Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (8 page)

The CSU commander relied on the science of physical evidence and a history of violence dating back to a time when New York City was the country’s murder capital—before that title was lost to Chicago. This man could be trusted to know a lunatic from a pro by the tracks and traces left behind. And so Riker had not anticipated Heller’s look of serious consideration for the insane theory of a hit man.

“Your perp has an untraceable murder kit.” The captain picked up a long blade, serrated on one side. “It’ll fit with the wounds. I bought this one down the street. You can buy ’em anywhere. A carving knife’s not your typical weapon for a pro, but they don’t all use twenty-twos. A bullet to the back of the head says assassination. That sends a message. It’s cold. It’s all business . . . but so’s this.” He laid out a photo of one victim, whose shirt was open to expose a wound where a stolen organ used to be. “Cutting out the heart—that’s got some hate to it. It’s personal . . . but
not
to your killer. He cuts ’em open. Only one
wound—a stab sawed out to a long, straight cut.
Not
a rage attack.” He held up a hammer. “This’ll match tool marks we found on the broken ribs, the one’s that would’ve been in his way. So . . . a slice, a few whacks, then snip, snip and done—like it’s just stuff on a checklist. No passion, not even close. That says hate at one remove. He could be a real cold whack job . . . but I’d say he’s getting paid for this.”

And
that
would be Mallory’s punch line.

—

ALBERT COSTELLO
and his no-name guest smoked cigarettes companionably as they discussed the mugging on St. Marks place. “He didn’t get my wallet. The coward must’ve been scared off. I can’t remember much. The doc said I should expect that with a cracked skull.”

The stranger drained his beer. “I heard a blind kid went missin’ that day.”

“No shit? I ain’t seen TV or a newspaper in days. What else did I miss?”

“The cops think the kid was on this street around the time you got mugged. You never saw him?”

Albert shook his head. And then, pressed to recall one more detail, he said, “A nun? Oh, yeah. I
do
remember her. I saw her comin’ from half a block away, even with my bad eyes. Not often you see that kind of outfit these days—like a black sailboat floatin’ down the sidewalk. So the nun stops at the bodega on the corner. She’s lookin’ at flowers, fixin’ to buy some, I guess. She must’ve been at it for a while before I got hit. The doc said I could count on losin’ maybe ten minutes or so. What’s your interest in a—”

The stranger closed one hand on his beer can and crushed it.

 
  
4

In this place of white tiles and stainless steel, sharp-pointed weapons were on display alongside the home-repair tools of saws and drills, all put to the service of mutilating the dead—the pathologist’s art. The most recently violated bodies were lined up in a row of four dissection tables. The autopsies had been completed, and the corpses only awaited removal to the morgue’s cold-storage drawers.

Chief Medical Examiner Edward Slope said to the young detective, “As you can see . . . you’re
late.”

Kathy Mallory had come without her partner, the peacekeeper. And so Dr. Slope braced himself for warfare. He welcomed it. What
fun.

The gun in her holster was a jump up from the razorblades confiscated in her childhood, but not much else had changed. She was still cold of heart, assuming she
had
one. Edward Slope felt honor bound to love the child that his old friend had left behind. However, the doctor took pains to make it known that he had to
work
at this obligation. And, in that spirit—on with the fight; he anticipated knives and guns, trip wires and torture. At times like this, he always felt nostalgia for their first battle when she was only a baby card shark in the Louis Markowitz Floating Poker Game. The little girl had insisted that, if he
could not
prove
cheating, she must be innocent. And her foster father, the cop of cops, had backed her up on this rule of evidence. That may have been the start of the bond between Lou and Kathy—that assist in stealing the doctor’s money. And years later, Edward Slope saw payback when Lou got the heart-attack news that his little felon, a
born
thief, was quitting college to join the NYPD.

It
was
a balanced universe.

Today, doctor and cop squared off across the first dead body. Out of respect for the calling of Sister Michael, hers was the only corpse to lay under the protection of a sheet. He had arranged the cloth to cover all but the nun’s wound, though every inch of her had been photographed for the police. But the detective had not yet seen those pictures, and it should have been predictable that Kathy Mallory would sense something hidden and—

She whipped off the dead woman’s sheet to expose the snow-white skin—and a colorful aspect of Sister Michael. Inked red roses encircled her thighs in a spiral climb to the hips. “These cloistered nuns . . . they just get more interesting all the time.”

“Kathy, that—”

“Mallory,” she said, reminding him to keep the professional distance of her surname. She had
rules.

And he always ignored them.

However, her interruption had spared him a point lost for mentioning the obvious thing—that the roses had certainly preceded a religious calling. Catholic nuns so seldom visited tattoo parlors. And now Sister Michael’s apologist added, “It
is
rather beautiful work.” Late in life, he had found that he was something of a romantic, and he had privately rechristened the dead woman as She Who Lay in Chains of Roses. “I can’t name the tattoo artist. We’ve got nothing like this on file.”

“She didn’t have tattoos when she was arrested for prostitution.” The detective raised her eyes in time to see his rare moment of
confusion. Too pleased with herself, she said, “I’m sure that was
before
Sister Michael became a nun . . . but I could check.”

Without rising to this bait, he said, “Red roses. That might suggest the lady fell in love.”

“The
lady?”
Kathy moved to the head of the dissection table and picked up a photograph taken with his instant camera prior to the autopsy. “A Polaroid? You wanted a souvenir?”

Of course she would see no other reason for this archaic form of photography in an age of digital everything. However, she was actually right. She had nailed him.

Kathy stared at the picture. “The nun’s smile. . . . That still bothers you, doesn’t it?”

Yes, but he was loath to admit this. “It’s rare, but facial expression
can
survive the primary relaxation after death.” Sister Michael’s smile had not survived the second laxity of rigor mortis passing off, but it had not vanished until he was done with her. The woman had smiled at him all through the brutality of her autopsy, the cuts that had laid her open from breastbone to Venus mound. And all the while, he had known that he was missing something here.

Something vital?

“Those stitches . . . that’s
your
work.”

“I always pitch in on high-profile cases.” Did that sound defensive? Apparently so.

Kathy’s eyes lit up—only an illusion of flickering eyelids, but a good one. She
had
something on him; she
wanted
him to know it. “No, this time it’s different.” In the sweep of one hand, she covered the length of his closing stitches. “This is almost like . . . embroidery.” The detective looked up to catch him—at what? Now she was distracted by a line of stitches that intersected his autopsy cuts. “So my perp’s a slasher.”

“Not exactly. He cut her open and—”

The naked corpse was attracting sideways glances from a morgue
attendant, who had entered the room all too quietly to collect the dead. Dr. Slope ripped the sheet from the young detective’s hand, and he covered the body again to protect the nun’s modesty.

A sign of weakness.

A game point lost.

Kathy watched in silence as the interloper was waved off and told to “Come back later.” He knew the detective had long suspected this minion of serious leaks to the press, but then—she suspected
everyone
of
something,
including his pathologists and, of course, himself. When the door had finally closed on the departed attendant, she looked down to stare at a pocket of the doctor’s lab coat.

Might she have a paranoid conviction that he was holding out on her? Oh, yes. Always. He looked down to see only a tip of the cellophane bag protruding from the suspicious pocket, and he had to wonder how many volumes of information she had extrapolated from that.

He pulled out this piece of evidence, properly tagged for chain of custody. The plastic identity bracelet bore the name of the nun and the hospital where she had been a patient. “Sister Michael was in town for diagnostic tests. I spoke to her attending physician. The day she went missing, she should have been in surgery to stem the leak of a brain aneurism. She was in pain, but she postponed the operation. She mentioned some pressing family business. Her doctor didn’t get any details.”

And Kathy said, “She wanted to visit her mother while she still had strength to deal with a crazy woman.”

This added more depth to his collected lore of the dead nun—scientific and not. “Sister Michael checked herself out of the hospital on Friday morning. She was expected back in the afternoon.” He was looking forward to playing his hole card, the one obvious aspect of the nun’s smile that he could back up with evidence. Though the essence of the smile bewildered him. Something familiar. What had he missed?
Sometimes he felt that he was close to grasping it—like now—and it eluded him again. As if to some guilty purpose, the thought sprouted legs and ran away.

Kathy Mallory had lost interest in the nun’s corpse. She turned to the other dissection tables, the three bodies left naked and with less lovely
embroidery,
obviously the work of other pathologists on his staff. “What about them? Same cause of death?”

“By that, I assume you mean heart failure—due to the fact that their hearts were cut out of them.”

“Trophies?”

So she had not yet spoken to CSU. This butchery was news to her. But the theft of body parts was a hallmark of the unbalanced killer, one who would leave the messiest tracks to his door, and this possibility should not have disappointed her—yet it did.

“The hearts have to be kept quiet.”

“Not a problem.” He had already gone to some trouble to ensure that no leaks would be made to the news media. “So . . . things in common. Except for the nun, they all had tape residue around their hands and feet. No food in the stomach. Signs of dehydration.” He glanced at the row of tables beyond this one. “Those three had antemortem knife wounds. I can’t tell you if the killer’s sadistic or just impervious to suffering.”

She examined marks on the arms of the middle-aged man, the purple bruises left by fingers and thumbs—upside-down handprints. The bodies on the neighboring tables had similar discoloring. “They were dragged.”

“Yes, I was
getting
to that.” Via a different avenue. “Three victims had abrasions in the leather at the back of their shoes. The fourth wore sandals. His abrasions were in the heels, and some broke the skin. So, for that one, you’ve got antemortem drag marks
and
postmortem.”

“Still alive when he was dragged the first time. No defensive wounds.
So he was drugged when the perp moved him to another location for the wetwork.”

“Or only tied up hand and foot.” Edward Slope’s problem was with her logic. Did he not mention the tape residue on wrists and ankles? Her conclusions were too often right, as in this case, but for the wrong reasons. And he had yet to mention the—

“You found needle marks, right?” Score for Kathy.

“Except for the nun. The other three have scabbed injection sites. But no drugs showed up in any of the tox screens.”

“You’ll have to redo them. Add a few things to check for.”

The
hell
he would.

She handed him a sheet of bloodwork with the letterhead of a New Jersey hospital lab. “Trace evidence from a live victim.”

He scanned the text. “No point in retesting. These drugs wouldn’t survive my time frames for death and decomp. The first one’s used on livestock. That might suggest injection with a medi-dart. Very smart. Your killer could inject his victim from a distance of thirty feet—assuming he’s a good shot with a dart gun. I don’t see the point in the other drug, the Rohypnol . . . unless he wanted to induce blackouts.” But that would indicate a plan for catch and release—a plan that would hardly fit a serial killer. Well, that was confusing, and he could see by her smile that she was waiting for him to admit this—so she could humiliate him with a simple explanation.

Tough luck.

Instead, he fired off his best shot. “As I said, there were
no
needle marks on the nun . . . but then . . . she wasn’t killed with a knife wound. That was done postmortem. And she was the only one with head trauma.” Ah, something Kathy had missed. A clear win.

The detective returned to the nun’s table to inspect the scalp, lifting the dark hair to expose the bruising of a bloodless wound.

“The weapon was a hand or an arm with a good deal of force.” He
smiled when she eyed him with suspicion, not buying this at all. And so, moving along to Kathy’s second miss, he said, “Check the other side of her head. More trauma. I found crumbles of hard, reddish material embedded in the cloth that covered her head.”

“Red brick.” She walked to the other side of the steel table. “Crumbles? Old brick.”

“CSU will have to confirm it.” But that had also been his guess. “It appears that the first blow knocked her into a wall.” Hence a hand or arm for the initial trauma.

Kathy inspected the second wound. “You found a skull fracture on this side, right?”