Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (27 page)

Trouble.
Charles had gone off Mallory’s script to brief detectives on their own store of information. He was in danger of losing these tired men to comas. And so Jack Coffey called out to him, “But this time it’s different, right?”

“Oh, yes,” said Charles. “Sorry. I only wanted to make the point that
your
suspect is willing to pay a lot more so he can distance himself from the killing. It’s a pattern with him. You see it carried out in the randomness of the victims and their far-flung neighborhoods. None
of those deaths will ever tie back to him or the mayor. You can stop looking for those connections.”

The men were nodding, agreeable to chopping routine hours off this chase.

“Hiring a professional killer leaves less chance of things going awry. And you can count on a third party to broker the murders. The middleman and the hit man might live out of state.
More
distance from the crimes.”

Oh, if only Charles knew when to stop. They already understood why a pro was hell to catch.

“All ten suspects lost fortunes in a high-risk venture. We might extend that trait to other forms of high-stakes gambling and a tie to bookmakers. Or, given market losses in the millions, the suspect may owe large sums to loan sharks. He’s likely done business with
someone
who had access to your hit man. Andrew Polk was the stockbroker who engineered crippling losses for your suspects, and the government
could
back that up, but I doubt that they’re so inclined.”

Whoa!
Where did that come from? Not the sketchy SEC document. And now Jack Coffey knew why Mallory was supplying information via ventriloquism. She was another one who liked some distance from bad acts.

Charles held up the suspect list. “These ten people have more than enough money left to cover the hit man’s fees. Given the . . . extra work . . . the kidnapping, the mutilation, delivering hearts and corpses and such, you can figure each murder at approximately a hundred thousand dollars.”

The lieutenant could almost see Mallory with her calculator, coolly cost-estimating the time and trouble of cutting out a human heart—times four.

Detective Washington stood up. “So we’re lookin’ at bank withdrawals, stock liquidation, stuff like that . . . to cover a
hit man’s
payoff.” His sarcasm begged the question:
Isn’t that just too damn easy? Oh, yeah, and hasn’t Mallory already hacked into the suspects’ accounts?

“You needn’t waste time on that,” said Charles. “Too many ways to separate oneself from offshore assets. Names become just numbers on a spreadsheet in a foreign bank.”

So . . . the short answer would be
yes,
Mallory had already looked into that. Satisfied, Washington sat down.

“And that does it for the investor who paid for the murders. Now we move on to the hit man.” Charles held up the tattoo artist’s drawing. “An efficient killing machine . . . up to a point. He
can
be rattled. He made a mistake murdering the nun instead of his intended target. Then there’s the highly publicized drowning of Mr. Costello. And stealing a child? Huge blunder. Your hit man is under enormous pressure. Too many errors. You
know
he’s unraveling.”

“Then it’s over.” Gonzales, the house skeptic, rose from his chair. “When a job goes sour, the pro goes underground. There won’t be any ransom demand for Jonah. No heart this time, either. The hit man’s a million miles from here, and we’ll never find that kid’s body. You gotta know Jonah’s dead.”

Backfire!
Oh, Mother, make up my bed and turn out the lights.

The other detectives could fill in the rest—every last shot at catching the hit man in one more screwup was gone. They all had a dead-end look about them. But, after the first forty-eight hours had passed, who among them had held out any hope for Jonah?

“I have good reason to believe that child is alive,” said Charles.

Well, that was not from Mallory’s cheat sheet of lecture notes. She knew better.

—

ONLY ONE LOCK
out of three required finessing. When Jonah had gone missing, his security-conscious uncle must have left home in a
hurry. Mallory saw no blinking lights on the wall panel by the front door. Harold Quill had not even taken time to set the alarm. Daylight penetrated the draperies enough to see her way across the front room of upscale furnishings and deep-pile carpet.

She walked down a hallway and stopped by the open door of a bedroom. Discarded jeans lay on the floor. A sneaker here, a child-size T-shirt there. An unmade bed. She approved of the state-of-the-art audio equipment and speakers. The shelves held thick books with raised dots of braille on the spines, and a computer sat on the desk. Detectives from this Upper East Side precinct had already passed along the store of files, kid stuff, nothing useful. But the laptop should have been confiscated. Something new might have come in. She tapped the power button. The screen glowed, and voice-recognition software responded, “Hello, Jonah.”

When Mallory said, “Email,” an argument ensued between the detective and the robotic voice that did not recognize her as one of its people. And so she killed it. After tapping in a change of settings, she stole into the boy’s mail the old-fashioned way and found nothing recent apart from ads and one short love letter from Lucinda: “If you die on me I’ll KILL YOU.” Unlike everyone else on the contact list, this little girl held out hope that the boy might log in—any minute, any second now—to read his messages, but Jonah was gone.

Dead and gone.

—

“
THE BOY
’
S ALIVE
.
Please
hear me out.” The psychologist had fallen into the begging mode. “There’s something very personal in the nun’s murder. That’s how you’ll catch the killer. She’s your tie to the hit man.”

Jack Coffey was willing to believe that last part, but the boy was certainly dead, and every face in this crowd said so.

“The nun’s likeness to her nephew is so strong,” said Charles. “That may be why he stole Jonah. Nothing else fits quite so well.”

Poor guy. He was sagging, dragging now. He must realize that he had lost credibility with his audience of detectives. All those sorry eyes.
Pity
from
cops.

“You read the autopsy reports,” said the man who did
not
know when to quit. “You know the killer kept some of those victims alive for days.”

“Not the nun,” said Gonzales the Doubter.

“No, she was the anomaly, a mistake. So look at the broad scheme. Such a public exposure of the murders. From the beginning, the hit man was on board with publicity—lots of it. And now the whole city’s on a first-name basis with Jonah. They’re all captivated by a
living
boy, and they want him brought home alive. And I know that’s what you want. Some of you have children of your own.”

Yeah, a lot of these men were fathers. Well, that part was pure Mallory, pulling heartstrings by remote control.

Cheap shot.

Well placed.

“The tension is building by the minute,” said Charles. “The news media’s keeping a round-the-clock vigil on the mayor. Andrew Polk’s on every TV channel, millions of watchers. He can’t step outside the mansion without facing the mob. The pressure’s rising. It’s over the moon. Could anything be more irresistible to the hit man’s client? You have to know he doesn’t want Jonah killed.
He hasn’t gotten paid yet!”

Gonzales was about to stand again, but thought better of it. Maybe he didn’t want to bludgeon the man at the lectern. Or was this detective weakening? He had two kids at home.

“Never underestimate the power of greed,” said Charles Butler. “People
will
make stupendous gambles for the love of money. They’ll bet on a big win,
knowing
it’s just too good to be true. And then they
grieve for the money they lose. Look at what one of Polk’s victims has done to get it back. Can you really see him giving up something so precious—worth so much money?”

Charles had ceased to be boring. Mallory must have written that closing shot. Greed was her favorite call for every criminal act on the books. But this idea that avarice would save the boy—these men would never have bought that spiel from Mallory. And she would never have begged them to believe in her.

The lieutenant walked among the seated detectives, passing out copies of the tattoo artist’s drawing, and he noticed a change in his men. Kudos to the shrink in the nice suit. Charles had created doubts among these cops in slept-in clothes, who traded glances with no roll to the eyes. In twos and threes, they got up from their chairs and marched out the door to hunt for Jonah, all of them believing that the boy
might
be alive.

But not Jack Coffey.

The plea had come from Charles Butler’s heart, genuine—and not. This man had been infected with a Mallory pathology, generating theory from spit. And though Charles could only have spoken to truth, it was a Mallory kind of a lie. What better way to refuel these exhausted cops than to dangle the beating heart of a living child?

She had only wanted fresh horses.

Well, she got them.

—

RIKER WAS ENJOYING
a quiet time-out from Mrs. Quill’s ministry of religious rants and grievances against whores she had known and raised. A civilian aide had volunteered to guide the old crone to a restroom, where she might drown in some freak toilet-bowl accident—if there
was
a God. Though not a churchgoing kind of a cop, he liked his odds.

The detective’s moment of perfect peace was ruined by the sight of Charles Butler leaving the lieutenant’s office. So much was on display in that poor bastard’s expression as he crossed the squad room to Riker’s desk. The psychologist folded his tall body into the visitor’s chair and slumped there, his face stuck in a comical look of surprise, like a giant frog poked in the eye—by Mallory, though she was miles way.

Jack Coffey must have ratted her out.

Only seconds after “Hello,” Charles asked the predictable question in the tone of
Say it ain’t so.
“Mallory believes the boy is
dead?”

Riker nodded. “Her and every other cop on the squad—till you tuned ’em up for us. And thanks for that.”

“She
played
me?”

“What a world, huh?” The detective killed off a smile in the making. Charles was also known as the Man Who Loved Mallory, and her playgroup of friends was not extensive, not if he discounted her machines. So now it fell to Riker, this chore of mopping up after his partner’s carnage. “You know her history with hookers.”

When Kathy Mallory had been much smaller and more feral, a homeless child whose theme song was
Gimme Shelter,
she had milked prostitutes for money, food and even a roof when she needed one. Crafty little kid, she had chosen hookers as the only patsies who would not give her up to social workers. And she had played those women, taking them for all she could get.

“One of the hookers even fenced the kid’s stolen goods. Kathy was a
great
street thief.” Whenever the late Lou Markowitz had spoken of his foster daughter’s felony childhood, he had been damn near bragging. And Charles had been the old man’s friend, his best listener. He would have heard many a story, but only bare bones, nothing that stank or bled.

“By the time Kathy was ten years old, she’d been to school on whores—the
stink
of whores. The cum from the johns on their skin
and their skirts. The vomit when they were dope-sick or drunk. . . . What hookers smelled like when they were three days dead, ripe and gassy. So you’ll excuse her for not buyin’ into that pretty story of a whore who
saw
the light,
found
the Lord, and turned into a damn
nun.
But here’s how really twisted Mallory is. . . . She doesn’t give a shit about nuns. Take ’em all out back and shoot ’em—she won’t mind. But the second she saw Angie Quill’s old rap sheet for prostitution? Mallory was on
her
side. Mallory’s the engine on this case, not Jack Coffey.
She
drives it. Whatever it takes, she’s gonna get the freak who cut out Angie’s heart.”

Almost done, Riker splayed his hands and shrugged. “So she played you,
lied
to you. Why do you care if she’s on the side of the angels . . . or the side of the whores?”

—

MALLORY MOVED ON
to Harold Quill’s bedroom, lit by airshaft windows, shadowy—and so she knew that the man loved the boy. For no sane reason, this fool had given up the better light of the
blind
boy’s room around the corner, where the sun shone for nobody.

The other contrast was the adult neatness here, everything in its place, her guarantee of a quick search. This was where she would find all the hidey-holes that civilians thought were so clever. The wall safe behind a hinged bureau mirror was a disappointment, holding only valuables. More promising loose floorboards were in the predictable place under the only scatter rug.

The hole in the floor held a gun.

This was a surprise, and not just because the Upper East Side squad had failed to note it in their report on the search of this apartment. Perhaps they had seen a homeowner’s weapon as all too common a thing, one with no relevance to their case of a kidnapped child. Stashed alongside the gun was the paperwork for purchase and registration. It was dated to the year Angie Quill had entered the monastery.

What else had that local squad left out of their report?

Mallory opened the closet. Given the neat spacing of clothing grouped by color and the regimented placement of shoes on the floor, she could tell that the messy upper shelf had already been ransacked by other detectives. When all the contents of that shelf had been pulled down, she held an ordinary shoebox in her hand, and the moment she lifted the lid, its importance was obvious. Yet this was something else found unworthy of mention by local cops, who had not even bothered to write a damn line about a hidden gun
—
an item that said the homeowner was not just scared, but very secretive about his fear.