Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (26 page)

The lieutenant bit down on the tip of his tongue. The pain kept him from tumbling into that Mallory mind-set, a kind of black pit where evidence, based on
nothing,
mushroomed in the dark. Even when she was not in the room, she could still get him.

But, unlike Mallory, Jack Coffey would not bank on anything quite this flimsy. He was for damn sure
not
going to alter the artist’s sketch to shave a head he could not even see.

—

CHARLES BUTLER
trailed Mallory into her favorite interrogation room, and this should have given him pause, though it was nothing like his own kitchen, no warmth, no charm to make a suspect less wary. It was all stainless steel with mechanized utensils like the computer that passed for a mutant coffeemaker. She was the antichrist of Luddites, but her brew
was
rather good. When they were seated at the table, she poured their coffee into brown ceramic mugs, and he took this as the warm-up for a deceptively cozy chat. He knew she would begin with casual conversation, something innocuous and only one rung above a comment on the weather.

“Picture Angie Quill as a kid hooker,” she said, “a little girl getting raped every night by five or ten men.”

Oh, a
gut-shot
warm-up.

She leaned toward him. “Or maybe just one man, a priest, her counselor, someone who’s supposed to protect kids like her. She’s only
thirteen years old. She’s got no way out. I’ve heard of younger hookers slitting their wrists, but not this one. Angie Quill knows how to wait. Now imagine that little girl all grown up and full of hate. She tells this priest she wants to be a
nun
. Well, Angie can hang him out to dry. He knows it—and she works it. She forces him to get her into a monastery. Then she’s off the street, out of reach. No one can ever touch her again. Better than that—she gets revenge. Every day that goes by, DuPont’s going nuts. What’s she confessing to the local priest? And what about the nuns in that monastery? How many people know what he’s done to her—what he
is
—this man you
like
so much? The one you
protected, defended.”

Charles dropped his head. He was helpless to—

“But that’s not what happened,” said Mallory.

On this cue of hers, his head jerked up.

“Did your good friend DuPont ever rape that girl? I guess we’ll never know, Charles. He’s such a damn liar—but he wasn’t Angie’s steady john.”

When would this
end?

“I had a little talk with the prioress of her monastery,” said Mallory. “What she said backs up my theory that Angie had one regular customer for years. So . . . one day, she must’ve realized that her rent-money john was a pro, a hit man. If he ever found out what she knew, she’d be dead. Hookers are usually so good at reading men. They’re better than you are at figuring out who’s nuts, who’s likely to go off on them—
cut
them—
kill
them. But here she is, sleeping with a killing machine. When she finally figures out what he is, it gives her the shakes. Cold-sweat fear. She knows she can’t hide that from him. She
has
to run.”

“Why wouldn’t she go to the—”

“The police? Prostitutes are dirt to cops. So she went to Father DuPont for help. The monastery was
his
idea. That’s the only way it all fits. I didn’t just take the Reverend Mother’s word for it.”

Of course not. A trustworthy nun? Not on Mallory’s planet.

She looked down at his coffee mug—cooling, untouched. “I could’ve sorted this out a lot earlier, wasted less time on the priest’s lies.”

He anticipated her final salvo before she said, “Maybe Jonah would be home by now . . . if you’d been straight with me.”

And—
bang—
Charles was truly shot through the heart. He had done nothing wrong. Logic was not on her side. And yet he sat there calmly waiting to find out what his punishment would be. There would always be payback. Though the biblical quotation must be paraphrased to spell it out as such—
Vengeance is mine, sayeth Mallory.

—

SO
,
LATE LAST NIGHT
, she had been in here, too.

Jack Coffey set a mug of freshly made coffee on his desk beside an envelope addressed in Mallory’s machine-perfect printing. It was marked for his eyes only, and this was rare. Normally, if she wanted case details kept secret, she just held out on everyone, even her own partner. Inside the envelope, all he found was a standard background check on members of the Quill family.
Standard
was the key word here. Any civilian could have gotten the same data by running a credit check, and there was nothing among these dry facts that could further the investigation.

But who had not already seen them? For days, these pages had hung on open display in the incident room. What was the point of secrecy now?

He could not ask for enlightenment. Giving her that satisfaction would be like taking a direct hit in their never-ending boxing match.

Lieutenant Coffey smiled at his own private joke on her. It would destroy Mallory to know that, perverse as it might be, one of the high points of his job was going round and round with her. She had a fight style that fascinated him. His wins were few, but they got him through
all the down days. So many times he had wanted to turn in his badge and gun, to bail on the political hell, the power plays and the squeeze of higher-ups—the crap side of his career. And then along came Mallory, and he would be up for a battle,
on
his toes and
back
in the fray. Most of the time, he wound up bloodied, beaten, and yet he reveled in it, and she always left him wanting more.

Following protocol, he locked her envelope in a desk drawer. Mallory’s data of no significance continued to bother him, and he figured that was the object here. He
knew
how her mind worked. There had to be something in that envelope that he should have caught, some item that would make him feel foolish after she explained it to him.

A sucker punch.

Hours would pass before he realized that he had guessed wrong.

 
15

“Sorry, Miss. I’ve never seen him before.” The owner of the bodega returned the tattoo artist’s sketch to the detective. “But don’t go. Not yet.” While the old man worked a crank to lower an awning over his sidewalk flower stall, Mallory endured a lecture. His subject was roses.

He dipped into a silver bucket of water and fresh-cut flowers to pluck a red one from a cellophane-wrapped bouquet. “Take this rose, for instance. Commercial trash. No scent. Looks pretty for a day, and then it droops. But that little girl’s roses?
Perfection.
Ah, my Angie.” He blew a kiss up to the sky.

Upon their first meeting, he had not been told that Angie Quill was among the dead of Gracie Mansion, and now, days later, he was deep into grief. His eyes were shot with red from long crying jags, and he looked to be on the verge of one now. The elderly man was also moving more slowly this time, his face fixed in an expression of sad surprise. She recognized it from other homicides, that look that asked of everyone he met,
How could she be dead?

For the first time in this case, Mallory said the customary words that were normally reserved for family members, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

He thanked her and held out the rose—a gift. “A bribe. Don’t forget my Angie. You find the one who killed her.”

“I’m working on it, but Angie changes with everyone we talk to. It’s like she was three different people. So . . . you were close.”

“I watched her grow up. If you hear things about her on this street—dirty things—pay no attention. She was a wonderful kid—sunny, happy. But then later . . . I think she was maybe twelve or thirteen. . . . Well, next thing I know, she’s lugging a baby around everywhere she goes.”

“Her nephew.”

“My Angie stopped being a little girl that year. You could see it in her eyes. Like she was my age, looking back at life the way it used to be. Kids, they’re always looking for what’s up ahead, but not her. It killed me to see that happen . . . but I can’t blame Jonah.”

More likely he blamed her baby-hooker life. He
knew
what that girl was—he knew a lot. “Did you ever picture her growing up to be a nun?”

“Never. When I saw her in that nun’s habit, I couldn’t believe it. I still don’t. Kids raised by religious freaks, they go the other way. And nobody’s got more reason to hate God than my Angie.”

So he could tell her more, but never would he volunteer any stain on that girl’s memory. The old man was so vulnerable right this minute, showing her his underbelly, exposing his heart for her best shot, and this could be such easy short work. But instead of laying him open and making him cry, Mallory held up his rose, nodded her thanks and moved on down the sidewalk.

—

“
THE PUBLIC STILL THINKS
we’re dealing with a spree killing,” said Lieutenant Coffey. The better story of a serial killer kidnapping taxpayers and cutting out their hearts—this had not yet occurred to the very imaginative news media. “But that won’t last long.”

He stood behind the lectern in the incident room, addressing a
squad of detectives slumped in their chairs. Half of them should be sleeping in the bunkroom down the hall.

Only one man was on his feet, and the tall psychologist’s back was turned, his attention focused on the evidence pinned to the cork walls. Mallory had finally allowed Charles Butler full access to the case—except for the dry details she wanted locked away in a desk drawer.

Jack Coffey stared at an empty chair. Mallory was late.

“Between forensics and the autopsy reports,” and one insane theory of the crime, “it looks like we’re chasing a hit man.” Well, that woke up one cop in the back.

Other detectives only stared at their boss in disbelief, none of them wanting to buy into the idea of a contract killer, a pro. If this was true, they stood a better chance at catching lightning in a pisspot.

Lonahan’s voice boomed from the back of the room, where he had been napping. “You mean a hit man gone nuts, right?” He seemed to like this idea for good reason. It might give them an edge. Lunatics were easier to bag.

“Good logic,” said Coffey. “But, no, that’s not it.” And now, since Mallory was a no-show, he presented her theory. “A serial killer may have hired a hit man for the wetwork.” At this point, no lynch mob was forming among the ranks, but maybe they were only too tired to fetch a rope. “So we’ll start with the hit man’s client.”

His eyes were on two empty chairs, side by side. Riker was on Granny duty, but where the hell was his partner?

—

RIKER STOOD
on a Brooklyn sidewalk not far from where he had grown up. This location had been his own suggestion. It was not on the NYPD list of safe houses. It was safer.

He smoked a cigarette and read the writing on the tall gray walls
of stone. The graffiti gave no passersby a clue that nuns were cloistered here. No one in this neighborhood had ever seen one. Aside from delivery people, visitors were rare, though the way had been paved for one very special, very crazy houseguest.

There were no worries for Harold Quill’s safety. He slept in the station-house crib, surrounded by detectives on bunk beds, and he had become so shabby and in need of a shave, he was beginning to look like them. His weird mother had been the problem, refusing to go anywhere with the men sent to fetch her.

But the batty religious fanatic
liked
Mallory. Go figure.

And the old lady had gone for the bait of a hideout with more crucifixes, rosaries and candles than she could fit in her East Village apartment. Then all that had remained to Mallory was to hold a gun to the head of an elderly priest, who had closed this deal with the mother superior for a bed with the Brooklyn nuns.

The door in the convent wall swung open, and Father Brenner escorted Mrs. Quill to the waiting car. Her insane majesty was ushered into the backseat, and the white-haired priest rode up front with Riker. Father Brenner was anxious, nerves shot, though, apart from dropping the old lady off at the door and collecting her again, he had ridden shotgun during their comings and goings.

So much damage from so little contact.

As they pulled away from the curb, Riker glanced back at the convent, wondering what kind of shape the nuns were in this morning.

—

WHERE THE HELL WAS MALLORY
? She had promised a profile of the investor crowd, her pool of likely suspects for a hit man’s client.

Jack Coffey’s attention was called to the back of the room, where the civilian in the three-piece suit raised his hand to volunteer.
Damn Mallory.
She had fobbed off this duty on her pet shrink, a bad choice, considering all these catnapping cops.

“Okay, Charles, can you brief us on a Wall Street kind of perp?”

“Of course.” As the obliging psychologist walked toward the front of the room, he said to the surrounding detectives, “Money makes people mean. The sudden loss of money makes them
crazy
mean.”

In his role as a police consultant, Charles Butler did not usually deliver lectures with such punchy opening lines, and this spoke to coaching from Mallory.

The lieutenant surrendered the lectern to this speaker best known for lulling his audience to sleep. And Charles said to the gathering, “I can’t even give you an age range. As you all know, criminal profiling is largely junk science.”

That was a crowd-pleaser. The men were happy to know that voodoo would be kept to a minimum this morning. Personally, they liked the man. Professionally, they spat on all of his kind. But when Charles held up a sheet of paper and announced that Mallory’s list had only ten suspects, the detectives came back to life, eyes open all around the room.
Now
they were getting somewhere.

“I have a few markers that might be helpful in singling one out,” said Charles, “Hiring killers is done all the time in every economic group—by husbands, wives, even their offspring. Frequently, it’s a low-level connection. A bartender knows somebody who knows somebody. It might also be a family member in need of quick cash, or any acquaintance with a criminal record who’ll do the job on the cheap. These amateurs usually get caught. And so do the people who hire them.”