The Chalk Girl (23 page)

Mann whirled around to face Riker, and now it was Mallory who stole up behind him, saying, ‘Toby didn’t even know about the glue. How could he?’

Mann turned full circle to gape at her, and Riker’s next words made him turn again.

‘Toby never saw the glue . . . so you never mentioned it. That’s the kind of detail you’d hold back to rule out crackpot confessors. But you didn’t want to rule out Toby Wilder.’

‘No,’ said Mallory, working the man’s blind side again. ‘You couldn’t risk him telling a story that wouldn’t match up with the evidence – the
glue
. What a good career move.’

They had worked him like a spinning ballerina, and now he shouted, ‘Stop!’

Stop the music
.

Rolland Mann returned to his desk and sat down. He took a deep breath.

And break time was over.

‘The boy didn’t do it.’ Mallory stepped up to one side of his chair.

‘And you
knew
that,’ said Riker, from the other side. ‘Now you
wanna kill the connection between your case and ours. You don’t want us digging around in your old business.’

Rolland Mann’s fingers curled around the telephone receiver. ‘Remember what I said about the speed dial? One phone call and you’re—’

‘You make that call, and we’ll have to return the favor,’ said Mallory. ‘It all comes back to the glue.’ She waved the patrolman’s personal notes. ‘And then there’s your ViCAP questionnaire. Fifteen years ago, you ran a search for a killer with a similar MO. That would’ve been a
month
after Toby confessed. You
knew
he was innocent.’

‘Here’s what I don’t understand,’ said Riker. ‘How did you get that kid in front of a judge when there was no investigation? We can’t even find an incident report.’

‘It’s like the assault on that little boy never happened,’ said Mallory. ‘What’ll we find when we run Toby Wilder’s name?’

‘A record of four years in juvenile detention,’ said Rolland Mann. ‘But you’d have to break the law to get that much. Juvie records are
sealed
.’

‘But not police reports on assaults. So how did you get that case on a court docket – a case that didn’t exist?’ And then she knew. Mallory stepped back from the desk. ‘You never got a signed confession, did you? Not for the Ramble assault. No, you got Toby to plead out on some
other
crime, right?’ Yes, she was right. His eyes were so much wider now.

‘And then,’ said Riker, ‘a
month
later, you ran that ViCAP search.’

Mallory held up the death certificate. ‘That was the same day Ernest Nadler died.’

Rolland Mann confirmed all of this by withdrawing his hand from the telephone. The mention of the child victim’s name had unnerved him.

Mallory pocketed the written confession as she crossed the room to stand before the old videocassette player. She pressed the eject button and pulled out the tape. ‘We’re taking this. I think you can trust us to be discreet.’

The detectives strolled out the door with their purloined goods.

Riker sat in the passenger seat, staring at the rearview mirror,
averting his gaze from the traffic violations of his tailgating partner. He could feel the shift of hard lane changes, but preferred not to meet the eyes of terrified motorists sharing this crowded patch of road with Mallory. Every car up ahead was threatened with a rearend collision. He touched his seat-belt clasp to be sure it was fastened.
Oh, what the hell
. The air bag would save him. He checked the side mirror one more time. ‘You were right. Goddard’s got nobody tailing us.’

‘This was always a closed game,’ said Mallory, ‘just the chief of D’s and Rocket Mann – and us.’

The car stopped for a red light, and Riker loosened his death grip on the rolled-up ViCAP questionnaire. ‘So the guy wipes out every trace of the kid’s assault – and
then
he makes a permanent record of the whole damn thing in the FBI database.’

‘It’s original,’ said Mallory. ‘Not your garden-variety blackmailer. And Rocket Mann was patient. He waited a solid month for the victim to die. Murder’s worth a lot more than an assault charge.’

‘Yeah,’ said Riker. If not for Mallory’s raid on ViCAP, the old FBI questionnaire would have stayed buried in the system. Mann’s blackmail victim only needed to know that it was there, and that it could be retrieved at will. Better than a bank vault. ‘So that poor kid who got sent to Juvie – he was just a scapegoat.’

‘He had other uses,’ said Mallory. ‘If the dead boy’s family asked for their pound of flesh, Mann only had to show them the interview tape – and maybe a booking sheet for Toby Wilder.’

The sealed records of Family Court resolved the problem of convicting Toby for a different crime. And Ernest Nadler’s parents would never know their son’s murder had been covered up for profit – the meteoric rise of a mediocre man, Rocket Mann.

Calling up CSI Pollard’s line on the Hunger Artist, Riker said, ‘The guy thought of everything.’ He removed the small microphone that passed for a tie clip. ‘Almost everything.’ Reaching into his
breast pocket, he pulled out the recorder, the damning voice record of Mann’s interview.

‘We’re not sharing that with the chief of D’s,’ said his partner. ‘Not till our case is wrapped.’

‘If we hold out on him—’ The car lurched forward. Then it stopped short, foiled by gridlock, and Riker blessed his seat belt, else he would have lost his teeth on the dashboard.

‘Joe Goddard’s a fool for chess,’ said Mallory to the man who had taught her that game when she was eleven years old. ‘He’s a regular player in Washington Square Park. And he’s not bad.’

‘Good to know. So the chief looks six moves ahead. So?’
Oh, Christ!
Now he understood why she wanted to hold something back – a bargaining chip. Joe Goddard had already made a move that gave two detectives power over him; he had bluntly spelled out a plan of conspiracy, a career ender for the chief of D’s if things went sour.

Mallory finished his thought. ‘You have to wonder how Goddard plans to keep us in line – and quiet.’ The car moved forward, but her head was turned to one side, facing her partner and not the windshield, a little act of terror that she saved for special occasions. ‘Here’s the problem. If the chief had some dirt on me, he would’ve spelled it out before our meeting with Rocket Mann. He’d never risk us changing sides. So I have to figure he’s got something on
you
.’

‘Well, he doesn’t.’ Riker had the cleanest badge in the NYPD, and the brat
knew
that.

Still driving blind, Mallory rounded a corner and
then
decided that she believed him. She turned her eyes back to the road and what lay ahead of them – two pedestrians in the crosswalk.

The hairy roundabout in traffic was over; they had come full circle and pulled to the curb. On foot, they entered a giant archway that tunneled through a Centre Street building, and they emerged
on the next street to stand at the foot of a public promenade paved with brick and lined with trees, lamp posts and benches. At the far end of One Police Plaza was a small gatehouse for the courtyard of NYPD Headquarters, a fourteen-story fortress built to withstand a siege of nonexistent enemies. Riker’s other name for this place was Paranoia in Spades, and so he knew they would not have to wait long.

Mallory checked her cell phone to read a text message. ‘It’s the gatehouse cop.’ He was their spy, their eye on the revolving door.

The detectives took cover behind a large sculpture, a frozen collision of gigantic red disks fused at odd angles. A few minutes later, Rolland Mann walked past them without his bodyguard, heading for the arch.

‘Nice timing, kid.’ Riker kept his position behind the sculpture – against his better judgment – waiting for another high-ranking official to walk by.

‘He’s coming,’ said Mallory. ‘Pay me.’

The man with the bullet-shaped head, Chief of Detectives Joe Goddard, was moving fast on the promenade, and then he slowed his steps to maintain a covert distance behind the acting police commissioner.

Riker handed his partner a twenty-dollar bill for a lost bet. He had not believed that Goddard would risk doing a shadow detail. And now they had solid proof that there was no official investigation into police corruption; the chief of D’s was running an under-the-table game.

The two detectives strolled through the arch and along the sidewalk of Centre Street. Riker insisted that his partner walk behind him. She had the strange idea that she could become invisible with only a pair of sunglasses to hide her, deluded that men would not stare at her.

Mallory really believed she was good at this.

But today she deferred to her partner. On shadow detail, Riker was the best of the best, though he would admit that Goddard was not all that bad. Fortunately, the chief had not anticipated being tailed, and there was never a backwards glance; the man was so focussed on his own quarry. And so they traveled, turning corners and walking down side streets, four ducks in a row.

The parade came to a halt when Rolland Mann stopped at the spread blanket of a sidewalk hawker and paid cash for a slightly used, certainly stolen, cell phone – a convoluted precaution in an age of anonymous calling cards and disposable phones.

How paranoid could he be?

Transaction done, onward they marched. Riker saw the action of a number punched into the cell phone that was then held to Rolland Mann’s ear to hear the rings. The time between this call and the next one suggested that no connections were made, but the third number resulted in a conversation of several minutes.

Calling concluded, Mann stopped by a vendor’s cart and purchased a bagel in a white sack. He looked around in all directions. His three followers had already stepped into shop doorways and out of sight. While Mann pulled out his bagel, Riker looked down at his side to see Mallory using the camera function of her phone.
Click
– a picture of Mann unfurling a handkerchief and wiping his prints from the cell phone –
click
– slipping the phone into the paper sack and –
click
– after crumpling the sack, he tossed it into a city trash container. Now, bagel in hand, he strolled back toward One Police Plaza.

A moment later, Chief Goddard stepped out on the sidewalk to retrieve the thrown-away phone from the rubbish. Riker followed Mallory’s cue and used his camera phone to snap a picture of the chief of detectives rutting around in the trash. Why not? In addition to proving chain of evidence for the ditched cell phone, this snapshot would make a great Christmas card.

Goddard never saw the two detectives, side by side, melding into foot traffic and turning a corner.

Coffey looked up when his senior detective broke with tradition to make a courtesy knock on the door to his private office. ‘Where’s your partner?’

‘She’s badgering another TV station to announce Humphrey Bledsoe’s funeral.’ Riker flopped down in the chair before the desk. ‘I might need to do some damage control.’

‘Something to do with God?’ And by that, the lieutenant could only mean Chief of Detectives Joe Goddard, every squad’s higher power. Coffey threw up his hands. ‘You’re too late. I just talked to him on the phone. He asked me if I told Mallory she failed her psych evaluation. When he talked to you guys, he had the impression that she didn’t know yet. I guess he’s sending a message . . . maybe a threat?’

‘But you submitted Charles Butler’s psych rebuttal, right?’

‘No, Riker, you really don’t want me to do that.’

‘She’s got a right to challenge Dr Kane’s evaluation. I know her lawyer gave you the—’

‘You mean this?’ The lieutenant held up the wadded ball of a legal document and tossed it over his shoulder. ‘All gone. Mallory’s still in limbo.’

‘What the—’ Riker was silenced when the lieutenant raised the flat of his hand.

‘I went to see Charles Butler today.’ Jack Coffey unlocked the top drawer of his desk. ‘I had a problem with his rebuttal. Small detail – thought it might be a typo. So he showed me his calendar dates for Mallory’s sessions and a draft of his report – a damn carbon copy from a
typewriter
. Will somebody please get that man a computer?’ The lieutenant pulled two sheaves of paper from the drawer and laid them on the blotter, side by side. ‘Here’s Dr Kane’s
original evaluation, the one she
failed
. And this is Charles Butler’s rebuttal. Read the dates.’ He sat back and laced his fingers behind his head.