The Chalk Girl km-10

by Carol O'Connell

  Mallory stared at the jumble of tools laid out on the table. ‘You got all this from screw holes in trees? That was the only real evidence, right?’

  Heller was way too calm when he turned his face to hers.

  And CSI Pollard prattled on. ‘The holes match a standard mount plate.’ He picked up a small plastic bag containing long screws with hexagonal heads. ‘These lag bolts fit the holes. One bolt would’ve worked, but he used two for every tree. Very clean holes, not what you’d find with a manual screwdriver. That’s how I know your guy used a socket wrench attached to a cordless drill.’

  Who knew murder could be so tedious? Riker turned to his partner for support with this idea, but Mallory seemed almost too lethargic to pistol-whip John Pollard.

  She stared at the two-wheeler dolly. ‘At least that makes sense.’

  Riker agreed. The police on patrol would have stopped anyone found in the park after curfew. A footrace through dark woods offered better odds of escape than a car chase, and an abandoned dolly would be harder to trace than a vehicle with a license plate. And it moved silently – no noisy motor. It was actually the safest way to transport an unconscious victim through Central Park.

  CSI Pollard removed the empty carton from the dolly’s platform. ‘Check out the tires. This brand matches tread marks from the first crime scene. Rubber inflatables – made to carry a heavy load over unpaved ground.’ And now, with a special smile for the pretty detective, he said, ‘I told you – this guy thought of everything.’ He popped off the balls of his feet – as if that would make him tall enough to appear on Mallory’s radar.

  Oh, but now she did notice him. How unfortunate.

  Mallory looked over the top of Pollard’s head to see Riker’s worried face, his silent plea – Don’t gut the little guy. They could not afford one more feud with Heller’s people. She nodded, and both detectives turned their backs on John Pollard to follow his boss down the hall to the private office, where another carton had been left on the desk.

  ‘You can take this with you.’ Heller opened the box to show them reams of paper, enough to make a dozen telephone directories. ‘This is from our database – lists of every product brand to fit the murder kit. You got model numbers for the past ten years, manufacturers, outlets. Some of these places went out of business, so we threw in global liquidators. No index. Sorry. I guess you’ll have to go through it page by page. I figure that’ll take you guys a few thousand hours.’ He smiled, perhaps for the first time in years. ‘Have a nice day, Detectives.’

  Mallory and Riker exchanged looks that conveyed the same thoughts: Heller really knew how to hold a grudge – and they were totally screwed.

  After dropping off the useless carton at Special Crimes, the detectives traveled north into Midtown, home to the Hunger Artist’s latest victim.

  Despite a do-not-disturb sign hanging from the doorknob, the manager of the hotel unlocked the door to Willy Fallon’s room. ‘She’s been with us a little over six weeks. Her previous address was a hotel in Los Angeles.’ There was little more that he could tell the detectives about this guest. The description of a demanding bitch was couched in polite terms of ‘She can be difficult at times.’ And phone records showed no outgoing calls. ‘Not so unusual. Everyone has a cell phone these days.’

  Or maybe yesterday’s party girl had no friends.

  Mallory opened the door by a crack to see a cell phone lying on the floor next to a small pile of clothing. The manager was dismissed, and the detectives entered a clean and serviceable room, not a palace, but the kind of place where middle-management executives might stay on extended business trips – hardly the accommodations of an heiress to the Fallon Industries fortune. ‘Looks like the family put Willy on a budget.’

  ‘Well,’ said Riker, ‘the recession hit millionaires, too.’

  ‘The Fallons are billionaires.’ Mallory checked the bathroom to find towels draped over the side of the tub and an unwrapped bar of soap that agreed with the rumpled sheets on the bed. There had been no maid service since the kidnapping. Next, she opened the door to the closet. The clothes hanging on the rod were very expensive – and very last year. She emptied a purse on the dresser. No vials, joints or pill bottles, but there was a light dusting of white powder at the bottom of the bag. She wet one finger and dragged it across the satin material for a taste. ‘Cheap stuff. Willy’s cocaine is laced with cornflower.’

  ‘That fits the budget theory.’ Riker stood over the small pile of cast-off clothes and shoes. ‘So this is where the perp dropped her and stripped her. Willy felt safe turning her back on the guy. And then –’ He made a swing motion with one hand. ‘Bam, down she goes. You could kill somebody that way. The other woman, the dead one – she was pretty ripe. Had to be the first victim – the practice run. Maybe the Jane Doe was dead before she went into the sack.’

  ‘No,’ said Mallory. ‘Slope says our killer didn’t even use enough force to knock that one out – just enough to stun her and knock her off balance. I showed him Humphrey’s hospital X-rays. Same thing. I think our guy just got carried away with Willy Fallon. He hit her too hard. That’s why she can’t remember anything.’

  Riker leaned back against the door and stared at wall decorations, cheap reproductions in plastic frames. ‘What’s our girl doing here? I could afford this place.’

  Mallory retrieved the cell phone from the pile of clothing on the floor, and she flicked through the list of stored numbers. ‘I’ve got one for her parents. It’s a Connecticut prefix.’

  However, Mr and Mrs Fallon were not at home to the police at this time. And concerning any future date, according to the secretary who made all their social appointments, the detective had a better chance of being thrice struck by lightning on a cloudless day. ‘But one can always hope,’ he said. And the line went dead.

  Wilhelmina Fallon was pain-free and flying high on medication as she multitasked from her hospital bed, clicking through TV channels and flipping the pages of newspapers until she came to the photograph of a coma patient found naked in Central Park. It took a long time to make a telephone connection to the reporter on that story. Twice she had to suffer insults of ‘Willy who?’ from underlings, a reminder that her party-girl days were old news.

  But not anymore.

  After identifying the coma patient as Humphrey Bledsoe, Willy placed another call, this one to a TV news station. She was too impatient to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper to restore her to fame.

  On the other end of a third phone conversation, a hotel bellman assured her that, yes, he had removed her drugs from the room in advance of the police dropping by. And, yes, the bellman would be happy to take a small cut of her stash in lieu of a cash tip.

  Willy had no cash.

  The last call was made to her parents, also known as the Bank of Mom and Dad, but Mr and Mrs Fallon were not at home to their daughter. This time the snippy social secretary fobbed off her call on old Birdy, the downstairs maid.

  A maid!

  Willy had just suffered a kind of demotion. ‘Birdy, tell my parents I want to come home.’ And now she learned from the lowliest employee in the Fallon household that a trip to the family compound would not be advisable at this time. It was almost like a recorded message. Willy imagined the woman reading lines from a list of stock responses to cover every occasion.

  ‘Birdy, I’m in the hospital. I nearly died. Do they know someone tried to murder me?’

  Apparently there was nothing on the maid’s list that might pertain to that question, and the older woman stammered, ‘I – I have to go now, Miss Willy.’

  Oh, of course – furniture to dust and floors to mop. This minimum-wage earner was a very busy person – no time for idle gossip with socialites.

  Willy wondered if she should teach the old bat a screaming lesson in class etiquette, a shouted stream of four-letter words guaranteed to wither the tender soul at the other end of the line. She clutched the telephone receiver a little tighter, and her voice dropped
to a begging whisper. ‘Birdy, please don’t hang up on me.’

  Too late. Her connection to home and family was a dial tone.

  After the telephone had been ripped from the wall and the pillows had flown across the room, a nurse walked in to find Willy crying and shredding newspapers into tiny pieces. Help was summoned. The words Mommy, Daddy, Mommy, Daddy, followed by a rant of obscenities were taken for a seizure, though the doctor hardly seemed worried or sympathetic as he put a needle into Willy’s arm.

  From the other side of the room, she heard the television set call her by name. And the anchorman went on to name Humphrey Bledsoe as another victim of the Hunger Artist. ‘A third victim remains unidentified.’

  A third victim?

  ‘Oh,’ said Willy, ‘I know who that—’

  ‘Problem solved,’ said the doctor, pulling the needle from her arm. These were the last words she heard as the room began to spin, and her eyes closed on the whirlwind of walls and furniture and newspaper confetti.

  THIRTEEN

  I can’t use the school toilets anymore. Humphrey and the girls might be hiding in one of the stalls. But sometimes I have to pee or die, and I do it in the garden out behind the school. Now and then, teachers see me zipping my pants up or down, but they never say a word. And this is proof that they know what’s going on. Not ratting me out for peeing on a wall, that’s how they show support. Piss on them.

  —Ernest Nadler

  The dissection room was a chilly place of bright lights, stainless steel, and white tiles. The medical instruments were best described as cruel. And the term remains had a different meaning here. Yesterday’s rat-chewed corpse from the Ramble was today’s collection of body parts, organs weighed, tagged and bagged, and tissue samples gone for lab tests. A section of the dead woman’s jaw was also missing, and so was the brain and the sawed-off crown of the head. What remained on the table was a hollowed-out torso with putrefied limbs and a face obscured by a loose arrangement of surgical gauze above the bloody hole where the chin had been.

  ‘If you want me to check for chloroform, a broad-base scan will take at least five days.’ The chief medical examiner stood beside the table and looked down at the body, the source of the stink in this room.

  Detective Riker retreated to the wall of sinks and cabinets; he was not keen on the blood-and-guts side of his trade.

  Mallory stood at the foot of the table, clicked on her recorder and said, ‘Jane Doe. Bag number two from the Ramble.’

  ‘She might be the second one found,’ said Dr Slope, ‘but this woman is the Hunger Artist’s first victim. I drew blood that was still in liquid form. That puts time of death within seven days. She was three, maybe four days dead when she got here. Heller can narrow that for you. He does wonderful things with fly larva.’

  Mallory stepped closer to the doctor. ‘I can’t wait around for Heller to hatch flies. I need that little detail now.’

  ‘Always in a hurry.’ The doctor picked up a clipboard from the small tray table and flipped through handwritten notes. ‘Her ordeal did a lot of damage to the organs. It was a slow death.’ He scanned the lines and flipped more pages, sometimes glancing Mallory’s way to see if she was sufficiently irritated yet. Apparently not. More page flipping followed. ‘As you might have expected – no stomach contents. That might’ve helped.’

  He smiled. She glared.

  He held up an X-ray. ‘There’s a hairline fracture at the back of the skull.’ Dr Slope waited a beat, and then, before Mallory could remind him that she had already seen that X-ray, he said, ‘Well, you know that didn’t kill her. Off the cuff, I’d say cause of death was dehydration. But then I found something else that was much more interesting.’

  Riker rolled his eyes. All he wanted right now was one standout detail that would marry up to a missing-person file. And Slope knew that. The stack of reports from the tristate area posed a huge expenditure of man-hours. But now the detectives would have to listen to a lecture. And this was his partner’s fault. Mallory and the doctor had a game to play. It had gone on for years. It would never end.

  ‘All right, let’s start over,’ she said. ‘Give us the basics. Age, height, weight—’

  ‘Mid to late twenties. Height, five feet six. Weight, one hundred ten pounds. Does that help?’

  No. That would fit a great many missing women from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, but Mallory never answered obvious questions. ‘What about tattoos?’ she said. ‘Injection sites? Birthmarks? Anything useful?’

  ‘There’s one truly rare feature.’ Slope’s pause was long and maddening, but Mallory was cool. Somewhat disappointed, the doctor walked to the counter and picked up a specimen bottle. ‘This is it.’

  Riker saw something white and wormy floating in liquid. ‘Our vic had an alien baby?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Slope. ‘The woman’s most remarkable feature was in her brain.’

  And Mallory did not shoot him.

  ‘I found this tumor on the pituitary gland. It’s not cancerous, but it would’ve caused other problems. It’s been there for a few years. The symptoms would’ve been obvious to her general practitioner. It’s situated in a tricky location for surgery, but doable. And it’s odd that she never had it removed.’

  ‘Bad healthcare plan,’ said Riker.

  ‘I don’t think so, but I’ll get to that later. A tumor in this specific location presents with a variety of symptoms, and not always, but sometimes, a drastic change in personality. I know that was the case with our Jane Doe.’

  ‘Wait.’ Mallory clicked off her recorder and folded her arms against the doctor. She was not buying this. ‘You diagnosed a change of personality . . . in a dead woman.’

  ‘You’re skeptical. I can always tell.’ Dr Slope gave her an evil smile as he lifted a strand of the corpse’s hair, half its length brown, half blond. ‘I can date that tumor back to her last salon appointment. My wife is a blonde. I know the cost of hair coloring. There are three different shades for these highlights to make them look natural . . . like your hair, Kathy.’

  ‘Mallory,’ said the natural blonde, correcting him – again.

  ‘It cost Jane Doe a lot of money to maintain this process. And she had another expensive habit – cocaine. I found old surgical scars from repairs to the damage in her nasal cavity.’

  Riker’s chin dropped to his chest. Scars inside the nose so rarely turned up in the details collected by Missing Persons.

  ‘So she had money to burn before the tumor showed up,’ said Mallory. ‘So?’

  ‘Well, two years ago, she not only stopped dyeing her hair – she also stopped brushing her teeth. She has dental caries in the age of fluoride. I had a forensic dentist consult on the damage, and his opinion nicely fits my timetable for the tumor. Also – and this goes back to your question on injection sites – there are none, and no additional scaring in the nasal cavity. The standard tox screen shows no recent drug abuse. So that’s another change in behavior.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Riker. ‘So far, we’re working off the description of a blonde with brown roots and cavities. Thanks. You got a photo of her face before you messed her up?’ He was hoping for something that might actually help. Right now they had nothing, not even her eye color. The last time the detectives had seen this corpse, strips of duct tape had covered the eyes and mouth.

  Dr Slope pointed to the counter. ‘There’s a set of photos in that envelope. But you won’t need them. I’ll have her name by this time tomorrow.’

  Riker’s head lolled back, and he stared at the ceiling. Was Mallory drawing her gun on the doctor? Did he care?

  ‘And that brings us to the plastic surgery,’ said Slope. ‘The woman had a chin implant.’

  That would neatly explain a gaping wound where the chin used to be. Any serial numbers on the prosthesis would lead them to the surgeon who did that operation. Riker looked at his watch. A search like that could be done in an hour or less. Why wait till tomorrow?

  ‘She also
had breast augmentation.’ Dr Slope held up a bag with two implants that looked like small white pillows. Riker knew they would be soft to the touch; their perfect shape was the only memorable thing about the first teenage girl he had groped in the backseat of his father’s car. Ah, nostalgia.

  The doctor mistook his smile for interest, and the lecture continued. ‘The prosthetics were traced to a European company. Unfortunately, with the time differential, I won’t get a call back until tomorrow morning. Then we use the codes to find the surgeon, and voilà.’

  They were going to lose a day in the identification. Well, even with the damage of a rat-chewed face, maybe they could rule out some of the missing-persons reports that had come with pictures. Riker opened the medical examiner’s envelope and stared at the first photograph of the victim’s face. ‘What the hell is this!’ It was not a question but an accusation.

  ‘Oh, the mole,’ said Dr Slope. ‘Didn’t I mention that?’

  Sarcastic bastard.

  Forgetting for the moment that autopsy damage made him puke, Riker walked to the head of the table and used his pen to dislodge the gauze from the dead woman’s face, what was left of it. The duct tape was gone, and now he could see the exposed upper lip – and a mole with two incredibly long, thick hairs that resembled cat’s whiskers.

  Riker was heading for the door, and Mallory was right behind him, when Slope called out the final punch line. ‘So . . . you think the mole might be helpful?’

  Riker stared at the autopsy photographs laid out on his desk, and then he looked up at his partner. ‘With Heller, we had it coming, but what did you do to Slope? I mean recently.’