And that was puzzling, too.
From ceiling molding to baseboards, the cork wall was covered with sheets of paper, each one filled with columns of figures. Riker guessed that these were telephone numbers by the separation spaces for area codes and prefixes. Though reading glasses rested in his breast pocket, he preferred to squint, and now he noticed that six of the numerals were arranged in random combinations, but one floating sequence of four remained the same in every line. So this was what she had been doing with the time since he had seen her last-apart from pumping bullets into her walls, blowing bugs to kingdom come when she could not find a fly swatter. And, given a dead body in the front room, he suspected her of worse behavior. Thankfully, in some saner moment, she had patched the holes in the plaster.
Dr. Slope’s eyes widened as he took in the thousands of numbers on the cork wall. Most had red lines drawn though them, all perfectly straight in machine precision. He moved closer to the wall, the better to see with his bifocals. “Oh, my God. She drew these lines with a pen.”
And those hand-drawn lines could only indicate telephone numbers that had not panned out for Mallory. The detective gripped the medical examiner’s arm and turned the man around to face him. “You’ve seen this before.” Riker’s t o ne slipped into interrogation mode, close to accusation when he said, “You know what this is all about. Talk to me.”
The doctor nodded, taking no offense. “I saw something like this a long time ago-on the Markowitzes’ old phone bills. As I recall, it was that first month after Kathy came to live with them. So she was eleven years old.”
Yeah, sure she was.
Louis Markowitz, a late great cop, and his wife, Helen, had raised the girl as their own, but never would Kathy Mallory talk to them about her origins. She would not even give up her right age. At first, she had insisted on being twelve, and Lou had bargained her down by one year, though she might have been a ten-year-old or a child as young as nine.
The medical examiner stood at the center of the room, wiping the lenses of his bifocals with a handkerchief. “Lou showed me his phone bills, line after line of long-distance calls. Kathy made all of them.” The doctor stepped closer to the wall, nodding now. “Yes, it’s the same. You see, when she was a child, she was prone to nightmares. Lou thought the bad dreams might’ve triggered those calls. Sometimes he’d come downstairs late at night and catch her with the telephone. She made hundreds of these calls that first month. This wall reminds me of the Markowitzes’ phone bill. In every long-distance telephone number, four of the numerals were always the same, and the others just seemed random. She wouldn’t t e ll Lou anything helpful, but he worked out a good theory. He knew there was someone out there, some connection to her early life, but she could only remember part of a telephone number.”
“So Lou called the numbers on his phone bill.”
“Yes, all of them. And he found an odd pattern. Every call was made at some obscene hour of the night-so even the men were inclined to remember them. You see, when a man answered, she hung up the phone. But if a woman answered, she’d always say, ‘It’s Kathy, I’m lost.’ ”
“That must’ve driven the women nuts.”
“Yes, it touched their soft spots and their panic buttons.” The doctor turned his face to a high-rise window on the dark city. “According to Lou, all of the women begged Kathy to tell them who she was-and where could they find her? But the child would just hang up on them. Lou figured that Kathy never got the response she wanted. Those women didn’t know who she was. So then she’d dial the next combination of numbers… trying to make a connection to someone who would recognize her.”
“A woman.” Riker fished through his pockets and pulled out a piece of paper given to him by the first officer on the scene. This note listed sketchy vitals of victim identification, including a home telephone for the late Savannah Sirus. One sequence of four numbers matched the ones repeated on the cork wall. “I guess the kid finally made her connection.”
Eight hundred miles away, another corpse had been found.
Hours after the windows of shops and offices had gone dark, an umbrella was snatched up by a gust of wet wind. Tearing and twirling, it scraped across the broad steps of the Chicago Art Institute. The only watchers were two great cats, standing lions made of bronze and blind to this broken trophy from the battle against horizontal rain. Their green patinas were altered by strikes of lightning and red flashes from the spinning lights of police vehicles. Cars and vans converged upon the construction site at the other side of Michigan Avenue.
Two homicide detectives were soaked through and through. They surrendered, throwing up their hands and then jamming them into coat pockets. Grim and helpless, they watched the heavy rain come down on their forensic evidence and carry it away. There it went, the body fluids, stray hairs and fibers, all flowing off down the gutter. The corpse, washed clean, could tell them nothing beyond the cause of death-extreme cruelty. There had never been a crime scene quite like this one in the history of Chicago, Illinois, nothing as shocking, nothing as sad.
The religious detective made the sign of the cross. The other one closed his eyes.
The dead man at their feet was pointing the way down Adams Street, also known as Route 66, a road of many names. Steinbeck had called it a road of flight.
The rainstorm had abated, but the owner of the gas station had no plans to do any legal business at this late hour. Locked behind the wide door of his garage was one happy crew of gambling men in the grand slam of Chicago crap games, high rollers only, beer flowing, dice clicking and folding money slapping the cement floor.
Big night.
A fortune was in play amid clouds of cigar smoke when the silver V o lkswagen’s d river, a young woman in need of gas, had come softly rapping at the door. Then she had banged on the heavy metal with both fists and kicked it a few times, calling way too much attention to the activities inside.
Stop the music!
And now he stood beside her under the bright lights of his gas pumps- and the crap game was forgotten.
“Is that what I think it is?” The man gazed lovingly upon her engine. “Oh, yeah.” He looked up at her with a wide grin. “Girl, what have you done? A Porsche engine in a V o lkswagen Beetle?”
And how had she done it?
Even if he had been cold sober, this problem would have given him a headache. It might have been possible to modify an old model with the engine in the rear, but this was a new Beetle with front-wheel drive, built for an engine under the hood. No kind of engine could work in the damned trunk. Yet there it was.
He had to take three paces back to see how this magic trick was worked. The silhouette of the car was slightly off, elongated, but otherwise a perfect job. The girl had fabricated a VW Beetle onto the frame of the 911 Twin Turbo Porsche. Before he stopped to wonder why she had done such a thing, he had already moved onto the problem of the convertible’s roof: that tall hump of a ragtop might cut into the speed, but not by much. Now how would this counterfeit body affect the Porsche’s performance in cornering?
“Hey, girl? If you take a curve too fast, you’ll roll this car. You know that, right?”
Advice and gasoline were all that he could offer her. The tall blonde preferred to work alone. By frosty glare and body language, she had taught him to keep his greasy hands off her immaculate engine.
“You got some time?” he asked. “I could put on a roll bar.”
The girl shook her head. No sale. She selected another tool from a lambskin pouch and worked on the mounting for a wiring harness. He guessed there was a rattle that annoyed her. Well, it would never do that again. She made it that tight, stopping just shy of stripping the screws.
“Girl, you might wanna think it over. If not here, then get one somewhere else.” It was not her money he was after; he only wanted to keep this youngster alive. She appeared to be the same age as his daughter. “With a roll bar, you’d have a sporting chance to keep your pretty head if the car flip
s over.”
And damned pretty she was with her milk-white skin, her cat’s eyes and those long red fingernails. The girl in blue jeans was downright unnatural; real people never looked this good at close quarters. And so he guessed that she was not from his part of the world, but maybe from someplace straight up and past the moon. Hers were the greenest eyes he had ever seen. If asked, he would not be able to describe their color in terms of any living thing. Electric, he would say. Yeah, electric green and bright like a dashboard light-not human at all. And he thought she might be carrying a gun beneath her denim jacket.
His gaze had lingered too long on that bulge where a shoulder holster might be. Her eyes were on him now-so cold. She seemed to be looking at him across the distance between a cat and a mouse, and he knew that this was all the warning she would ever give him. He had his choice of two creatures: she might be a stone killer, and then there was his own kind. “You’re a cop, right?” The mechanic pulled a wallet from the pocket of his grimy coveralls, and he did this slowly-no sudden movements to set her off. He showed her the identification of a retired Chicago police officer.
Her face gave away nothing, not her next move, not anything at all. The situation could go sour at any second. If he had guessed wrong about her, he might wind up dead. In his sixtieth year, his reflexes had slowed. But now, as a sign of trust, she ignored him once more and turned back to a perusal of her engine.
He began to breathe again.
“I was on the job for thirty-five years.” He faced the bastardized car, and his voice carried just a touch of sarcasm. “Thought I’d seen it all.” Still attempting to make conversation, he said, “Nobody would ever figure you for a V o lkswagen type. Not your style, girl. It’s a car for people my age, burnout rock ’n’ rollers who could never get past the sixties. Hell, this should’ve been my car.”
The Porsche beneath the fabricated shell explained a lot-on several levels. A true VW convertible was a happy little vehicle with no hard edges, a cartoon of a car, and it got a smile everywhere it went. He took the young blonde’s measure again. Cosmetics-like this fake car body hiding a killer engine-could never so neatly disguise what she was. And if this young cop believed that she could work undercover, she was dead wrong. But he could think of no other explanation for a civil servant driving a car with an engine that cost the moon and the stars-unless the kid was on the take.
Her dashboard had another modification that never came from the factory. He made another foray to draw her out for a chance at shoptalk, and he meant copshop. “Well, I see you got a police scanner. Me, too.”
She studied her engine, forgetting that he was alive.
He tried again. “So… you know about the murder on Adams Street?… No?” Did silence mean no on her planet? “They found the body right in the middle of the damn road. Real piece of work. I heard the cop chatter on my scanner.”
“ Adams Street and what?”
“ Michigan Avenue.” He had a gut feeling that she already knew this address, but his guts had lied to him before, and a bullet fired when his back was turned had forced his retirement from the Chicago Police Department.
Casually, as if opining on the weather, the girl said, “And there’s something peculiar about the crime scene.”
Though she had not asked him a question, he gave her a slow nod to say, Oh, yeah. This one’s about as peculiar as it ever gets. Aloud, he said, “I bet that’s why you turned out tonight. Am I right?” Force of habit from the old days, he would always chain one odd thing to another: this strange young cop, this bastard car with New York plates-this crime. “A serial killer, right? And New York ’s got an interest?”
Oh, how he missed the Job, his old religion of Copland.
The young blonde packed up her tool pouch and closed the trunk on that fabulous engine. The fuel pump rang its bell-the gas tank was full. She handed him a platinum credit card, giving him second thoughts about her status as underpaid police. She waited in silence for her receipt.
As she was driving off, though he had no hope of being heard, he called after her, “You be careful out there!” His eyes traveled over darkened buildings where innocent people lay sleeping. “And the rest of you stay the hell out of her way,” he warned them in a lower voice-in case he had guessed wrong about-what was she called? He looked down at his copy of the credit card receipt and read only one name. “Well, don’t t hat beat all?”
American Express called her Mallory-just Mallory.
The mighty storm front, born in Chicago, had cut a sodden path eastward. It rained on a patch of the Jersey coast, and then, like many another tourist, it crossed the George Washington Bridge, entered New York City – and died.
Only a few drops of water pocked the windshield of a sleek black sedan as it rolled out of a SoHo garage and pulled into the narrow street. The traffic was light, and this was good, because Detective Riker was hardly paying attention to the other cars as he rode out of town.
After another check on Mallory’s c redit cards, he learned that she had bought a late supper in South Bend, Indiana, still traveling west on Route 80, and leaving no doubt that Chicago was her destination. With one cellphone call, Riker had activated the anti-theft device installed in her car. And then he had bartered his soul to the Favor Bank to bury the paperwork on her surveillance. Given her straight route and likely point of entry, her LoJack’s s ignal had been picked up when the car crossed the state line into Illinois. And, thanks to a police car tracker in Chicago, Riker knew that his partner had stopped awhile at a gas station in that city-even before she had used her credit card to pay for fuel. Though she was definitely in flight, he took some comfort in her use of traceable credit instead of cash. And she knowingly drove a car equipped with a LoJack device; this alone spoke well for the theory that she had not murdered Savannah Sirus.
And everything else argued against innocence.
In his request for covert assistance from Chicago, the New York detective had traded on his reputation as a shabby dresser with a low bank balance; these hallmarks of a dead-honest cop made his badge shine in the dark. There were even rookies in the state of Illinois who had heard of Riker. And he planned to destroy the best part of himself-for Mallory’s s ake.
He stopped for a red light and closed his eyes. More frightening than the corpse in Mallory’s front room was the wall of telephone numbers in her den. If nightmares had triggered her childhood calls, then Riker had to wonder, Kid, what are your dreams like now?
2
The car’s engine idled as Mallory pulled an old letter from her knapsack. This was only ceremony; the pale blue ink was illegible by street lamp, and the discolored paper was falling apart at the folds. The opening line, committed to memory, began with green lions-and there they were. The matched pair of statues flanked the broad steps of the Chicago Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, and they pointed the way down Adams Street.
The letter went on to say, “There are travelers who recognize this intersection of commerce, high art and green lions as the beginning of the Mother Road, though its original starting point was elsewhere. Historically a shifting highway, now it’s vanishing, reduced to a patchwork of interrupted pavement scattered through pieces of eight states, all that remains of a fine romance with the journey and the automobile.”
Mallory was not of the romantic ilk. The night was wet and cold, and she was disinclined to wax poetic on the American car culture.
Angling the headlights into the darkness, she anticipated police barricades, but these wooden sawhorses bore the name of a Chicago contractor. The crime scene was also a construction site, and this was one detail that was not picked up on her police scanner. Her high beams lit up concrete segments of an old water main stacked beside earthmoving equipment. The late hour and a recent storm had cleared the area of witnesses-not that she cared. She killed the engine and left her car to push one of the barricades aside, and now she walked toward the bulky machines that might hide more obstructions.
Wooden planks spanned two of the traffic lanes, and an orange sign warned her of a large hole beneath the boards, but all that interested Mallory was a large sheet of crumpled blue plastic nudged along the ground by the wind. At each corner was a crude tear where the thin material had been ripped loose. She easily found the former moorings of this blown-down canopy; bits of twine were still tied around lampposts and signs. Other tarps, ones belonging to the contractor, were made of light canvas and sized to cover machines. The workmen would have needed no cover; they would have been gone before the late-night storm; road repair might carry on in the dark-but not in the rain. And this flimsy material was not something a crime-scene van would carry. It could serve only one purpose here-a temporary cover for a killer who wanted privacy from high windows and the elevated train that bisected Adams Street.
The killer had brought his own tarp to the party, and the crime-scene unit had failed to confiscate this evidence, mistaking it for construction debris.
Mallory pulled out her cell phone and placed a call to Chicago PD. Failing to introduce herself, she demanded the name of the detective who owned this homicide.
“Kronewald?”
We ll, that conjured up a familiar face. She could picture the old man turning a heart-attack shade of red when he found out what the CSU team had left behind-plastic, a fingerprint technician’s wet dream. “Tell him to collect the blue tarp. It belongs to the killer, not the contractor.”
The desk sergeant was asking for her name as she ended the call. Mallory, never inclined to waste words, was busy just now. One more barricade to go, and then she must be on her way before Detective Kronewald turned up to find a New York cop on his little patch of turf.
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