Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (9 page)

“No, not enough force for a fracture, but that’s your death blow. It ruptured her aneurism. The cloth of her veil protected the impact site. So . . . no broken skin, no blood to nail down time of death by coagulation. She
might’ve
died on the spot, but she could’ve easily lingered for hours. A stroke from hemorrhage—”

“You told me she was dead when he cut her open.”

“
Right.
With the first three victims, the killer came up behind them for the injection.” He was inappropriately cheerful when he said this, for she had missed something else. “Look at the angle of the first blow to the nun’s head.”

Kathy hunkered down, eyes level with the nun’s skull. “So Sister Michael was the only frontal assault. She
knew
the perp.”

Oh,
please.
As a man of science, he preferred solid evidence over unsupportable inference. “Well, here’s something . . .
factual,”
he said. Not
too
caustic. He held up the New Jersey hospital’s tox screen for her live victim. “If the other three were injected with these same drugs, the doses would’ve been tailored to weight.”

“So every time out, he worked off a shopping list of specific victims.”

“It would seem so.” He pointed to the first drug on Mrs. Cathery’s
lab report. “That one’s got a paralytic component. It’s used for tagging animals in the wild. Lethal in the wrong dose. The injected victims would’ve fallen down almost immediately. That would suggest a location that wasn’t in full view of the public or—”

“No, it
doesn’t.”
One hand went to her hip to put him on notice that he was venturing into cop territory. And where did
he
get off doing
her
job? “My perp could’ve done it on the sidewalk in broad daylight. Say a pedestrian passes by, sees our guy supporting a helpless victim,
helping
him. Fine
.
No need to stop. The good Samaritan moves on . . . while the victim gets dragged away and murdered.”

“The
nun’s
assault—”

“That one needed privacy. An indoor crime scene with an exposed brick wall.” She lifted Sister Michael’s right hand as if to kiss it. “I smell bleach. The perp cleaned her fingernails.”

Damn.
He had lost his last ace. “Only one hand was—”

“After she died,” said Mallory.

“You can’t
know
that. I
told
you! She could’ve lingered for—”

“
Logic.
She got a piece of him.” The detective held up the doctor’s personal Polaroid, the shot taken when the nun still wore a sly smile. “She had his skin under her fingernails. She wouldn’t smile that way
after
the perp bleached out the evidence. So no DNA, but now we know he’s got scratches.”

“She marked him for you, that’s
obvious.”
And, per the rules, no score for Kathy. “But you—”

Oh . . . fresh hell.

Edward Slope bowed his head as the other mystery, the most troubling one, came undone. He called himself six kinds of a fool. How could he have failed to
recognize
it—when the young cop beside him was the Queen of Get Even? The nun’s smile that had so disturbed him—but affected him most while he had been cutting into her—it was Kathy’s smile.

—

THE CHAIN
-
SMOKING STRANGER
finished another beer, and now he considerately dumped his crushed can into the duffel bag at his feet, rather than mar Albert Costello’s coffee table with a ring from the sweaty aluminum.

Well, somebody had raised this guy right.

The younger man’s meaty arms spread across the back of the sofa—so at home here. It was like they had known one another for years. He had not yet tired of the mugging story, asking, “What was you doin’ out there on the street that day?”

“Watchin’ life go by,” said Albert. “Every day I got a cravin’ for it. So I go outside. But I got nowhere to go. I lean against a lamppost for a while. I watch the people walk past me . . . the ass end of life.”

The last cigarette in Albert’s pack had been smoked, and there was no more beer in the refrigerator. What food had remained over the past few days of his hospital stay was inedible now. And so he accepted the stranger’s offer to share a meal with him, cold beer and smokes, too.

What a deal.

His companion led the way down the stairs. On the ground floor, the man turned his back on the street door to open the one for the rear of the building. “I’m parked out here.”

When Albert stepped into the alley, the sun had gone down, though there was still lots of light left to a summer evening. The air out here was cooler, invigorating, and he was not tired anymore. No, he was coming back to life. Precious life.

—

WHO WAS ALBERT COSTELLO
?

The commander of the Special Crimes Unit sat in Detective Mallory’s chair, staring at one paper neatly aligned with the edges of her
desk. It was a fax cover sheet for a report from the Lower East Side precinct, but where was the report? The information on this single page was sparse; it only told him that she had blown off the priority case to waste time on a days-old mugging.

The lieutenant opened and slammed every insanely neat drawer to no avail. And when he had checked the call history on Mallory’s landline and savaged her wastebasket, he raked one hand through his hair, a bad habit that increased the bald spot at the back of his head.

Jack Coffey would credit most of his lost follicles to the stress of running a homicide copshop. Otherwise, he was the average physical specimen who could rob six banks in a day without a single witness able to supply one distinguishing feature. At the age of thirty-seven, what set him apart on a police force of thirty thousand was the early rise to an elite command position,
and
he would have to agree with his mom that he was one smart cop—because he always knew when Mallory was scamming him.

Her desktop was so clean that insects would not land here for fear of leaving incriminating prints in the fresh layer of furniture wax. Apart from the telephone, the report’s cover sheet was the sole item on display, and he read it again—all four lines of text.

He called it bait.

Yeah, after sending all his calls to her voice mail, Mallory knew she could count on him to go through her stuff and go a little nuts over the one totally meaningless thing that was
not
there—the damn report.

He walked away from her desk, cover sheet in hand, with a plan to hunt down the missing report on Albert Costello’s mugging and actually read it—a waste of
more
time—instead of following a better instinct to crush this paper into a ball, set it afire and spread the damn ashes all over her desk.

—

FROM BASEBOARD
to ceiling molding, the walls of the incident room were lined with cork, and the pinned-up text and photos for the priority case were spreading virally. Jack Coffey quickly spotted the mugging report. It was fixed to the cork at two corners, and so it had caught his eye as the only sheaf of paper that did not dangle by a single pin. He knew that a carpenter’s plumb line applied to one edge would find it in perfect alignment with heaven and earth. Mallory’s contribution. Where was that neat freak now?

And “Who the hell is Albert Costello?”

“Mugging victim,” said Rubin Washington, a broad-shouldered cop with thirty years on the job and an invaluable lack of charm that worked well on hard-core felons. Not a chatty man, he stood before the wall, pinning up the ME’s preliminary. But now, with a glance to the side, he noticed that his lieutenant was still staring at him. “It was a bop-and-drop, boss. It went down on St. Marks Place a few days back. Riker and Mallory went over there to chase the old guy down.”

Oh, and dare his boss ask, “What the
fuck for?”

“Costello left the hospital, and he doesn’t answer his home phone.”

And that was so
not
Jack Coffey’s point. “They’re wasting time on a damn mugging?”

“Mallory says the nun won’t fit the pattern, but the old man might.”

There were times when Lieutenant Coffey believed that he was in charge of this squad. Today he was more in line with reality. He walked down half the length of this wall to read a spread of yellow sheets, the handwritten statements gleaned from interviews. He had sent detectives out to canvass the neighborhoods of their victims, in part just to make the point that Mallory could not get all the pertinent background data from a computer. But her theory was proving out from one sheet to the next in this information gathered by mere humans knocking on doors. There was a pattern—but it would only fit three out of four victims.

The first and most decomposed was Ralph Posey, forty-one years old and a resident of the Upper West Side. He never spoke to neighbors, and he had no job, no coworkers or family to notice if he was alive or dead. He was only known to the local grocer, who bagged his purchases every Monday at noon and professed no surprise at the man’s murder because “He was a shithead.” The oldest victim, Sally Chin, had lived on the Upper East Side. She had twice weekly hobbled to her chiropractor’s office on crutches. If not for this habit, no one on her street would have recognized her photograph. And the very shy young Alden Toomey had worked from his home in the West Village, only venturing outside on Sunday to attend church services, the only service that would not make a delivery to his apartment.

Mallory was right. The nun would not fit the victimology, and neither would her nephew. They were the only two people who would have been reported missing on the day they vanished. Unlike his aunt, Jonah Quill did have a predictable routine, the daily route of a schoolboy, but he had not been following it when he was taken.

On the other side of the room, his expert on nuns, Father DuPont, stood alongside Detective Janos, a gorilla cop with a face of pure menace and a voice of surprising softness. Janos, a gentle, polite person, confounded everyone he met, and that made him the perfect choice for this assignment. Priest and gorilla faced the cork wall—the bloody one, with pictures of a woman’s body laid open on the autopsy table, her innards hollowed out. For Jack Coffey’s purposes, these shots were better than the crime-scene pictures of wounds that were too modest by comparison.

Though appointed by the Pope, Cardinal Rice was the town’s best-liked politician in every election year, and he had more influence than God. And so his emissary, Father DuPont, had been shown every courtesy at Special Crimes. Rare was the civilian who was allowed into the incident room, though this man had been invited only to view this
one set of photographs—to soften him up for the detective’s interview. And the priest did seem paler now, sickened and so politely bludgeoned by the bloody ruin of Sister Michael’s dead body.

—

MALLORY KNOCKED ON THE DOOR
of the mugging victim, Albert Costello.

Riker leaned against a wall and read her copy of the old man’s police report. It matched the date when the nun and her nephew had disappeared from this same street. “But this guy won’t fit the pattern. The cop coded it as a straight up bop-and-drop.”

“No, that’s a training-day screwup.” Mallory banged on the door one more time. “The partner, the
real
cop, signed off on it, but he let the rookie do the paperwork.”

“How do you
know
that?” Who, apart from this precinct’s desk sergeant, would
know
that? Riker could not ask if she was setting him up for a sucker bet. They had an audience.

“There’s people been livin’ here for years,” said a woman from the first floor, “and they think it’s an empty apartment. That’s how quiet the old guy is.”

“Oh, yeah,” said the neighbor from an upper floor, when he looked at the photograph filed with the mugging report. “When I’m home on the weekends, I see him outside sometimes, just hanging out on the sidewalk.”

Another tenant sniffed the air. “Cigarettes? A
smoker.”
Her face scrunched up. “Well, at least it doesn’t smell like he died in there.”

Mallory turned to this woman from the top floor. “You pass this door every day, and you never caught a whiff of cigarette smoke?”

“Hey, I would’ve noticed if it was
this
bad.”

The jingle of keys bobbing on a belt loop announced the building superintendent, who was huffing up the stairs to unlock the apartment.
When the onlookers and the super had been dismissed, Mallory opened the door and flicked on the light.

The odor of cigarette smoke was thick, and dust coated lampshades and tables. Riker hunkered down to touch a spill on the carpet. It smelled like beer. “Still wet. The old guy hasn’t been gone long.”

Mallory was staring at the only clean ashtray in the apartment. Others were in various stages of full to overflowing with cigarette butts. “Our perp’s been here,” she said.

“What?” Where was this coming from? Riker only saw evidence of one occupant in the beer cans that littered a small table next to an armchair.

“The perp’s a smoker, too,” she said. “He didn’t just take his butts with him. He
washed
an ashtray. No DNA left behind, and we won’t find any prints.”

Riker picked up a week-old newspaper and uncovered another empty ashtray, but this one had not been cleaned in years. The detective recognized the crusted residue of every ashtray in his own apartment. He turned to look at the efficiency kitchen, rendered useless by dirty dishes overflowing the sink to cover the countertop and stove. That area’s small patch of linoleum recorded a hundred sticky spills never cleaned up. The garbage pail was full of soiled paper plates and cups, a few plastic knives, forks and deli napkins that accompanied take-out food—and solved the problem of no clean dishes. The old man who lived here never washed
anything.
So his partner had zeroed in on one ashtray, clean and shiny, and now Riker was a believer.