot and the ME’s photo of the rose tattoos.”

“The guy who did her tats is Joey something,” said Lonahan, barrel-chested and better known as Bullhorn. His normal speaking voice could be heard in the city’s outer boroughs, and now everyone in the room was awake. “Joey hasn’t worked there in years. But we know
Angie didn’t get all those roses in a day. Maybe one tat a month. So . . . forty roses. The guy knew her that long.”

“Good. A customer he’ll remember,” said Coffey. And maybe the tattoo artist moonlighted as a hit man. “Any leads on where Joey is now?”

“Naw,” said Gonzales. “Our guy was long gone before the new owner bought the place. And no Joeys in the old employee records. We figure he worked off the books for cash.” He handed the lieutenant a police artist’s rendering of what Joey might look like, him and a million other lean young men with long hair and beards.

In the drawing’s margin notes, Jack Coffey read a list of all the tattoos that other employees remembered seeing on the arms of this artist. “Okay, maybe we’ll catch a break at the nun’s mass tonight. Joey might turn out for her.”

One detective slouched in his chair, facing the only unoccupied desk.

“Riker, where’s your partner?”

—

THE SQUAD
’
S MOST ENDEARING NAME
for her was Mallory the Machine. He found her in the geek room, melding with the technology, plugged into it for all Riker knew. It was hard to tell in an age of wireless computing. Her eyes were fixed on a glowing screen of text when he came up behind her with no illusions that she might be surprised. One of her electronic gadgets would surely rat him out. They were kin to her.

“Riker, it’s time to dust off one of your old snitches. After you cut him loose, Chester Marsh got a job as a lawyer with the SEC.”

He looked down at his shoes. Confidential informants were sacred names that carried curses. Cursed was the cop who burned his snitches by speaking their names in the wrong company.

Fourteen years ago, he would have preferred to shoot Chester
Marsh in the head instead of bleeding him for information on a criminal client. But Riker had been blindsided by an agreement between Marsh and the District Attorney’s Office. Such deals were standard currency, done all the time, but this one had been done behind Riker’s back, and the stench of it would never go away.

After that case had been wrapped, one of Marsh’s honest clients died—a suicide. The lawyer had embezzled an old woman’s money and cost her a berth in an upscale retirement home. A backroom agreement with the DA had allowed that thief to skate on restitution, and so Nora Peety, left with nothing and no one to take her in, jumped down to the subway rails and into the path of an oncoming train.

Before choosing the A Train to take her life away, she had mailed a letter to the
nice
policeman, the sympathetic one, who had held her hand for days and days, while gathering dirt to turn her thieving lawyer into a snitch. The lady’s goodbye note to Riker had no salutation or signature, only eight words written in a faltering, spidery script.

One line.

It had destroyed him.

Nora had
loved
James Taylor. She had played his music all day long, and maybe counted on Riker to recognize the final line of a refrain, lyrics to a song of fire and rain.

“I always thought that I’d see you again.” That was all she wrote.

When her suicide train had come and gone, it left a stain on Riker. He called it murder. He took all the blame. And he had lost three days to binge drinking before unpacking his guilt for Lou Markowitz, a man who could be counted on to keep secrets.

Kathy Mallory, a child in those days and an eavesdropping brat, had listened in and made off with the name of his snitch. The kid had later invoked Chester Marsh, just testing the value of her goods, when she tried to extort Riker for coins to feed the lunchroom’s snack machine—
literally
blackmail for peanuts.

The little girl had picked her moment well—his first day out of rehab for cops who saw the spiders of delirium tremens. Riker had never been more vulnerable—and yet he had held the advantage in that short negotiation. He had a store of holy kid words like
rat
. “Okay,” he had said to her then, “do it now. Tell everybody what you got on me. Tell ’em all how Nora Peety died. You know why they don’t already know that story? It’s ’cause I’ll never rat out a snitch, not even that sack-a-shit lawyer.
There—are—rules.”
Then he had spread his arms wide, saying, “Take your best shot, kid.”

Kathy had quietly slipped away from the lunchroom. On toward the close of that bad day, Riker had found a bag of peanuts lying on his desk.

A peace offering.

An understanding.

And she had never again mentioned Chester Marsh, not till today. So, all those years ago, he had taught her nothing lasting. Kathy the child had only saved away the snitch’s name in her little toolkit of useful things. This sad thought was writ on his face when he raised his eyes from the floor to see his partner smiling at him. But it was not a
gotcha
smile, and that threw him for a moment.

“Riker, is there anyone you hate more than that cockroach lawyer? . . . You want payback for the old lady?” Mallory turned to her computer and scrolled back the text to show him the logo of the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Marsh got a severance package when he left the SEC. He can’t practice law anymore. That was part of their deal to get rid of him. But they gave him a government pension.”

Oh, this was so wrong. “You gotta do twenty years to qualify for a—”

“Right,” said Mallory, “Unless the feds were worried about blowback on a dodgy case—like Polk’s. So let’s call it payment to keep Marsh’s mouth shut. But if he talks, his deal gets rescinded. He was only there for ten years, so the pension isn’t much, but it’s all he’s got.
You can take it away from him—rob him just like he robbed the old lady.” She swiveled her chair around to face Riker. “And you won’t be burning a snitch. Nothing to do with that old business. This is a
new
game. He’s just a material witness—no deals, no protection.”