It Happens in the Dark - M11

by Caroll O'Connell

  The whole house had rocked throughout her childhood in their care.

  Early into her teens, she had learned to dance with partners her own age, to touch classmates without hurting them. However, Helen’s talking-to-boys lesson had been something of a failure. Her foster father had explained the flaw one spring night in Brooklyn while they sat outside on the front porch. A date had escorted her to a school dance, and she had come home alone. “It’s not your fault, kid,” the old man had said to her then. “You were born with gunslinger eyes. Forget that boy. One day you’ll meet a guy you can’t scare.” He had laughed. Like that was a joke. “But, seriously, kid, how did you like the band?”

  Tonight, Mallory stood inside a crowd of bodies pressed up against hers in smells of perfume and cologne, sweat and booze. They all swayed and stomped to the worst of rock music from a live band, and every one of the musicians should be shot dead. Yet there was a beat, and she danced to it, danced with every comer, never losing sight of the stagehands, who sat out every song at the bar with their backs to the room, having given up on being turned down by women.

  Joe Garnet took a call on his cell phone. Mallory noted the exact time as she grabbed her jacket off the back of a chair with an idea that the three of them would be moving on soon. Yes. The boys pulled on their parkas, and Ted Randal made a call as they all walked out the door, the two stagehands and their blond shadow.

  She followed them back to the park, where they stood by the same bench, looking around, and an angry Garnet said to his cell phone, “Where the hell are you, man?” The night was too bitter cold for their dealer to run an open drugstore, and he had yet to show.

  Now they all had time to kill.

  It was one o’clock. Perfect. She searched her pockets and found the index card that Clara Loman had given her this morning. She read the contact numbers for the Nebraska sheriff who had refused to share details of an old family massacre. Mallory figured the man for an early riser who would have gone to bed hours ago. Her call was picked up on one ring—had to be a bedside phone—and a sleepy voice said, “Yeah?” And when she had given him her name and rank, he asked, “Do you know what the hell time it is, Detective Mallory?”

  She heard the sound of a lamp switched on. There would be no warm-up for the sheriff. She planned to knock him off his stride, knock him right off the edge of his nice warm bed. “About that old massacre,” she said. “Did the twins know any forensic details? Or did they really stay in the attic the whole time their family was being slaughtered?”

  Silence.

  She needed better bait. “Why weren’t those boys registered for school? Both of the girls were.”

  “I’d have to say I’m definitely cozying up to you, ma’am. Call me back if you can tell me something useful.”

  Click. His lamp switched off. Click. The connection went dead.

  Bastard.

  The stagehands had hooked up with their dealer. Cash and drugs changed hands, and they were on the move again, crossing wide Houston. The teenagers stopped after four more blocks into SoHo, and Garnet pressed the buzzer for an apartment building. This Greene Street address was familiar. The detective flicked through the contact information on her phone. Alma Sutter lived on the fourth floor. Mallory counted up four windows high to see a light. Then a second light came on, and a woman’s shadow moved across a drawn curtain, and the stagehands were buzzed in. A dope delivery? Yes, it was. Moments later, the teenagers were outside again and hustling down the sidewalk, counting cash.

  So they were only dial-a-dealers. That explained why those bone-stupid amateurs had no arrest records. Little fish. Detectives from Narcotics would waste no time on them. The stagehands bought their supply on the fly and marked it up for customers. Chump change—only enough money for nightclubbing. If she picked them up on their next run, she would only net a possession charge, not enough drugs to scare them with trafficking. If they were the source for Nan Cooper’s weed or Dickie Wyatt’s fatal dose, she had no leverage to make them talk.

  Mallory raised her eyes to Alma Sutter’s lighted windows. The usual customer base for home delivery was rich. The actress was not. But some addicts were too paranoid to risk a drug deal on the street, and that category might fit. Did Alma need something to help her sleep tonight—or maybe to calm her nerves for the next go-round with the police?

  • • •

  Sheriff James Harper lay on his bed in the dark of a Nebraska night, waiting for that damn cop to call back.

  When an hour had passed, he gave her up as a waste of time and lost sleep. There had been many such calls over the years, though other cops had shown the decency to phone his office number in the daylight hours. In his conversations with police and FBI agents around the country, he had learned many things, like how to read a blood-splattered wall, and they had taught him the range of sickness that could lead to a family massacre. But he had never given his tutors anything in return, other than telling them that their own bloodbaths were not related to his old cold case.

  Mallory’s call was a standout. Why had she bothered to check out the children’s school records?

  And why didn’t she call back? All the other cops did, persistent cusses, calling again and again. But not her. Maybe she was afraid to make him angry by disturbing him again so late at night.

  Well, that was the trouble with females.

  No balls.

  The sheriff closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  • • •

  Acting out an old cliché about drunks, Axel Clayborne slid off his chair and disappeared beneath the table.

  Thump.

  Charles Butler had matched everyone’s drinks, shot for shot, and he was not inebriated—not so it showed—unlike his companions from Special Crimes. Consequently, the detectives all voted him the best candidate for body disposal. And now, with only two fingers hooked round the edge of the heavy oak table, he easily moved it to one side.

  “Cool,” said the waitress.

  “He’s just showing off,” said Riker.

  After picking up the unconscious actor, Charles slung him over one shoulder, as if the man weighed no more than his topcoat, and Clayborne was carried up the stairs to Riker’s apartment, thus tidying up the floor of the saloon to the barkeeper’s satisfaction.

  • • •

  Mallory never touched the wall switch by the front door of her apartment. Lights in her windows tended to attract the attention of Rabbi Kaplan, as if he could see them all the way from Brooklyn across the river.

  More likely, the rabbi had a spy in Frank the doorman.

  In darkness, she skirted furnishings of black leather, hard wood and sharp edges of glass. Upon entering the bedroom, Mallory undressed by the digital glow of a bedside clock. She set the alarm and dropped off to sleep. When the buzzer sounded, it was four o’clock in the morning of a Nebraska time zone.

  The voice that answered her call was testy, saying, “What the—”

  “The five-year-old was the first one to die,” said Mallory. “That’s where your blood trail starts. . . . Then her sister. . . . Then the women.”

  “Well now, that’s more like it. So tell me something I don’t know. What have you—”

  Click. Mallory hung up on him, rolled over and went back to sleep.

  • • •

  The sheriff lay in the dark—just a tad slack-jawed. He had actually confirmed case details for that cop. God damn. He blamed this screwup on his interrupted sleep. And maybe, pushing sixty now, he was getting too old for this job. Or the girl from New York City just knew how to pick her moments—and ran a better game.

  Was she that smart?

  For what remained of the predawn hours, he replayed the worst night of his life in another house, a dead quiet one on a tree-lined street. The youngest child had indeed been the first to die, and hers was the first body found, all curled up under the quilt. In search of her missing head, he had found the older girl on the floor between the beds—also hacked by an axe and a
ll her bones broken by a baseball bat.

  Then the mother.

  Sarah Louise Chalmers, a widow at the young age of thirty-two, had been slaughtered close to the door of the master bedroom. So he knew she had risen in the night, responding to screams of one child or both. Sarah’s divorced sister had her blood splattered all over another bedroom. That woman had also been running to meet her killers at the door, where the first drops of her blood had hit the floor, elongating backward as the fight spilled into the room, chasing round the bed. The wet, red, hallway tracks had split off, one pair to each of these women, and then they had crisscrossed during the attacks. The grandmother had not a mark on her, but that death, once he understood it, had been a little horror show unto itself.

  Tonight, he walked barefoot through the rooms of his own house, a lonely place for half the past decade. He entered the den, which was littered with old crime-scene photos. His ex-wife had objected to the amount of time he had spent holed up in here behind a locked door, hiding what he could never share with her. She should have thanked him for that, for sparing her bad dreams of bloodied corpses.

  He had called out for survivors on that long-ago night. It had been a hell of a trick skirting slicks of blood in the hall to search the fourth bedroom for Sarah’s nephew, who lived in that big old house of blended, fatherless families. The red footprints had shown no sign of even pausing by the older boy’s door.

  James Harper looked at the wall clock. He had no chance of getting a cop’s personal phone number, but someone in that city would tell him where Mallory worked.

  Minutes later, when he heard a voice on the telephone say, “One Police Plaza,” the sheriff stated his business, and the man on the other end of the line explained that the NYPD was one of the largest employers in the nation, second only to the military. “We got close to forty thousand cops!” And Mallory was not exactly a rare surname on his personnel directory. “So help me out here, pal. You got her rank? Maybe you know what borough she’s in?”

  The sheriff ran one hand through his graying hair. What had she said the first time he had been awakened from deep sleep? “She’s a detective, if that helps.”

  “Naw, that only narrows it down to—”

  “She called me about an old homicide case at four in the damn morning. And she sounded real young. Voice like silk, and no scruples about waking a—”

  “Oh, yeah,” said the voice on the phone, running over the sheriff’s words from the mention of lacking scruples—apparently a good clue. And evidently, among young homicide detectives, females named Mallory were not so common. “I used to work in her precinct,” said the cop from New York City. “She’s a real pisser.”

  For the second time that night, the sheriff said, “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  As he wrote down the telephone number for the Special Crimes Unit, he was staring at the photograph of a narrow back staircase in the house of murdered women and children.

  There had been no blood on the steps leading up to the attic bedroom, where the twins were hidden—still hiding under the same bed when he found them. As he recalled, their pajamas were blue, their eyes were wide, and the boys were small for their age, weighing next to nothing when he had carried them down the stairs, bundled in a blanket to shield them from the sight of blood.

  No one had heard either one of them say a single word from that night on.

  ROLLO: The kitchen smelled like fresh-baked cookies. The rest of the house smelled of blood.

  —The Brass Bed, Act II

  Mornings at the Riker residence could be ugly.

  And so the drapes were closed and all the shades pulled down when the detective fumbled for slippers to protect his feet from stray bottle caps and bits of broken glass. Slippers were easier to operate than a vacuum cleaner. Not yet ready for sunshine, his eyes were scrunched shut as he opened the bedroom window for a blast of cold air—and slammed it once his heart was started.

  When Riker emerged from the bathroom, there were bloody bits of toilet paper to mark the places where he had cut himself shaving. He slowly made his way through the obstacle course of the living room, where the floor was layered with newspapers and junk mail, take-out cartons, a discarded sock—and one movie star.

  Last night, Charles Butler had considerately dropped the drunken Axel Clayborne on the cleanest patch of carpet.

  Though a good host would check for a pulse, Riker only glanced at the body on the floor. Somewhere in this mess, his cell phone was chiming with Mallory’s ring tone, the opening bars from an old Eagles tune, Desperado. He lifted an empty beer carton and there was his phone. He answered her call, saying, “Hey, kid. . . . Oh, not much. Charles says Axel Clayborne’s a flaming narcissist.”

  And the actor lying on his floor said, “You need to replace the bulb in your plastic Jesus night-light.”

  • • •

  The high tin ceiling had a fanciful curlicue pattern from the early 1900s, and the ochre walls were racked with cooking utensils that had no wires or batteries. There was no tick of a clock, not here; he would not allow it. The only sound was the gurgle of a percolator brewing in the old-fashioned way. In this age of instant everything, time moved slowly in Charles Butler’s kitchen. Everyone who came knocking on his door gravitated toward this room, this place of laid-back comfort and perfect peace. Just now, it was flooded with sunlight, the heady aroma of coffee—and exquisite tension.

  This morning, there had been no knock to announce a visitor, no footsteps in the hall behind him, but he knew she was there. He could tell by a change in the air, something akin to electricity:

  This prickling of the flesh.

  The fine hairs standing upright.

  Years ago on another winter’s day, the late Louis Markowitz had sat at this same table, drinking coffee and explaining rules for the Heart Attack Express, a game he had devised for a very young Kathy Mallory in the early days of her foster care, a time when she had distrusted Louis, and building bridges to her had required extreme craftiness on his part. A feral street child was not in the jump-rope set, nor a cuddler of teddy bears. And so the policeman and the little girl had terrorized one another, creeping up on each other in the dark or in the daylight, surprise attack from behind with the jab of a finger and the tagline, “You’re dead.”

  Targeting the back of the neck had been the child’s idea. The lack of sensitivity there had made it hard for Louis to instantly distinguish between fingertips and lethal weapons.

  Upon entering her teens, she had surpassed the master, killing her foster father with ease and evading all his attempts to kill her. “At my age, it’s like getting hit by a train,” the old man had said to him on that day—hence the name of the game. And then, with great pride, he had added, “That’s my baby. And the game never ends. She still kills me.”

  Louis Markowitz had met a death all too real in the line of duty, leaving his Kathy no one to play with—for a time. This morning, she had come to play with Charles, to kill him with a touch, and he was insanely flattered.

  He would judge her to be no less than four feet behind his chair. Though her perfume was discreet, the perk of his large nose was the gift of great sensitivity. Had she come any closer, he would have detected the scent of some alien flower that never bloomed in nature. And, by trial and error, she knew this. So Mallory would have to make it a quick kill, crossing that gap in a rush to touch him. With great effort, he kept his muscles from tensing in anticipation. And now, to foil her, he said, “You’re just in time for coffee.” Without a backward glance, he rose from his chair and reached out to a wall rack to pull down another cup. When he turned to greet her properly and perhaps to gloat a bit—he sucked in his breath.

  He would never expect footsteps, but there had been no scrape of chair legs, nor a rustle of paper. Mallory had closed the distance, and then some, to take a seat on the far side of the table. By all appearances, she might have been sitting there, leisurely perusing his newspaper for hours—though she had ma
terialized in the space of his skipped heartbeat.

  Scary? Truly.

  And the Heart Attack Express rolled over him.

  Charles took a deep, slow breath as he lifted the percolator from the stove burner and poured coffee into her cup. “Last night, I met one of your suspects, the film star.”

  “The narcissist.” She laid The New York Times to one side as he handed her the steaming cup. “Isn’t that what you called him? Is that like a cousin to a psycho?”

  “No, it’s hardly an exclusive club.” He sat down at the table, unable to repress his smile, though he knew it made him look foolish. Sadly, in moments of extreme happiness, like this one, he must always play the clown in the room. “You will find narcissism in sociopaths. As they see it, the universe revolves around them. However, neither trait will constitute mental defect. In the wide spectrum of—”

  “I’ve got one lunatic in the mix. His name is Bugsy. He used to be an actor, but now he thinks he’s a character from a play. How credible is that?”

  Not terribly, not in her view. That much was obvious. In Mallory’s world every form of insanity was the fabrication of a suspect or a defense lawyer.

  “Well, I’d need more to go on,” he said. “There’s role-playing, fantasy, delusion, psychosis.” And, of course, her personal favorite—fakery. “Narrowing that down would take some—”

  “You’ll find all of Bugsy’s info on the wall in the incident room, but this’ll get you started.” She laid down a notebook opened to a page of lettering so neat a machine might have printed it. At the top was the Connecticut address for a Mrs. Rains. “That’s his mother. She’ll see you this afternoon.” Mallory peeled off the center sheet of the Times and opened it wide to hide behind it.