Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (39 page)

“Okay, Counselor, let’s move on to
The Brothers Karamazov.”
He smiled. “Yeah, you heard me right. Your client knows ’em all on a first name basis. He’s got their phone numbers on his laptop. Just dumb luck we got a cop who’s read everything by Dostoyevsky. One of the Karamazovs—Dmitri, I think—his number connects to what might be the last phone booth in America.” Riker turned to Brox. “It’s inside your
bookie’s favorite bar. Dmitri’s real name is Bernie Mars. He’s old-school. Doesn’t wanna know from cell phones. Bernie says you don’t know squat about sports, and you bet like a little girl. Pansy, that’s what he calls you.”

“Detective,”
said the attorney. “I warned you about deprecating remarks.”

Yeah, like that ever worked. “Time to do a deal, Counselor. I got three more Karamazov brothers. You don’t wanna wait till we finish tracking their numbers. We might find the hit man before your client pleads out.”

That was a lie. Detective Sanger had already checked out the remaining book characters, Aloysha, Ivan and their bastard brother Pavel. Two of the cell phones had pings in areas of heavy drug traffic, and he figured them for dealers. For the third number, Sanger had gotten lucky with a call history.

Detectives Janos and Washington were on the way to visit a cell-phone owner, who had so generously left a name and street address on the tape of a 9-1-1 call—when a frantic woman had begged the operator to send an ambulance for her asthmatic daughter.

—

THE DETECTIVES
from Special Crimes drove along a forested road in the neighboring state of Connecticut. Widely spaced mailboxes were the only indications that there were houses nestled deep in this expensive acreage. They found the mailbox they wanted, but they could go no farther. An officer in uniform was stringing yellow crime-scene tape from tree to tree on either side of the driveway. The two New Yorkers sat in their unmarked car and watched a medical examiner’s team hoist a zippered body bag into a meat wagon.

Janos threw up his hands. Oh, shot in the dark—maybe they had arrived too late to question their suspected hit man, Gail Rawly.

“Well, that sucks,” said Washington, indicating that he was not up for an interstate jurisdictional war over that corpse.

When they stepped out of their car, they had the full attention of the officer guarding the driveway. He examined their badges and ID cards very carefully—he was
that
young. “I can’t let you in.” So apologetic, he nodded toward the foot of the driveway. “The detectives are back there with the Crime Scene Unit.”

“Not a problem,” said Janos. There was no chance that those locals would give them anything useful. “You might be just the guy we need. I bet you were the first responder. Am I right?”

The rookie policeman’s smile confirmed this. Janos could also depend on the fact that the hometown detectives had treated this youngster like he was unfit for anything beyond handmaid’s duties. “Officer, if you got the time, we need some help on this case we’re working back in New York.”

Right again. The kid responded well to simple respect.

According to Officer Sacco, Gail Rawly was the victim of vehicular homicide. “In his own driveway.” And this cop had other inside information as well, the only perk of being invisible to “those pricks in charge,” when the grownups were talking. “They got a suspect. Mrs. Rawly had her bags all packed. The little girl’s, too. So, she was planning to leave her husband, right? The detectives figure there was a fight, and that’s why she ran Mr. Rawly down in the driveway. Then, I guess he was still breathing . . . because she backed over him and parked the car with one wheel sitting on his chest. That’s how I found him—under the wife’s car.”

At Janos’s request, the uniformed officer used his cell phone to call the local detectives at the other end of the driveway—to tell them that two New York cops had information on their victim. Always best to turn up with gifts when visiting another jurisdiction.

Officer Sacco put away his phone and pulled one end of the crime-scene tape free. As Janos and Washington walked up the driveway, they
passed CSIs who were dusting a car’s steering wheel for prints. Playing nice with this crew, the detectives held up their badges, and they were careful in giving wide berth to the blood pool on the ground. Up ahead, a man with a suit and badge stood outside the front door to the house.

This local cop was wary, unhappy to see the foreigners from out of state, and now he introduced himself as one of the detectives who owned this homicide. “We already know the guy’s an insurance investigator.”

“Of course you do,” said Janos. “And I’m sure you know Mr. Rawly’s credit card was used to book
three
plane tickets north of here. We figure the guy paid cash for the real destination. Is that how you see it, too?” No, he could tell this was news to the hometown cop. “So you knew the whole family was planning to blow town . . . not just the wife and kid.” He leaned around the detective to see suitcases stacked in the foyer. “I’m guessing when you checked those bags, you found Gail Rawly’s clothes in the mix?”

No, again. What had these fools been doing with their time?

“We got more on your vic,” said Washington.

The man from Connecticut stepped to one side, and the New York detectives pulled on latex gloves to make a cursory walk-through. They avoided the bedroom with its door ajar to show them the child-size furniture and pink walls of a little girl’s room. An older female was also in there. They could hear her crying.

On their return to the front room, Washington handed over three passports pulled from a duffel bag found in the den. “Forgeries. Brand-new names for the whole family. So you gotta know Rawly’s not your average insurance investigator. We figure him for a hit man. He must’ve known we were close to nailing him, but he didn’t plan to leave the wife behind. That tells me they got along pretty well. We don’t like Mrs. Rawly for this murder.”

The younger Connecticut man took a hands-on-hips stance that
said, in sandbox lingo,
Oh, yeah?
And his partner said, “Well, if she didn’t do it—who hit the hit man?” And his smirk told them that he expected no snappy answer for that one. Evidently, these two liked their own theory of the crime, holes and all, and they were sticking with it.

—

TWO HOURS LATER
, Janos and Washington sat in their lieutenant’s office, making a full report. They had gotten as far as the driveway murder when Jack Coffey said, “So our hit man’s dead.”

“No,” said Janos. “You didn’t get our message?”

“Yeah, I got the gist of it.” Lonahan had taken that call and relayed the bare-bones information that the Connecticut suspect was dead. The lieutenant had yet to read the more detailed account. “It’s been a busy day.” A bitch of a day. So much time had been lost to being reamed out by an irate district attorney.

“We figure Gail Rawly for the middleman.” When Washington was done with the details of their walk-through, he said, “On our way outta there, we talked to the CSIs working on the car. They pulled fingerprints and matched ’em up with the wife’s. Hers were the only ones on the steering wheel. . . . Mrs. Rawly really loves her car.”

“Real
nice
car,” said Janos. “The steering wheel’s mahogany, and the spokes are covered with
gorgeous
leather. The lady keeps them oiled so they won’t dry out.”

“Those CSIs are Mrs. Rawly’s biggest fans,” said Washington. “Cleanest car they’ve ever seen. That’s how they picked up on the smudges in the oil, smudges thick as fingers on the steering wheel’s spokes. They stuck out ’cause of the cotton fibers.”

“Gloves,” said Coffey. “Could be gardening gloves, but even so—”

Janos finished this thought for him. “Who steers a car with the spokes of a steering wheel?” The wife would not go to that trouble to
preserve her own fingerprints on the wooden rim. “That’s how we know our hit man’s still alive and—”

“Hey, what gives?” Washington was facing the window on the squad room, where Dwayne Brox walked solo toward the stairwell door. “We’re kicking him loose—
now?
We got him tied to Gail Rawly.”

“Who
might
be involved. That’s not enough to hold Brox. But Riker
did
point out that the hit man might see him as a liability.” Jack Coffey watched the stairwell door close on their prime suspect. Good as dead—given the murder of Gail Rawly. “But the little creep didn’t seem to care.”

“What about the mayor?”

“He’s already gone.” Detective Sanger leaned in the doorway with that finish to the day’s update for Janos and Washington. “The arraignment was quick. It’s a done deal on the charge of obstruction, but Polk’s under house arrest at Gracie Mansion.”

The other two detectives looked to their lieutenant, silently asking,
What? What did he just say?

“That’s the judge’s call. We can’t keep Polk in custody for a bailable offense.” Apparently, there was nothing in the criminal code to cover receiving a child’s bloody heart from the mailman. They could only slap his wrist for holding on to it, lying to Mallory and obstructing her case for an hour.

And now Jack Coffey could count on his squad taking the blame for a hit on Dwayne Brox and maybe a mayoral assassination because—
that was just how this fucking day was going so far!
But his demeanor was laid back when he said, “Okay, next assignment. Mallory’s not taking any calls. Find her. Drag her back. . . . Handcuffs would be a nice touch.”

—

SHE LOWERED HER EYES
to stare at the open pocket watch in her hand. Time would be crucial in one special scenario, and Dr. Slope’s voice was subdued when he said, “You think Jonah Quill’s alive.”

“Not for long. My perp’s a killing machine. It’s not like a hit man enjoys his work. It just doesn’t bother him. Adults, kids—it’s all the same to him. . . . So why don’t we have the right heart?” Kathy was so still as she looked down at the old-fashioned timepiece, watching time get away from her.

On a note of hope, the doctor said, “Maybe Jonah escaped and took his heart with him.”

“Maybe.”

Edward Slope read defeat in her voice and the bow of her head. “If there’s anything I can do to help . . .
Anything.”

She raised her face to his. He recognized that smile. And so he knew that she had already prepared a list of things that he could do for her—since he had asked, sucker that he was.

 
25

Chief Medical Examiner Edward Slope likened it to an invasion. An hour ago, this private office had been a fortress of tranquility with a dragon of a secretary to stave off intruders. Now it was full of staff, excited crosstalk and machines, as his own people—
traitors
—tapped keys for computers and cell phones, hunting down data on heartless cadavers. Kathy Mallory had altered the very atmosphere to copshop air that reeked of bad coffee.

The doctor sat at his desk, which had not yet been commandeered, though she
was
crowding him, sitting beside him, working at a computer perched on the credenza—
his
computer. The door opened, and another console rolled in, piloted by one of his pathologists
cum
furniture movers. The young detective had also recruited his own investigators, and it troubled him that they were so quick to follow her orders, never questioning her authority.

Her own tapping stopped as her chair rolled back from the credenza. “This is a dead end.” After running the heart’s DNA through data banks, she had come up with no leads.

Well,
good.
The I-told-you-so moment was upon her. “I
told
you the boy wouldn’t be on a transplant list. The kind of surgery he needed—”

“There’s too many surgeons who do valve replacements,” she said. “And
you
wouldn’t give me a time frame for the damn operation.”

Dr. Slope sucked in his breath for a ten count. Something about her voice made it clear that he had been derelict in his duty, incompetent in her eyes—as if he should be able to look at a bloody hole in a defective disembodied heart, a hole that
might
have been the location of an artificial valve, and tell her exactly
when
that
theoretical
operation had been done.

Was his blood pressure rising? Undoubtedly. On that account, he must compliment her, though not just yet, perhaps on his deathbed. And he was
not
going to respond to that
ludicrous
—

“Got another kid!” Grinning ME investigator Bill Farley shot up one hand like an old lady on bingo night, and then he bent down to the work of circling another name on his printouts of registered graves in the tri-state area. “Best one yet. I got a seven-year-old who died in New Jersey. Jewish Orthodox—no embalming. He was buried yesterday morning.” Farley turned an expectant face to Kathy Mallory.

Expecting what? A smile? A reward? Was he delusional?

She only nodded, not yet prepared to toss her new dog a treat. “And the follow-up?”

“I talked to the doctor who signed the death certificate,” said Farley. “No valve replacement surgery, but the kid
did
have a heart defect. The parents had an appointment with a cardiologist right before their son died.”

Edward Slope wondered if he might have scored a point here for prescience—a surgery that
would
have been performed if only—

“Here’s the bad news,” said Farley. “We can’t use the parents for a DNA match. The boy was adopted.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” said Dr. Slope. “The child’s personal items—”

“No such luck.” Farley turned away from Kathy to face his boss,
belatedly recalling which of them
was
his boss. “The mother was a wreck. So the family decided to—”

“They took away the dead boy’s things,” said Kathy. Her foster father had endured the attempted kindness of such thieves upon the death of his wife, Helen. “They didn’t want the mother to see reminders of her son when she came home from the cemetery.”