Right about now, Aunt Angie should scream, Shut up! Don’t make him mad! But there was no anger to the man when he said, “That’s a good one, kid.” The voice had moved to a different place in the room. Jonah heard a click of the cigarette lighter, and now a familiar static.
“Do blind people—”
“—watch TV? Yeah,” said Jonah, his mouth crammed full of crackers, “all the time.”
—
SHE WATCHED LIEUTENANT COFFEY enter the lunchroom to wolf down a late meal from a take-out carton. He ate fast, but a lot could be accomplished in fifteen minutes or so.
Mallory turned off the desk lamp in his office and opened the blinds by a crack so she would see him coming. When his laptop had been powered up, the detective entered the password, the one he believed would keep her out of his business. There were no new entries since she had last hacked in from her own computer.
She already had the stats for the lieutenant’s cell phone and landline. The chief of detectives had not yet called to complain about her insubordination. No contact at all. Though there were other communications to interest her, some of them handwritten notes to read by the glow of the laptop screen. The desk phone rang. The chief’s name and number appeared on a lighted bar of text. She picked up the receiver—and waited—and finally the caller said, “Jack?”
“Can I take a message?”
“Mallory.” Goddard’s tone conveyed more than disappointment. He did not want to talk to her—anyone but her.
Before she could lose him to a hang up, she said, “The mayor lied about the ransom demands.”
“Forget that! It’s a dead end. Officially a dead end. Got that, kid? So there won’t be any more visits to Gracie Mansion.”
With no emotion, no inflection, she said, “I know why the killer cut out the hearts. . . . They’re not trophies.” And by the silence, she could tell that the chief had no ideas of his own or he would have shouted her down. He was waiting on her next words.
She let him wait, let him hang.
Seconds ticked by. Close to a minute. The phone went dead, but not with the sound of his usual slam-down to end all his dealings with underlings. No, this call ended with the quiet click of a receiver gently lowered to its cradle, and she could read much into that.
Apparently, the chief had worked it out.
Did it scare him much? Oh, yes.
6
Riker remembered when this small space had been occupied by a Xerox machine, a supply cabinet, and one old glitch-ridden desktop computer that had been abandoned here after its last breakdown. Over years of invasion, this place had been packed with technology, most of it alien.
Now it was the geek room. One large monitor had pride of place on the back wall, and three small ones lined a console of switches, slots and a keyboard. The computer screens were dark, but there was light; tiny points of it winked and blinked from the walls of stacked electronic gadgets that Riker could not name. It was all he could do to keep up with new models of laptops and cell phones. He seldom entered this room alone, and this morning, working on only four hours of sleep, he could not lose the idea that the machines were watching him, talking about him.
This was Mallory’s domain, hers even when she had been much shorter, when he was still allowed to call her Kathy and sometimes You Brat, Punk Kid and other terms of endearment for a child. This had been her playpen in the after-school hours until Lou Markowitz’s workday ended and he drove his foster child home to Brooklyn. The old man had thought it a bad idea to let his little darling wander among innocent people on the sidewalks of Manhattan—so many unprotected purses and pockets. One day, while Lou was on midget duty—cop lingo for watching the kid—he had thrown Kathy in here with a challenge to get the old crap computer back in working order. The city would give him no money for a good one, but the squad’s slush fund might cover a few new parts.
This little room had expanded into a universe of potential for a child with a natural bent for computers and online robbery. According to her foster father, the baby bandit had been almost giddy that day. So appealing was the idea of stealing pricey toys from the police, brand-new computers, a gang of them, via bogus electronic purchase orders. She had freely given all her loot to Lou—or Hey Cop, as she had called him then—with no bills to pay, not on hacker’s goods. Surprise! And so a little girl had hung the old man’s pension out in the breeze for a few nervous years of awaiting a summons from Internal Affairs.
Riker had first heard of the geek room when Kathy was in elementary school. He had been a captain then and on his way to a falling-down drunk who would soon fall from grace and rank. He had come to Special Crimes as a visitor on that day, kicking back, feet up on his best friend’s desk, just talking shop, when a detective had come in with a message for the squad’s commander. “Lou? The kid wants to see you . . . in her office.” And Lou Markowitz had laughed until tears squirted from his eyes.
Where was the grown-up Mallory this morning?
Riker read a line of digital numbers on one of her machines that gave him the time to the millisecond, and it was now five past nine. It was rare for the punctuality fanatic to be late by so much as a minute, and this put him on guard. And then he saw her. If not for her reflection in the dark computer screen, he would never have known she was coming up behind him to stop his heart with one hand, one poke of a finger or a word.
Not gonna jump this time. Without turning his head, he asked, “Whatcha got?”
“I found Albert Costello,” said Mallory.
“Where?”
“Don’t tell him.” Lieutenant Coffey’s voice came from the doorway. “Don’t ruin it. He’s gotta see it.” Riker spun the chair around to face the boss, who now pointed to a computer, saying, “She found him in there.”
—
TWO MORE DETECTIVES had entered the geek room to stand, shoulders squeezed to shoulders, behind Mallory’s chair with Lieutenant Coffey and Riker.
“That’s Albert Costello in the Hudson River,” she said, as the image of a floating body filled the wide-screen computer monitor.
“He was pulled out by three kids on a speedboat,” said Jack Coffey, for the benefit of the other men, who had not yet seen this feed. “Driving drunk out of their minds. One of them was so smashed he lowered the anchor. Then, the other two boys noticed it was slowing down the boat. So . . . up comes the anchor, and up comes Albert.”
The video had not picked up any conversation from the high-school boys in the boat, but there was a sound track. As the detectives watched the corpse being pulled aboard like a great floppy fish, they listened to the a cappella lyrics of an old children’s song sung in rounds, Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Albert’s body was seated at the back, and, with help from his new friends, the dead man waved to the viewers.
“No rigor yet,” said Detective Gonzales.
“That comes later,” said Jack Coffey, “after the kids pose him at the other end of the boat. Albert was in full rigor when the ME’s crew got to the pier. They had to pry the old man loose. He had a death grip on the steering wheel and a beer bottle in the other hand . . . while smoking a cigarette . . . while dead.”
“Well, that’s the way I wanna go out,” said Riker.
All the while, the voices on the sound track sang in the sweet, pure notes of young tenors, each line of lyrics riding over the last and the next, blending in perfect three-part harmony, the end of the song forever chasing its beginning.
“I bet their parents sobered ’em up real fast,” said Gonzales. “No way those little punks could make that sound track three sheets to the wind.”
All through the video, the boys sang, “Row, row, row your boat—”
They took turns posing for cell-phone pictures, mementos of each one of them with arms wrapped round their good buddy, the drowned man.
“—gently down the stream—”
O
ne boy put a cigarette in Albert’s mouth, and then the youngster thoughtfully relit it when the corpse lacked sufficient breath to keep the butt burning.
“—merrily, merrily, merrily merrily—”
Another boy forced the old man’s lips into a surprisingly lifelike grin. Finally, Albert Costello looked like he was enjoying the party, and they propped him up behind the wheel.
“—Life is but a dream.”
Now these ancient lyrics were followed by new and obscene improvisations that praised the stamina of the old man’s genitalia and his ability to hold his liquor despite the infirmity of death.
“Ya know?” said Riker. “They don’t sing bad.”
“There’s a reason for that,” said Mallory. “These kids hooked up at their local church when they were ten-year-olds.”
“Choirboys?”
“Yeah,” said Lieutenant Coffey. “Ya gotta love it.”
And Riker did. Good for you, Albert. Not a bad sendoff for a lonely old man.
“Here’s the best part,” said Mallory. “If our perp was only cleaning up a loose end, there were easier ways to kill Albert Costello. But he can’t have another murder on that street, right? That won’t fit the pattern. So Costello gets tossed in the river. A staged suicide gets an obit in the papers, and then it’s forgotten. But now the old man’s gone viral. Over a hundred thousand hits on this video.”
Riker was liking this more and more. “If our guy’s Internet-savvy, his head’s exploding right now.” And if he was a computer illiterate? No problem. A televised media circus was guaranteed. Then their killer could watch his mistake expand into a broadcast-news miniseries with a catchy theme song.
—
JONAH HAD FINISHED his breakfast of saltines, but with a spread of peanut butter this morning. His stomach was less queasy, and it was easier to keep his crackers down.
He sat on the couch across the room from the talk of traffic patterns on the television set. Now the volume was turned off, a cue for more conversation from the man seated beside him.
Early lessons of Aunt Angie: Sometimes people talked with only their faces and their eyes. Be careful what you say to them with yours.
He knew what she had meant by that. Back when they had lived with his grandmother, emotion would rearrange his face. He had tried not to give away his fear. Granny liked that too much. Whenever he had been left alone with the old woman, when he felt her hands on him, he would smile and say her magic words, Pray with me. And the meanness would turn to pain-free rants of Praise the Lord, while he waited for the sound of bells to climb the stairs, a jingling that would say to him, Hold on! I’m coming! Aunt Angie was coming to carry him away.
But not this time.
Jonah knew his face was showing only curiosity, and it was genuine. He wondered what this monster’s magic words might be.
A click, a fume of smoke, a sigh, and Cigarette Man said, “I still can’t wrap my head around the idea of seein’ nothin’. How do you know, anyway? How could you know what nothin’ looks like?”
Jonah found the man’s voice calm enough, reasonable. There was nothing to be afraid of yet. “Ask me anything about eyes. Yours. Mine. I got it wired.”
This was not quite true. There were still bridges to cross. In his preschool days, he had spent hours sitting on Aunt Angie’s lap while she plugged all his questions into a computer at the public library. His curiosity had continued after she left him, but now he had a computer that could talk and listen. Sometimes at night, alone in his room, he would ask for a link, and his electronic oracle would guide him to a room in the ether were other explorers gathered, those who wanted to know what blindness was like—or what it was like to see. Building bridges in the night.
“I know how your eyes work,” said Jonah. “They don’t show you anything. They’re a one-way road of data. They can only feed the brain raw information. Then the brain sends it to three different places and makes it into pictures of what’s right in front of you. If the brain gets scrambled, so does the picture. Every day, every time you open your eyes, you’re going on faith.”
“Naw, I know what I see.”
“You see in your dreams, right? You think that stuff’s real? No, it’s all lies from the same picture factory inside your head. It lies to you when you’re asleep. And when you’re awake? Tell me you never saw something that just couldn’t be there.”
Jonah could feel the silence. It was cold. It was bad. And this conversation was so over. He had said the wrong thing, but what?
Cigarette Man turned on the television’s volume in the middle of a broadcaster’s sentence about a drowned man. Then the TV voice was killed. And there was a sound of rapid tapping. Typing? Yes, the man was working at a keyboard on his lap and mumbling obscenities in the long stream of a single breath. The tapping stopped. The laptop sang.
Jonah knew that old tune. Row, row, row your—
“Damn it!” ended a string of curse words, and the laptop was closed with a hard slap on the lid. Heavy feet stalked away. The panting from the low-lying mouth-breather was dying off as the dog also left the room, toenails clicking, trailing its master over a patch of uncarpeted floor.
After a slow count of ten, a distant door slammed, and Jonah rose from the couch with a plan to walk the walls and find another door, one that would let him out of this place. His hands outstretched, only five steps across the room, the dog’s toenails came clipping back to him across hard floor. Then only wheezing as the dog traveled over the rug.
The animal growled. The boy backed up to the sofa and sat down.
The pit bull was in front of him. Hot breath snuffing one of the sneakers. Slobbering on it. The jaws closed on it—and squeezed. Jonah stiffened. His crackers were creeping up his throat. He waited for the teeth to penetrate the leather, but now his foot was pulled straight out and shaken in the dog’s teeth. Frenzied, furious, the animal tugged at the sneaker and pulled it free. Jonah’s naked foot dangled in the air. He dared not move or draw a breath, though he followed the dog’s heavy breathing as it trailed off, but not far.
And now the chomp-down noise of the pit bull biting into the running shoe that stank of a foot.
Chewing it.
Loving it.
—
RIKER LEANED against the door frame and said to his boss, “We got good news—and good news.”
Mallory stepped into the lieutenant’s office to lay a sheet of paper on his desk. “That’s Albert Costello’s bloodwork.”
Suspicious, Jack Coffey stared at the report from the Medical Examiner’s Office. “We got the old man’s body back from Jersey? That was quick.” Too quick.
“No,” said Riker. “That’s from an old sample. After Albert got mugged, he spent a few days in a hospital. They took a vial of his blood in the emergency room.”
“But it was never tested.” Mallory moved toward the television set in the corner. “Dr. Slope had the blood sample picked up last night. It’s positive for the livestock drug—a match to the carjack victim in Jersey.”
“There was no date-rape drug in Albert’s system,” said Riker. “But we figure that’s ’cause the old guy was on the original hit list—before our perp screwed up and killed the nun. So Albert only got the injection to drop him. Nothin’ to wipe his memory.”
“And that’s why he had to die.” Mallory picked up the remote control for the muted TV set in the corner. It was tuned in to the city news channel. “We know the killer spent time with him yesterday. He’d want to know if Costello remembered anything about the botched hit.” She pulled out her gold pocket watch, a hand-me-down from three generations of police in the Markowitz line. In times of trouble with the boss, she used this prop to remind him that she was from a family of cop royalty. But today she actually seemed to have an interest in the time.
Jack Coffey knew she was planning some kind of a bomb for
him, and now his eyes were trained on the TV screen. “Very nice,” he said. “In theory. So you got a tie to the carjack lady, but nothing connects to the body dump at Gracie Mansion. All four of ’em were drug-free.”
“Sure they were,” she said. “Three of them were kept alive long enough for the drugs to clear their systems. He didn’t need any drugs for the nun. She died a minute after she met him.” And now, in the tone of Oh, and by the way, she added, “We need a warrant to search Gracie Mansion.”
Oh, right. “Not a shot in hell. I know what happened between you and the chief of Ds. So I’m guessing Goddard’s behind a memo from the deputy commissioner.” Coffey tapped his laptop, the source of the memo. “An email was sent to Heller, and he copied it to me. It says the mansion’s interior is off-limits to the CSU.” And this had surprised the man in charge of the Crime Scene Unit—since he had never planned to send his CSI’s inside, not until he saw that KEEP OUT sign among his morning emails.
“That sounds like the chief’s work,” said Mallory, “but you won’t be butting heads with Goddard anymore.”
Riker chimed in with “That’s the other good news.”
On this cue, Mallory closed her pocket watch and turned on the volume for the television as an anchorman said, “—aired earlier this morning.”
Jack Coffey watched a recycled news clip of reporters outside One Police Plaza, the headquarters of the NYPD. On camera, a reporter spoke to his anchorman, saying that the chief of detectives was unavailable for comment on the Gracie Mansion murders. “Chief Goddard is currently on vacation in parts unknown . . . for an undetermined time.”
How dirty could the mayor be to run the chief of Ds out of town? Well, this could open the door to Gracie Mansion. Just the smell of it would kill objections from higher-ups in the NYPD. “Okay, you’ll get that warrant.” Obtaining it would fall to the district attorney, an elected official, not a mayoral appointment—and the DA hated that little prick, Andrew Polk. “It might not happen today.” It would still require careful judge-trawling to snag a magistrate who would sign off on a search of the mayor’s residence.
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