The Chalk Girl (38 page)

‘It all comes down to the flowers.’ Mallory stared at a document from the files. ‘And here they are again. Toby brought flowers into the Ramble. The way it’s written up here, he laid them down in the place where they found the dead wino. If this is true, it looks like Toby witnessed that murder. That’s how he knew where to lay his flowers.’

‘Or Toby did the killing,’ said Riker. ‘And maybe he strung up the Nadler kid, too. Did you believe Carlyle when he said Ernest Nadler was a witness to the wino’s murder?’

‘Who knows? If there ever was a witness statement, you know it got shredded fifteen years ago.’

‘Yeah.’ Elbows planted on his desk, Riker rested his head in his hands. ‘And we still got nothing solid on Rocket Mann. Chief Goddard’s gonna shit a brick if that bastard comes up clean. We’re screwed.’

‘Maybe not.’ Mallory turned her laptop around to show him a screen from the NYPD archives. ‘Ernest Nadler was strung up for at least three days . . . but there’s no report on file with Missing Persons – or any other department.’ She smiled. ‘The kid doesn’t come home from school one day. After a few hours, his parents get worried. Dinnertime comes and goes. Then it gets dark outside. There’s no record that they ever called the police. But most parents really like their kids. And that’s how I know they ran all the way to the nearest police station – on the Upper West Side.’

‘Rocket Mann’s old precinct when he was a detective. Bastard – he probably shined off the paperwork.’

‘But the parents keep coming at him,’ said Mallory. ‘Days go by. Maybe Mann sends out the uniforms to knock on some doors in the neighborhood. The Nadlers are half crazy. Eventually, just to shut them up, Detective Mann does a little work, checks out the kid’s hangouts and his friends. Then somebody put him on to the Ramble.’

‘Okay, that explains why he was on the spot when Ernie was found hanging in a tree.’ Riker lifted one hand in a gesture of
So?

‘Now back up,’ said Mallory. ‘What if there’s a reason why Mann wound up with the parents of a missing kid? Maybe it wasn’t just luck of the draw when the Nadlers walked into the station house. What if the parents already knew Detective Mann?’

‘
Before
their kid went missing? You figure Mann was the cop who took down Ernie’s statement on the wino murder?’

‘I know he was.’ Mallory pointed to highlighted text on her
screen. The old entry named Rolland Mann as the detective assigned to the murder of a nameless derelict. ‘If Ernie came forward, he would’ve given his witness statement to the cop who owned that case. The parents would’ve been there with their son . . . and that was the first time they met Rocket Mann.’

‘Then later, when their kid goes missing, the Nadlers ask for help from the only cop they know.’

Rolland Mann’s wife sat up in the dark. She rose from their bed and left the room. Lately, Annie seemed to have an internal clock for the scary hours when she was afraid to sleep – afraid of him. When morning came, he would find her lying on the couch, where she felt safe – safer. This pattern had begun with the first morning paper to carry a new piece of a very old puzzle. Perhaps Annie already knew what he had done.

But fifteen years had passed, and she was still alive. What more proof of love did Annie require?

No sleep tonight
.

Rolland reached out to the nightstand, picked up his cell phone and turned it on to check his messages. Ten of them were from ADA Carlyle. And a new one was ringing through. He held the phone to his ear. ‘Yes? . . . What witness statement? . . . You
moron
. They scammed you. How much did you tell them?’ He glanced at the lighted dial of the alarm clock. Right about now, the detectives of Special Crimes Unit would be pulling records for the final phone call of a terrified ADA reaching out to him – in the scary hour.

Phoebe Bledsoe lay in her bed – listening – eyes moving from window to window.

Click, click
. What was that? Bedcovers fell away as she sat bolt upright. Was someone trying the lock on the door? No. She
recognized the hum of the refrigerator’s automatic ice-cube maker. More cubes clicked into their plastic container. Phoebe lay back on the pillow. So – only imagining things – she was too good at that. And still she could not lose the fear that someone was out there.

And in here, Dead Ernest was with her, a little corpse lying beside her in the dark.

‘I counted on you,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d come for me . . . I waited. I held on, because of
you
.’ Dead Ernest moved closer to whisper in her ear. ‘You were a witness, too. And now Willy’s out there somewhere.’ He nodded toward the window. ‘I hear footsteps. She’s coming for you. Now you know how it feels.’

The greatest flaw in her homemade wraith was the lack of a heart. This little doppelgänger only bore a physical resemblance to her old friend. Even the way it smiled lacked Ernie’s personality. But what of the real boy, the living child – what if he
had
counted on her to come for him – to save him?

She had never been allowed to visit Ernie during his monthlong coma. Humphrey had told her why: ‘Mom and Dad don’t want you to know his hands were hacked off.’ Taking this for no more than routine torture by her brother, she had not believed it then. Not then. But, because she was an invisible child, ignored by everyone, she had found her way into Ernie’s hospital room.

To this day, she would not allow Dead Ernest to pull his phantom hands from his pockets – to discover what had been done to him during the long sleep.

There was a rap, tap, tap on a windowpane. In a small, still rational compartment of her brain, she knew this was only a tree branch knocking around in the wind. She rose from her bed and hesitated before parting the curtain, only intending to peek through a slit.

She sucked in her breath and lost her balance, falling to the floor
and dragging down the curtain with its rod. Willy Fallon’s face was pressed up against the glass, fleshy features smeared in monstrous distortions.

Phoebe screamed.

Willy laughed.

On her knees, Phoebe Bledsoe scrubbed the marking-pen letters from her cottage door. Only two words – and
still
Willy had managed an error in grammar. The scrawled message YOUR NEXT was faint now, but only a coat of paint would make it disappear.

Phoebe dropped her sponge, startled by the sound of footsteps coming up behind her.

‘It’s only me.’ Mr Polanski came to the end of the flagstone path.
Keys jingled on his belt loop as he hunkered down by her side. ‘I called the headmaster at his summer home. He won’t let me change the gate lock. He says it’s an antique. Well, you know how the school feels about every really old thing. So I didn’t even ask if I could put a chain and a padlock on that gate . . . I thought the headmaster might say no.’ The old watchman smiled and held up a small key. ‘This goes to your new padlock, Miss Phoebe.’ And now he handed her another one. ‘That’s the spare. You’re the only one with keys. Do you feel safe now?’

Did she? Would she ever?

Dr Slope was not available, but a more agreeable pathologist was on call this morning. Mallory stood before him, hands on hips, her way of saying,
Give up
. And the man responded well to intimidation – less work for the detectives.

‘It’s not here.’ The young doctor faced his computer monitor. ‘No death certificate on file, not under that name.’

‘Okay, pal,’ said Riker. ‘Let’s say we’re just shopping for a dead wino. We’ll take anything you had in stock that day.’ The date they had given him corresponded to the death of a homeless man in the Ramble, the unidentified murder victim of Toby Wilder’s plea bargain.

The man in the lab coat scrolled down the screen and then stopped. ‘Got it. There’s only one body that fits. No name, just a number. It was found in Central Park.’ He tapped the keys to call up autopsy photographs. ‘Well, two odd things. There’s a big gap between the time this John Doe came in and when the paperwork was finished. And see here? These pictures show damage from a beating, but the body was never cracked open.’

‘You gotta be kidding me.’ Riker leaned down to the screen image of a savagely beaten corpse. ‘This guy’s a mess. He was a murder victim.’

‘Yes, sir, he was. And that’s noted right here.’

Mallory motioned for the pathologist to get up and get out of her way. She slid into his chair to click through the photographs one by one. ‘No good head shots. The beating really bloodied up his face. We’ll never get an ID from these pictures. Wait. Look at this one.’

Riker stared at a close-up shot of an injury to the flesh. A scalpel lay next to the body, and this was the only guide to scale. ‘A bite mark.’

Mallory nodded. ‘
Little teeth
. Kids killed the wino.’

Riker turned to the pathologist. ‘Why the third-rate autopsy? A homeless bum wasn’t worth the time?’ He pointed to the screen. ‘Nobody thought that was weird enough for a closer look?’

‘We want an exhumation,’ said Mallory. ‘We want it
now
.’

‘I understand you two are slandering the reputation of my department?’ The chief medical examiner had suddenly become available to the police.

Kathy Mallory stood next to the computer in Edward Slope’s private office. ‘I need your password to bring up the autopsy photos.’

‘Of course you do,’ said the doctor, sardonic to the bone.

His young assistant sat down at the keyboard with the impression that the detective might actually need help.

When the file was retrieved, copied and laid on Slope’s desk, he scanned the top sheet. ‘This autopsy was done by Dr Costello, not the best pathologist I ever had. He didn’t last long.’ And this file was brief. A few minutes later, he looked up from his reading. ‘I don’t have a problem with the findings in the bloodwork. A call of alcoholism works nicely with a notation that the victim smelled like a brewery. The blood-alcohol level is the highest possible for a man in an upright position.’ Next, he glanced at pictures of the corpse.
‘The cause of death was obviously a beating. It’s quite well documented here.’

He rose from his desk to stand behind the younger pathologist at the computer. ‘Raymond, bring up our social calendar for the same date.’ Slope leaned down to scrutinize the text on-screen. ‘When this body was examined, we had four corpses stacked up from a nightclub shootout. Now,
those
victims got full autopsies. But we also had three upstanding taxpayers killed in a traffic accident. The one with the severed head was driving a BMW convertible. Could there be a more obvious cause of death? No, I think not. And the well-heeled, headless guy didn’t get any more attention than your favorite wino.’ Edward Slope smiled as another conspiracy theory turned to ashes.

Mallory leaned over his desk and spread out the autopsy photographs until she found the picture that she liked best. ‘So . . . if you’d done this one yourself . . . if you’d seen those little teeth marks.’ She let the rest of her question dangle.

Slope snatched up the photo and stared at it. ‘Very
small
teeth marks – a child’s teeth.’ And now he went through each shot, taking more time, looking closer. ‘Didn’t I say that Dr Costello was not a shining star in this department?’ He laid the pictures down. ‘To answer your question – I would’ve done a full autopsy and pulled out all the stops.’ He had clearly underestimated the incompetence of his erstwhile pathologist. How could the man have missed this extraordinary evidence of a very uncommon murder? And the answer? It was in the notation, ‘
smells like a brewery
,’ and the John Doe designation of a homeless man – as if this might justify a three-minute autopsy on a busy day with more reputable corpses stacking up on the tables. ‘This doesn’t change the fact that your wino was beaten to death. And you know bite-mark identification is wildly overrated.’

Kathy Mallory laid down the photograph of a smiling schoolboy
wearing blazer and tie – and a partial bite mark on his neck. ‘I say it’s a match. If your man had bothered to write up a kid’s bite marks on the wino’s body, that case would never have been fobbed off on a probie detective like—’

Edward Slope held up one hand, a signal that there was no need to finish that accusation. Smiling, he picked up the school photograph. ‘And now, of course, it’s clearly
my
fault the Nadler boy was murdered.’

As if in agreement, she said, ‘It’s not too late for a better autopsy on the wino.’

‘Yes, it is.’ The younger doctor sat at the computer, reading text on the screen. ‘The wino’s body was claimed ten years ago for private burial, but that’s the only mention of a second interment. No details, no idea where the body was buried the second time.’