Blind Sight

by Carol O'Connell

After he had disappeared into the delicatessen across the street, Zelda remained near the door to the police station. Charles Butler was not the one she had wanted. She waited for the other one.

  —

  RIKER SAT DOWN beside Jack Coffey in the watchers’ room, and he turned up the volume for the interrogation on the other side of the glass, where Susan Chase, tired of being ignored, had just demanded to know why Charles Butler was released.

  “He’s been cleared,” said Mallory, without looking up from her paperwork. “He had his accountant fax us five years of tax returns. No FBARs. We don’t think he was hiding offshore assets.”

  Jack Coffey turned to the detective beside him. “No what bars?”

  “FBARs,” said Riker. “F, as in, you’re fucked if you didn’t report an offshore account. Mallory says, if these people wanted to hide Polk’s hush money from the SEC—and they did—that cash had to spend at least six minutes in undeclared accounts.”

  “Why are they smiling at her?”

  “They think cops are stupid. It also means their accounts were in countries with no U.S. tax treaties. By now that money’s somewhere else, maybe three shell corporations removed from their names.”

  In the next room, Mallory was saying, “It’s amazing how many ways there are to distance yourself from your money. Some are even close to legal. Offshore hedge funds, trusts. But let’s say you had an offshore account of your own . . . and you lied about it. A lie to a federal agent—about anything—that’s jail time. So before we invite the feds in,” she said, as if that would ever happen, “would any of you like to volunteer undeclared assets? . . . No? . . . Your attorneys are still downstairs. Would anyone like to lawyer up?”

  Three hands were raised.

  In the watchers’ room, Riker said, “That means everybody’s dodgy.”

  “Okay,” said Jack Coffey, “I’m losing the drift. Didn’t the feds interview the investors?”

  “Yeah, all of ’em, years ago.”

  “If they’d squeezed hard enough, one of them should’ve caved by now and implicated Polk.”

  “Well, the feds didn’t try all that hard. Polk ran a sweet scam, smart as they come.” Because Riker knew his boss played the ponies, he opted for racing parlance. “Say that old stock deal’s a nag in the Derby, okay? Polk’s been juicin’ that horse to make it run real fast, and now it’s a favorite to win. But him and his buddies at Banter Capital, they got long-shot bets against that win. So Polk’s horse is outta the chute, and he tips off the feds on the fixed race. Then the government boys show up . . . and shoot that nag before it crosses the finish line.”

  “That’s why the SEC let him skate with that settlement deal? He embarrassed the crap out of them?”

  “Oh, yeah. He couldn’t have done it without ’em. . . . Polk could only win with a dead horse.”

  —

  THE LAWYERS FILED INTO the interrogation room to pair up with their clients, and the peepshow was over for Jack Coffey.

  He walked down the hall to the incident room, where, only this morning, every bit of paper had been fixed to the cork in neat rows of perfect alignment. But now lopsided notes, photos and layered sheets of text gathered by the rest of the squad had spread around the walls. Mallory’s walls. Oh, the horror. The lieutenant watched her move from one crooked sheet of paper to another, righting every wrong-hanging thing in her path.

  Quiet, stealthy, he crept up behind her. “So the investors—where did that get us?”

  Unsurprised, she never lost her momentum of pins and papers. “If Polk goes to jail for insider trading, those people go down, too. It’s all about complicity in bad acts. He lied to the feds, but so did every—”

  “I got that. And this ties to murder and kidnapping . . . how?”

  “The hit man’s client is using Polk’s own playbook. If the perp goes down, he takes the mayor with him in a plea bargain. That was probably spelled out in the ransom demand.”

  Coffey nodded, as if this made sense—as if he did not plan to nail her for a money motive based on a probability shored up by a string of ifs. “So . . . if the killer is one of those investors, and if he gets caught hiring out the kills—”

  “He—can—take—down—Andrew—Polk!” Her last pin was stabbed into the cork wall. “And that’s how I know the hit man’s client is one of the investors . . . because Polk doesn’t want him caught.”

  Very nice—almost a perfect fit for the mayor’s lies and lack of cooperation. Almost. The lieutenant tapped the picture of Dwayne Brox. “So what’s he doing on the list? Polk can’t be worried about this one. Riker told me Brox’s parents were the only ones who could’ve signed the nondisclosure. And they’re both dead. So their kid’s got no leverage on Polk—unless Mom and Dad put a confession in writing. What are the odds on that?”

  Riker joined them at the wall, maybe sensing that he was needed to referee. The giveaway clue would be the way his partner and the lieutenant were squaring off as Mallory said, “That logic only works if the mayor knows which investor’s doing this to him. You think those ransom notes were signed? Give me those odds.”

  Good one. Totally humiliating. But Coffey was up for a counter-strike. “Even if everybody’s got offshore accounts—what’s that worth? Nothing. We’ll never know if a ransom gets paid or who—”

  “A ransom can’t get paid that way.” Mallory ever so slightly raised her eyebrows.

  And he knew—HE KNEW—she was asking if he had given up all hope of shielding himself from her forays into other people’s computers. This time, he would have to agree to be punched in the teeth. And so he said, “Okay, talk to me.”

  Riker wisely drifted away from this conversation.

  Mallory picked up a glass jar from the evidence table and emptied more pins into her right hand, a lot of them, a messy nest of sharp points. “The feds still want to get Polk on something, tax evasion—anything at all. It’s a vendetta with them. They watch every online keystroke he makes, every dollar he’s got.”

  “But they can’t track offshore—”

  “Onshore, offshore—bank secrecy’s eroding all over the planet. Polk cleaned out the hinky accounts years ago . . . and he probably mentioned that to his lawyer.” She idly hefted the ball of sharp pins in her right hand, perhaps waiting for her boss to pursue the probability that she would know that for a fact.

  No way in hell. He did not want to—

  Mallory tightly fisted the hand that held the nest of stick-out pins. Christ, that had to hurt like mad. He could not tell by her face, and he could not tell her to stop that. He would not own up to being freaked out. But she knew it. She loved it. And she did have his focused attention, a guarantee that there would be no need to repeat herself one more time. She hated that.

  “Polk’s got the profits from his stock scam, all of it legally laundered and invested,” she said, so calmly, as if she had not been stabbed at least forty times by the fisted pins. “Now the mayor’s set for life, and the feds can’t touch him. So he could open a new offshore account. That only takes twenty minutes, but—”

  “If he moved a large chunk of cash, the feds would catch it.” And they would have all the access numbers to follow that electronic breadcrumb trail. “The SEC might be real happy to share that with us.”

  “Right. And Polk knows he lives in the goldfish bowl.”

  Coffey cadged a quick look at her fist. No blood yet, but he half expected a pin to poke through her skin. “Then there’s no way our perp can get his payoff from the mayor.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” And she would not say more. On this last tantalizing note, Mallory turned back to her work on the wall, jamming pins into paper and cork, so happy to leave him dangling.

  She cheated! Those pins had never been in her fist. They rested, unbloodied, in the palm of her other hand.

  His chance to wring her neck wa
s lost as more detectives entered the room to see Mallory’s improvements on the walls—and something new. One wide, insanely neat swath of paper had been added for the hit man. Two items had center place, the tattoo artist’s sketch and a large map of New Jersey, though the carjacking of Elly Cathery was hardly proof of the hit man’s home state.

  Coffey stepped up to this patch of the wall to stand with Riker and two other men.

  Lonahan was reading Mallory’s profile notes. “Our guy smokes cigarettes?”

  “Yeah,” said Riker. “He policed his butts in Albert Costello’s apartment.” And when it looked like he was up for a challenge on this, he said, “The perp polished an ashtray, one ashtray out of ten. Costello never washed anything—ever.”

  “Okay, good enough,” said Gonzales. “But what makes you think he owns a pit bull and a Jaguar?”

  A sag to Riker’s shoulders told all of them that his partner had held out on him.

  “I got that from the monastery’s prioress,” said Mallory.

  Jack Coffey did not recall that witness statement crossing his desk, and might there be a reason for that oversight? Should he ask Mallory how much ugly pressure it had taken to get that head nun to snitch on one of her own kind? No, perhaps not.

  “The prioress told me a pit bull wandered onto the grounds. Very sweet dog. No aggression. Angie Quill was the only one to run away. She wouldn’t go outside for days after that. Always at the windows. Watching the woods. Then the nuns got a call from the pit bull’s owners, people on neighboring land. So the dog’s still on the property, but now Angie thinks it’s safe to go outside. . . . I say she knew our hit man, and the minute she saw that dog, she thought he’d found her.”

  Gonzales nodded to admit that this was strangely plausible. “And the Jaguar?”

  “The nuns grow their own food. Not a little vegetable garden. A crop field. When Angie volunteered to run the tractor, she told them she learned to drive stick-shift in an old Jaguar. That gets more interesting if you know that Mrs. Quill and her son had no idea she could drive or where she’d get her hands on a car like that. Works nicely with a prostitute’s steady customer. She’d never mention him, either.”

  “No way.” Gonzales shook his head. “There’s gotta be a million Jags in New Jersey.” And, based on something so flimsy, he was sure as hell not going to—

  “Pastrami on rye?”

  Charles Butler walked in with a large brown paper bag from the delicatessen across the street, and Gonzales was distracted by the sandwich held out to him. As the deli bag was passed among the others, the psychologist mentioned running into an investor on the sidewalk, though not one from their shortlist. “Zelda Oxly all but confirmed Polk’s scam. Actually, that’s more of an inference drawn from—”

  “Close enough,” said Coffey. “We can use that to lean on her.”

  “I doubt it,” said Charles. “Zelda’s fearless beyond imagination. You have no idea how frightening that woman can be.”

  “Right,” said Mallory, as if she might think that worth jotting down. “So, after talking to you, did this woman leave? Or did she hang out on the sidewalk, maybe waiting for someone else?”

  —

  “I HAVEN’T SEEN you since the funeral,” said Zelda Oxly. But when Dwayne turned her way, he was looking beyond her or maybe around her, as if she merely blocked his line of vision. Weird—but he had always been an interesting little shit.

  Young Brox stood at the center of his front room, one of seventeen. Zelda knew every detail of this apartment, the square footage and every amenity. The view was incomparable. She approached a wall of floor-to-ceiling window glass to admire the panorama of Central Park. At her feet, there were depressions in the rug that would fit the legs of a missing grand piano. On one plaster wall, large rectangular shapes of lighter paint had picture hooks at their centers. So Dwayne had sold his parents’ art collection, too. And had he burned through all of their restitution money from Andrew Polk? Or was he simply at a loss as to how he might liquidate an offshore hedge fund?

  She could help with that.

  Zelda gave the young orphan a benevolent smile. “You’re behind on your mortgage payments. Such a big mortgage. . . . I keep tabs. Did you know your father and I were in a bidding war for this apartment? When he lost all that money, I was rather hoping he’d put the place back on the market.”

  “So you dropped by to discuss real estate?”

  “No, dear. I came to talk about the unspeakable things.”

  18

  Zelda Oxly was in a rare good mood as she passed by the liveried doorman for Dwayne Brox’s apartment building. Smiling broadly, she stood on the sidewalk and—

  Ah, there he was. Her chauffeur, Leaman, waited by the rear door of the limousine, holding it open. There was no word of warning, and he would pay for that. She had one foot inside the car before she saw the uninvited passenger, a young woman who was too preoccupied with papers in hand to even acknowledge the owner of the damn car! Everything about this stranger spoke to money—even the designer blue jeans, dark blue, obviously dry-cleaned. And her hair—the cut was fabulous. Zelda made a mental note to get the name of the stylist.

  But first, “Who the hell are you?”

  The young blonde raised her face. Such cold eyes—electric green, machine green. The interloper reached out to tap the intercom below the wide panel of privacy glass.

  Lovely manicure.

  “Circle the block,” said the blonde to the chauffeur, and though there was zero inflection in her voice, Leaman was all too eager to please her, pulling away from the curb on command. Turning back to Zelda, she said, “That’s all the time I’m giving you. Once around the block.” And now to answer the question of her identity, she pulled back her blazer to display a very large gun in a shoulder holster—a calling card of sorts.

  “So you’re a cop. And what should I call you?”

  “Mallory, just Mallory.” She handed over a sheet of paper. “So, Zelda—”

  “Miss Oxly,” she said, correcting the young— Oh, bloody hell! This was a copy of Andrew Polk’s nondisclosure agreement. It was neither signed nor addressed, but—

  “I’m sure Dwayne Brox has one of those sheets,” said Mallory. “Part of his parents’ estate. So it’s not binding on him. That made Dwayne a weak link in the restitution deal. And that worried you, didn’t it . . . Zelda?”

  Yes, but no more.

  Not until Mallory said, “But Brox isn’t a problem now. When you came out of his building, you were just too pleased with yourself. Before his parents died, they didn’t tell him anything about Polk’s problem with the SEC, right? Nothing in writing?”

  No, and even if Dwayne had read their nondisclosure agreement, it covered only a year of client conversations with his parents’ broker—neatly protecting the one conversation that could hang Andrew Polk. So this cop was running a bluff based on nothing more than a satisfied smile after leaving Dwayne’s company. What damage could this possibly—

  Zelda’s musings came to an abrupt end.

  In answer to no question voiced aloud, the young mind reader said, “I’ve been going over Polk’s old brokerage transactions. All those hinky tax dodges he told you were legal? . . . They’re not. They’re called Dodge by Custom. IRS customarily ignores them. You think that’ll save you if you lie to me the way you lied to the feds?”

  Another bluff? It was not a very good one. There was a reason why God made so many tax attorneys.

  “You declared a loss for the stock scam—even though you got full restitution. But never mind tax fraud,” said Mallory. “My favorite charge is conspiracy.”

  Instantly deflated, every sip of air sucked out of her, Zelda waited for the blonde to demand details of the crucial broker’s conversation. When no such thing was asked of her, she began to count up her misdeeds in earnest. What else might this cop already know?
And what interest could the police have in tax matters—unless that old swindle tied into something bigger, uglier. Zelda took a tentative step outside a world that revolved around only her own concerns, and—crash!—she smashed up against murder and kidnapping. And like any accident victim, she felt a clammy knot in her chest and a sudden coldness on a warm summer day.

  The limousine had completed its circuit of the block, and the detective pressed the intercom button to say, “Leaman, pull over.” And to Zelda she said, “Your chauffeur tells me you have an appointment with Andrew Polk. Cancel it. Now! . . . You’re not going to feed the mayor any insider information about today, nothing on Brox or anyone else. Don’t cross me. I’ll know if you do. A little boy will die. . . . I’ll come after you. . . . Any questions?”

  Noooo, not a one.

  —

  THE BOY had to die tonight. That part of the conversation was plainspoken.

  “Yes, I can fill that order.” While Gail Rawly talked back to his cell phone in code words and tones of dry business, the little princess sat on his desk, pouring invisible tea into tiny plastic cups. “Huh?”

  A catch? A change of plan? Of all the idiotic—

  A bonus! “How much?” The promised amount would put him close to his figure for retiring to the bolthole in Costa Rica. Beach house, I hear you calling me. “Sure. That’s doable.” Gail winked at his daughter and set down his little teacup to write out the new drop site for the heart of another child. “Got it.”

  And—click—the conversation was over.

  Gail waited with endless patience until Princess Patty grew tired of pretend tea for two and wandered out of his den, dragging her favorite doll by its hair. After dropping the client burner in the top drawer of his desk, he picked up the one used exclusively for calling his partner.

  Iggy Conroy answered on the first ring with the same old salutation, “Yeah!”

  “Do the kid tonight.” Gail counted ten seconds of silence. “This isn’t a problem, is it?” Had the boy become a pet—or was he already dead?