Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (36 page)

Gail had never relied on anyone to follow instructions like—only use your burner and NEVER write down my number. Holding up the client’s stolen cell phone, he said, “
I
sent this to Brox. Even if the cops had found this one, it would’ve been useless to them.” He unlocked the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a phone of his own. “This is the one I used to call him. You see? It’s just like his, a dinosaur—no GPS capability. And cell-tower triangulation? Not out here in the country. There’s just one tower—an omnidirectional antenna. Let’s say the client
gave
my phone number to the cops. It’s a burner. They’d only have records of my calls to Brox, but not my name. And a ping off a tower out here only nets them a six-mile radius for a location.” Bless crap technology.

The sky was lightening. The sun would be up soon. “Go home. No worries. I know what I’m doing.”

Iggy Conroy took his leave just in time. Gail could hear the sounds of his household stirring to life with the first flush of a toilet down the hall.

His wife screamed.

She appeared in the doorway with their child clutched tight and riding on her hip. Mary held an asthma inhaler in her free hand. Empty? Or no use? His little princess was struggling to breathe. Lips turning blue. Eyes closing. Head dropping. Dying?

“Call nine-one-one!” yelled his wife. “Don’t just stand there!”

He dropped the cell phone on the floor and ripped the child from her arms. Now he ran for the front door. It was still early for commuter traffic. He would make good time on the road to the hospital.

Gail was settling his daughter on the front seat of the car when his wife tore out of the house on a slipper-foot run, yelling, “Stop! I called nine-one-one! There’s an ambulance coming!”

Smart. The EMTs would get Patty breathing in three minutes. His wife’s brain worked much better than his in emergencies like this one. Fear for his child always clouded his thinking. He looked down at the tiny limp body.
Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die!

—

AN HOUR INTO DAYLIGHT
, little Patty was doing just fine, and the small family was on the way home. The sleeping princess rode down the hospital corridor in Gail’s arms as he walked alongside his wife.

This was Iggy’s doing—the scent of cologne he had tracked into Patty’s bedroom, that and the smell of cigarettes in his clothes. The miserable—

The red exit sign was in sight when another thought occurred to Gail, and he hid the dread from his wife when he asked, “Mary, when you called for the ambulance, which phone did you use?”

“The
nearest
one. What does it—”

“Mary? Was it the landline on my desk?”

“Uh-uh. Not that one.” She walked ahead of him, passing through the glass doors as she opened the flap on her shoulder bag.

Gail wanted to scream!

But that would wake Patty.

He followed Mary across the parking lot and caught up to her at the car. He held his daughter tight, maybe too tight, and watched his wife riffle through the contents of her overcrowded purse. She laid a
day planner on the hood of the car, then her own pink smartphone, Patty’s juice box, an old stuffed toy that their child had outgrown and all manner of
crap.

“I grabbed the cell phone you dropped on the floor,” said Mary. “It’s a real old one. I don’t know why you— Here it is.” Search ended, she held up his burner, the one used exclusively for his calls to Dwayne Brox—and, more recently, a 9-1-1 operator.

 
23

Gail Rawly stared at the cell phone used for making and receiving client calls. It lay on the desk blotter, gutted and dead—but too late. Its call history would now contain a link to a 911 emergency—a name—and an address. Had Dwayne Brox written down this burner’s number on a scrap of paper left somewhere in one of those seventeen rooms on Fifth Avenue?

If only this problem could be fobbed off on his wife. Mary had a genius for the life-and-death crisis. Princess Patty had survived this day by her mother’s wits, not his. And so he asked himself what Mary would do.

First, she might get rid of all the other burners locked in his desk. He opened the drawer that held his collection of outdated cell phones for contacting clients—and one hit man.
The drawer was empty.

So Iggy had returned to clean up more loose ends. Had he been watching the desperate scene of the medics reviving Patty? Had he orchestrated that rescue mission to clear the house? Damn right. Iggy had planned it with the smell of smoke and cologne in Patty’s bedroom.

Wait.
This was a good sign. His partner could easily have killed the whole family, but he had settled for wiping out cell-phone tracks—
except for the burner that Mary had carried away in her purse. By now, Iggy had ditched his own phone to become invisible, unreachable. No skip-trace tactic would ever locate a cash-and-carry man who left no paper trails. After the Conroys, mother and son, had moved out of the city, Gail knew their names would have been jettisoned for new identities—because Iggy was paranoia incarnate.

He stared at the empty drawer of lost connections. What now? Beyond the glass of the French doors, he saw Mary and the princess out back, sitting on the edge of the swimming pool, dangling their legs in the water. The family landline rang at the front of the house, and he ignored it.

Second ring.

What would Mary do?

Third
ring.

Gail was slow to rise, not caring much who might be calling that number, and his feet dragged on the way to the living room, where he picked up the receiver and said a listless, “Hello.”

And Iggy said, “Your burners are dead and buried, but not all of ’em. I checked the numbers, Gail. I know you still got the one for calls to Brox. Get
rid
of it! And then, you and me? We’re done.”

“Wait! One minute, okay? . . . Iggy, I know you don’t trust the technology. If you want to go back to the client’s place . . . just to make sure he didn’t write down my burner number. I understand. I really do. You got a pen on—”

“I already got that number, Gail.”

Of course he did. That number would be the only one listed for outgoing calls on the phone he had stolen from Dwayne Brox—a number that cops could link back to a 9-1-1 tape of Mary supplying this address for the ambulance.

“There’s no way to track that number back here.” Was he believed? Could Iggy hear him sweating through the telephone line? “But I
know how you feel, and I’m okay with it. I’m not worried about you going back there to look for the—”

“So . . . you screwed up.”

The click of disconnection was terrifying. But Gail’s first calming thought was that Iggy was not lying in wait near the house.

Gail believed this because he was still alive.

—

MAIL CARRIER MARKO PATRONE
zipped up the bulky blue bag on his cart and left it on the sidewalk to enter an apartment house. This building was always trouble. He inserted a key in the lock of a long metal plate, then swung it down on its hinges to expose the row of open slots for tenant mailboxes. One was jammed up with catalogs and junk mail from previous visits. That old lady
never
cleaned out her box without a reminder from him.
Bitch!
And there she was, waiting for the elevator only steps away from the interior door that his key would not open. He banged on the glass. “Hey!”

When his lecture had been delivered to the old bat, and all his letters dropped into their boxes, Marko passed through the street door.
Ah, jeez.
His mail cart had fallen into the basement well below the sidewalk. Had he forgotten to zip up his mailbag? Yeah. Banded letter bundles were lying on the cement floor where the trashcans were stored. He scrambled down the steps and righted the tipped-over cart.

If this had happened around the next corner, he’d be in deep shit for sure. All those reporters were still hanging around Gracie Mansion.

Marko wiped dirt from the bundles. Good as new. But when he returned them to his bag, he saw the cardboard corner of a package that should not be there. He parted letters and magazines to dig it out. This box was small, but not sized to fit a standard mail slot. It should have gone out on the parcel truck. The block letters addressed it to Mayor Andrew Polk. After twenty years on this route, a package for
Gracie Mansion was not likely to slip his mind. And, sure as hell, he had
not
packed this one.

Damn supervisor. Back at the Post Office, he had seen that bastard poking through the bag, double-checking mail screened by the cops—so he said. Nothing had been said about
adding
one more to the carrier’s load. The boss had no right to cram last-minute shit in a carrier’s bag. And it was jammed in deep so it wouldn’t get noticed until Marko was out the door.

More outrage—not one damned postage stamp on the box and no metered sticker, either.

Maybe supervisors and big-shot politicians thought they could just ignore postal regulations. He had a mind to go back there right now and raise a stink.
Or,
instead of filling out the paperwork for a package with no return address and no postage, he could forgo the satisfaction of reaming out his jerk supervisor, fun as that might be, and just drop off the damn parcel. Why not? For a package with postage due, maybe he could meet the mayor—and maybe get himself on TV.

—

ANDREW POLK
walked down the passageway to the Wagner Wing, where space expanded into a grand ballroom of tall blue walls and white trim, bronze urns and crystal sconces. Crossing to the far corner, he entered a small tucked-away reception room, the one with the yellow walls and a view of East End Avenue, though only a snatch of sidewalks and road could be seen between the trees on either side of the driveway. He was watching the reporters watching him when the mail arrived. The postman, having passed muster with uniformed guards, was escorted into the park—
holding a small square box.

Just the right size. And it was his birthday!
What
perfection.

There it was, hanging out in sight of a dozen cameras for all the world to see. Oh, this was almost too orgasmic to be endured.

Not waiting for the postman to reach the gatehouse, where another guard would surely confiscate the box, the mayor flew into the wing’s entryway, down a short flight stairs, and he was out the door on the run to accept his small package in full view of the street. He stopped near the foot of the driveway, and then, with one arm around the civil servant’s shoulders, Andrew Polk smiled and waved to reporters.

He looked down at the little carton addressed to him in familiar block letters. No stamps?
Bravo!
It had bypassed the screeners who opened his personal mail at the Post Office.

The mailman was paid the estimated postage due—and assured of five-seconds’ immortality on the evening news. With a final wave for the cameras, the mayor retreated up the driveway to enter the Wagner Wing, silently singing,
Happy birthday to me—

Would he make it back down the passage to the mansion before his protection detail noticed that he had slipped away?

—Happy birthday to me—

He was half the way across the ballroom when he met a worried Detective Brogan coming toward him. Good reason for worry. The man in charge of guarding the mayor of New York City was late to notice that His Honor was no longer upstairs in his private quarters.

And where was this bodyguard’s partner? Napping?

Brogan looked down at the small square package—a brand-new worry.

—
Happy birthday to meeee
—

Andrew Polk pressed the addressed side of the box against his chest. “No problem. The mailman says they’re screening everything at the Post Office. Oh, but you already knew that.” Grinning, the mayor walked away with a song in his heart and a heart in his hands.

—

THE CALLER ID
on Mallory’s desk phone gave up the name of her pet reporter, Woody Merrill, who was part of the throng of watchers at
the gate to Gracie Mansion. Media leaks were currency in Copland. In exchange for her promises of insider tidbits, Woody had agreed to update her on traffic in and out of the gate, as well as her keenest interest—any
odd
thing.

She trusted him more than the mayor’s bodyguards.

That protection detail had been pared down to two men under house arrest in the mansion, where they awaited department hearings on charges of fraudulent furloughs and faked reports to cover up the mayor’s many vacations at sea. The police commissioner might assume that this would scare Detective Brogan and his partner, Courtney, into hyper vigilance. But Mallory took them for cops with very little left to lose—only going through the motions of the jobs they had thrown away.

Tapping the keyboard on her laptop, she let the reporter’s call go on ringing. On the fourth ring, she picked up the receiver, aiming for annoyance in her voice when she asked, “What’ve you got for me, Woody?” There had been no reason to pose this question. She was already watching the reporter’s camera feed on her screen.

“Check this. I sent you a photo op with a mailman. The mayor almost kissed the guy. Is that—”

“Yeah,
right!”
Mallory slammed the receiver down on its cradle, leaving Woody to assume that this was her comment on his waste of her time.

Far from it.

She froze the video and zoomed in on the small square package cradled in Andrew Polk’s right arm—held close to the chest—something precious. The mayor’s police bodyguards were nowhere in sight. Those detectives had never been told what a serial killer was using as proof of death, but they had been under orders to report everything coming into the mansion. As yet, neither of them had phoned in the receipt of this parcel.

It was the right size to contain a human heart, proof that the boy was dead.

Riker was just sitting down at his desk when she said, “Have somebody pick up Dwayne Brox. Tell him we’re bringing him in for a handwriting sample.”