The Chalk Girl (43 page)

Elderly Mrs Buford bent down to fetch her morning
Times
, eager to read the next episode of the Ramble murders. The saga of the Hunger Artist had become her new soap opera.

The door across the hall opened, and she braced herself. The neighbor woman’s husband had done morning paper duty for the past few days. Such a creepy fellow, he had interfered with the digestion of her breakfast. But now – oh, thank God – she saw Annie standing on the threshold.

What a relief. Rolland Mann had apparently not done away with his wife after all.

Well, now they could resume their old morning ritual, cordial exchanges of hellos and comments on the weather. Or maybe not. Mrs Buford noticed the suitcase. ‘Going somewhere?’

Escaping, perhaps?

Annie nodded.

‘Have a lovely time.’ The old woman closed the door only to open it a minute later at the sound of weeping. Annie Mann had traveled only a few steps from her own door before she crumpled to the floor beside her luggage. She sat huddled against the wall.

Mrs Buford belted her robe and bustled across the hallway with the shush of fuzzy pink slippers. Bending creaky knees, she knelt down beside her fallen neighbor and took the woman’s hands in hers, rubbing the cold, clammy flesh till it warmed, till Annie’s breathing was less of a struggle, and the sweat of her brow ceased to roll into her eyes. The younger woman fumbled with the catch on her purse and spilled a dozen pharmacy bottles across the carpet.

‘I’ll get you some water so you can take a pill.’ Mrs Buford had no sooner entered her own apartment than she heard the ping that announced the arrival of the elevator. When she looked out the door, it was a great surprise to see two uniformed policemen in the hall – a greater surprise for Annie Mann, who slumped over in a dead faint. And perhaps that was for the best. Poor woman. She never could have left the building fully conscious. One officer picked up Annie’s wallet from the spilled contents of her purse. He nodded to the second man, who carried her limp body to the elevator, leaving the suitcase behind. A young blonde knelt on the carpet, scooping the pill bottles back into the fallen purse. How odd.

Well, in any case, Annie had made her escape.

Of course, Mrs Buford had imagined this scene a hundred times,
but she had always envisioned the husband in police custody – not the
wife
. She was about to close her door when a voice called out, ‘Wait!’ She poked her head into the hall once more and saw the long-legged blonde coming toward her – closer, closer.
Oh, my, what strange green eyes
.

The young woman showed her a gold badge and a police identification card that made her a detective. A
detective
! How exciting. As the blonde restored the badge to a back pocket of her jeans, her blazer fell open on one side, and now a very large gun was on display in a shoulder holster.

Oh, this was simply
marvelous
. Mrs Buford was fairly giddy when she said, ‘Tell me it’s
murder
.’

‘Yes. Yes, it is.’

The old woman rose up on her toes, all atingle with anticipation, and when the young woman asked, ‘Wanna play?’ Mrs Buford replied, ‘
Could
I?’

Coco perched on a desk near the stairwell door and lectured Detective Gonzales on the terrible importance of toilet-seat locks. ‘The rats can get in that way. They swim up through the water in the toilet bowl. But if the seats are locked down, they just swim round and round till they drown.’

The lieutenant stood with Mallory and Riker on the squad-room side of the window, watching the action in the next room through the blinds. Via an open intercom, the three of them eavesdropped on a conversation between the people inside the not-so-private office, where the two civilians were on a first-name basis now, Annie and Charles.

The lady was not what Jack Coffey had expected, not the pretty trophy wife of a political up-and-comer. She looked so ordinary – if he discounted the fact that she was terrified.

Annie Mann held tight to the arms of her chair, so afraid that she
might lift off into space. Despite the fear, she smiled when Charles Butler did. This new expression transformed her. No longer plain, she was all warmth and charm personified. Magnetic. It was almost a magic act. But the illusion was short-lived, and she shifted back into panic mode, eyes darting everywhere, on the lookout for danger in the corners of the room. And now she panted like a dog.

Charles perused the pharmacy stash from the woman’s purse, then selected a bottle and handed her a single pill. She popped it in her mouth and chomped it like a candy. When she was calm, he left her alone to join the covert observers on the other side of the office window.

Mallory looked through the blinds, staring at the woman as she spoke to the psychologist. ‘Is she crazy?’

‘No,’ said Charles. ‘Not at all.’

‘So she’s faking,’ said Riker.

‘Oh, no. I agree with Mrs Buford’s diagnosis. Annie’s genuinely phobic. She tells me she’s always been prone to panic attacks in social situations.’

The lieutenant and his detectives feigned interest in this, as if they had not been privy to every word. And now, with the mistaken idea that they were
actually
interested, Charles continued. ‘Well, that’s how agoraphobia begins. In the early stages, Annie was quite functional. Hospitals were her primary safety zones – areas of competence and confidence for a nurse.’

‘She hasn’t worked for fifteen years,’ said Jack Coffey, in a game attempt to speed this along.

‘And during that time,’ said the man with no short answers, ‘the rest of her safety zones also dwindled. She’s afraid of having panic attacks in public areas. Over the years, she’s avoided a growing list of such places. And finally, she had nowhere to go. Then there’s the additional reinforcement of long-term confinement. She hasn’t left her apartment since they moved in.’

‘We saw you give her that pill.’ Mallory said this as if accusing him of drug trafficking.

‘A very mild sedative,’ said Charles. ‘She was badly frightened – about a minute away from meltdown. I assume you want her coherent?’

‘
Legally
coherent,’ said Coffey. ‘Is that woman stoned?’

‘No, I’d say she’s more clearheaded now.’

‘That’s all we need to know.’ The lieutenant signaled Detective Janos, who entered the office and led Annie Mann outside to the squad room and down the hall to a place for less genteel conversation.

‘Rats have agoraphobia, too,’ said a small voice closer to the floor.

Four people looked down to see that Coco had ditched her babysitting detective, and she was not smiling anymore.

‘Rats don’t feel safe in open spaces.’ Coco’s solemn eyes followed the woman being led away. ‘That’s why they keep close to the walls.’

And now all of them watched Annie Mann’s body grazing the wall as she was escorted down the hallway.

Her shoulders hunched. Her eyes were wide.

The interrogation room with its puke-green walls and blood-leaching fluorescent lights was too alien for this agoraphobic – but not scary
enough
. Riker wondered how edgy the woman might have been without the damn sedative.

‘You changed your name,’ said Mallory.

‘I got married,’ said Annie Mann.

‘She means your
first
name,’ said Riker. ‘You used to be Margaret – now it’s Annie.’

There was no hesitation when the woman said, ‘I was always Annie to my friends.’

‘You gave us the wrong Social Security number,’ said Mallory.

‘I changed it. I was worried about identity theft.’

This was the first stumble. Thus far, Mrs Mann’s responses had been too quick, and they had the tone of a memorized script, but now the detectives had what they were waiting for. This was the hook, the first bungled lie.

‘Fifteen years ago,’ said Riker, ‘nobody worried about identity theft. I don’t think we even had a name for it.’

‘My wallet was stolen – my license, credit cards—’

‘You never filed a police report, never checked your credit report.’ Mallory tapped keys on her laptop computer. ‘And you didn’t replace the driver’s license. It says here, your license expired. So did your charge cards. I can’t find any paper on you for the past fifteen years.’ She turned the computer around so that Annie Mann could see the document on-screen. ‘Look at this. Your name isn’t even on the deed for your condo.’

Annie leaned closer to the screen, as if that might clarify the line of type that declared her husband the solitary owner. ‘This can’t be right.’

‘You didn’t know? Your neighbor, Mrs Buford, thinks you’re married, but she’s the only one in the building who’s ever seen you.’

‘I’m
married
!’

Riker leaned forward. ‘We pulled all the phone records. You never called your husband at the office – not once. His secretary tells us he’s single.’

Mallory raised more documents on the screen. ‘You’re not a beneficiary on his pension plan. You’re not even listed as a dependent on his health insurance.’

‘But, hey,’ said Riker, ‘you don’t need health insurance. You’re low risk. According to the neighbor, you never leave that apartment.’

‘Rolland Mann files as a single taxpayer,’ said Mallory. ‘No dependents. So you lied when you said you were—’

‘We’re
married
. We were married in Canada.’

Riker smiled. ‘I’d like to believe you. But there’s no record of a marriage registered in
this
country. There’s no trace of you anywhere, Annie. It’s like he wiped you out of existence fifteen years ago. You know how we found you? My partner stopped by to find out why Rolland made a three-minute phone call to his empty apartment.’

‘If he killed you today,’ said Mallory, ‘the only one who’d miss you is the old lady across the hall.’

‘We’re trying to help you, Annie.’ Riker reached across the table and covered her cold hands with his. ‘So . . . you and Rolland, you met at the hospital – when you were watching the Nadlers’ kid. Nurses and cops, that’s a natural combination.’

‘No. Rolland was my boyfriend
before
that. He’s the one who got me the job with the –’ Annie Mann pulled her hands back and covered her mouth. And now in the posture of
I give up
, her shoulders slumped and she bowed her head. ‘It was just a few hours a night, but the Nadlers paid me for whole shifts. Real nice people. They’d been cooped up in that hospital for a solid month. They only wanted to step outside for a regular meal together . . . like
normal
people . . . just a few hours. Their kid was
supposed
to be stable.’

‘You were on duty when Ernie Nadler died,’ said Mallory. ‘You were the last person to see him alive. And that looks bad for you, Annie. The parents did everything they could to keep Ernie safe, but their little boy was murdered on your watch.’

‘No. He died from the injuries – or maybe infection from—’

‘You
know
it was murder,’ said Mallory. ‘You were in that hospital room when he was killed, smothered to death with a pillow.’

‘Oh, my
God
. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t even there when he died. I went out for a smoke on the fire escape. I swear I was only gone a few minutes. When I came back, the boy was dead. Rolland – he was a detective then – he was in the room. He can tell you.’

‘You should worry about what he
already
told us.’ Mallory pushed a sheet of paper across the table. ‘That’s his witness statement. You recognize the handwriting? He says he was at the hospital in the morning,
not
the evening – not when the kid was murdered.’

‘I’d like to help you, Annie,’ said Riker. ‘But I need to hear your side of it.’

‘He was
there
! When I got back to the kid’s room, Rolland was standing by the bed. He asked me where I’d been. I was
so
freaked out. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. He won’t tell anybody I wasn’t there when the kid died. He told me to wait fifteen minutes and then call a doctor. He saved me from a negligence charge. And then Rolland
married
me to save my ass. He said a husband can’t testify against his wife.’

‘He lied,’ said Mallory. ‘A husband can’t testify to spousal conversation, but he can testify to events. That’s why he kept you around for fifteen years. You’re a bone he can throw to the cops if everything goes sour. When the doctor came in to pronounce the boy dead, you told him you were there the whole time. Isn’t that what happened? Isn’t that what Rolland told you to say?’

‘Rolland
loves
me.’

‘The guy really planned ahead,’ said Mallory. ‘So he was the last one to see the kid alive. But guess who’s getting hung out to dry, Annie. It’s all on you now. You – the crazy lady who can’t even leave her apartment. The nutcase with a pharmacy of drugs in her purse and a—’

‘
No!
I’d never—’

‘A nurse who kills her patients,’ said Mallory. ‘That’s how it’ll play out in court. You felt bad for a little kid with amputated hands. You wanted to spare Ernie all that horror – when he woke up from the coma. So you took a pillow, and you—’

‘
No!
I wasn’t even
there
when the Nadlers’ son died!’