Kathy Mallory laid her hands flat on the desk, her desk now. How she loved these little hieratic strategies of furniture and psychological leverage. „I need an autopsy, all the trimmings.“
„Get in line.“ Slope settled into one of the visitors’ chairs. „It might take a few days.“ He opened his newspaper, her cue to leave, as if that ever worked. „I’ll have Dr. Morgan determine the – “
„No. It has to be you.“ She was almost petulant. „It has to be now.“
„You don’t have the rank to make that kind of a request,“ he said, tacking on, „Kathy,“ just for fun.
„Mallory,“ she said, insistent.
She held up a stack of photographs, then fanned them like a deck of cards and dealt them out, one by one – just like her old man. Louis Markowitz had been a portly soul with hound-dog jowls and a charming way about him. Charm had never been an option for Kathy, and yet, every now and then, the doctor fancied that he found traces of Lou lingering on in his foster child, sometimes a gesture or a phrase.
Briefly put, Lou’s daughter knew how to manipulate him.
Even though he was fully aware of her calculation, this deliberate and casual way she had of breaking his heart, he played along every time. The doctor leaned forward to examine the crime-scene photographs, torso shots all of them, and every camera angle showed a pair of scissors driven into the victim’s chest.
„Good aim,“ he said, „no hesitation marks. Hardly any blood loss, so it was a quick death – but you already knew that.“ Truly, he was intrigued by the request for a full autopsy, but he could not simply ask her a direct question. Their relationship had the strict parameters of a duel. And now, as he leaned back in his chair, he was even more generous with his sarcasm. „So… you had some doubt about what killed this man?“
„No, but it wasn’t the scissors.“ She wore the only smile in her limited store of expression that was not forced. It was the smile that said, Gotcha.
In the early gray light of her bedroom, Nedda Winter lay very still, not even drawing a breath – waiting for the panic to subside. It was always alarming to open her eyes and find herself alone. And how quiet it was. She had lived too many years with constant companions, never awakening in any normal sense, but ripped from sleep with the early morning orchestra of a one-note moaner in the next bed, and beyond that one, the screamer’s bed and a chorus of harpies singing an angry song of Shut up! Shut the hell up! or Nursey, Nursey, I’m cold, I’m wet. Nedda had played the audience for them, staring vacantly in the direction of their noise and wondering how she would get through another day. Her nights had been whiled away with plans for her own slow death. But that was over now. She had a new plan and something to live for.
Her heart settled into a normal rhythm, and her gaze calmly roved over the daisy pattern on the century-old wallpaper. The flowers had been yellowed with age generations before she was born. All the other bedrooms of the house had been repapered in her absence. Here, nothing had changed. The furniture was the same, just as she had left it when she was twelve years old, except for the trunk that once sat at the foot of her bed. All of the Winter children had had such trunks. By custom of the house, hers had probably been consigned to the attic when she was assumed to be dead. Otherwise, this might be like any morning from her childhood.
Only the music was missing.
She reached out to her bedside table and turned on the old radio. It was tuned to a station that played only jazz, her father’s favorite music for as far back as memory would take her. When Quentin Winter was alive, trumpets and piano riffs had filled this house, day and night, loudest in the party hours. Mellow saxophones had dominated at the break of a new day, and, toward midmorning, Daddy had played the blues as background music for his hangovers.
Nedda pulled on her robe and entered the bathroom, where her eyes bypassed that strange old woman in the mirror. She looked down at the wide array of pharmacy bottles lined up on the sink. One by one, she flushed her morning doses down the toilet. The medication had been prescribed for an illness that she had never had, and now she watched the tablets swirling around the toilet bowl. What luxury this was after all the years of picking up the pills that other patients had spit out, then ingesting them, tasting other people’s bile and inheriting their diseases and sundry germs. How difficult it would be to make anyone understand that this slow attempt at suicide had been the act of a sane woman. Now, in the absence of any medication, she was getting stronger every day, disappointing her brother and sister.
Barefoot, she left her room. On the other side of the door, she met her dead stepmother on the day of the massacre. In the manner of a puppeteer, memory worked Alice Winter’s limbs, and the pretty woman crossed the threshold of the bedroom to rouse another version of Nedda – -young Nedda with the long red hair. The house itself had been drowsing, running off the low batteries of nine sleepy children on a Sunday morning.
As Nedda started down the staircase, her father, with only a few more hours to live, was climbing toward her. Fifty-eight years ago, she had stood on tiptoe to kiss him in passing. Now she simply watched him go by in his silk pajamas and dressing gown. What a beautiful man he was, long fair hair like a prince from another age. He was holding a glass with the foul-smelling ingredients of his hangover cure. The disembodied voice of Billie Holiday wafted up the stairs behind him, dogging him from the phonograph below and moaning the blues to Daddy.
In the next century, Nedda completed her descent to the parlor floor, where Bitty was a child-size lump beneath the afghan on the sofa. She sat down in a chair beside her sleeping niece and waited. A few minutes passed before the younger woman sensed another presence in the room. Small hands gripped the afghan, and her eyes opened, cagey at first, only looking through slits for signs of danger. „Aunt Nedda?“
Was there just a touch of fear in Bitty’s voice? Yes, and Nedda winced.
„Good morning, dear. I was just curious. What did you do with the tape from the security camera? The police were asking about it.“
„I put it where they’d never want to look.“ Bitty fumbled with the afghan then produced her Bible from the folds of wool and opened it.
Oh, not a book at all.
The Bible was a clever box, and nestled inside a rectangular compartment was the videotape.
The morgue attendant from the graveyard shift was not at his desk. The chief medical examiner was about to ask Kathy Mallory what she had done with the poor man’s body, but then the double doors swung open and Ray Fallon appeared, alive if not well. He was nervous – Kathy had that effect on him – and sweating from recent exertion.
After handing a deli bag to the detective, the attendant was tipped lavishly but not thanked, not that Fallon cared, so eager was he to get away from her. „Men’s room,“ he said to his boss.
And Slope knew that the man would not be back again until Kathy had left the premises. „You sent him out for your breakfast?“ The doctor affected the lecture mode that he used when he suspected her of cheating at cards. „If you think I’m going to tolerate – “
„I had to get rid of him.“ She dug into the brown paper bag and pulled out a bagel. „I can’t afford any leaks on this case, and he’s the worst. You know you should’ve fired that weasel years ago.“
This was her very best trick – reversal of guilt, and he should have seen it coming because she was right.
Kathy Mallory bit into her bagel. With her free hand, she pulled out the metal drawer where she kept her own personal corpse. The victim was still encased in the body bag, and there was no attendant paperwork attached. None of her crime-scene photos had included any body parts above or below the torso, and now she pulled back the zipper to give the pathologist his first look at the face. „It’s Willy Roy Boyd.“
„Ah,“ said Slope, „your lady-killer. So, given his current condition – dead – I’m guessing that you lost your temper when he made bail.“
Her strip show continued downward until she had ex
posed the pair of scissors sticking out of the man’s chest.
„Point taken,“ he said. „Not your style.“ If Kathy had inflicted this wound, the scissors would have been placed more symmetrically and at a perfect right angle to the flesh. She was peculiar that way, compulsively neat.
The doctor unzipped the rest of the body. „If I were to roll him over, would I see any other signs of trauma?“
„No,“ she said. „That’s not it.“
And the game went on.
He checked the dead man’s eyes and fingernails. „No obvious indication of poison.“ He stared at the chest. „Those shears make a hell of an entry wound. I would’ve expected more blood.“
„Right. He was dead when the scissors went in, but Dr. Morgan didn’t catch that. He said the scissors contained the bleeding like a stopper in a bottle.“
In defense of his young and unseasoned, possibly incompetent, medical examiner, Dr. Slope said, „Well, that’s one possibility.“ Like hell it was. Hers was the more likely explanation. The dead man was thin, his chest concave, and the shears went deep. One did not rupture the human heart so neatly, not with a weapon of this size and thickness. „I’ll know for sure after the chest is cracked. So you don’t think he was stabbed to death.“
„Of course he was stabbed to death.“ The perverse brat paused a moment to relish this small win, the look of surprise in his eyes. She pointed to the chest. „And that’s the only entry wound.“
Edward Slope had to smile. He was the one who had taught her this twisted game. The student was surpassing the master.
Kathy Mallory picked through the dead man’s hair. Finding something she liked, she said, „See this spot of blood on the scalp?“
Slope adjusted his glasses as he leaned over the corpse. „Yes, and here’s another one on the upper lip. So small.“
„And this drop on his shirt.“ One red fingernail marked the spot. „That’s three drops total. And none of the blood is where you’d expect to find it if the shears had killed him. It’s a back-strike splatter. So the wound was made with something smaller, thinner.“ She leaned down to rifle her knapsack and pulled out a bag tagged by Forensics. It contained an ice pick. „I like this for the primary weapon. I want his stomach contents. I want to know what he ate for his last meal and where he ate it. I want a screen for drugs. If he’s a user, I need to know when he got his last fix. And I want – “
„Stop.“ The doctor put one hand up in the manner of a traffic cop. „First things first. A few drops of back-strike blood doesn’t prove it was an ice pick. I can’t even corroborate a second weapon. I’ve told you a hundred times, textbook scenarios don’t even get close to the spectrum of trauma I see on my dissection table.“
„I didn’t work this out by reading a book.“ She opened the evidence bag and held it close to his face. „Sniff that.“
No need. The odor of bleach was strong. „Someone cleaned it.“
She turned over the evidence bag to show him the white residue of a price tag peeled from the bottom of the pick handle. „It’s brand new, a perfectly smooth surface. Heller says, even without the bleach, his luminal wouldn’t pick up any blood on the metal. But this is the weapon. It fits with the back-strike blood.“
„You know who killed him, too?“
„An old lady.“
„Good,“ said Slope, finding this only fitting since Willy Roy Boyd had murdered three women. And now he better understood police concerns about leaks to the newspapers. He envisioned the headline: Old Lady Kills Lady-Killer.
Kathy Mallory parted the hair on the dead man’s scalp. „This drop runs horizontally. The woman said they were both standing when she stabbed him.“
And blood ran down, not sideways. „So, either the law of gravity has changed or the old woman lied.“
„No, I believed that part. He was on his feet when she stabbed him the first time. But he was down and dead when she pulled out the pick. And that explains the drop of blood in a horizontal streak.“
The doctor nodded. „And then the shears were pushed into a prone corpse.“ He smiled. „Congratulations. Now you can nail an old lady for mutilating a corpse, but he’s just as dead either way, and hardly worth the trouble of – “
„I want that autopsy. I need proof that the ice pick killed him.“
„Any idea why this woman would go to the trouble of planting a second weapon?“
„Yes.“
„But you’re not going to share. No, of course not. What was I thinking? So, obviously, you want evidence to dispute her claim of self-defense.“
„No, that holds up,“ she said. „Willy Roy Boyd was a one-trick pony. He was in that house last night to kill a woman.“
Though Edward Slope’s brain had stripped a few gears, he was damned if he would let it show. The doctor stared at her with his best poker face, but hers was better.
Endgame.
Kathy Mallory had won a full autopsy by the chief medical examiner, for now that he had been suckered in – what were the odds that he would let anyone else touch this corpse?
W aiting for the explosion, boys? The upper half of the wall was a wide window on the squad room, and, with the blinds open, Lieutenant Coffey’s private office was a damned goldfish bowl on view for fifteen pairs of eyes. He pretended not to notice the men beyond the glass as they covertly looked his way.
The lieutenant was young for a command position, only thirty-six, but he was aging fast to fit the job. Stress had chiseled new lines into his face, giving him an expression of constant pain, and, just now, it was a fight to bite back a scream as three detectives brazenly walked up to the glass, the better to observe their boss, the poor bastard with the thinning brown hair, the tension headaches and a knotted-up gut.
The case load for Special Crimes Unit had spiraled out of control. And the new mayor, a man with the soul of a corporate raider, was planning to cut the department’s allotment in manpower and funds. Every day was run at a heart-attack pace, and yet, Jack Coffey was showing no early warning signs that this was the worst possible time to jerk him around, nor had he raised his voice to Mallory and Riker, who sat unmolested on the other side of his desk. He was not even holding a gun on them, and the other detectives must find that odd.
When he glanced at the glass wall again, he saw money flashing out there in the squad room. Bastards, they were making book on this meeting.
Never let the troops see you crying like a little girl.
That was his mantra today.
Riker and Mallory were on their best behavior this morning, quietly waiting for him to finish scanning another precinct’s report on a common burglary gone awry. He crumpled the cover sheet in one hand. Well, this was just great, this crap. Why would these two detectives drag this case home to an elite squad of firstgrade gold shields?
„Mallory, close the blinds!“
This was a test, and he was gratified to see her do it, and so quickly, not even dragging it out to jack up his frenzy.
Big mistake, Mallory.
Now he knew that all the leverage in this room belonged to him. Better than that – with the blinds drawn and no witnesses, he could do whatever he liked with these two. He leaned forward and gave them his most benign smile to knock them off balance. The partners exchanged looks that clearly said, Oh, shit.
So they wanted this case really bad.
Well, tough.
But he just had to know why.
He pulled one sheet out of the pile of paperwork, the results of the fingerprint search they had requested. „You’ll be happy to know that neither one of your socialites has a criminal record. What a surprise, huh?“ He also crumpled this paper into a ball and tossed it over one shoulder, then picked up a collection of forms that transferred the dead man to his own doorstep. „And this makes it official. We’ve been screwed in triplicate.“ He took his time crushing these sheets into another ball. He bounced it off the back wall. After spreading out the remaining paperwork, he selected two sheets
from the array. „Well, what have we got here?“ Could his sarcasm be more obvious? Did he need to work on that? „I’m looking at two witness statements, one from a little old lady, eighty years – “
„That’s a typo,“ said Mallory. „Nedda Winter’s only seventy.“
„And she’s at least as tall as Mallory,“ said Riker.
„Maybe an inch over,“ she said.
„Yeah,“ said Riker. „Make that five-eleven.“
Coffey glared at his detectives, then looked down at the paperwork, saying, „And next we have a shitpile of biblical quotations from Bitty Smyth, a forty-year-old woman of undetermined’height.“ He paused to glance at Mallory. „Just jump right in if I get anything else wrong, okay?“ His true message to her, delivered only by the tone of his voice, was You speak – -you die.
The lieutenant turned to his senior detective, whose face was always easier to read. „So, Riker, the catching detectives agreed with you. They figured it for a staged crime scene. Fair enough. Heller’s report backs them up. But the old lady explained that in her statement. She was afraid the cops wouldn’t be very understanding if she ‘d killed an unarmed burglar. So she put the ice pick in his hand.“ Jack Coffey leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. „Well, I say no harm done. She gets to slide on that one. I may even send her roses for killing that butcher.“ He swiveled his chair to face Mallory. „I’m surprised that Nedda Winter isn’t your new best friend. Willy Roy Boyd was your perp. You think a quick death was too good for that little freak? Would you rather wait out years of appeals before the state put him down with a needle?“
„That old woman lied about the – “
„Miss Winter gets away with everything, Mallory.“ Coffey picked up the amended statement and scanned the lines for the one he wanted. „She says her medication causes confusion.“
„Ah, bless her.“ Riker flashed a smile at Mallory. „Nedda was good, wasn’t she?“
Jack Coffey was not amused. „Maybe you guys should’ve brought her in here to do your talking for you. I called the old lady myself. It took me five minutes to queer the idea of an inside job. She said there was always a spare key in the planter outside the front door, and she couldn’t remember setting the burglar alarm last night. So much for our perp turning off the alarm with a security code. She also solved your problem with the missing videotape. A patrol cop named Brill took it out of the security camera.“ Coffey looked down at his personal notes. „That was last week after an attempted break-in. The cop returned it to Bitty Smyth, but she never got around to reloading the camera. The ladies figure the housekeeper tossed out the videotape with the trash.“
Winter House Page 5