Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (41 page)

“Sorry, Miss. I thought Bobby was in here. Must be slackin’ off
somewhere. The kid’s my assistant. He’s the one who works all this crap.”

“I know how it works.” She pulled out cassettes that had been switched out in the early daylight hours before the funeral. Maybe the killer had been here checking markers, looking for dates of a fresh corpse, and he might have seen the backhoe digging a child-size grave before the funeral.

The groundskeeper was taking a second hard look at the suspect drawing, holding it to the light of a window as he squinted and rubbed his chin. “Most of it don’t match, but there’s somethin’ about the eyes. We got a regular visitor here. When I see him, I never look him in the eye no more. Makes my skin crawl. You know what I mean?” The old man walked to the shelves and pulled down a tape. Handing it to her, he said, “Try this one. It’s his regular day, and he always passes this building. No way around it if you park in the lot. Always goes by with a big bouquet of roses.”

“Red roses?”

“Yeah.”

She flipped a power switch, then fed the tape into the mouth of the machine and pressed the play button for the center monitor. The camera range was narrow. In the mistaken assumption that the electronic equipment might have some value, only this small building was covered. And now she saw the back of a man with a blue baseball cap and a bouquet of roses.

“That’s my guy,” said the groundskeeper. “The cap, the walk—that’s him. You won’t never see his face. Sorry ’bout that. No camera ever caught him on the way back to the parking lot.”

“I don’t suppose you ever followed him.”

“Never, not
that
guy.”

And she took this last remark as a positive ID for a stone killer.

—

THE VISITOR
with the blue baseball cap had appeared in two other tapes, but only the back of him. One that captured him without his roses gave Mallory a rough idea of where he had been. The grave of the Phelps boy provided a direction, and beyond that, an absence of security cameras gave her a path through an old section, closed now for lack of room to fit one more headstone. Visitors were not so common here. In company with the groundskeeper, she had found six plots with red roses among the floral offerings. Half were ruled out for flowers too fresh or too wilted to fit the timing of the hit man’s last bouquet.

She phoned her shortlist in to Riker. “Check the state tax roles for these three.” She fed him names and dates of birth and death. “Whatever you can find on them.”

“Okay, let’s go,” she said to the groundskeeper. He walked alongside her on the path to the main building of the Elroy Cemetery, where all the records were kept.

“Don’t get your hopes up, Miss. The boss’s computer is secondhand crap—almost as old as the cameras. No Internet. Penny-pinching bastard.”

—

PENNY
-
PINCHING
did not fit with the décor. Even Charles Butler, her walking, talking reference book for all things antique, would have approved the appointments of this private office. The furniture dated back to the mid 1800s, when the first grave was dug. The detective and the groundskeeper sat in matching high-back leather armchairs from the same period.

The young man behind the mahogany desk was the descendant of a long line of Elroys. He stared at another antique, his outmoded desktop computer, as he searched it for names of the dead and buried. He had found all but one from her shortlist. “This last one? You must’ve made an error when you—”

“I was
there,”
said the groundskeeper, taking offense on Mallory’s behalf. “I
know
she wrote down the right names. Section and plot numbers, too.”

“Impossible,” said Elroy. “That last one’s in a section that was closed over fifty years ago.” Done with the old man, he flashed a toothy smile for Mallory. “But we
do
cross-index.” He scrolled down a list of numbers and names. “Ah, plot 947. Like I said, we’ve got no Moira Conroy buried anywhere in this cemetery. That plot belongs to Moira
Kenna
. That’s the name that would’ve appeared on her temporary marker, the one we always put down for the funeral. So . . . I can see what happened here. When the monument company finished carving her permanent headstone, obviously they delivered the wrong one, a stone for an entirely different Moira. We can’t be expected to keep track of things like that. And, apparently, the Kenna family never made a complaint.”

A corpse with an alias carved in stone?

Mallory reached out to swivel his monitor sideways for a look at the screen of names and numbers. She pointed to the end of one line. “Check out the dates for birth and death. Explain
that.”

He leaned in to peer at the glowing numerals that followed Moira Kenna’s name. “She died in 1931 . . . at the age of five.” And now he consulted the notebook page with Mallory’s neatly printed date of death for Moira Conroy, a woman who had lived much longer and died only nine years ago. “Oh, yes, I see.” It was highly unlikely that it had taken the stone carver more than eighty years to deliver the wrong monument.

“That’s why the family never complained,” said Mallory. “They were all dead when you illegally sold that grave the
second
time.” Did she believe this? No, she had a better theory. But menace inspired cooperation.

Mr. Elroy got off to a sputtering start. “N-n-no! We would
never
—
”

“
Prove
it! You still have paperwork on that plot? Forms with next of kin? A funeral home?”

“Our paperwork dates back more than a hundred and fifty years, and it’s all intact. Most of it’s on
real
paper.” He said this as if it might be a good thing to run a business in the wrong century. “The older sections haven’t been scanned into the computer yet. So the Kenna child is downstairs with the rest of the backlog.”

—

OR NOT
.

In the basement storage area, Mallory stood before an old wooden filing cabinet, one of many, and she waited for the flustered Mr. Elroy to go through the contents of one drawer—for the third time. The file for plot 947 was not to be found.

“Oh, dear,” he said. “If she’s been misfiled, we’ll never find her until
all
the paperwork gets scanned. That might be
years
from now.”

Mallory’s scenario for that was
never.
But a theory was proving out by the evidence that could not be found.

The file might have disappeared nine years ago, shortly after the second interment, the burial of Moira Conroy’s trespassing corpse. Or it might have been stolen earlier, maybe on a day when the hit man was trolling cemeteries, hunting for an identity to steal for a living woman with roughly the same date of birth,
another
Moira. An elderly woman might find it hard to give up her entire identity—easier to keep her own first name.

Only a dead child would do. Children left no paper trails in the system, and a little girl with the same first name would have been a greater stroke of luck in a smaller cemetery than this one. The buried girl’s birth certificate was all that was needed to apply for a Social Security number and a fresh start with bogus credentials. This was theory, but it fit so well with a single fact: Mallory knew she could count on two bodies in that grave.

The man who brought flowers to the deceased poseur had ordered
the replacement gravestone with the extra corpse’s true name, an act of sentiment that had served a second purpose. It obliterated the last visible trace of the grave’s first tenant.

But the stolen identity would have had a life span of its own, one that left tracks. Mallory phoned her partner to add another name to her list of searches. “Run a tri-state trace for a paper ghost, another Moira, last name
Kenna
.
”

—

FOR THE LENGTH
of a commercial break, all of Iggy Conroy’s possibilities remained intact.

He waited for the news story promised by the teasing mention of a suspicious death and the exhumation of a New Jersey grave—after a word from the sponsors. With the tap of the mute button on his remote control, he killed the TV volume and watched a silent parade of film clips to sell him this thing and that. How many ads could be smashed into a single minute?

Another minute.

An eternity of ads.

C’mon, c’mon.

The news anchor reappeared. Iggy turned on the volume as the picture changed to a field reporter on location in a parking lot. He recognized the old man standing alongside the young woman with the microphone. She introduced him as an employee of the Elroy Cemetery, the only one willing to speak to the media, though he did not
seem
all that willing. The reporter had boxed him in between two cars and the shrubs that lined the parking spaces.

Following her first question, the surly groundskeeper said, “No, lady, I ain’t seen a cop car all day.” Asked why the small casket had been exhumed and taken away in a van, he replied, “Ah, who knows? It’s not like that never happens. Let’s say you’re dead, and you think you’re all
set in your final resting place. But then your family decides to take you with ’em when they move down to Florida. Better weather, right? And maybe your new grave’s got an ocean view. . . . People are stupid. . . . But that kills your rumor on a grave robber, don’t it? The relatives never haul off empty coffins.” And now, on to the traffic report.

A
small
casket. A lying old man.

The cops had that kid’s heart!

Had Dwayne Brox just handed it over to them? Was that why they let him go?

Iggy walked through all the rooms of his house, saying goodbye to every wall. It was time to torch his meat locker.

 
26

The tumbledown house, a shelter to vermin and squatters, sat on the ragged edge of a slum that used to be a town. Even the rats here were down to skin and bone. The only thriving life forms were weeds that came up through cracks in the pavement. Harvey Madden, the wasting man on the front stoop, smiled wide as Iggy Conroy cruised past him to park the van at the end of the block.

Years ago, before Harvey had started sampling what he sold, he had been a pharmacist who owned his own drugstore and drove a nice car. Today the addict was a marginal man, such a puny man that he crouched below the notice of narcs, and no one would miss him if he never went back to that house for his bedroll. There was no muscle on him, but the height and age were roughly right. The skeletal junkie was coming down the sidewalk as Iggy opened the rear door of the van.

Harvey obligingly climbed inside, and with him came the smell of underwear never washed. Every dime made on deals went to feed his habit. Nothing left for soap. Between a bony finger and thumb, he held up the promised sugar cube. “Not your usual buy,” nothing like the drugs he supplied for Iggy’s murder kit. “This is primo, my friend. Packed with hallucinogens for the trip of a lifetime. Forget
Paris.”
He
dropped the cube into the hand of his best customer. “Made to order for a quick dissolve with no aftertaste. And it kicks in fast. You’ll love it.”

“It’s goin’ in a pint of water.”

“No problem. I promise you, it’s
packed.”
And Harvey had been about to say more, but he felt the jab of the dart in his neck, whispered the words,
Oh . . . rats,
and then he lay sprawled on the floor of the van.

Only paralyzed.

There needed to be smoke in Harvey’s lungs when he died.

Iggy’s exit plan was simple. Torch everything. Kill everybody.

—

DETECTIVE GONZALES
sang out, “Road trip!”

All around the squad room, men were opening and slamming drawers. Some clipped side arms to their belts. Others favored shoulder holsters.

“Hey, Mallory. You still at the cemetery?” Riker cradled the desk phone’s receiver between his shoulder and chin, freeing his hands to hide his eyeglasses and find his gun. “Your paper ghost, Moira Kenna—she’s still pretty lively. Pays utility bills, property taxes. . . . Naw, no driver’s license, but she’s the registered owner of a vintage Jag. . . . Yeah, I thought you’d like that. But get this. Twelve years ago, she bought a house for cash. . . . Right, that was the year she applied for a Social Security number.”

Janos called out to him from three desks away, “Tell her Moira Kenna’s still writing checks on her bank account!”

“Hear that? Mallory, you’re gonna
love
this. The date of birth you gave me for the other woman—that fits a Moira Conroy in New York. She dropped off the tax rolls the year Moira Kenna bought the house in Jersey. . . . Yeah, twenty-two Birch Drive in Lowell. Everybody’s on the move. The whole squad. We’ll meet you there.”

When he ended the call, the other detectives were filing out the
stairwell door. He shouted to them, “Sirens all the way! We need speed! Mallory doesn’t want any backup from the locals!”

“Smart move,” said Gonzales. “They’d just fuck it up.”

So true. If one patrol car pulled in the driveway, it would get the boy killed. Cops, too. The alternate game plan for the Jersey police would be dicking around for hours, waiting for a hostage negotiator to show up on the scene. Either way, the kid was dead, and their hit man was out the back door.

This was a job for shock and awe and a battering ram.

Washington pumped the address into his smartphone and squinted at the map on the little screen. “Right across the bridge and down the road we go. We’re a helluva lot closer than Mallory. That cemetery’s seventy miles from this address.”

Obviously, Washington, smart man, had never ridden in a car with Mallory behind the wheel. And so Riker said, “I got twenty that says she beats us to the house.”

Every man on the squad had a sporting nature, and this guaranteed him more speed on the road. He would cover every single bet and hope to lose—rather than have her go in alone.