Blind Sight

by Carol O'Connell

  Leaning over the threshold, Riker tapped the light switch. Two feet in, he looked down to see a bloodstain on the floor. “So that’s where Albert cracked his head.”

  “In a fall,” said Mallory. “That fits getting drugged with a paralytic—like the old lady in Jersey.”

  Even if she had a tox screen to say the old man was drugged, a fall was no sure thing. Costello’s head might have been bashed into this floor. But Riker said nothing. He was accustomed to her forcing puzzle pieces to fit the picture she liked best. He turned to the window and its view of a tall silver pole dead center in the frame. That had to be what one neighbor had called the old man’s favorite lamppost, his hangout spot for an hour every day. The hermit’s fixed routine was another match with three of their murder victims.

  Mallory stood on the far side of the room, leaning down for a look at the lock on the back door. “A few light tool marks. Nice job. This was jimmied in advance. It’s a good lock, damn near pickproof. Our perp wouldn’t leave it for the last minute.” She walked back to the front of the store to stand by the window. “He chose this place because he knew he’d find the old man out there by the lamppost. That says stalking, planning.” She opened her hand to show him a single red rose petal. “Found it in the doorjamb. The nun was in here, too. The perp must’ve taken her flowers with him, but he missed this.”

  It was a leap to pin the nun’s presence on a flower petal, yet Riker would go along with her on that. And now the paralytic made more sense to him. “So our perp sticks Albert with—”

  “A medi-dart. Animal Control uses that same paralytic to bring down wild dogs. So the perp would’ve fired his dart gun from in here. He’s nowhere near Albert when the drug kicks in.”

  “Okay.” It was a stretch, but— “I’ll buy that. So then he hustles Albert in the door before the old guy can hit the sidewalk.” Just being neighborly. “And along comes the nun, lookin’ to meet up with her nephew, and she gets this far.”

  Mallory glanced at the stain that might be Albert Costello’s blood. “The old man’s out cold on the floor. She can’t see him. But she sees our perp through the window, or maybe he’s standing in the doorway. She knows him. That’s why he reaches out and drags her inside. And then, before he can kill her . . . she screams.”

  Riker grinned. “Yeah, sure she did.” Hell she did. A lot could be gotten from the physical evidence, but, for damn sure, evidence made no noise, no screaming, not so much as a whisper. The sarcasm should have pissed off his partner, but no. Her eyes lit up like scary green candles, advance notice of his impending humiliation.

  He would never learn.

  Mallory turned to the open door. “Our guy goes to a lot of trouble to cover up what he’s doing in here with Costello. Grabbing the nun, a witness who can place him on the scene—that’s chancy, but she’s right there. Reaching distance. Why would he risk going outside to snatch a blind kid off the street? And you know Jonah hasn’t gotten as far as this store before something startles him.” Arms folded, she faced her partner. “The boy can’t see, but he hears his aunt scream. It surprises him, scares him. Nothing else fits with the kid dropping his cane out there on the sidewalk and leaving it there—yards away from this store.”

  Okay, maybe the evidence could scream. Riker nodded. “So . . . no cane in the kid’s hand when he comes through the door, lookin’ for his aunt. Maybe the perp doesn’t know Jonah’s blind.”

  “Or the boy can tie him to the nun. She knew her killer.”

  Maybe the nun knew their perp, but Riker let that part slide on the off chance that his partner was holding out on him, setting him up for another fall. A hard call. It could be that she just loved this theory enough to marry it.

  The detectives left by the rear door to stand in the alley on a large square of cement piled with the store’s discarded shelving and bags of trash. But there was room enough to park a car, even a van, and there was privacy for a double kidnapping. The rusty metal overhang would’ve sheltered the scene from the high windows, and a view from the lower ones would have been blocked by a dumpster.

  “The perp cut out the nun’s heart to match the MO for the other kills,” said Mallory. “He figures we probably won’t make a connection to a mugging victim, the original target, but why risk it? So today he came back to finish off Albert Costello.”

  —

  TRAFFIC ON THE BRIDGE was light. The stranger walked ahead of him on the footpath, walking fast, and Albert was being left behind. Hey, he had not come all the way out here to take a stroll by himself. He had to hoof it to catch up. The younger man stopped behind a wide section of the steel framework, hidden from the passing cars. The brim of his cap was pulled low, and his eyes were going in all directions, everywhere but up.

  “Smell that air,” said Albert. “I think it might rain. . . . What’re you lookin’ for?”

  “Cameras. They’re everywhere these days.”

  “Yeah, it’s gettin’ so you can’t take a piss without somebody watchin’.” Albert raised his eyes to the high ironwork. “I don’t see no cameras.”

  The stranger was on him, grabbing him. Wait a blessed minute here! Gripped by arm and leg, Albert was lifted upward.

  Over the railing.

  God Almighty!

  He was in flight over night-black water.

  Falling, screaming, Albert pawed the air, working his legs, as if he could climb an air-stair back up to the bridge. Reason was flown. Life was everything. Life was all.

  He hit the water, landing hard, as if upon a bed of concrete. The pain. His legs. His back. Plunging down and down. Holding his breath. He would not give up his last bit of air. His arms flapped like wings. He flew up to the surface and filled his lungs. Blessed be.

  Albert expelled a gulp of air as a wave covered him and he was sucked under, inhaling water, his chest in the grip of a giant fist. Back to the surface, and there his coughing ripped his innards. Drowning was lung-tearing, nose-searing, godawful hurt. The water torture went on and on—until, exhausted, he sank below the black waves and hung there. Motionless. Calm now, all the oxygen cut from his brain. Taking away the pain. No trace of him was left on the skin of the river. The last bubble from his mouth floated up and away to pop his final breath in the open air.

  —

  WATER?

  Jonah Quill was slow to awaken in this dank room, sipping air fat with moisture. He could feel water all around him—taunting him. His throat was sore. His lips were cracked. One hand dropped to a cool stone floor. The other one touched down on a rubber surface, and he walked his fingers across it to find a wire that would plug an air pump into a wall socket. This was an inflatable mattress like the one his uncle dragged out for Jonah’s sleepovers with friends.

  The boy lay very still, listening to his own replay of an old soft-spoken reminder, his ritual for every awakening, Open your eyes. This had always been his aunt’s first command of the day. Not till he was in kindergarten did he think to wonder—what for? Why lift up his lids for eyes that could not see?

  “I’ll show you.” Aunt Angie had taken him up to Bloomingdale’s to run his hands over a department-store manikin. A saleslady had lain one down for him, so he could reach and touch the lids of open plastic eyes, and the saleslady had told him it looked nothing like a living person.“But shoppers feel the dummies watching them, and they don’t steal so much. We call it the spook effect.”

  And then Aunt Angie had said, “Open eyes, even blind eyes are useful . . . because you might be watching them, all those strangers out there with eyes that can see.”

  This was a gift she had given him, one that had increased him by guile, but it was not so useful now, not here. Still, he opened his eyes—for her.

  The boy rose from the mattress, and it took some effort to stand up on cramped legs. He was nauseated, and his stomach hurt. Jonah kicked off one sneaker and, by light touch of toe
s, looked for obstacles in his path. His big toe hit cold metal, and he ran his hands over the stacked appliances, identifying the clothes dryer by its round door and inside drum. The object beside it was lower to the ground, smooth and—

  A laundry room with a toilet?

  Jonah was tempted to drink the smelly water in the bowl, but then his elbow hit something taller, and his hands found—what? Rough outside, smooth inside, a hole. A drain? A sink! A big one! His fingers traveled along the edge to find the faucet taps, and he turned on the water. Cupping his hands, he drank from a stream of cold, clean liquid.

  All the while, he gave thanks for this manna, forgetting for the moment that God was his sworn enemy, He Who had stolen Aunt Angie—and then let her die. Jonah’s voice was hoarse as he sent up another prayer to the Almighty Bastard Who art in Heaven, a suggestion for God to drop dead.

  Next in the order of exploration, his one naked foot touched the source of a mildew smell, and his hands dipped low to identify a bucket with a mop inside. Then he let his fingers travel waist-high across the wall to find the ball of a knob and turn it. There was no give to the door—locked—but there was a growl on the other side. Low to the ground. Guttural. Ugly.

  Given more water over the past few days, he might have pissed his jeans when the dog barked and raked its nails on the wood, scratching, pawing, clawing, howling now, mad to get inside—to get at him!

  Jonah had never fainted before, and so he would not call it that, and he would not call it sleep. He—just—switched—off.

  —

  MALLORY AND RIKER remained standing, still waiting for a response from their boss, the very quiet man behind the desk.

  Lieutenant Coffey continued to toy with a paper clip, unfolding it to a straight length of metal, a flimsy weapon at best, but he dared not unlock the drawer where he kept his gun. Calm enough now, he said, “Okay, that’s a first. You want me to believe this freak, this whack-job serial killer . . . hired a professional killer . . . for the wetwork?” No doubt, bet money would change hands between these two when they realized that he was not falling for their bullshit. But Jack Coffey was not inclined to drag this out, and so he reminded them that “The freak takes trophies,” and then yelled, “He cut out their fucking hearts!”

  Riker nodded in agreement. So true. “Talk to Heller. He says—”

  “No!” He was not going to play this out with the commander of Crime Scene Unit, a man with no sense of humor. The lieutenant turned his back on the detectives, swiveling his chair to stare at a street window never washed in this century, as if he could see through it. Good sport that he was, and with no rancor at all, he said, “Go away.”

  And they did.

  —

  KILLING A NUN? Snatching a kid? Had Iggy lost his mind? Their client was only paying for four low-profile kills. Oh, and a phone call, a lousy heads-up on this mess, that would’ve been nice—a professional courtesy.

  Goddamn hell of a day!

  Gail Rawly was not the one on the murdering end of this enterprise. He saw himself as more of a matchmaker, though his wife believed he was a freelance insurance investigator, and he was—on the side—but only for the sake of filing income taxes. He would never want to run afoul of the Internal Revenue Service.

  If only his partner would be so cautious of the law.

  He switched off the radio’s gory news story when six-year-old Patty entered his home office in footed pajamas. Gail could see his own features in the little girl with his wavy brown hair and ocean-blue eyes. She was carrying a newspaper, helping Daddy, so he might overlook the fact that she was not asleep at this hour. He thanked her for the paper and laid it on his desk. “Back to bed, Princess.”

  No, she would stay. Her pajama feet were firmly planted on the rug to say so, and the lift of her chin said she went where she pleased, did she not?

  Gail turned his eyes to the newspaper. He could not recall the last decade when the New York Daily News had published a late edition. This one had front-page photographs of the nun and the boy. Three of the four bodies dumped on the mayor’s lawn were almost footnotes to this story. And there was no mention of the mutilation, not a line about organs cut out of the corpses.

  What was the client doing with those hearts?

  A phone rang. Before Gail opened his desk drawer, chock-full of cell phones, to see which one it was, he predicted that his caller would be the freak for hearts, wanting to carp about the alteration in the plan. He could almost read anger into the phone’s chirp.

  But there was pure joy in the client’s voice. “Well,” said Gail, “I’m so happy you’re pleased.”

  He waved one hand to shoo the princess from the room. Her Highness ignored him. “Yes,” he said to his caller, “quite a splash in the news.” Did the hit man still have the blind boy? “I’ll check on that.” He must do it quickly, and that little boy should not turn up dead or alive without further instructions. “Okay.” A photograph? “That’s not a problem.” Now he received another instruction to carry out before the next sum would wind up in his offshore account. And their business was done.

  Gail dropped the client phone into his desk drawer and picked up the one reserved for conversation with his business partner.

  The little girl glared at her father, so impatient for him to read her a bedtime story because—that was Daddy’s damn job!

  Gail smiled at her. “Soon.” He held up one finger to say, Daddy has just one more thing to do. And it might be best if she did not listen in while he discussed a little boy’s murder with Iggy.

  “No!” The princess would not be put off. She stamped her little foot. She had spoken.

  —

  IGGY CONROY cast a bulky shadow by lamplight as he lowered the boy’s limp body to an armchair. The drug should have worn off by now. This kid ought to be wide awake. The man ran a hand over the stubble of his shaved head. Aw, he must have gotten the dose wrong again. He lifted one shoulder in a hell-with-it shrug.

  For the first three hits, the ones kept alive for a while, it had been a simple storage problem. At the client’s request, they had gone three days without food or water, and Iggy had no problem with details like that. They were not his pets.

  He called them meat.

  And he never talked to the meat. He had no need to know all its little hopes and dreams. But this kid was a wild card with no instructions. Iggy watched the boy’s shallow breathing. Would it live or die?

  The boy’s head lifted. Fingers curled, and one blue-jeaned leg stretched out. The eyes were opening. What for? Why open its eyes if it really was blind?

  —

  “YOU LOOK JUST LIKE HER,” said the man with cigarette breath.

  Jonah had awakened in a different room. Not a basement. No dampness here, no smell of dank walls or mildew. Exploring fingers rounded the thick arms of an upholstered chair. One of his sneakers was gone, and there was carpet under the one bare foot. A wave of nausea came on with stomach cramps as the fog in his brain slowly cleared—and then she was dead again. Aunt Angie died every time he opened his eyes.

  “Hear me, kid? I said you look just like the nun.” The voice was raised, but not at the level of speaking to the hard of hearing. Jonah knew that pitch. It was like the man was talking on the telephone to someone in another place—where all the blind people lived.

  You killed her, you freak!

  Jonah, don’t say that out loud. Don’t take him on. That’s what Aunt Angie would say. He could not believe that she would never talk to him again. It was too hard on him. And so he played her voice in his head, off and on like a radio—until the touch memory of her skin, so cold in death, just skittered away.

  And now it was time for a little terror, a sound that did not belong to Cigarette Man. It was low to the ground and nearby. Jonah’s fingers dug into the padded arms of the chair, and he turned his face down toward the mouth-
breather, the wheezer on the floor. “What kind of dog is it?”

  “Pit bull. How’d you know it was there?”

  The subtle heat of a hand waved in front of Jonah’s face, grazing his nose. “I heard the breathing. . . . I know that dog smell.”

  Dogs like that—they can go off on you for no reason. Aunt Angie had said this before, when he was small, when she was teaching him to navigate the sidewalk with a cane. She had never wanted him to be afraid of the street, only wary of what he reached out to touch with his bite-size fingers.

  “As long as I’m around,” said Cigarette Man, “the dog won’t hurt you. And if I’m not here? Don’t move. That’s important, kid. It won’t attack if you don’t move . . . if you’re real quiet.”

  The dog was an it? Most people’s pets were hims or hers. Cold metal was pressed into Jonah’s hand. Round. A can. A tickle of carbonation in his fingers.

  “It’s okay, kid. No knockout drug this time. Just soda.” He put something else on the palm of the other hand. “And crackers. Little bites, okay? Your stomach’s been empty for days. You wolf ’em down, it’ll make you sick.”

  Jonah traced the tiny bumps of crystals on the crackers, and he said, “Saltines.”

  “You see a lot for a blind kid. . . . What’s it like? Is it all black . . . like when you turn out the lights?”

  “I was born blind. I’ve got no way to know what black looks like.” Aunt Angie would tell him to tone down the anger, and he tried. And he failed. Hatred ate everything inside of him. He loved her so much—and this freak killed her!

  “Not a dumb question, kid. You gotta see somethin.’ Even nothin’ looks like somethin.’”

  This might top the list of stupid things asked about his blindness. What did nothing look like? “I can help you with that,” said Jonah. “Close your eyes.” You freak!

  “Okay, they’re shut tight.”

  “So tell me . . . what can you see . . . out of your asshole?”