Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (4 page)

Sergeant Murray, not so vain as the SoHo detective, put on his bifocals, the better to study the small face on the poster. “I’ll be damned. Nobody told us about any nun. . . . She looks just like Jonah.” He led Riker up the stairs to the second floor, saying over one shoulder, “Tell you what we got. Cops downtown reported sightings of a blind kid tapping his way up a street with a white cane. They can place him in the East Village that morning. But we got other sightings in the Bronx and Queens.”

“The East Village fits with Sister Michael,” said Riker. “We know she bought flowers on St. Marks Place around nine that morning.”

“Well, this’ll get us some leads.” Sergeant Murray held up the poster for a second look. “What’s up with those dicks at Missing Persons? We should’ve had a copy of this. The nun’s even got the kid’s smile.”

“Shit happens.”

The sergeant nodded to say,
Amen, brother,
and then he stopped by a closed door at the top of the stairs. “We keep him in here.”

The door opened by a few inches to give Riker a covert look at a civilian half his age, who sat at the far end of a conference table that was littered with paper cups and take-out cartons, pens and yellow pads. The young man’s head was bowed, and his hands were clenched together in a white-knuckle prayer.

Murray kept his voice low, saying, “That’s the kid’s uncle, Harold Quill. He won’t go home. Don’t expect much, okay? The guy’s punchy. No sleep since his nephew disappeared.”

The lean, dark-haired Quill sported a stubble of beard, and the wrinkles in his expensive suit were also a few days in the making. When the detective and the sergeant entered the room, the man looked up with the eyes of the boy and the nun, large and gray and ringed with black lashes, but his had a vacant look of no one home. His skin was bloodless. And a puff of air might push him over, not that he would notice.

Riker had seen this before—what was left of a man when a child went missing.

After Sergeant Murray made the introductions, the detective sat down beside the distraught uncle. “So . . . you got a family connection to Angela Quill. Is that right?”

No response? Was this guy debating whether or not he should answer that simple question without legal advice? Rich people—could they even answer a damn phone without a lawyer?

“Angie’s my sister,” said Harold Quill. “She’s a—”

“A nun, yeah. Was she meeting up with your nephew yesterday morning?”

“No! Why would you—” Quill covered his face with both hands, as if that could make a cop disappear, and he shook his head. “I drove Jonah to school. . . . He should’ve been in class.”

“The nun’s gone missing, too. My partner’s downtown talkin’ to your mother. Do you—”

“No!”
Harold Quill grabbed Riker’s arm, and the detective pretended not to notice that this man’s fingernails were digging into him. “Promise me,” said Quill, “
promise
you won’t tell my mother where I live!”

—

DETECTIVE MALLORY
was Mrs. Quill’s only visitor from the NYPD. Evidently, her son had failed to tell police that his kidnapped nephew
had a grandmother on the Lower East Side. Less surprising, no one had even telephoned for a statement on the disappearance of her daughter, the nun.
Most
surprising? This woman had taken the dwindling of her family members quite well—as if one or two of them might vanish on a typical day.

“I called the prioress to tell her what I thought of my daughter for standing me up.” In a lower voice, the mother muttered, “That
bitch.
That
whore.”

And would the nice detective like some tea?

Statuettes of saints cluttered every surface in this stuffy parlor that stank of scented, votive candles, the odor of cinnamon warring with rosemary and lavender. All the walls were lined with portraits of Jesus: a laughing Christ and a weeping one, but predominantly bloody, suffering Christs nailed up by hand and foot, and
these
images had set the tone of the interview with Mrs. Quill, whose mouth was forever frozen in the downturned arc of the righteous, whose eyes were way too wide and laser bright with the light of the Lord.

Mallory sat on the sofa, flipping through the family photograph album.
Useless.
Most of the faces pictured here had been scratched out, though not all of these erasures were done with the same tool. Some cuts were sharper than others. Beside her sat the scrawny matriarch of the family, dressed in a prim white nightgown. The loudmouthed crone guided the detective, page by page. And so Mallory discovered that images of the husband had been the first mutilations.

“May he rot in hell! He left me with
three
damn kids.”

Next in the order of abandonment came the scratched-out face of a blond daughter.

“Gabriel. Gabby, we called her. She was fifteen when that picture was taken. That’s when she ran away from me. A year later, she
died
giving birth to a bastard.” Mrs. Quill said this with great satisfaction, as if that death might have been payback for a child born out of
wedlock. The woman lowered her voice and leaned closer to share another happy confidence. “Gabby’s son was born
blind.”

Even a more seasoned detective would have flinched. Mallory only looked down at one more photo of a faceless girl, and this one had dark hair.

“Oh, that’s my Angie, the other goddamn whore.” Mrs. Quill reached out one bony hand to turn to the next page, and there was the only unscarred picture of this daughter, a recent addition that had yet to be pasted in with album corners. Sister Michael was posed in the robes of a nun. “She redeemed herself . . . with the
church.”
Sarcasm suggested that the nun had yet to be redeemed here at home.

Every picture of Mrs. Quill’s son, Harold, had the face scratched out in the year he had sued her for custody of his nephew, Gabby’s blind child. “Poor little Jonah. They stole him from me—Harry and that bitch social worker. By now, the boy’s drowning in sin.” A photograph of this child as a toddler, who had yet to commit any
known
sin against his grandmother, had survived the knife cuts of omission from the family.

Given more than a nodding acquaintance with Crazy, Mallory had to ask how this woman fancied chances for the survival of Sister Michael and Jonah. “Are they dead or alive?”

“Dead!” This firm vote revealed no guilt, but perhaps the opinion that a nun and a little boy could deserve to lose their lives. Then Mrs. Quill added, “Dead and gone to God,” a slightly better outcome, though offered up with less enthusiasm.

—

THE WALLS WERE BRICK
. The door was metal. The grown-ups were dead.

Jonah had stepped on their flung-out arms and legs while mapping this chilly room that was fifteen steps square. A queasy horror. And
now the stink of them was dulled by clogs of snot brought on by the boy’s crying. He had found his aunt among the corpses.

By touch, he had recognized a long robe and veil, but he knew it was Aunt Angie by the smallest finger of her right hand, broken in her childhood and crooked out at the knuckle. Jonah had held this hand so many times. He could never mistake it for any other.

She had gone away when he was seven years old. For five years, he had waited for her in the fantasy of She Comes Back—and here she was.

He kissed her crooked finger.

High on the wall and beyond his reach, the loud motor started up again with the death rattle of an old machine, its parts clacking, broken or breaking down, but still churning out more blasts of cold air. Shivering, Jonah laid his body down beside his aunt. She gave him comfort—and warmth. Her wide robe was generous enough to cover him, too. “Thank you.”

Pieces of a day were missing. Or was it two days? His internal clock was broken. There was a rumble in his stomach, but the thought of food made him want to puke. Was his brain busted, too? Dumbed down? Only now he thought to wonder what had happened to him—to her.

How could she be dead?

Aunt Angie
knew
how to fight. On her way out of his life, she had taught him that fingernails could draw blood, thumbs could gouge out eyes, and a kick to the balls could put a man in a world of hurt. And then she had walked out the door to catch a bus to God’s house.

Had she known then what was coming—
who
was coming?

Her killer would never suspect him until it was too late. He could walk right up to that sick bastard and play helpless—just a kid, right?—and then
nail
him.
Kill
him?
Yes!
Beneath the blanket of the shared robe, Jonah’s fists made one-two punches.
No
fear. Aunt Angie was
with him, keeping him warm, teaching him how to draw blood and bring on pain. His aunt’s side of this conversation was made up from saved-away memories of her, the sound of her, but all the words had the ring of true things. He knew what she would say to every—

The air conditioner shut down. Now a new sound. Metal on metal. A squeak to a door hinge. And the dead woman’s voice inside his head screamed,
That’s him!

The boy shook off the robe and sat up.

Footsteps.
Heavy
ones. Aunt Angie sang out,
Get ready!

Jonah was shaking and shot through with freaking cold, heart-a-banging panic.

The footsteps stopped a few paces into the room. Jonah rocked his body like a toddler with a wooden horse between his legs. The hard-soled shoes were crossing the floor, coming for him.
They were here!
Now the smell of cigarette breath. So close. Puffs of stinky air on his face.

Close enough!
yelled Aunt Angie.

A man’s deeper voice, a
real
one, said, “You can’t
see.”

Jonah, get him!

Sorry, so sorry, but he could not do that. He was
crazy
scared. A small bottle of sloshing liquid was pressed into his hands—a reward for getting the rules right in a world where twelve-year-old boys were always outmatched by grown men.
Sorry.

The bottled water tasted odd. No matter.
So
thirsty. Jonah drank it, gulped it down. All gone now. His rocking slowed—and stopped. His fear ebbed away, dulling down to nothing. Sleep was creeping up on him.

Behind him was the man’s hard-sole step. Stepping over the other bodies? Light plops. Dull scrapes. A quick shuffle of shoes. The door opened and closed, shoes leaving and coming back again—and again. More steps and shuffles, rustles and—what?

No!
Jonah shook his head, shaking off a mind-muddling fog.

He reached for Aunt Angie’s hand.
No, no, no
—she was sliding away,
leaving
him. Her body was dragged across the floor faster than he could crawl after her. Not
fair!
He rose up on his knees, as much of a stand as he could manage, and his hands balled into fists. “Give her
back!”

The door went
BANG!

And the boy fell, toppling to one side. Sleep came on so fast. He never felt the pain of hard ground rushing up to meet him with a knock to the head that said,
Good night!

 
  
2

The trees of Carl Schurz Park gave cover to Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor. In the small hours of the morning, an alarm had sounded, and now this eighteenth-century landmark and its adjoining wing were surrounded by sheets of plastic tied off on ten-foot poles. Above this curtain, only the upper half of the extension building could be seen by civilians on East End Avenue. They saw nothing of the more secluded yellow mansion that overlooked the channel waters of Hell Gate—and the corpses stacked up on the lawn.

Members of the hazmat team were visible through the cloudy plastic as they moved about in helmets and bulky white suits that were sealed to protect them against deadly gasses and flesh-eating viruses or come what may.

On the broad sidewalk across the street, their audience was sporting Sunday-best T-shirts, shorts and summer dresses. The atmosphere turned festive as the crowd applauded the first sighting of bright-colored umbrellas attached to rolling carts. Food vendors had turned out to cater this new threat to public health and safety. Men in aprons hawked their wares along the roadbed, first servicing the front lines. Then hungry buyers at the rear sent their money
forward, hand-to-hand, and bags of bagels and coffee were handed back to them.

Men and women in dark suits held up the IDs of Homeland Security, and they yelled at the civilians, ordering them to move on. Predictably, these federal agents were ignored. The menace implied by moon suits had scared off out-of-towners, but not blasé natives who always formed a crowd for the prospect of sudden death in New York City. And,
damn it,
it was time for brunch.

Behind the backs of the shouting agents, a cadre of uniformed police officers stood in a line down the center of the avenue, and they all wore smirks of
We told you so, you stupid bastards.
The NYPD
knew
how to do crowd control. And, clearly, the federal government did not.

Some civilians with curbside views sat on canvas camp stools sold from a cart with merchandise that included paper fans and sun visors. Most of the crowd remained standing, growing restless as they watched the slow, blurry movements of the hazmat team. New York attitude was in the air, and it demanded,
Hey, let’s get on with the show!

—

TWO DETECTIVES STOOD
behind the gawkers. One wore an out-of-date suit that spoke well of him as a civil servant who lived within his means, though, truth be told, Riker hated shopping and had let it slide for years.

He gave his partner a gallant wave that said,
Ladies first,
so he could use tall Mallory as a wedge to move through this tightly packed mob. People tended to get out of her way, and not because they respected the badge or her tailored threads—or the running shoes that cost more than Riker’s entire closet, shoes thrown in. The whole package said that she was
somebody,
but the Mallory effect on crowds was more than that. When she wanted to jangle a civilian—like right now—she dropped every pretense of being human and walked toward the poor bastard, as
if she meant to walk right through him, and this was all that was needed to inspire that man’s wary backwards dance.