Blind Sight

by Carol O'Connell

  And held it.

  With no idea of how much time was passing, Mallory was lost in two dimensions of glossy black and white.

  16

  Harold Quill was officially in protective custody, but no one had found it necessary to apprise him of this.

  Days ago, he had ceased to haunt his own Upper East Side precinct, and now he was a round-the-clock guest of the SoHo station house. Given a shower in the downstairs locker room, he smelled better today, and a clean sweat suit had been found to fit him. But he was still unshaven. Razors were too difficult to manage just yet. The poor rich man, with no coins for the snack machine, had been fed from deli bags, and he was always wide-eyed, jazzed on cophouse coffee.

  With no knock on the door, he entered the lieutenant’s private office, lured there by the glow of the television set. Ignoring the man behind the desk, Quill pulled up a chair in front of the screen and flicked through the channels. Apparently, even zombies could work a remote control.

  It was always a mistake to let him watch TV, but Jack Coffey never sent him away.

  Quill found a channel for what passed as network news, and today’s guest for bullshit and coffee was a fiction writer touted as an expert on kidnapped children. This was not a great improvement over the star of an FBI shoot-’em-up movie, who had appeared in yesterday’s segment as the voice of law enforcement.

  The lieutenant turned to face his second visitor. Finally, Mallory had decided to put in an appearance. She stood in the open doorway, holding a shoebox in her hands and staring at the back of Quill’s head. Clearly, she wanted that man squashed underfoot and swept out like a bug.

  Something had changed.

  What was in that box? The lieutenant would not ask, in hopes that his lack of interest would spoil her fun. Without a word said, no explanation for showing up late to work, she turned and walked back to her desk in the squad room, where she handed the shoebox off to Janos.

  Quill looked away from the TV screen to ask, “It’s true? The more time that passes, the less chance I’ve got of getting Jonah back?”

  Yes, the idiot onscreen had gotten that part right, but Jack Coffey said, “He’s full of shit,” and that was also true. “Sometimes years go by and the kids come back.” Every rare once in a while, such things did happen, but this time there could be no happy ending.

  Harold Quill was suddenly drawn to the window that looked out on the squad room. Coffey followed the track of the man’s startled eyes to see Father DuPont carrying a suitcase toward Mallory’s desk.

  “You know that priest, right?”

  “No, I’ve never seen him before.” Quill turned back to the TV set, missing the surprise on the lieutenant’s face.

  Maybe it was not in the nature of zombies to tell convincing lies.

  —

  FATHER DUPONT set his suitcase on the floor. “I’ve been reassigned to a little town in North Dakota. I’m told the Catholics are wildly outnumbered by buffalo. . . . Can I stand the excitement?”

  “So you screwed up,” said Mallory.

  “I did.” Yet he smiled as he sat down in the visitor’s chair. “Cardinal Rice seems a bit fuzzy about granting permission for the nuns to leave their monastery. Also, he can’t recall slighting their bishop, leaving him out of the chain of command. That caused a few hard feelings between them. And the cardinal has no memory of chartering a bus to bring the nuns to the city, but he did authorize me to pay the bill . . . as my last act in his service.”

  “I was wrong about you,” said Mallory. “You never had the makings of a good con artist.”

  “My father was terrible at it. He got caught, too. Dad went to prison when I was a kid . . . but I’m sure you already knew that.”

  She did. “Even the prioress was onto you, but I don’t think she ratted you out.” Mallory had dug his pit for him, but he had fallen in without so much as a push. Like father, like son. She had counted on incompetence, knowing from the onset that this scheme could end no other way.

  “Well, Detective, was the prioress at all helpful?”

  “Yes. Now I’m damn sure our killer was a john from Angie’s hooker days. . . . But you already knew that.”

  During her time in the confessional, the prioress had not been able to supply anything as useful as a name or address. Angie Quill had never given up details like that—or how the dangerous man in her life made his living. But the girl would have told everything to this priest. And, still, DuPont would give up nothing helpful.

  Bastard.

  “What’s left of Angie’s family . . . I’ll keep them safe,” she said. A deal was a deal: a promise of protection in exchange for the no-questions-asked delivery of a prioress.

  That must have been an interesting ethical dilemma for a priest. He had to know why she wanted to get at that old woman outside the shelter of monastery walls: The prioress might say what he could not. And Mallory could have tortured that frail nun all night long if she had wanted to—while the priest’s vows remained unbroken. That was integrity? No, and they both knew it. And the prioress—she knew it, too.

  “Do you think the boy’s still alive?” Quiet seconds later, Father DuPont was subdued by the understanding that, if he anticipated hope—from her—he would wait forever. He rose from the chair and picked up his suitcase.

  They were done.

  And he was off to do penance among the buffalo.

  —

  JANOS ENTERED the interrogation room with the shoebox found hidden in Harold Quill’s closet. He removed the lid to show the man what was inside, and asked, “You got any more of these stashed away?”

  Surprised, Harold Quill shook his head. “No, that’s all I have left. I hid them under my mattress when I was a kid—so my mother couldn’t butcher them. They were mine.” He reached out for the stolen shoebox, but Janos set it down on the other side of the table.

  Were the contents still precious to Quill, or did the man understand what this covert stash of family snapshots said to the police? “So you were the family photographer, huh?”

  Quill nodded and resumed his study of the other photographs, the ones in the album retrieved from his mother’s apartment. He turned the pages of mutilated faces stabbed away with scissors and knives. “Crazy old woman. I was lucky to save anything.” He pointed to a figure in the background of one picture. “This guy used to follow Angie around the neighborhood. She called him her puppy.” He glanced at the tattoo artist’s sketch of their suspect. “But he was nothing like that guy.”

  Janos doubted that they would identify Angie’s steady customer this way. The squad had counted on Mallory to beat the living crap out of that priest until he gave up what he knew, but evidently she was off her stride. And so, on to the fallback game, the torture of Uncle Harry. Janos had been looking forward to this. “Mallory says you got lots of photographs on your walls. Mostly pictures of you and the kid. All the shots of your sister were hidden in the closet.”

  Quill kept turning album pages, pretending not to hear this.

  Janos emptied the shoebox on the table and sorted the loose photographs into a timeline. Every face was still intact, rescued from Mrs. Quill’s knife work. In one sidewalk shot, a schoolgirl posed with a baby in her arms. By the age of the nephew, he knew this was a portrait of Angie at thirteen. She looked so tired. Was she already selling her body on the street? A very pretty kid. In the background, the eyes of grown men were fixed on her. The little nephew figured in most of the pictures. By Christmas trees and haircuts and tricycle rides, the boy grew inches taller, shot to shot, too heavy for her to carry anymore. He would have been five years old when the backdrop of St. Marks Place disappeared from the shots. Two more years were pictured here before his aunt vanished from the family photos, and Jonah posed alone.

  “I don’t see any pictures of the monastery here.” Janos’s face expressed curiosity, though he already k
new the answer when he asked, “Maybe you got some on your phone or your laptop?” Mallory had already checked the man’s electronic picture galleries and come up dry. “I looked at the nuns’ website. I know they got visiting days. You took the kid up there to visit his aunt, right?”

  Uncle Harry, the camera bug, had recorded every missing baby tooth and even Jonah’s visits to the dentist. Yet now the man looked up at him, dumbstruck at first, as if this absence of monastery photographs might be hard to explain. “Well, we only went up there around the holidays.”

  Yeah, sure you did.

  “Funny thing,” said the detective, “I talked to Jonah’s friends. They didn’t know his aunt was a nun. They didn’t know he had an aunt. You told your nephew not to tell anybody. Is that right?”

  Quill squirmed.

  Janos leaned across the table. “That was your scary little secret for years, wasn’t it? You knew about that hit man all along. But you don’t tell us? Do you know how stupid that is?”

  —

  FATHER DUPONT sat at the airport bar, drinking a glass of wine. While awaiting the boarding call for his plane to North Dakota, he knitted an imaginary hair shirt as a component to self-flagellation.

  He had known that girl for years, and he had never known her at all.

  Who was Angie Quill?

  She had acted her age only one time—for the cop who had brought her in for that first counseling session. As the officer was leaving, pulling the door shut behind him, her childlike affect had slipped away. That first time alone with her, what the priest remembered best were her full lips. Wet. Licked in anticipation. What did he have that she might want? And she had given him a knowing smile that day, a hooker’s understanding of what any man might want in return.

  For their next meeting, Angie had brought Jonah along as her living proof of hooking for day-care money, and all her words had been softly couched in kindness, no tones or looks of seduction that might taint the infant on her lap. He could still see her wearing that Madonna face of motherlove.

  On days reserved for family counseling, Angie’s mother had never bothered to appear. But the brother had shown up once, a bit late and sullen, a generic teenager. Though Harry was the older sibling, he had minded Angie in matters of cussing and sitting up straight in his chair. She had been Harry’s drill sergeant of good manners that included a thank-you to the priest for scholarship money.

  She had been someone else again, another stranger, when she opened the door for his home visit, his interview with the monstrous Mrs. Quill. Angie had played asylum-keeper that day, so skillful at ducking smacks and thrown objects, diverting the religious zealot’s tantrums into sane responses for the priest’s questionnaire. His mission that afternoon had been to determine the fitness of the home.

  Father DuPont winced, drained his glass, and asked the bartender for another.

  Angie’s survival had depended on splitting herself into fraudulent pieces—like the time he had appeared with her in court to request that another arrest for prostitution be set aside. That time, she was fifteen years old and acting the part of the clean-scrubbed young penitent, a winning act for the judge.

  Poor fractured baby, going nowhere on a carousel of ever-changing personalities. Had there been even one that she could have called her own?

  It would not be the persona that she had created for her interview at the monastery. That day, her face had been radiant with false piety. Years of reports from the prioress had yielded nothing but praise for the young acolyte, and so he knew that Angie had been stuck with that face until—

  She must have been so tired when she died.

  —

  MALLORY ENTERED the interrogation room and settled into a chair beside Janos. Eyes fixed on Harold Quill and faking curiosity, she said, “If word got out that Father DuPont knew about the hit man, he’d be dead, right? That’s why you lied to Lieutenant Coffey—told him you’d never seen that priest before? You were protecting DuPont?”

  This gave Quill a plausible out, but he only sat there shaking his head, playing the baffled idiot who knew nothing of priests or hired killers.

  And that was going to stop. Right now.

  “When your sister was in the monastery, she had one family visit. One . . . in five years.” Mallory banged her fist on the table, just to see the man jump, and he did. “Everybody lies to us! You want your nephew to die!”

  “No! God, no. When Angie said she was going to be a nun, I-I—”

  “You didn’t believe her,” said Detective Janos. “Because she was scared? Maybe packing her bags on the fly?”

  “Yes. . . . What was I supposed to think? After my sister left, months went by. No letters, no phone calls. I knew she was still tight with the priest, so I went to Father DuPont. I told him I’d tear down the whole damn church if he didn’t tell me where she was. He wouldn’t say anything, but he made a phone call. And then he drove me and Jonah upstate to the monastery.”

  “So Angie could tell you not to shoot off your mouth anymore,” said Janos.

  “Yes, but not in front of Jonah. She put it all in a letter. I had to read it and give it back to her before we left. That’s how scared she was. So . . . no more visits. That was her idea. We moved after that, me and Jonah, when I came into money. Nicer building. Good security.” His voice cracked. “We should’ve left New York. Maybe left the country. It’s all my—”

  “Never mind that,” said Mallory, all her anger switched off as a reward. “What else can you tell us about Angie’s—”

  “Did my son tell you she was a whore?”

  Harold Quill turned to the door as Riker escorted his mother into the room. “Shut your goddamn mouth! She put food on your table!”

  “And she earned the money on her back, legs in the air.” The harpy’s loud laughter finally tapered off into giggles and coughs. “Oh, Lord,” she said. Out of breath now, Mrs. Quill graced her son with a malevolent smile. “My daughter . . . the nun.”

  Her laughter erupted again. The fun just went on and on.

  —

  JACK COFFEY turned to Charles Butler, who sat beside him in the watchers’ room. “Mallory says Mrs. Quill is bat-shit crazy.”

  “Based on what? A lack of maternal instinct? Did you know that researchers believe they’ve isolated a mommy gene? It’s triggered by ER alpha waves in the preoptic area of the brain. A genetic marker for good parenting—in mice.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Quill has no mommy gene.” The lieutenant made a rolling motion with one hand, silently begging this man to get on with it. “And?”

  “And neither is she a mouse. So far, I’d say she’s just . . . ugly mother material.”

  —

  “HELLO, DEARIE.” Mrs. Quill sat down in the chair beside Mallory’s, singling out the young detective as the one best liked in this company, which included her son. “What can I do for you?”

  “We have some pictures for you to look at.” Mallory arranged a slew of old sidewalk photographs into a neat display, too neat, each one perfectly aligned and equidistant from surrounding shots. She did this as fast as her partner could deal from a deck of cards.

  Riker knew a ruler would tell him that the first row of photos were lined up exactly an inch from the edge of the table. Was Mallory even aware of doing things like this? At times, he thought it might be a parlor trick, played to a purpose—like now. He could see that Detective Janos was suppressing an urge to applaud, but he was also spooked by her, and so was the crazy lady’s son.

  Mallory invited Mrs. Quill to look over these old pictures in a spread of years on St. Marks Place. “Tell me what you can about the faces in the background. Just the boys and men.”

  Mrs. Quill’s hand moved across the display, fingers spider-walking, and then she clutched one photo. “This boy—he wanted her. You can see it in his eyes.” She pointed an accusing finger at another
snapshot. “And that man there? Pervert. You know what he was thinking. Angie, too. That slut. That whore.” Her son laid down his head on folded arms, and she said to him, “Oh, poor thing. Tell the nice police lady you had no idea how Angie bought you that fancy education. Spreading her legs for every damn—”

  “Enough!” Harold Quill stood up too fast, knocking over his chair and jolting the table. “Okay, Mom. Why don’t I tell them what you did to Jonah.” He turned to Riker. “Mom favored old-fashioned diapers. She liked the pins—the screams. Angie and me, we couldn’t watch the baby every minute.”

  Riker nodded. “So you needed somebody else to change Jonah’s diapers when your kids were in school.” And Angie had worked the streets to pay for it. Was that how it started?

  “You’re a smoker, Mrs. Quill?” Mallory opened a dog-eared file, and a photograph lay on top of the city paperwork. Riker and Janos stared at the five-by-ten image of a little boy with marks on his back in the shape of a cross. Each angry red sore was the size of a lit cigarette. “That’s your work?” By Mallory’s tone of voice, she might be asking about the evil old bat’s prowess in needlepoint.

  Harold Quill answered for his mother. “Damn right. A social worker took that picture . . . so I could get custody of my nephew.”

  His mother leaned toward Mallory, speaking low, confidentially. “Nobody’d give little Jonah to Angie . . . ’cause she was a whore.” Grinning, she lowered her head to more closely admire the photograph—her handiwork on the skin of a five-year-old child. “Ah, Gabby’s boy. The son of another godless slut.” One finger traced the cross of cigarette burns in the picture, and her voice was so maddeningly reasonable when she said, “It had to be done.”

  Previously, it had never occurred to Riker that he might come to a point in life where he wanted to break a woman’s teeth with his foot. He smiled at the monster and gently covered one of her hands with his own. “Take another look at the pictures, ma’am. See any more faces you know?”