„And there ‘11 be a cop posted on the door,“ said Mallory striding into the room. She glared at the tiny woman on the bed as if this attempt at suicide had been a ploy simply to annoy her.
Charles could tell that Bitty was only feigning sleep this time, but he said nothing to give her away.
Mallory turned her attention to Nedda. „You should’ve called the police first. Now it’s too late. All the evidence is gone. No one told those idiots in the emergency room to save the stomach contents.“
The doctor was about to take offense at this, for she was referring to his idiots. But now, thinking better of that, with perhaps a keen eye for disturbing personalities who carried guns, he was edging away from Mallory and toward the door, then gone.
„There’s no mystery about her stomach contents,“ said Nedda. „Prescription sleeping pills. My niece took an accidental overdose.“ She lied nearly as well as her opponent. „Calling the police never entered my mind.“
That much was certainly true.
Oh, no.
Mallory was leaning over Bitty for a closer look, saying, „She’s faking. She’s awake.“
„That’s enough,“ said Nedda. „My niece needs rest, and you need to leave this room.“
The young detective was squaring off against the older woman when Charles appeared at Nedda’s side, lending support to the idea that Mallory should leave, and right now. It was an unsettling moment. Charles looked into Mallory’s eyes and roughly guessed her thoughts. She was wondering if he would humiliate her, if he would physically move her out of this room, laying hands on her for the second time in one day. And, no, he would not have the heart for that. But she chose not to give him the benefit of that doubt in her mind. She turned and left the room.
Mallory could commit any sort of bad act and depend upon him to feel the guilt.
How did she do that?
Riker sat with the family members in the reception area of the hospital. His pen moved across the page of his notebook, taking down their statements on Bitty’s overdose. „Any idea how many pills she took?“
„No, we never thought to ask,“ said Bitty’s mother. „It was quite a scene. Nedda was jamming her fingers down my daughter’s throat to induce vomiting. I was – “
„On the phone,“ said Lionel, finishing the sentence, „calling for an ambulance.“
Sheldon Smyth was being unusually quiet for a lawyer. Riker wanted to stick a knife in the old man by asking exactly when Cleo and Lionel had discovered that the law firm was ripping off their trust fund, but Mallory would shoot him for tipping their hand too soon.
He looked up to see his partner marching across the lobby, heading toward this little family with all the deadly resolution of a train on the way to a wreck. He turned back to Cleo, resident of a planet where people communicated via telepathy. The woman was staring at her brother. Something passed between them, and they were of one mind, Riker was sure of that, before their heads turned in unison to stare at Mallory.
These people were creeping him out.
This time, Bitty was not faking. She had fallen into a natural state of sleep, and there was no conversation between Charles and Nedda, neither of them wanting to disturb her rest.
But now the patient stirred, eyes opening to smile at her aunt. „I knew you’d come.“
„To the rescue?“ said Charles. „So you knew you were in trouble tonight.“
„I must have taken too many sleeping pills.“ All the signs of a lie were there, eyes shifting away from his, fingers fidgeting on the blanket, so uncomfortable in this falsehood.
„You’re not sure?“ He smiled to say never mind. „I heard your messages on my machine. It seems like you knew what was happening, but you waited for Nedda. Why not call an ambulance yourself?“
„I wasn’t thinking very clearly?“
Perhaps she had not believed that her family would have opened the door to an ambulance. That was one possibility, the one that Kathy Mallory would have liked best.
Mallory sat in the hospital lounge, facing Cleo and Lionel with the clear understanding that they were a unit. What they had suffered as children might have formed that weird bond. Or it might have developed while they were murdering their little sister, the only Winter child still unaccounted for. Bitty Smyth’s near death had expanded the possible scenarios for Sally Winter’s disappearance.
Where would two children hide a little corpse? Not in the hat closet that had so intrigued Mrs. Ortega. Children did not wall up bodies. They buried them as they buried family pets. The dead girl would have taken up no more ground than a good-size dog.
Child’s play.
Brother and sister sat together with the same body language, arms folded, eyes level and calm, meeting her gaze and awaiting the inevitable interrogation. She let them wait. Sheldon Smyth seemed sober now. The old lawyer was tensing, also bracing for an onslaught of questions. His brow was lightly filmed with sweat, though the hospital lounge was cool and dry.
This old man was going to be so easy to break.
She could watch the works of his brain churning behind his eyes, trying to anticipate her first question, heart racing. All three of them were waiting for her, wondering when she would begin the inquisition. The three of them were leaning slightly forward, expectant crows on a wire.
Mallory stood up and turned her back on the trio, then crossed the lobby in tandem with her partner – and without a single word spoken.
The documents raided from the Smyth firm gave Mallory’s private office at Butler and Company the look of a temporary warehouse, but one located in that other dimension where Chinese puzzle blocks were born.
She was stacking cartons of varied sizes to form an enormous cardboard cube at the center of the room.
While she explained that the outer shell was made with as-yet unread documents, Riker admired the walls of her structure from all sides. It was a maniacally efficient use of space, and very disturbing to a man who tossed discarded beer cartons into the corners of his apartment so he could readily discern the empties from the partially emptied.
Riker wrecked her perfect symmetry by dragging a carton out of formation.
An hour later, he was sitting on the floor, almost done, gently laying out the last of the brittle pieces of paper from the middle years of the previous century. These canceled checks bore the signature of the guardian, James Winter, and they were arranged in the order of their dates. „If Sally Winter didn’t die of natural causes, we can rule out Uncle James for the killer.“ He looked up at his partner. She was engrossed in Pinwitty’s book and paying no attention to him. „Aren’t you going to ask me why?“
„Hmm.“ Mallory turned another page.
Riker had finished working backward in time to lay out the last check. „It looks like James skipped town before Sally died. All the signatures in this group were traced. Every one of them exactly the same. I guess the Smyth firm didn’t want to break in a new guardian so they kept him around on paper. But these forged checks are still making payouts for doctor’s visits and home nursing for the kid.“
„I never thought James Winter killed Sally.“ Mallory held her place, marking the page with one finger as she closed the book. „This text is unreadable, but the pictures are interesting. Were there any prints on Stick Man’s ice pick? There’s nothing about it in this book or your grandfather’s notes.“
„Who knows? I told you, all the evidence boxes were robbed, gutted for souvenirs. That ice pick disappeared fifty years ago.“
One long red fingernail tapped the book cover. „So how did Pinwitty get a photograph of the pick?“
„What? There aren’t any photographs in that book.“
„Then Charles’s copy must be a revised edition.“ Mallory opened the volume and showed him the clear picture of an ice pick in an evidence bag. „You can even read the detective’s signature on the label.“
Upon their second visit to Martin Pinwitty’s one-room apartment, the first thing the detec
tives noticed was an elaborate profusion of flowers, exotic blooms well beyond the author’s purse.
„It’s a sympathy bouquet. My mother died yesterday.“ Pinwitty rushed to the stove and began a lame attempt at hospitality, lighting a flame under his teakettle.
This time, the detectives did not feel obliged to eat stale pastries and drink cheap swill. Riker turned off the gas burner. „Just give us the ice pick, and we’ll go.“
Pinwitty’s lips parted as if to scream.
Riker was holding up the book, and it was opened to the picture of the murder weapon in an evidence bag. „This pick.“
„I bought that photograph. I never actually had the – “
„No,“ said Riker, „you don’t wanna lie to a cop.“ He flipped through the pages of the picture section. „You took all these shots yourself. Cheaper that way, right? Your publishers even gave you a photographer’s credit.“
„I don’t have the pick anymore.“
„Yeah, you do,“ said Riker. „The Winter House Massacre is your whole life. Once you had that pick, you’d never let it go.“
„My mother’s illness was very costly. I had to sell off a lot of things.“
Riker shook his head to let the man know that he was not buying this excuse. „You would’ve sold your mother for medical experiments before you sold that pick.“
Pinwitty was backing away, when he made eye contact with Mallory. He turned back to face Riker, finding him less threatening – a mistake – and now the author made a little stand of sorts. He straightened what passed for a spine and thrust out his chin, what there was of it. „The pick is mine. I bought and paid for it.“
„Well,“ said Riker, „that makes my job a lot easier. You just admitted to buying stolen goods. Give me the pick or we tack on a few more charges.“
„Statute of limitations,“ said the author. „I bought it more than seven years ago.“
„You got me there, pal. I can see that I just don’t watch enough cop shows on television. So I guess all we’ve got on you is concealing evidence in an ongoing case. No, wait a minute. If you broke the seal on the bag, we can add tampering with evidence. And then there’s my personal favorite, obstruction of a homicide investigation.“ He stepped toward Pinwitty, and the man fell back into a chair, startled to be suddenly sitting down and looking up at the detective’s angry face. Riker put his hands on the padded arms of the chair and leaned into the author’s face as he explained the worst of this man’s crimes. „And you’re pissing off my partner.“
Riker pointed to Mallory, who was seated in a chair next to the sympathy bouquet, idly ripping the heads off of flowers.
The chief of Forensics personally returned the ice pick to Mallory and Riker. More accurately, he dropped the pick on his desk blotter and threw the paperwork in Riker’s direction. The big man leaned forward, voice icy, saying, „You told my people this was a rush… for a fifty-eight-year-old homicide. You bastards. I’m up to my eyeballs in work, and you come in here with this crap.“
Riker was mentally digging himself a foxhole underneath his chair.
„So,“ said Mallory, so casually, as if she were not in deep trouble for lying to Heller’s staff, „you got a match on the fingerprints?“
And now it was her turn to receive a flying object – the small white card with Nedda Winter’s elimination prints from a more recent crime scene. It sailed across the desk and landed in her lap.
Riker regarded Finnegan’s Bar as the front room for his upstairs apartment. It saved him the trouble of picking up his dirty socks when company came calling. And now he greeted his first guest of the evening and waved the man to an empty bar stool reserved in his honor. „Hey, thanks for coming.“
Charles Butler had been to Finnegan’s before, but he still turned heads with the regulars, men and women with guns. He stood a head above the rest, broader in the shoulders and entirely too well dressed for this dive and this company of wall-to-wall police. „When will they release Nedda?“
„She’s not a prisoner.“ Riker held up one hand to flag down the bartender. Two fingers in the air netted him a nod and a promise of two beers. „She can walk out any time she likes. This wasn’t Mallory’s idea. Nedda wanted to do it. I’ll get a call when it’s over. You’re sure the lady doesn’t want police protection tonight?“
„No, she was adamant about that. She’s positive that her niece attempted suicide. And I agree with her. Maybe it was a cry for help, but not attempted murder.“
„So Nedda’s moving in with you?“
„For a few days.“ Charles accepted a beer from the bartender. „Maybe longer.“
„You didn’t discuss any of the evidence with her, did you? I mean the will, the trust fund.“
„No, it never came up in the conversation. And I don’t think she gives a damn about money. That’s Mallory’s fixation, not Nedda’s.“ Charles sipped his beer, not inclined to volunteer any more.
„So I’m guessing you and Mallory are at odds right now. I’m guessing ‘cause the kid never tells me anything.“
„I suppose I question her methods.“
„Yeah, she does things that you’d never do.“ Riker drained his glass. „And a few things I wouldn’t do, either. That’s what makes her a great cop. Now, if she was working for the opposition, I’d lose sleep at night. Did you have any time to look at my file?“
Charles laid the ancient folder on the bar. It contained more of Pinwitty’s collection, pictures recently acquired for the next revision of his book. The old crime-scene photographs showed all the dead bodies of the massacre, some large and some painfully small. „I agree with you. It fits better with a murder for hire. Not the work of a lunatic or someone with anger issues.“ He lowered his head and spoke to his glass. „You know what’s most disturbing about the massacre at Winter House? Oddly enough, it’s the lack of rage. Assembly-line carnage. How do you profile a killer like that? Someone sane who kills for the money?“
„Well, Charles, you don’t. You know why? These people don’t drop in from another planet. They don’t start out as psychos. They’re us.“ He could see that Charles was resisting this idea. „I can tell you how it’s done, how they’re made. You take a youngster out in the woods. The boy’s first kill is all set up for him. The victim is kneeling on the ground, hands tied behind his back. All the kid has to do is put the gun to the back of this man’s skull and squeeze the trigger. But the victim is begging for his life and crying. There’re maybe two, three other men watching the kid. They’re all junkyard dogs, but they wear silk suits. They drive nice cars. And the boy looks up to them. He can’t back down, can he? Naw, too humiliating. Plus, he’s scared shitless. He’s either one of them or he’s a liability. Hell of a choice he’s got. So he does it. It’s a small thing, they tell him. Just squeeze the trigger, kid, they say. And that’s what the kid does. He blows a human being away and gets sick all over his shoes. He’s crossed a line, and he can’t get back. The next time is easier. Soon it’s just his job. He wasn’t born to do this. I guess that’s why the mob would call him a made man. He’ll spend most of his life in prison, but the boy doesn’t know that yet. You can make a hitman out of almost anybody, but it’s better if you get ‘em young.“
Riker nodded toward the window. Beyond the glass, a twelve-year-old boy stood on the sidewalk talking to a girl, his flawless face growing pinker by the second. He was falling in love for the first time, his whole shining life ahead of him. „That kid would do.“
Charles turned his face to the window and the youngster on the sidewalk, so innocent, the raw makings of evil. „What about Mallory – when she was younger?“
„Naw. She wasn’t the best scratch material.“ Did that sound reassuring? Would Charles buy a lie? „When she was ten years old, she was a fullblown person.“ He smiled at this memory of a wildly talented street thief with the chilling eyes of a small stone killer. „And she hasn’t changed all that much.“
Charles seemed genuinely relieved. Wh
at a gift for denial. Poor bastard, he was always seeking evidence of a beating heart and a bit of a soul, never appreciating the true marvel of Mallory – that she functioned so well without them.
Chapter 10
LIEUTENANT COFFEY WAS IN THE DARK, AND HE WAS IN AWE. On the other side of the one-way glass, Nedda Winter was seated at the long table, passively watching a police aide, who laid out the polygraph equipment, the rubber tubes, the clips and their wires.
„So that’s Red Winter.“ Jack Coffey’s words were as soft as whispers in church. „When the lady came in, she told the desk sergeant that your polygraph exam was never finished.“
The lady?
Nedda Winter’s supporters were legion now.
„This was her idea, not mine.“ Mallory sat down beside the lieutenant.
„But no pressure, right?“ He kept his eyes on the woman in the next room. „I know her niece attempted suicide tonight. You didn’t make any threats against Bitty Smyth, did you?“
Even Bitty had champions.
When the police aide had departed from the interview room, Nedda Winter reached out for the transducer and attached this cardio device to her thumb. Next the woman bound herself with the rubber tubes that would record her breathing, and last she attached the clips to her fingers. Dragging her wires with her, she moved her chair back to the wall. After removing both her shoes, she sat there, very still, staring at the one-way mirror, the window for the two police sitting side by side – watching.
„All the years I’ve been on this job,“ said Jack Coffey, „I’ve never seen anybody do that before.“ He turned his eyes to Mallory. Unspoken was the question What did you do to that woman? He could never voice his suspicions. Contrary to policy, Mallory had failed to tape the previous polygraph examination. Now he was assuming the worst of her and only grateful that there was no proof.
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