Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (38 page)

 
24

Gail Rawly quelled the urge to yell, to flap his arms and bang his head against a wall.

Perhaps it was a mistake to let Mary believe that they were going on a surprise vacation. She had wasted precious time securing every window’s hurricane shutters to protect the house from summer storms while they were gone—never to return. And she had given Gail his own list of chores. Insanely enough, he had done them, though
speed was everything today.

Mary and the princess were packing bags—
still
not ready to go!

He should’ve just tossed his wife and child into the car. One small mercy on a bad day, Mary and Patty could not see outside the shuttered windows as Gail lay flat on the driveway, opening the garage door with his remote control in one hand—and a gun in the other—checking to see that there were no feet hiding behind the two cars parked in there.

—

“
MY PEOPLE
don’t
make this kind of mistake!” said the chief medical examiner as he led the young detective into the old autopsy room that had been repurposed for secrecy. No keys to the door were held by janitors or morgue attendants. A single archaic lightbulb was trained
on the dissection table, another artifact from the infancy of forensic medicine. Only the half-size refrigerator belonged to this century. Dr. Slope had wheeled it in here himself, and now he opened it to extract a small metal tray, one of five. “The chain of evidence is indisputable. It’s got
your signature
on it.” When he turned around to face an angry Kathy Mallory, he held a child’s heart in his gloved hand, but “It’s not Jonah Quill’s heart.”

And gone was her best evidence.

He gently placed the organ on the table. “It has the bio markers for a male, but it came from the body of a younger boy, six or seven years old. And there’s one more departure you might find interesting.” He nodded toward the small refrigerator, his makeshift morgue of hearts. “The other four were well preserved by the vacuum-sealed bags. No air to oxidize the tissue, and carbon monoxide was added to keep them red.”

“Like meat from a fresh kill,” she said. “That’s what the hit man’s client expected to see.”

“And the grocer’s customer, too. Gas flushing—that’s a meatpacker’s trick. Your killer shows an insane attention to detail.” He looked down at the tray that held the child’s heart. “But this one’s a bit
too
red. It wasn’t wrapped within hours of death—but days afterward. That’s why your killer bathed it in red food coloring. Smell it.”

Always game to sniff body parts, she bent low to the table and inhaled the odor of the heart. “Sour,” she said. “Spoiled meat.”

“Spoiled before the packaging, and it wasn’t nicked by the cut to open—”

“But there
is
a wound,” she said, as if he might have missed that gaping slice, so different from the cuts needed to sever the heart from the body. Every other appendage was a stub.

“Your butcher might’ve been in a hurry this time. Or—back to insane detail—he was trying to hide the fact that
this
child had an artificial valve.” He saw the challenge in her eyes, a look that said,
Prove it!
And, as she well knew, he could not identify what was
not
there. She was always annoyed when he played detective, and he seldom missed an opportunity to irritate her. Now for his best shot. “If there was no artificial valve—maybe there should have been. The boy needed at least one. I found a congenital defect in another valve.”

Take
that.

“A damaged heart? So this boy died of natural causes.”

And now it was his place to be annoyed. She was always making leaps with no foundation. “I can’t make that call with only the—”

“
I
can,” she said. “The hit man’s
got
Jonah. It would’ve been a lot easier to take
his
heart.”

Excellent point. If the killer had not slaughtered and mutilated twelve-year-old Jonah, what were the odds that he would murder a younger child for a heart? “So . . . let’s say it’s a death by natural causes.”

“Right.”
She could pack so much sarcasm into a single syllable, but then she layered on a bit more. “Let’s
say
that.”

“Then your killer went shopping for corpses. There was no embalming, but you can rule out hospital morgues. They refrigerate the—”

“I would’ve done that anyway. Too risky for my guy. Too many security cameras, and they’re staffed round the clock.” By tone alone, she managed to convey that he should stop this cop kind of speculation. All she wanted from him were facts.

Well, too bad.

“Funeral homes,” he said. “The boy might’ve been Jewish Orthodox. There wouldn’t have been embalming for the—”

“And no stolen body parts. A relative or a family friend would’ve stayed with the corpse till they put it in the ground.”

Kathy had done that service for her foster father, a not-so-orthodox Jew. The vigil had not been required for Louis Markowitz’s death, and no one had asked this of her. But that ancient custom had been her
story to the rabbi on the night when he had gone to the morgue and tried to coax her home.

However, Edward Slope, her greatest detractor, was not so easily gulled. He had always seen that observance of ritual as a liar’s cover story for a long goodbye. Stubborn Kathy, neither ready nor willing to give up her dead on that night, had only grudgingly surrendered the body to a casket come morning. And so it was the doctor’s theory that she had loved Lou Markowitz more than that good old man ever knew.

—

UPON WAKING
, Jonah obeyed the old command of Aunt Angie’s to open his eyes—to no purpose. Only his fingertips could see the bandage that covered his head like a helmet. More gauze was wrapped around his swollen leg. Both wounds throbbed, but there was no pain. He was only groggy. Drugged again?

There was moisture in the air. He was back in the basement, and an antiseptic smell overpowered the stink of the mildewed mop.

Upstairs, the man’s feet were heavy as hammer falls, pausing only for the slam of doors and the lighter bangs of cupboards roughly closed. Objects dropping, breaking on the floor overhead. And now an outcry, a long strung out
Ah!
from the gut that spelled out Cigarette Man’s despair.

The dog was agitated. A bark. Panting. Wheezing. Toenails crossed the cement beyond the door, on the way to meet the man’s footsteps stomping down the stairs.

Was Cigarette Man coming to beat him to death? Was he that angry?

The bolt on the door slid back. The smell of cigarettes walked in.

And Jonah said, “Before you do this . . . tell me why you killed her.”

The footsteps came closer. The rubber mattress sank on one end as the man sat down, and his voice had no anger to it when he said, “Sure you wanna hear this?”

“Yes . . . please.”

“I don’t
know
why she died. . . . I set out to kill an old man that day.” The lighter clicked. A sigh. The smell of exhaled smoke. “I was inside an empty store, waitin’ for this geezer. He’s like five feet away when I shoot him with a dart. His knees give out, and I’m right there to catch him and take him back to the store. So I’m halfway in . . . and I see you comin’ down the sidewalk
 . . .
with Angie’s face. I dump the old man on the floor, and I lean outside. I’m lookin’ at you, kid—when she comes up behind me,
jumps
me. She’s
on
me. We roll into the store. Her on my back. Fingers goin’ for my eyes.
Screamin’!
I get her off me. Backhand her and knock her into a wall.
Now
I see her face.
Angie. . . . ForthelovaGod,
it’s Angie. . . . She’s slidin’ to the floor when you come runnin’ in. But she’s already dead. She didn’t hit that wall hard enough to even knock her out, but she’s—”

The dog sent up a wail of pain, and the man yelled, “Shut up!” In a softer voice, he said, “And I see you standin’ there, eyes real wide. Scared. Lookin’ right at me. . . . I started that day with a clockwork plan, and it all went to shit in half a minute. . . . I don’t know
why
she died.”

“She died to save me. She’s
still
trying to—

“Naw, they don’t come back, kid. Ghosts. They’re not like you think. They’re more like echoes of people.”

“You heard the bells in the sky. I
know
you did.”

“You were awake for that? I thought you was out of it. For a while there, I thought you was dead. . . . Okay, the jingle bells—that wasn’t her. Out here in the country, sound can travel a long way.”

“From the
sky?”

“She’s gone, kid. She won’t never come back.” Cigarette Man got up from the mattress. His steps were slow to cross the floor. The door closed on the man and the dog. Outside the laundry room, the pit bull whimpered and thumped to the floor, breathing ragged as if it had run a fast mile.

Jonah lay back on the mattress, falling in love with his own game of ghost. The jingle bells had sold him on it, and now he whispered, “Aunt Angie?”

The boy waited for a sign from her.

He waited so patiently.

—

DETECTIVE MALLORY
was nowhere to be found, and all her calls were going to voice mail. Rather than wait any longer, District Attorney Ambrose decided that the commander of Special Crimes should do the interview. Rank should speak to rank—and not one, but three of Andrew Polk’s lawyers.

Jack Coffey entered the interrogation room, mindful that the mayor was a control freak. He followed Charles Butler’s advice to ignore the man—a sure way to piss him off and off-balance him. The lieutenant spoke to the first attorney in the string, the youngest one who seemed least at home in a police station. “We pulled the erased information from your client’s cell phone.”

The lawyer, just a tad apprehensive, turned to his client.

Coffey shot a glance at the mayor. He could translate Polk’s smile as
Nice try, but no way.
True, there was nothing incriminating on the phone taken from the mayor’s pocket. In a show of clarifying things for the least experienced lawyer, the lieutenant leaned toward this young man to say, “I’m talking about the other cell phone, the one with Jonah Quill’s proof of life.” This was only a bluff, but, “That bookends nicely with proof of death.” And those last three words were made hideously clear as he laid down a photograph of the bloody organ and what was written on its plastic wrapping. “That heart was cut out of a murdered child, Jonah Quill. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”

All three attorneys were taken by surprise, even the eldest one at the end of the table. Coffey enlightened them. “The mayor was keeping it in his safe. Maybe a sick souvenir. Who knows?”

The two younger lawyers must be new hires, virgins in murder and mutilation. Their faces were that pale shade that preceded projectile vomit. But the old man at the table, Arty Shay, was famous for being able to stomach every damn kind of carnage, and so he was beloved by criminals uptown and down. Shay was not inclined to fold early, if ever, and he said, “About that phone. We’ll need to see evidence of the—”

“You don’t get zip,” said the lieutenant. “Not till your client’s been charged and arraigned for conspiracy kidnap and murder.”

The other two lawyers acted as alter egos for the mayor, getting antsy on his behalf. Andrew Polk only sat back and enjoyed the performance. He must know that they would never find a second phone or any other tangible evidence against him. Jack Coffey’s second thought was that the mayor was just not in touch with reality.

Either way, no sense of fear.

“Charge my client, Jack. Or cut him loose,” said Arty Shay.

Very ballsy. Bluff called. Game over? No, not with one charge left on the table. “Okay, Arty, let’s start with the appetizer—obstruction of justice. You’re welcome to a witness statement for the kid’s heart.” Jack Coffey pushed the photograph of the disembodied heart in the lawyer’s direction. “You can keep that if you like. I got my own copy for the judge at his arraignment. Hell with pictures, I can bring in the damn heart. We gave your guy first shot—as a courtesy, but now we’re done.”

The lieutenant turned to the youngest lawyer. “If you don’t know the drill, when we got two perps, we give them a chance to roll on each other. First one to rat, that’s our winner. House rules.” And now he faced the mayor. “You saw Dwayne Brox when you came in, right? Sitting at a desk . . . writing out his statement. Hey, you had to wonder why the guy smiled at you. So, as far as a deal goes, it’s his turn now. Oh, and the feds asked for a crack at him, too.” He wanted to put his fist through the mayor’s maddening grin.

At least Arty Shay seemed rattled, a small victory. And Shay’s young
associates took a cue from their boss’s startled face, running over one another’s words to say that they would need some privacy for a conversation with the client.

—

ALL THE PLAYERS
had changed. Dwayne Brox was seated at the table with his own attorney when Riker walked into the interrogation room and announced that “Anna Karenina’s a whore.”

That might be harsh.

A phone number found on Brox’s laptop had connected police to an escort service, but call girls were one up from whores in a prostitute’s pecking order. And the lady’s professional moniker, Kitty Kat, was not to be found in any Russian novel. So Bug Boy had created an alias for an alias for a woman whose real name was Su Ling, a recent arrival from Hong Kong.

“We had a talk with Kitty.” It had been a short chat under threat of deportation. “She says you got a tiny weener, kid. Skinny, too. Her escort service has you down as Needle Dick on their client list, and that explains a lot.”

Well, finally—an expression that was not smug. Dwayne Brox was leaning into it, angry and showing it.

The attorney rested one hand on his client’s arm, a subtle warning not to react to the provocation of a dick shot, and now the lawyer favored Riker with an imperious glare. “Detective, I think we can dispense with remarks like that.”