The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

by Carol O'Connell

  “Get to the point,” said Mallory. It was an order.

  Hafner pushed his glasses up, and the constant smile was even more patronizing, as though he thought this was an unruly child he was dealing with. “This lack of a purse is significant in the interpersonal dynamics of the relationship. People who don’t carry identification on their persons lack identities of their own. A woman of low self-esteem would gravitate toward a man who was habitually abusive to women.”

  “According to Mrs. Farrow,” said Mallory, leaning in for the first shot, “Bosch stopped carrying a purse after she was mugged three years ago. The robbery report is on the record. I sent it to you with all the rest of the paperwork. Do you read the reports we send you? And there are lots of women who prefer pockets to purses.”

  Coffey watched Hafner’s eyes drop down to note that Mallory did not carry a purse. Now Hafner was scrutinizing her face, evaluating Mallory like a specimen. His eyes were gleaming, as though he had discovered a unique life form. He had.

  “Dr. Hafner,” said Coffey in his best damage-control tone, “Do you think he’s likely to kill again?”

  “Oh, definitely. He may have killed many times. We don’t know that this is his first murder. I don’t think he’ll be able to stop himself.”

  Coffey was thinking, Bullshit, and Mallory’s eyes were framing stronger language.

  “Go on, Dr. Hafner,” said Coffey.

  You idiot, personal friend of the mayor or no.

  “The immaculate condition of the apartment is an example of ritualistic, compulsive behavior, the ultimate cleansing. Such compulsively neat individuals always have severe personality disorders.”

  Coffey concentrated on Mallory. Her lips parted. For her, this was tantamount to an emotional outburst. And now he wondered what Hafner would make of Mallory’s compulsively neat and well-ordered environs. The computer room was spotless and kept that way by a civilian keystroker who feared for his life if dust should settle on the computer equipment.

  “So you think our man would fit the profile of a serial killer,” said Coffey.

  “Highly probable. And I would be very interested in the formative years of all the suspects.” Hafner was staring at Mallory as he said this. “Was there trauma? Abuse? Abandonment? Maybe a history as a runaway.”

  Coffey sat back and studied Hafner. The man was just too damn fascinated by Mallory, openly examining her face as though gauging the effect of every word on her.

  Hafner pushed his glasses up again. “The cleansing ritual may go hand in glove with compulsive punctuality.”

  Coffey leaned forward.

  Punctuality? Where was that coming from?

  Perhaps Hafner had seen Mallory’s computer room after all, and more. Hafner could have accessed Mallory’s psych evaluation, which had been mandatory following the discharge of a weapon in the line of duty. This was not about the suspect. This pumped-up twit thought he was going to play with Mallory, to bait her like a lab animal.

  Coffey looked to Mallory’s face, and he could see that everywhere he had gone with this idea, she had been there before him. Coffey sat well back in his chair and well out of the loop. Let the twit fend for himself. Whatever she did to Hafner, he had it coming. He communicated all of this to her with the slight inclination of his head.

  Sic him, Mallory.

  “Perhaps a visual aid would be useful,” she said, her voice assuming the soft, deceptive notes of a civilized member of society.

  Coffey watched her gun slide easily from the shoulder holster, and then he ceased to see it in the lacuna that was part of the cop’s blue wall of silence. He was blind to the gun—no, the damn cannon, not a police-issue revolver, but something that made substantially bigger holes.

  “Listen, fool,” said Mallory, bringing her chair closer to Hafner’s, closing in for the kill, and not a neat kill either. The gun that Coffey could no longer see was in her hand.

  “This was a spontaneous act,” she said in even syllables. “The weapon was a rock. You had that information.”

  She raised the gun, touched the metal with one long red fingernail and the revolving chamber swung out of the armature. Her voice rolled on in velvet octaves which contrasted sharply with the deadly thing in her hands.

  Hafner was a study in rigidity. A black fly whined past his head. He seemed not to notice. The glasses slid down his nose. He did not correct them.

  “He didn’t bring a weapon to the crime site,” said Mallory. “He didn’t plan to kill Bosch that morning. When he did kill her, he panicked and ran. It took him more than thirty minutes to get his nerve back. You would have known that if you’d read the ME note on the body being moved.”

  She emptied the bullets into her lap, and then inserted one bullet back into the gun and swung the chamber back into place with a click.

  The fly landed on Hafner’s cheek. He never moved to swat it, he never moved at all.

  She smiled.

  Coffey was fascinated by Hafner’s new role as Mallory’s mouse.

  The fly whined off and landed on the wall beside Hafner’s head.

  “I figure he was more your type, Hafner—comfortable in a controlled situation. Prone to panic when things got out of his control. Like when he used that rock.”

  She pointed the gun at the fly crawling about on the wall; the barrel was aiming over the bridge of Hafner’s nose.

  She fired.

  Hafner jerked backward. The click of the empty chamber had the effect of an exploded bomb. A wet stain was spreading out from his crotch. It took seconds for the man to adjust to the fact that he had not been hit and need not fall down, that he had merely wet his pants.

  The fly was gone.

  Coffey stared at the bare wall with wonder. Had the fly winged away, or was it lying at the baseboard, dead of a heart attack?

  She dangled the gun for a moment and slowly brought it back to rest in her lap, the barrel carelessly pointing toward the sweating man in the chair close to hers.

  Coffey could hear the man breathing. The glasses, greased with sweat, slid further down Hafner’s nose, off his face and landed on the floor at his feet.

  “He didn’t stalk her—he knew her well,” said Mallory. “That’s why he came back to destroy her fingers, her prints. He figured it would buy him the time he needed to clean the apartment, to get rid of his own prints. A learning-disabled twelve-year-old could have worked that one out.”

  She leaned forward now, holding the gun casually, her arms propped on her knees. Her gun seemed only incidentally pointing toward the doctor’s crotch.

  “You’re an inept jerk, aren’t you, Hafner?” She was nodding her head slowly, and he mimicked the motion, nodding his own head in agreement. His eyes twitched back and forth between her face and her gun.

  “And you’re not going to submit a bill for this crap, are you?” She shook her head slowly from side to side, and in this way, she worked Hafner’s head in the same motion.

  “Good. You can go now.”

  Hafner never moved or blinked.

  “Thank you for coming by, Dr. Hafner,” said Coffey in the manner of a wake-up call, rising, dismissing the mayor’s close personal friend. He was averting his eyes from the dark stain on Hafner’s trousers. He was not seeing the gun, which he had never seen, sliding back into the holster.

  Now Coffey was smiling at Hafner’s back. Mallory was going to get clean away with this. What were the odds that Hafner would ever tell anyone she had made him pee in his pants?

  The man was not quite out the door when Mallory was rising to her feet saying, “I’m getting my own shrink. The department’s paying for it with what I just saved you on that idiot.”

  “Sit down. I’m not done with you yet.” Before she could give him any grief, Coffey said, “I don’t care what kind of a busy day you have planned. Sit!”

  She sat.

  He had learned a lot from Riker. Anything passing for a polite request would have been considered a sign of weakness.
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br />   “Let’s start with the cap gun Heller found in the trash. If it’s tied to the perp, then he might have premeditated the act. It’s possible he used it to threaten her into a private location to kill her.”

  “It was a—”

  “Shut up, Mallory. You only take the bits and pieces that support your pet theory. You can’t know for a fact that he didn’t plan to kill her. The real facts are barer bones.”

  “Hafner doesn’t know—”

  “I have no use for Hafner. I’ll sign off on your own shrink. But you open up to the possibility that the perp planned the kill, and maybe he’s killed before. And what about motive? She caught him out in some kind of a scam? Is that the story you want me to take to the district attorney?”

  “She was a researcher. If you’ve got the skills to check out the father of your baby, you do it. She got something on him. If she could find it, I can find it.”

  “You don’t even know that he was the father of the baby. You see what you’re doing?”

  No, she didn’t see, didn’t hear. He was talking to the air.

  “You underestimate a perp and you’re dead. You’re hanging out there on your own.” And that took guts, or maybe not. Perhaps she was merely fearless, and it was that which would get her killed—the lack of a healthy sense of fear.

  “Are we done?”

  “No, there’s just one more thing. Be careful you don’t shake out the wrong tree, Mallory. You may have more than one of them coming after you. I can see the lawsuits piling up now.”

  Charles sat back in his chair and waited out the family ritual of Robert Riccalo admonishing the boy and the woman.

  He didn’t like Riccalo.

  The man craved a spotlight and a stage so he could strut up and down all morning and display his mind, his maleness, his ruthlessness. And then, after lunch, he would want to rule the world. The man’s eyes were black water. God only knew what was really under the surface, and God had probably shuddered and looked away quickly, only checking briefly to maintain His reputation for omniscience.

  Now the man was leaning close to Justin, denying the child any possession of personal space. The boy turned to the woman. No help there. Sally Riccalo always avoided looking directly at Justin. And that was interesting.

  “Justin, this nonsense will end!” the man was saying, booming, threatening.

  The cat was backing away to a corner of the room. Nose didn’t like Robert Riccalo either. Charles smiled at Justin, and the boy seemed to take a little heart from that.

  Mallory walked in, and all conversation stopped. The cat trotted up to her, eyes fixed on the one it clearly adored.

  Mallory cut the small animal dead with a look. In tacit understanding, the cat backed up a few steps to sit down and love her from a safe distance. The purr was audible all over the room.

  The purring stopped when the square wooden pencil caddy on the desk began to rock. The cat was under the couch before the caddy fell over on its side. A fury of color flushed Robert Riccalo’s face. His hand gripped his son’s arm, and the boy winced with the pain.

  “Not so fast,” said Mallory, walking over to the desk. It was a command, and Riccalo seemed stunned to see his hand obey her, as it released the boy’s arm and fell back to his lap.

  Mallory picked up the pencil caddy and righted it. “We’re accustomed to objects flying around the office. Aren’t we, Charles?”

  And now a pencil came flying out of the caddy and aimed at Charles’s throat. Mallory’s hand shot out and intercepted it.

  Charles swallowed. “Well, some of us are more accustomed to that sort of thing than others.” Oh, fine. Now Mallory had added flying pencils to her private arsenal.

  “It happens all the time.” Mallory was staring at the boy, who only showed curiosity. She walked behind Charles’s chair and another pencil flew out of the caddy and neatly into her hand. “Nothing to it.”

  The boy was showing no reaction anymore. Apparently he had grown bored with airborne pencils.

  “So it is a trick!” said Riccalo, turning on the boy with a look which promised something nasty when they were alone again.

  “Not necessarily,” said Charles. “But you see, so many things in the area of psychokinetics can be duplicated with illusion. That’s why it’s so difficult to test for a gift. It’s going to take a while is all my partner meant by that demonstration.”

  He looked up to Mallory, willing her to nod and smile in agreement. Fat chance, said her eyes. He turned back to Riccalo. “We’re looking for something we can test. Come back after Christmas, and we’ll get into this in more detail.”

  When goodbyes were said, a new date set, and the Riccalo family was through the door and gone, Charles turned around to find Mallory standing close behind him. And this was another trick of hers that unsettled him. There was never any warning noise of footfalls. Sometimes he wondered if she just liked to see him jump outside his skin for a second or two. Nose trotted into the room to sit at her feet. When Mallory was around, he could at least keep track of the cat by the purring.

  Mallory ignored the sound of the small, contented engine, and settled into a wing-back chair with dancing Queen Anne legs. She nodded to the couch, beckoning Charles to sit down with her. “Aren’t you going to ask me how I made the pencil fly?”

  “No, let me guess, all right?” He was smiling as he sat down. “Every now and then I see a street vendor who still sells the Wonder Widow, a black rubber spider on a nearly invisible nylon string. When the vendor works the string, it looks like the spider is crawling along by itself. When a large crowd gathers, he makes the spider fly to the face of a victim, who invariably screams and then buys ten of them. Did you ever have a spider like that?”

  Mallory nodded. “Riker gave me one when I was a kid. He said it was a souvenir from his last round of the DTs. And if I liked that one, he knew where he could get a million more.”

  “So you took a nylon thread from a stocking, attached it to something sticky, but not too sticky—maybe a small bit of tape dusted with lint or talc. Then you attached this sticky sliver of tape to the pencil. When you jerked the thread, the pencil was aloft and the sliver of tape came loose. So whoever picked up the pencil would find no evidence of the method. You maneuvered the direction of the pencil by angling the thread around my chair.”

  “Right. So now at least we know how it’s being done. A kid could do it.”

  “Mallory, you’d make a terrible paranormal investigator. When I accepted the case, I let go of my preconceptions. Just because you duplicated the flying pencil, that doesn’t mean that was how it was done. This type of investigation must be conducted by gathering facts, and with no preconceived ideas about guilt or method.”

  “You’d make a bad cop, Charles. While you’re dicking around with empirical evidence, someone is going to get hurt or dead.”

  “Now you see, you’re doing it again. You develop a hunch and hang the evidence. Damn anyone who gets between you and your preconceived solution.”

  Charles watched the cat curl up in a patch of sunlight at her feet. “However, you’re probably right about one thing. There’s an unhealthy dynamic in that family. I have no idea which one of them is doing it.”

  “Well, yesterday the pencil flew at the stepmother. That’s something.”

  “It is easiest to make the pencil fly in your own direction, isn’t it?” Though Mallory had rather neatly sent a pencil toward his own throat.

  “I wouldn’t rule out the stepmother. But with two women down, it seems more likely that she’s the new target. Either that or she wants to frame the boy.”

  “But for what reason? What a mess.”

  “What are you complaining about? You started out with a set of suspects and a walking, talking victim. I had to work at the park murder.”

  “Solved it yet?”

  “Yeah, right,” she said, rising to a stand and placing one hand on the hip of the blue jeans, the soft material of the blazer falling back from t
he gun. “When is Henrietta coming?”

  Before he could respond, the cat stood up on its hind legs. Charles watched Nose turn gracefully in a perfect circle, and then another. From Mallory’s expression, he gathered she had seen this trick before.

  “I think you’re supposed to give Nose a reward when he dances. He might have been trained that way. The dancing is in the novel.”

  He walked over to the reception room desk, pulled the thick manuscript from the center drawer and quickly thumbed through the first chapter. “Here—‘He taught my cat to dance.’ Seems he did that during a four-day weekend, early on in the relationship. You can’t take a work of fiction literally, of course. But the cat does dance.”

  “Four days? I thought it took longer to teach an animal tricks. Especially a cat.”

  “Not if you know what you’re doing and you don’t mind being ruthless with the animal. I expect he withheld food from Nose.”

  Mallory turned her back on the cat, which was dancing still. “Well, he doesn’t have to do that for food anymore.”

  The cat dropped softly to ground, as though she had commanded him.

  “So, Mallory, you were also right about the manuscript. It’s a matter of weeding the truth out of the fiction. Listen to this:

  ‘When New York is covered with snow, it’s beautiful for all the minutes before you’re mugged, shot in the crossfire of a drug war, run down by a drunk, attacked by a psychotic who has forgotten to take his medication, sued by your landlord, threatened by the tax collector, bullied by the mouthy neighbor, bitten by the pet pit bull, surprised by rats running across your path with full-grown house cats clenched in their teeth, divebombed by pigeons, infested with mice and roaches, shorted by a payroll clerk. . . .When the baby comes, I will take her away from here to a safe place where it’s beautiful all the time.’

  “The baby is in the last few chapters of the book. The female character doesn’t seem to have any emotional involvement with the man. The child is everything to her, all she cares about.”

  Mallory nodded. “The baby might argue for Harry Kipling or Judge Heart. They’re both fertile. Maybe I should scratch the blind man off the list.”