The Chalk Girl (14 page)

Ah, now she could
hear
– but she could not see, nor could she speak.

A lone hand touched her throat, and fingers pressed down hard. A woman called out, ‘I got a pulse!’

‘No, don’t touch that tape,’ said a man. ‘If she’s dehydrated like the others, you’ll peel the skin off her face.’

Others?

‘Wait for the paramedics!’

‘Here they come!’

Sirens
. She heard sirens, running feet, and a new voice said, ‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’

One arm was pricked with a needle.

‘Nod if you can hear me,’ said a woman close by.

And Willy Fallon nodded.

‘Lady, I’m gonna cut a small hole in that tape across your mouth. Then I can insert a tube with water, okay?’

Willy nodded again. Oh, yes.
Yes!
Her mouth was flooded with a thin stream of cool water, and she swallowed, greedy for it, choking on it. She was
alive
.

Heller had always resented his promotion to commander of Crime Scene Unit – a damn desk job – and so he was a common sight in the field, observing his people at work. He stood beneath the newly discovered hanging tree, and he was pleased, but not because the latest victim had survived. This was the only pristine crime scene for the Hunger Artist. He turned to the man beside him. ‘Did you notify Mallory and Riker?’

‘Yeah,’ said the park ranger. ‘They didn’t even ask where the tree was. They just wanted the name of the hospital.’

‘Good.’ His technicians would have ample time to work the scene without those two underfoot, though the detectives could have done nothing to ruin his good mood. On the contrary, he planned to dampen
their
day. When he explained the mechanics of the crime, it was going to drive them both nuts. This thought put Heller in such rare high spirits he nearly smiled.

Like the other hanging trees, this one also had two screw holes drilled into the trunk just above the roots. He looked up into the thick leaves as he spoke to a veteran CSI. ‘What about marks on the branch?’

‘No rope burns on this one,’ said the woman. ‘John got pictures.’

‘Okay,’ said Heller, ‘cut out the screw holes.’

An appalled park ranger watched the CSU team cut a circular core sample from the tree trunk. ‘Why such a big chunk? That’s a
lot
of damage.’

Heller could have explained that he needed both screw holes in one piece of wood for tests and court evidence. Instead, he brushed his face, as if a bug had landed there, and the ranger took his meaning. There were no more protests from the tree lover when the team decided to saw off a branch as well.

Over the next hour, more equipment arrived. With a nod to the techs combing the ground around the tree, Heller made his way across a clearing to the site of an experiment. There he found his new CSI, John Pollard, a corn-fed boy from Ohio, experienced and solid on science. The only flaw in the youngster’s résumé was the civilian status; he was a tourist in cop culture. Pollard had finished the last of three test runs, and now he loaded his equipment onto a hand truck outfitted with two oddball tires, a brand of inflatables to match tread marks found yesterday – one of the few bits of evidence they had not read about in the
Times
.

‘How’d it go, John?’

‘Very smooth, sir. But God knows there’s gotta be easier ways to kill people.’

One eyelid was pulled back, and Wilhelmina Fallon stared into a brilliant white light. She heard a small mechanical click, and darkness followed. As she drifted in and out of sleep, words were caught in snatches at first, and now whole sentences floated back and forth across her bed. She recognized the doctor’s voice when he said, ‘The sedative’s wearing off. Don’t expect much. She was hit on the back of the skull. The concussion wiped ten or fifteen minutes of memory.’

‘That’s three for three,’ said the voice of a woman.

And the doctor said, ‘Pardon?’

Another stranger, this one a man, said, ‘Three bop-and-drops. Blows to the back of the head.’

‘Gotta go. Don’t stay long, okay?’ A door closed on the departing doctor.

The strangers’ voices remained in the room. The door opened again, and feet walked in. There was no need to open her eyes. By their conversation, Willy knew all three of them were cops. She could even sort out the ranks by the deference the new voice paid to the other two. She ignored them, slowly waking to an inventory of soreness and pain from shoulders to ankles.

Now she recognized the new voice. After the tape had been removed from her eyes and mouth, this policeman had taken her statement in the emergency room. He was answering a question for the other two cops, saying, ‘Naw, she’s fine. That tube in her arm isn’t feeding her meds. It’s for vitamins.’

‘Christ,’ said the other man. ‘It looks like she’s been starved for a week.’

And this one must be a detective.

‘No, sir,’ said the man with lower rank. ‘More like twenty-four hours, give or take. She could remember a TV show from yesterday. Must’ve been on the skinny side before she got strung up in the Ramble.
Starvation chic
. That’s what the ER doc called it. Your vic was naked when they cut her down. No ID yet.’

And the female detective said, ‘You didn’t get a name while she was conscious?’

‘No, ma’am. She started screaming. That went on for a while before they sedated her.’

‘So the lady was in a lot of pain?’ asked the other detective.

‘No, sir. I think the doc knocked her out for being a bitch. It was
that
kind of screaming.’

Willy repressed a smile. Just above her, she could smell stale tobacco trapped in clothing when the male detective leaned over her and said, ‘Hey, Mallory, didn’t this woman used to be somebody?’

Bastard
.

‘Society pages,’ said the one called Mallory, moving closer. On the other side of the bed, a discreet trace of very good perfume warred with the tobacco smell of the man. ‘But mostly tabloids.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said the other detective. ‘Willy Fallon, party girl and queen of drug rehab. Doesn’t look so good now, does she?’

Oh, really?
Willy’s eyes opened by slits, and one hand snaked out from beneath the sheet to grab the man’s crotch. With his soft parts firmly in hand, she administered a light, threatening squeeze, a warning not to move – not to breathe. Her voice was hoarse when she asked, ‘What’s your
name
?’

He looked so surprised. They always did. This one had the classic frozen stance for hostage testicles. ‘Lady, don’t do it.’

‘He’s a cop,’ said the woman. ‘Let go of him.
Now!
’

Willy turned her head on the pillow to see a tall green-eyed blonde. She glared at the woman’s linen blazer. ‘Either you stole
that from my closet . . . or we have the same tailor.’
Oh, shit
. It looked better on the cop.

And now – another surprise.

The blonde snatched up Willy’s free hand and bent back the fingers to bring on sudden pain, the kind that came with bright points of light, with shock and awe and the patient’s agonized scream of ‘You fucking
bitch
!’ The man’s testicles were freed as the blonde’s silently implied condition of ending the torture. But Willy was still yelling obscenities after her wounded hand had been released.

The cop called Mallory pulled a notebook from the back pocket of her superb designer jeans. Pen to the open page, her words were frosty when she said, ‘So, Miss Fallon, now that you’re
awake
—’

‘You
bitch
! You
cunt
!’

‘—can you think of anyone who might want you dead?’

‘I can make you wish you were never born!’

The man pulled back Mallory’s blazer to expose a gun in a shoulder holster. ‘My partner can
shoot
you,’ he said. ‘She wins. Now answer the damn question.’

The blonde seemed almost bored when she asked again, ‘Who wants you dead?’

‘Tough one, huh?’ The man smiled. ‘Just give us your top ten.’

The patient recited an automatic response, a phrase oft repeated on the occasions of drunk driving and possession of recreational drugs. When she was done, the detectives could only stare at her, and the uniformed officer said, ‘Huh?’ This was the first time these words had elicited any surprise from the police.

Willy raised herself up on one elbow. ‘Didn’t you hear me, you
morons
? I’m invoking my right to remain silent. No more questions till my lawyer shows up.’

The male detective answered his cell phone, said ‘Yeah?’ and then turned to his partner. ‘Heller’s got something.’

The detectives quit the room, trailed out the door by the cop in uniform.

Well, that was easy.

Willy reached for the device that hung from her bedstead. So familiar from her days in drug-rehab facilities, this was a remote control for running nurses until they dropped. Oh, but first she must call a lawyer. Yes, that was rule one, impressed upon her when she was child – when her parents still cared if she lived or died.

What the hell was the name of that stupid assistant district attorney? Had she ever called him by his right name? No. When she was thirteen years old, she had alternated between Bowtie Boy and You Jerk.

The private office of the man who ran Crime Scene Unit was a cluttered repository of weird dead things in glass jars and catalogues of arcane knowledge. Riker and Mallory had been kept waiting – and wondering how much trouble they were in – and how were they going to dig their way out?

Heller lumbered into his office and glared at each detective in turn. Sizing their necks for nooses? No hellos were offered. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a photograph of two holes in tree bark. ‘This is what we started out with. Screw holes in trees . . . after we read about the trees in the newspaper.’

Apparently all was not forgiven. Riker turned his head toward the sound of squeaky wheels. The new hire, CSI John Pollard, entered the room, pushing a hand truck that fit Coco’s loose description of a delivery man’s dolly. The long struts of the handle extended up from a square of metal between two wheels. A large cardboard carton sat on this low platform, held in place by buckled straps.

‘That box holds a simulation of the murder kit,’ said Heller. ‘My guy’s the same weight as the heaviest victim. John, sit on the box.’ The CSI perched tailor-fashion on top of the carton, and his boss secured him to the dolly with straps. ‘Now you got a rolling weight of just under two hundred pounds.’

Riker eyed the hand truck with its load of box and man. ‘Could a woman move that thing?’

‘One way to find out.’ Heller turned to Mallory. ‘Give it a shot.’ And then he walked out the door, unconcerned that this might give her a hernia.

She tipped back the hand truck and wheeled the carton with the ride-along CSI out of the office and down the hall. If this caused her any strain, Riker saw no sign of it. They entered a room of bare walls and a clean, steel table. This was a thinking-man’s lab with no visual distractions – and no noise. Heller could gut detectives in here all day long, and no one would hear the screams.

John Pollard, freed from his bindings, began to unload the carton, and Riker shook his head –
no, no, no!
– as a jumble of equipment accumulated on the long table: a bag of screws, a cordless drill, a metal plate, a socket wrench, a pulley – and a
winch
? Attached
to the winch cable was a heavy-duty hook used for towing cars and trailers. Two battery leads extended from its back end, and now –
Christ Almighty
– a car battery was set on the table. ‘What’s with all this crap? Our perp used a
rope
to hang the sacks. We
gave
it to you. We even saved you the knots.’

CSI Pollard leaned down to retrieve a bagged coil from the carton. ‘This is one of the ropes from the crime scenes. But the Hunger Artist used a winch cable to lift those bodies into the trees.’

Heller laid a photograph on the table. It was a close-up shot of a branch. ‘You see those marks? Those are imprints from a chain used to hang this.’ He picked up an open-sided pulley. ‘Your perp threaded one of these with a winch cable.’

John Pollard rested one hand on the winch. ‘This model can pull a rolling weight of five thousand pounds – cars, boats. It wasn’t designed to
lift
anything, but we tested this one in the park.’ He touched the two red battery leads. ‘These hook up to any twelve-volt.’ He nodded to the car battery at the other end of the table. ‘I’m guessing the Hunger Artist would pick the lightest brand. That one weighs thirty-five pounds.’