Mallory's Oracle (2 page)

A siren cut the thick, humid air, screaming like a woman. Some fool had called an ambulance, and it was rushing toward them as though there was still time for Louis Markowitz, as though the man had not been dead for two days.

And what a place to die. The windows of the six-story building were all cracked glass and black holes. Chunks of concrete lay on the sidewalk, having fallen from the once elaborate facade. In the past few weeks, this abandoned East Village tenement had done some service as a crack house. The addicts had left a trail of works winding from the sidewalk to the door.

The car dipped as another, heavier man joined him on the car's fender.

“Hello, Coffey,” said Chief of Detectives Harry Blakely, who was all gone to gray hair and not so lean as the younger man by forty pounds, nor so beautiful by twenty years of drink which put veins in his eyes and sallowed his flesh.

“Chief,” Coffey nodded. “Riker filled you in?”

“Much as he could. It's the same freak? You're positive?”

“It's the same pattern with the wounds.”

“Oh, God,” said Blakely, as if God could find him in this section of lower Manhattan. Not likely, yet he wiped his face with a handkerchief and squinted up to where heaven would be if not for the crumbling brick of the tenement building. “You got a preliminary yet?”

“Yeah, but it's half-assed. Slope hasn't shown up yet. The techs figure they died maybe forty to fifty hours ago. There's plastic in the woman's wounds.”

“You got an ID on her?”

“Miss Pearl Whitman, age seventy-five. She's from Gramercy Park, same as the first two.”

“No shit. You know who that is? Pearl Whitman of Whitman Chemicals. You got any idea how much she's worth?”

It was like the Chief to give a credit line to a corpse. He was a good political animal.

“Look who's here.” Blakely was nodding in the direction of a van with a TV news logo on the side. He gestured thumb down to a uniformed officer who moved quickly to direct the van and its cargo of reporters and cameramen onto the cross street and away from the crime scene. “Speaking of freaks. Those bastards can smell blood before jackals can.”

Jack Coffey closed his eyes, but it did him no good. He could see the
Post'
s headlines on the inside of his eyelids: “Invisible Man's Third Kill.” A rival newspaper had favored the name Gray-Lady Killer, but the public had taken more of a fancy to the supernatural aspect of the first murder.

That first old woman had been a daylight kill in the park at the center of Gramercy's square. Anne Cathery had died in full view of every window that looked out onto that square, and every bench sitter, every passerby. Yet no one had witnessed it. Her corpse had lain in anonymity among the shrubs, ignored by blase, uncurious New Yorkers. In the early-morning hours of the following day, flies had attracted the curiosity of a resident.

The second victim had also been found in the square. But now Pearl Whitman had broken the pattern by dying at an unfashionable Manhattan address, twenty blocks south by geographic standards and miles further down by economics. Another deviation from the pattern was the death of a cop, the head of Special Crimes Section no less.

Harry Blakely lit up a cheap cigar, and Coffey bit down on his lower lip to offset a new wave of nausea and stop the onset of dry heaves. He was only hoping to keep some of his dignity, for he had nothing left of his lunch to give to the sidewalk.

“How do you suppose the perp got the old lady down here, Coffey? Any ideas?”

“Had to have a car,” said Coffey, his mind working on automatic pilot now, only really concentrating on his innards. “Probably snatched her off the street in Gramercy. No rich old broad is gonna be out for a stroll in this neighborhood.”

“Well now.” Blakely smiled. “He has a private car. That's more than we had yesterday. So Markowitz wasn't a total loss.”

What would they do to him, Coffey wondered, for punching out the chief of detectives? Well, he would have free beers for the rest of his natural life, but no pension.

“You're the senior man in the section, Coffey. You do right, you'll make captain before the year is out. It's your baby now.”

Yeah, right. And who was going to explain that to Mallory?

Coffey was facing the long black limousine slowly pulling to the curb, but he was not really seeing it, not registering that this must be Police Commissioner Beale's limo.

“Aw, Markowitz,” Blakely was saying, as much to himself as to Coffey. “This was a real bonehead mistake. He should've pulled the pin years ago.”

Coffey's hand clenched wrinkles into the wilted material of his suit jacket. So all the times Lou Markowitz made the department shine had counted for nothing. He would be remembered for this last mistake. Maybe the perp was just smarter than Markowitz. Coffey had never met anyone that smart. And if and when he did? Would Blakely be sitting with someone else and remembering Lieut. Jack Coffey for
his
last mistake?

“Has anyone told Mallory?” asked Blakely.

“She's in there now with forensics.”

“Oh Jesus—”

“She was the first officer on the scene. You were figuring to keep her out of it?”

“She's in there with Markowitz's body?”

“Yeah, and she's pissed off.”

He was only vaguely aware of another man standing close by his shoulder and putting one bloodless, bony hand on the fender of the car. Coffey winced as the man leaned close to his ear and yelled, “Are you telling me Sergeant Mallory is in there!”

Where had Beale come from on his little ferret's feet?

Still a bit slow and slightly stupid with shock, Jack Coffey turned to look down at the little man's watery gray eyes. He thought the commissioner had a very big voice for a little jerk.

 

Dr. Edward Slope had come straight from a poolside barbecue at his suburban Westchester home. Actually, he had escaped from his in-laws and neighbors, running from their screaming children, ducking the flying Frisbees, keeping a blind eye to the smoking hamburgers and franks on the grill, not stopping to change his clothes but only grabbing up his bag. His apologies, on the fly, had been profuse, but when he last saw his wife, she had been holding a long, sharp skewer and miming the words ‘I'll get you for this' as he backed his car down the driveway and left her to the whirlwind.

In his practice as medical examiner for the city of New York, Dr. Slope usually came to his patients in a more somber suit of clothes, and not the garish splashes of Hawaiian color which competed with the blood of the crime scene. In a further, unintended rudeness, the exotic flowers of his shirt muted the dead woman's more fashionable blue dress, and drabbed the dead man's brown suit.

And he usually tended to strangers and not to a man he had known for half his life. He had walked quickly from the car to the door marked by a guard of uniformed officers. No one had caught up with him to tell him it was Louis in there. He had walked into this room and met his old friend as a corpse. Now, as he sagged against the bare brick wall, the bright floodlights deepened his wrinkles and made him seventy instead of sixty.

He had to ask himself, what was wrong with this picture? Oh, just everything. Louis should be issuing orders to forensics and the photographer, and pumping him for early details and best guesses. In no scenario could Louis be one of the bodies.

And why was Kathy Mallory here? She should be sitting at a computer console back at the station, and not on her knees in the dirt and the dried blood, flies lighting on the curls of her hair and crawling over her hands and face.

The photographer and the forensic crew were standing by the door, waiting on a go-ahead from Mallory. She was kneeling on the floor, pushing a gold wedding band up the pudgy third finger on the left hand of the corpse which had been her father.

Dr. Slope turned his attention to the boy in the handcuffs. It seemed unnecessary to have such a large policeman restraining the kid. In that weakened condition he could not have outrun one of the dead bodies. The boy's head was bleeding, and half his face was swollen. Slope thought of practicing on a living patient for distraction, but then he figured he would see this one in his regular practice soon enough. The skeletal junkie was a day away from dying. Were the wounds Mallory's work? It was obvious the boy was Mallory's creature. He was tied to her by his eyes.

Mallory looked up at the boy. “You moved the body, didn't you?”

Apparently, she had trained the boy rather well in the short time they had known one another, perhaps a half hour by the recent blooding. The boy responded quick as a starving lab rat.

“Yes, ma'am. I rolled him over on his back.”

“Tell me when I've got it right,” she said, rolling the heavy body of Louis Markowitz over on his face.

Slope wondered if she had ever been on a homicide crime site before. He thought not. From her earliest days on the force, she had always been more at home with the NYPD computers than people, living or dead. A bizarre linkage of memory called up a fine spring day in Kathy's childhood when Louis had taught her the rudiments of baseball.

In a somewhat different spirit, Dr. Slope strode over to Louis's body and hunkered down beside her. He pointed to the darkened splotches on the face. “Line up the places where the blood's pooled under the skin. Line 'em up flat with the floor.”

She nodded and leaned down, nose to nose with the white face of the corpse, her hands working at the dead flesh, which was deceptively warm in the August heat. When she was done, she looked up to the boy, who nodded.

Slope was checking Mallory's pretty face for signs of traumatic shock, and he was disconcerted at not finding any. She was all business, lining up the dark blood pools on the white left hand now, and looking back to the boy again. The boy nodded once more. Satisfied, she stood up and crossed the room to stand over the corpse of the old woman.

The woman's throat bore a wound resembling a second mouth. The front of the blood-crusted dress had been cut away, and the brassiere as well. One breast hung deflated against the rib cage. The other had been laid open by the knife and was covered with flies. The buzzing was nearly a roar, and the medical examiner regarded the black cluster of insects as a single feeding organism. The corpse's ancient face was a study in horror as the flies crawled in and out of the open mouths of her face and throat.

Mallory stared at the old woman with as much compassion as she would give to furniture. She looked back to the boy.

“And now this one,” she said.

“No,” said the boy. “She was that way when I got here.”

“Anything else? Did you touch anything, move anything?”

“No. I went through the dead guy's pockets and ran. I threw the wallet back there.” He pointed to a loose pile of bricks and garbage in one corner of the room. The wallet lay on a torn green garbage bag.

Slope caught the eye of a forensic technician. He nodded at the bag and then made a few jots in his notebook.

“You!” said Mallory, calling the man over. “You got the kid's prints?”

The technician held up the card with the splotches of ink in neat squares which identified each printed digit.

She turned to Martin, the uniformed officer who held the handcuffed boy by one bone-thin arm.

“I don't need him anymore. Kick him loose.”

Slope stopped his medical examination and watched Martin's young face and saw the patrolman's mistake in the making.

“Mallory, he robbed a corpse,” said Martin. “Markowitz's corpse, for Christ's sake. You're gonna let him walk?”

“A deal is a deal. Now kick him loose,” said Mallory in a voice, low and even, that said with restrained, under-the-surface violence, ‘Don't you push your luck with me, not ever.' As she walked toward Martin, she seemed to grow in size and power. It was an unsettling illusion, and Slope wondered if she was even aware of it. He thought she might be.

Martin was quick to fish out the cuff key. His reddening face was turned down to the work of unlocking the irons. A moment later, the junkie was gone.

He guessed she hadn't wasted much time on the boy's constitutional right to a lawyer, and he knew she had wasted no time at all in discouraging his right to remain silent.

Now she turned on the photographer. “Okay, it's in prime condition. Shoot.”

The peripheral brightness of repeating flashes made spots in Slope's vision as he moved to the second body. He slipped plastic bags over the hands of the woman's corpse and then looked up to Mallory. “I'll get to work on it as soon as you release them.”

“The old woman's the same pattern as the other two?”

“The same.”

“Do Markowitz first,” she said. “I'm not gonna learn anything new from her.”

“You got it.”

“What can you give me now? How long have they been dead?”

Like father, like daughter. He knew there was no tie of blood between them, but there was much of Louis in her.

“Two days, give or take. With the heat and the decomposition, I won't be able to pin it to within five or six hours. But I can fix a few hours of daylight on either side. Same pattern there.”

“How long did Markowitz live?”

“Maybe thirty minutes to an hour. I'm guessing by the blood loss. I'd say the wound was enough to kill him without medical attention, but he died of a massive coronary.” Markowitz had had some practice surviving mild attacks. This one must have had the force and effect of a slow train wreck.