Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (25 page)

The dog ran merrily through the federal network, easily skirting familiar firewalls and making great leaps over known trip wires, crawling under others, and then—out of nowhere—a zap laid him low. Oh, the
pain!
One leg gone and dripping blood from the stump, loyal Good Dog came limping back to his mistress with no bones in his teeth, only scraps of data. The case itself had been deep-sixed in the basement vault of a sealed computer sector.

So the feds had a new hiding place. Fancier weaponry, too.

Well, this was how her dog learned.

The Queen of Good Housekeeping gathered her electronic buckets
and mops to clean up the bloody paw prints so the feds could not follow her dog’s tracks home.

Bless the feds for hobbling their field agents with triplicate paperwork. Sets of reports had survived the sweep to bury interviews with some of the mayor’s victims from his Wall Street brokerage days. Other bits of the case lived in private email chains of Andrew Polk’s former clients, angry outcries of foul play. These civilians had flimsy firewalls, safeguards that a ten-year-old child would spit on, and a nondisclosure agreement had surfaced in the open book that was one investor’s home computer.

She so loved the fools in their glass houses.

Her intercom buzzer announced an expected visitor. Compulsively punctual Mallory would be late for work this morning.

—

IN CHARLES BUTLER
’
S ESTIMATION
,
living
room was a misnomer here. Mallory’s environs of stark white paint, black leather, glass and steel had the feel of a domicile forever stalled in transition, each bare wall and clear surface either anticipating the mementos of personality—or suddenly bereft of them, and the furniture only awaiting the moving men.

The psychologist sipped his coffee in tense silence and with the tacit understanding that he was sitting in the open jaws of a trap. The recent strain in their friendship had not dissipated any; he had known this the moment she trotted out the good china cups. More generous ceramic mugs were reserved to her friends, the trusted few. Not him. Not anymore.

Cups emptied, he followed her down a short hallway and into another room, one with not even the pretense of hearth and home. This was where the machines lived, and the offending warmth of hardwood floors was covered by a rug of battleship gray. Electronic
equipment sat on steel tables, and more was stacked on shelves. A far cry from the claustrophobic geek room at the station house, here her mechanical slaves could stretch out, reach farther and steal more.

A good portion of one upper wall was aglow with a gigantic computer monitor, her best-loved toy, and onscreen were small pictures of file holders. As she touched one of these icons, it responded to her body heat and opened in a flurry of cartoon documents flying across the screen’s surface to line up in a row of perfect symmetry. Judging by the labels, some of this information once resided in government computers and those of financial institutions in the private sector. Her stolen goods on open display might show a new level of trust in him—or disdain for his honesty. It was a coin toss.

Mallory touched the first image in the lineup. “This one has dirt on the mayor’s old brokerage house. Lots of questionable transactions, but one scam stands out. He gutted his own clients to pull it off.” She tapped an arrow in the margin, and the page changed to a long roster of Polk’s former investors. “My suspects.”

Great financial losses
might
work as a motive, though it strained credulity to place money at the core of four insane murders. But her world was all cause and effect with no tolerance for random acts of unhinged minds. Money motives had neat figures, and she was good at math—not so good with the chaos of madness. There must always be logic in the State of Mallory, and she would even make it up to make it so.

“The mayor’s scam was a variation on a pump-and-dump,” she said. “He hyped a drug company that was going public. The whole thing hinged on a lie about a vaccine for Alzheimer’s. Polk’s lie—fobbed off as insider information. That’s why his clients believed a mediocre stock offering was the deal of the century.”

“I remember that old rumor. It was years ago.” He could recall the exact date of the stock’s dazzling rise and more spectacular fall, but
that would be showboating. What he could not recall was any link to Andrew Polk. “That story spread like a virus. Why do you think Polk was the epicenter?”

“I
know
he was. The feds know it, too.” Mallory turned to her list of names. “Ten of these people started a stampede of investors up and down Wall Street. The public was lining up to buy in on a bad deal.” She pointed to another document on her screen. “This is Banter Capital. They placed casino bets with every big brokerage house in town. Foreign markets, too.”

“Stock futures?”

“For the performance of one stock—on one day. They bet it would tank on the first day of trading. It did. The bets paid off in long-shot odds when Polk’s rumor was killed on the trading floor.”

“And the stock was downgraded.”

“It was in the toilet,” said Mallory, more succinctly. “Polk lost money, too. That kept him off the feds’ radar for a while. He got a job at Banter Capital, and a year later, he left with a severance package worth five hundred million dollars. His golden parachute.”

“That was his cut on the betting?”

“No, more like extortion—go-away money. Banter Capital needed to sever ties to him when the SEC opened an investigation. I think Polk deliberately triggered the feds’ interest so he could jack up the fear—and his parachute money.”

Charles
could
follow her logic, but he would rather not. That way lay a massive headache. But rather than point out that this was maniacal beyond belief, he only said, “Seems a bit risky.”

“But Polk likes risk. The criminal case hung on what he told clients before they invested. Insider trading, even for bogus information—that’s jail time. Polk’s ex-clients wanted him dead, but they wouldn’t help the SEC investigators. I figure he promised them hush money, maybe some payback on losses. That’s the only way he could’ve gotten
all ten of them to sign nondisclosure agreements.
Idiots.
They risked prison when they lied to federal agents, but Polk’s agreements locked them into a criminal conspiracy. There’s no way out for them now. They’re stuck.”

Charles nodded his understanding of legal flypaper.

“They’ll never cooperate with us,” she said. “But they might talk to you. Then you can pick me a likely psycho—a killer.”

Well, this was progress. At least she acknowledged an element of insanity in four murders. He read the list of badly damaged investors—her suspect pool. Among them, he recognized names of people he knew, two of them old friends of his parents’. That elderly couple could never have been a party to anything like this. “How many of these—”

“I’m only interested in ten big losers for one transaction.” She tapped the document again. The page changed to her pared-down list, and his parents’ friends were still there. “One of them hired out four kills.”

What?
Murder for hire? “So the spree—”

“
Not
a spree killing. Forget what you read in the newspapers,” she said for the hundredth time in their acquaintance. “Here’s what the papers can’t tell you. Our perp paid for those murders over a two-week period . . . and his hit man cut out the hearts.”

That made
less
sense. “A serial killer’s not likely to pass up the joy of hands-on murder. And the hearts, the trophies, wouldn’t provide any pleasure, either. If someone else cut them out, they couldn’t give him a tactile—” Oh, he was telling her something she already knew. He intuited this mistake by her folded arms and a warning in her eyes that said,
Don’t. Seriously . . . don’t.

Aloud, she said, “Rich people. They hire out raising the kids, walking the dog
and
murder. But you’d have a point—
if
the hearts were trophies.”

And what else might they be?

Ah, now he understood. They were clearly into her sport of the day: finding new and different things to do with human body parts. It took him two seconds. “That would only work with kidnap and extortion. . . . Ransom. . . . The heart of one victim prompts payment for the next one?” When she smiled, he knew this was the correct answer—even though it could not
possibly
be right. “But it’s my understanding that the four victims were selected randomly.” Again, her smile was his confirmation, and he said, “So . . . no apparent reason to
pay
a ransom.”

Her smile held.

And before his head could spin around three times upon the axis of his neck, she changed the subject, turning away from him to face her shortlist on the screen. “I matched some of these people to the Social Register.”

He counted three names from the old families of the New York Four Hundred, and he recognized others from the charity circuit. “I can tell you some of them are dead.”

“But they had heirs.” In Mallory’s reckoning, the love of money would be in the DNA of their descendants.

Would she ever return to the matter of random murders and stolen hearts? Certainly not. No sport in that. There were subtle rules to be observed in this game of hers, chief among them,
no
begging.
And so he could only continue on the topic at hand. “Why do you think any of Polk’s former clients might talk to
me?”

“Because you have lots of money, Charles.”

She classified him as one who was not on her side, but one of
them,
the silver-spoon suspect class. This should have given him a hint of things to come, but he was startled when both hands rode her hips as she said, “So you and Father DuPont . . . what did you talk about last night? Catching up on old times?”

Ambush by appointment. How original.

Now it was her turn to be surprised. She was studying him, waiting for the telltale blush of embarrassment, a genetic defect that programmed him to be honest in all things. A sudden cherry-red complexion made deceit impossible, and so it was said that his face could not hide a thought. Untrue. He
could
keep a confidence with no intent to deceive. However, the blush’s loophole of all things pertaining to principle seemed to escape her.

She failed to read his mind. It pissed her off.

Well, too damn bad.

No—just a trick. Her half smile set off warning bells in his brain, great swinging gongs sized to fit a cathedral.

Was it just possible that he had already given up everything?

Yes.
And was this witchcraft on her part? Well, no. Mallory’s logic was good, but she also had a lexicon of silences to work with. And what had she gleaned from his?

Oh . . . everything.

Obviously, last night she had followed Father DuPont from the church and confirmed her suspicion that he and the priest had met before. Though, the previous night in the restaurant, neither man had acknowledged the other. Charles’s failure to comment on their acquaintance, both then and now, had given her
two
silences, enough to infer the rest—up to a point, but
what
point?

Pressure, pressure—almost a race to outrun her galloping paranoia.

Well, she could deduce that he had first met Father DuPont in the context of a psychologist’s trade, or else he would have mentioned this man quite naturally in passing, but he had not—and Mallory made a feast of things unsaid. More damage: Since he had no private practice, she could guess that his first meeting with the priest had been a one-off therapy session for a man in deep distress.

“Here’s what I
don’t
know,” said Mallory. “The first time DuPont came to you for help, was he was still counseling Angie Quill?”

At least, that part she could not tell. And he
would
not tell. Though, when she was done probing
this
silence, he felt like a shopworn virgin with little to nothing saved for the marriage bed.

—

MALLORY HAD BEEN WORKING
late last night.

Lieutenant Coffey stood at the center of the incident room. Every cork wall was so orderly now, but this was more than compulsive neatness. She had also pruned evidence, shifting attention to her own focus points by taking down all the paperwork and pictures for every victim that was not a nun or a schoolboy. Even Albert Costello had disappeared from the walls, his hour in the media spotlight used up and gone. Albert and the other three hermits had been relegated to file holders stacked on the evidence table—should anyone care to look at them, and he guessed that no one ever would. Mallory only saw these people as clutter. Cold as that was, he could not argue the point.

The lieutenant pinned up Joey Collier’s sketch of the boyfriend who had accompanied Angie Quill to the tattoo parlor. How reliable could this drawing be?

Almost a decade had passed since the only meeting of the tattoo artist and their prime suspect. A thick head of hair had been roughly sketched in, probably not a well-recalled detail, and neither was the mouth of faint lines that were almost not there. But he knew the drawing had gotten one feature right—the eyes of a predator in that moment right before the lunge. Tension,
tension—
waiting for the strike. Waiting to be dead.

The boyfriend had kept close watch on the artist for maybe an hour while the first rose was tattooed on young Angie’s thigh. Not exactly a hit-and-run memory.

Alongside this drawing was a blowup of the tollbooth photograph taken on Sunday. Computer enhancement had raised finer detail—a
waste of time for a picture of nothing. The driver’s face was hidden by the pulled-down brim of a blue baseball cap—not one visible feature. But there
was
a departure from the sketch—no hair to be seen, not a single strand stuck out below the rim of the cap. Short hair or no hair? He could not tell. If the driver in this photo was completely hairless, shaved-head bald, that would fit with a killer evolved over time into a forensic-savvy pro, who wanted no DNA left at his crime scenes.