It Happens in the Dark

ALSO BY CAROL O’CONNELL

The Chalk Girl

Bone by Bone

Find Me

Winter House

Dead Famous

Crime School

Shell Game

The Judas Child

Stone Angel

Killing Critics

The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

Mallory’s Oracle

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Copyright © 2013 by Carol O’Connell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

O’Connell, Carol, date.

It happens in the dark / Carol O’Connell.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-62318-3

1. Mallory, Kathleen (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 3. Policewomen—Fiction. 4. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3565.C497I83 2013 2013015334

813'.54—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY

I have a black-and-white photograph of four children on a beach in Paradise. That’s how they remembered years of their childhood in the tropics on the Isle of Pines, the setting for Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island.

There are palm trees in the background, and the children wear swimsuits. Marion, grinning, perches on driftwood and cuddles her younger sister, Martha. Norman stands behind them, the oldest child, the serious one. In the foreground is little George, who tells terrible jokes, and yet he gets laughs.

A perfect day. Paradise in a snapshot.

Later, the family orange grove will be lost in a fire, and their father will work in a sugarcane factory to earn the passage money back to Boston. On the boat ride home, the children will lose all the Spanish words they knew. Still ahead of them is a global war, uniforms, guns and weddings, USO dances, jazz and jitterbug, an exciting time to be alive—
so
alive. An atomic bomb will fall, a mushroom cloud will bloom. Their families will grow through more wars, through an upheaval of technology and social revolution, more weddings, funerals, lots of christenings, as the four of them move through history, brothers and sisters.

One child on that beach in the photograph, Martha Olsen, died this past September. She was my aunt. She was the last. They are all gone.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND APOLOGIES TO REAL LIFE

Though downplayed in the book, Manhattan’s Midtown North police are
so
good they won a Tony Award for service to the Theater District. Also, the local unions would have you know that they protect their artists and artisans much better than I do, and union-card holders are rarely—in fact,
never
—murdered this way.

ROLLO:
To cadge a line from Blake, “Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than to nurse unacted desires.” (He turns to Susan) Oh . . . sorry. Did that make you nervous?

—
The Brass Bed
, Act I

The Theater District did not shut down for winter storms. East and west of the Great White Way, streets were electrified. Bright lights and the dazzle of animated signs hawked comedy and drama, dance and song. Up and down the sidewalks, ticket holders shielded their eyes with mittens and gloves to gawk at the gaudy marquees.

Peter Beck’s bare hands were jammed into his pockets, and, head bowed, he only saw the pavement. His scarf was a crusted band of ice, feeble protection from stinging snow, but it served to hide the playwright’s moving lips. His voice was low, and so there was no fair warning for passersby. If other pedestrians had seen his face, they might have found him odd, but, had they heard what he was saying, they would have given a wide berth to the mumbling man who was alternately angry and insanely sad.

The woolen cap was ripped from his scalp, and he turned back to watch it sail over a lamppost on the corner of Forty-ninth Street and Broadway. He raised one naked hand, and it was an effort to form his numb fingers into a fist.
“Thieving wind!”

His other enemies were all theater folk.

He was done with crying, but the tears had not dried. They had frozen. Muttering, shivering, Peter walked past the theater’s main entrance, where he might well be told to wait in line. Farther down the sidewalk, he paused at the stage door, but decided against the humiliation of proving his worthiness to a rent-a-cop and perhaps being turned away if his name was not on the list of those who had made the cut.

When he had rounded a corner and then another to enter a blind alley, the wind was at his back, blowing him down the narrow lane of fire escapes and Dumpsters to a dead end at the rear door. And there was the damn security guard he had hoped to avoid. The stranger in the tri-cornered cap hunched beneath a glass-caged lightbulb, smoking a cigarette.

Would this man stop him? Oh, let him
try
.

As Peter reached for the doorknob, he knew there would be no challenge. He was invisible to the guard. At best, he was perceived as insignificant. And then there was that other word, the one used by women to neuter men—
harmless
.

Well, not tonight!

After the final curtain, the whole theater company, players to grunts, would bow to him on bended knee, wet their pants and crawl away.

Once he was inside, the alley door banged shut behind him, and Peter’s fingers, red as lobsters, fumbled with the buttons of his overcoat. As he made his way toward the broad scenery flats, the backstage lights flickered. Apparently, the glitches in the wiring were an ongoing thing. He looked up to see the young lighting tech, a tall stick with big feet, clambering down the catwalk ladder to stand with a pimple-faced stagehand in the wings. Neither of them gave so much as a nod to the sad man swaddled in wet, black wool.

Had he been
stark naked
, they would not have acknowledged him.

Snowflakes melted on Peter’s shoulders and his hatless, almost hairless head. Unwinding his scarf as he walked, he glanced at the blackboard on the wall behind the stage manager’s desk.

He stopped.

And his heart stopped—

For one beat—

Two beats.

New line changes were scrawled on the slate in white block letters. Opening night had come and gone, but the play was still evolving by an unseen hand, a chalk-wielding haunt, who gave new meaning to the word
ghostwriter
.

The playwright burped. A hiccup followed. The floor tilted and spun.

Hours ago, Peter Beck had left his apartment, dead drunk, and then lost both his gloves in two different bars twixt home and the theater. Listing to one side, he nearly toppled over when he heard the warning call, “Curtain in thirty minutes!” Threatening to pitch forward with every step, he lurched down a short flight of stairs to find his seat in the audience before—

The lobby doors opened wide, and people were coming down the aisles.

Peter found a place card on his reserved chair in the front row—but not front-row
center
. He had been shunted off toward a wall, brushed aside by a lackey’s seating arrangements. More cards appeared on three neighboring seats, and these were marked for the playwright’s guests, though he had invited no one.

Lacking the energy to shrug off his heavy coat, saving his strength for the final act, he sat down and fell asleep. Now and then, his watery eyes opened to catch snatches of the night. The front row was filled to his right. On his left side, the three complimentary seats remained empty, advertising that he was a man with no friends, certainly none among the cast and crew. He had missed the first performance, and not one of those bastards had thought to call and ask if he was well—or had he done them all the favor of a final exit, perhaps a long fall from some high window.

Rousing from lethargy for a slow turn of the head, he counted the house. According to the only critic in attendance last night, the play had opened to a sparse audience of twenty souls in a space built to hold more than a thousand—though not a bad turnout for foul weather, a theater with a blank marquee and a play with no advertising. Ah, but owing to that bizarre review in
The
Herald
, tonight’s crowd had grown. At least seventy people had braved this second night of horizontal wind and snow. They formed a cluster in the center rows, and all of them had better views of the stage than he did.

The houselights dimmed. The curtains parted. Peter’s eyelids drooped and fell. Laughter woke him in fits as the first act was drawing to a close. He came fully awake to screams from the audience, cued by an actor’s swing of a baseball bat.

A
bat
? And when had
that
piece of business been added to the play?

The lights went out.
All
the lights. Curiously, even the red exit signs were turned off. Peter sweated in his thick wool coat and shifted his head to work out the crick in his neck, a quick slice of pain. His shirt collar was soaking wet, yet he felt oddly buoyant in his body, and his mind was floating elsewhere. The only sound was that of a small object striking the floor. And now, like the darkness, the silence was absolute.

When the stage lights came up, a woman seated on Peter’s right was the only one to scream this time, but she was not facing the stage. She was shrieking at
him
. He turned to her and gurgled a response as his chin nodded down to his chest.

•   •   •

Onstage, two actors transgressed when they stepped out of character and turned to the invisible fourth wall. Peering into the audience, they saw the bloodied corpse of the playwright slumped in a front-row seat, and one thespian said to the other, “Oh, crap. Not
again
.”