Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  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 full-blown 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. What 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.

  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.

  Mallory’s hands curled into fists under cover of darkness.

  Rising from his chair, the lieutenant said, “Lock up this room before you go in there. I don’t want anyone to see this.” And he would not watch either, no stomach for it.

  “Wait,” said Mallory. “You think I’m a monster, right? So why don’t you take over?” Her tone was pure acid. “Go on. Fix the old lady a nice cup of tea. Be her new best friend. See if she tells you anything useful—anything at all.”

  Jack Coffey’s hand rested on the doorknob. He would not turn around, and he could not leave.

  “But first,” said Mallory, “you can take my badge.” She rose from her chair a
nd stepped closer to the window on the interview room, then leaned her forehead against the glass. “I’m so tired of everybody lining up behind Nedda Winter. What’s the point of me showing up for work anymore?” Mallory reached into her back pocket and pulled out the leather folder that held her gold shield. “The old woman’s holding out on me, and that’ll get her killed. But what the hell. If she dies, she dies, right? And nobody cares who massacred her family. And Sally Winter— more old history. Who cares if that little girl’s body was stuffed in a hole like a dead dog? Not me—not you.”

  Jack Coffey turned around to face his detective. “I know you’ll never let go of that badge, Mallory. You’re better at this than your old man when he was in his prime.” He quit the room, closing the door softly, just to let her know, that, though she had cut him at the knees, there were no hard feelings.

  And now that she had beaten Coffey, she glanced at the window on the interrogation room. One down and one to go.

  She looked over her handiwork, this barefoot woman wired to a machine, every muscle tensing, bracing. They stared at one another. Nedda was blind to Mallory, but well aware that she was being watched from the other side of the mirror. The woman was waiting so patiently for the game to begin. She raised her head, as if to ask the young detective—When?

  Kathy Mallory left the observation room, locking the door behind her, not out of deference to Jack Coffey’s wishes, but for the sake of privacy alone. She entered the brightly lit interview room, and Nedda Winter looked up with no reproach for what was about to happen to her.

  Mallory knelt down on bended knee and lifted Nedda’s right foot in her hand, noting its fragile, paper-thin skin and the raised blue veins that came with age and a hard life. She gently slipped one shoe back on the woman’s foot and carefully tied the laces, not too loose, not too tight. When she had done the second shoe, she raised her face to Nedda’s. “The night you killed Willy Roy Boyd—you didn’t find that ice pick on the bar—in the dark. You had it under your pillow, didn’t you?”

  Nedda nodded between wariness and surprise.

  Mallory removed the metal clips and unfastened the tubes that bound the woman’s breast. “You never feel safe anymore, do you?”

  “No. Not for a long time.”

  “Not since you left the last hospital.” Mallory walked back to the table and pulled out an ordinary wooden chair that had no wires. “Sit here.” Fumbling with her list of rules for a life, she added the word “Please.” When Nedda had joined her at the table, the detective said, “Suppose we just talk.”

  And Nedda did.

  She began with the morning of the massacre, counting up the dead. “All those bodies. When I got to the top of the house and saw the nanny on the floor, I couldn’t go into that nursery. I didn’t want to see Sally’s body. I couldn’t find Cleo and Lionel, but I’d only searched the rooms upstairs.”

  Returning to the staircase, she had stopped awhile by her stepmother’s corpse. “She was a silly, flighty woman, but I loved her so much. She was the only mother I ever knew. Then I sat down on the steps beside my father’s body.”

  James Winter had entered the house as she was pulling the ice pick from her father’s chest. “Uncle James bundled me into the car, and we drove to a dingy little building in Greenwich Village. He left me there for days and days. Said he had to go back for the ice pick because my fingerprints were on it. When I saw him again, he told me it was no good. The police got to the house before he did, and they had the ice pick. He said they’d found the bodies of all the children, Cleo and Lionel too. And the baby was dead. They were hunting for me, he said. He cut off my hair and dyed it with shoe black. I stayed in that room for a long time. I don’t know how many days. I lost count. An old woman brought my food. Clothes, too—I think they were hers. She was very kind to me.”

  “She’s the one who taught you to read the tarot cards,” said Mallory.

  “How did you know that?”

  “I know almost everything. Just a few more loose ends. Go on.”

  “One night, the street outside my window was full of police. I thought they’d come for me. The old woman came upstairs. She said we had to clean the place right away, and then I’d have to leave. If the police found any trace of me, she’d go to jail. We worked all night into morning, washing down the walls, the floor, the furniture. While she was downstairs, getting a suitcase for me, the police came and took her away. Later that day, Uncle James came back. We waited for dark, and then we drove up to Maine. He said he had a summer cabin there. When we crossed the state line, he stole a car from a restaurant parking lot and left his own car in its place. I remember a road into the woods. After that, all I have are missing pieces of memory—like Uncle James turning off the headlights. I thought that was queer. The road was so narrow, and the woods were pitch dark. We were driving blind. The last thing I recall was the car’s inside light coming on. I don’t remember the crash. When I woke up, I was in the dark, and the car was rocking. I was in so much pain. I turned on the headlights. They pointed straight up at the sky, and below me there was nothing but black space. I screamed.”

  “A cop named Walter McReedy rescued you.”

  “Yes. Later, he told me that the driver had drowned in the quarry pool.”

  “You never told McReedy who the driver was?”

  “I thought Uncle James was dead. Walter said the body would float up eventually, but it never did. And he never mentioned finding my uncle’s abandoned car in the restaurant parking lot. I could never ask him about it. I told him I couldn’t remember anything.”

  “And that’s how you knew your uncle meant to kill you that night.”

  “Yes. Uncle James must have jumped from the car just before it went over the edge. That’s why the inside light came on. And the police never found his car because he’d used it to drive back to New York. So I knew he’d tried to kill me. And he was still alive.”

  “You couldn’t tell Walter McReedy the truth.”

  “No, and I couldn’t go home again. I didn’t know that there was anyone alive to come back to. And the police had my fingerprints on the ice pick.”

  “This pick.” Mallory reached into her knapsack and pulled out a plastic bag containing the murder weapon. “There were only two fingerprints on the handle. That’s how the police ruled you out as a suspect. Thumb and index finger, the prints you left when you pulled the pick out of your father’s body. There’s no other scenario for the way they appeared on the weapon. Otherwise the pick was clean. So the lead detective figured the killer had the presence of mind to wipe that pick after using it to murder nine people—so why leave two clear prints behind on a murder weapon? The fingerprints cleared you. Those cops only wanted to find you and bring you home.”

  Nedda bowed her head. “If I had known that Cleo and Lionel were still alive, I would’ve told Walter McReedy everything. But I believed Uncle James when he told me that their bodies were found in the kitchen. I never got to that room.”

  Mallory leaned toward her, one hand resting on her arm. “You spent two years with the McReedy family.”

  “Off and on—between surgeries. Most of the time was spent in the hospital.”

  “The McReedys never talked about the Winter House Massacre? That was national news.”

  Nedda almost smiled. “Once, there was life before television. You can’t imagine that, can you? But we had radio on a clear night, one station from Bangor that played gospel music.”

  “You were famous.”

  “But I wasn’t the Lindbergh baby—just the debris of a crime that happened somewhere else. The local paper was a two-page weekly newsletter. And the biggest news in that small town was the story of the McReedy brothers rescuing me and risking their lives to do it. Now you see why my uncle took me there to die.”

  Mallory nodded. “And all that time you spent with the McReedy family, you were waiting for James Winter to come back and kill you.”

  “Yes. Twice I thought he was dead, and
I was wrong both times. When I was fourteen, I thought I was being watched. No—I knew he was watching me.”

  “Your uncle James.”

  “Yes. I found cigarette butts at the edge of the yard, and sometimes I’d see them glowing in the dark from my window. I didn’t want Uncle James to come after me while I was living with the McReedys. I couldn’t lose my second family that way. So . . . when the family left town to visit relatives . . . I stayed behind.”

  “You set yourself up as bait to draw him out.”

  “I loved the McReedys.” Nedda looked down at her folded hands. “The man came for me in the dark. He broke down my bedroom door. But I was ready for him. I’d been ready for two years.”

  “You stabbed him with an ice pick you kept under your pillow.”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t Uncle James. I sat next to the corpse all night long. When morning came, I never looked at the man’s face. I couldn’t bear to see him. I was still afraid of him—even then. Can you understand that?”

  No, Mallory could not, but she nodded, saying, “You were only a little girl.”

  “When the McReedys found me there with the body, I was sent to a hospital. They said I was in shock. I couldn’t speak for days. It took a long time for Walter McReedy to identify the corpse. He visited me in the hospital and told me that I’d killed a small-time criminal named Humboldt. I asked him over and over if that could be a mistake, and he said no, that was impossible. Fingerprints never lied.”

  “So you stayed in the hospital to keep that family safe. You figured James Winter was always out there, waiting for another chance to kill you.” This also explained the death of Willy Roy Boyd and the near-death experience of the private investigator in the park. It was Nedda Winter’s job in life, all her life, to protect the people she loved.