The Chalk Girl km-10

by Carol O'Connell

  They all looked at him with eyes that said, Drop dead.

  The CSI rolled out the dolly that Mallory had found in the park. ‘No prints. It was wiped clean, but I traced the serial number. It was sold to a landscaper out in Queens. The guy died a few years back. I interviewed his widow. She says her husband got these inflatable tires from their kid’s go-cart.’

  All around the room, heads lifted. Now Pollard had their attention. This CSI had crossed a line when he interviewed that woman. Unlike some of Heller’s staff, this one was a civilian – not a cop – not one of them.

  Pollard slapped the black car battery attached to the dolly’s long handle. ‘This powered a joist for lifting heavy loads up to roofs and terraces. Cheaper than hiring a crane. The landscaper worked off the books – no payroll names, no client list. This dolly was stolen off a jobsite seven years ago. The widow doesn’t know which one. She only remembers her husband was working in Manhattan that day.’

  And what might the widow have remembered if a real detective had done that interview? Jack Coffey bit back the first obscenity that came to mind.

  Pollard returned to the table, and the wave of his hand encompassed everything on it. ‘We figured out every detail.’ And now, item by item, he told them the mind-numbing story of working up all of his evidence from screw holes in the bark of trees. And finally – finally – the little guy raised both hands to say his magic act was over – and maybe he was expecting applause.

  Fat chance.

  ‘You missed a few things,’ said Mallory from the back row of chairs. And CSI Pollard pretended not to hear this.

  Jack Coffey shook his head to warn her off – as if that ever worked. Mallory left her seat and moved toward the front of the room. Damn it! Just when things were going so well – when they were having all this nice make-up sex with CSU – she had to mess with this man.

  Mallory set a small bottle on the table. ‘That’s chloroform. It belongs in the murder kit.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ John Pollard gave her a patronizing smile. ‘I can show you the ME’s X-rays of skull fractures. The victims were subdued by a blow to—’

  ‘Two of them were stunned,’ said Mallory. ‘Only Willy Fallon was hit hard enough to knock her out. The perp needed to keep his victims quiet.’ She picked up the duct tape. ‘And this won’t do the job.’ She ripped off a piece and covered the CSI’s mouth. ‘If you want to make noise, you can still be heard. Try it.’

  And now he was heard. The sound he made resembled the amplified buzz of a startled mosquito. When he raised his hands to pull off the tape, she slapped his wrists. ‘No, that’s cheating.’ She used more tape to bind his hands behind his back.

  The lieutenant knew this was the time to step in, but one glance around the room told him that his whole squad was solidly behind Mallory’s bad behavior. They loved this. She was one of them again, and all for the minor price of a twit’s dignity.

  Jack Coffey smiled. He could live with that.

  Mallory owned the room. ‘We have a witness who puts our perp in coveralls, posing as a delivery guy. That’s how he gets them to open the door. Then he drops the victim with a blow to the back of the head.’ She glanced at the cluttered table and then turned to the CSI. ‘You got so carried away with your little screw holes, you never developed evidence for the assaults.’

  Now Pollard was making quite a lot of noise – despite the tape on his mouth. He might be the best show-and-tell exhibit ever presented for a briefing.

  ‘Even if the perp had knocked out all three victims – would he count on them staying that way? No,’ said Mallory. ‘Not his style. He over thinks everything – mark of an amateur. No injection sites on the bodies – so I know he sedated them with this.’ She lifted her bottle in one hand and a small cloth in the other as she continued the education of the CSI. ‘You can buy chloroform on the Internet. You can even make it at home. This is what he used to keep them quiet while he wheeled them through the streets and the park – because that’s the risky part. And this bottle is the only item on the table that can break our case.’ She turned to face her happy audience. ‘The ME’s broad scan for chloroform will take another three days to confirm. Pollard didn’t even request it. I did. And he didn’t use a mass spectrometer on the sacks to check them for chemicals. That’s two mistakes. Three . . . if we count his interview with the landscaper’s widow.’

  There were get-even smiles throughout the room.

  ‘And then the perp does this.’ It was definitely in the spirit of payback when Mallory, with a trip and a shove, laid out CSI Pollard on the floor and hog-tied him. After covering his body with the sack, she rolled him over to close the opening with rope. Next, she dipped the dolly’s wide step underneath him. Braced against a wall, the squirming man was neatly loaded onto the metal platform, ready for transport.

  At this point, someone might have said that even a woman could have done it. But no one did.

  EIGHTEEN

  The mad Driscol lives in the old carriage house behind the school. Phoebe says her great-aunt lost most of her brain cells to a stroke. Years ago, the old lady ditched her nurse and ran naked into the garden when it was packed with students. All the girls were weirded out by the saggy breasts and belly of old age, says Phoebe. But from the boys’ point of view, a naked woman was a naked woman.

  And now I understand one more school tradition.

  In every classroom that overlooks the garden, the boys begin and end the hour lined up at the windows, hoping to catch sight of a naked mad Driscol.

  —Ernest Nadler

  ‘Bagging the man was going a tad too far.’ It was Jack Coffey’s policy to discipline detectives in the privacy of his office.

  Mallory opened her pocket watch, a silent reminder that she had more important business.

  The lieutenant bypassed his line about the crucial importance of a good working relationship with CSU. Perhaps it was best to begin this lecture at gunpoint. ‘You only think I won’t suspend you.’

  ‘I found an old case of a hanging in the Ramble.’ She laid a ViCAP questionnaire on his desk.

  Coffey scanned the lines of standard FBI questions, page after page of them. The filled-in responses told the story of a little boy strung up in a tree for three days. ‘When did this happen?’ He flipped back to the dated cover sheet. The incident had occurred fifteen years ago, back in his younger days as a rookie cop. ‘How come I’ve never heard about this case?’

  ‘There never was a case – no investigation, no paperwork.’ She reached out to tap the line for the petitioner’s name and rank. ‘He buried it.’

  ‘Shit!’ The former detective listed here was now in charge of the NYPD during Police Commissioner Beale’s hospital stay. Rolland Mann might be only hours away from absolute power. ‘So, Mallory . . . got any more bombs in your pocket?’

  ‘I know why they call him Rocket Mann. Fifteen years ago, he should’ve made his bones on a case like this, but that didn’t happen. Well, it did, but not in the usual way.’ One long, red fingernail pointed to the date. ‘Ten days after that, Mann got his gold shield. There’s nothing in his job jacket to explain it. Before the promotion, he was a brand-new white shield.’

  ‘A baby dick with training wheels.’ Coffey stared at the old questionnaire. ‘There had to be a case file. Maybe it was sealed or expunged. That works if the assailant was a juvenile.’ He looked to her for a nod of confirmation on this theory, or – even better – a shrug to say that she had not yet illegally unlocked every juvenile file for that year.

  She shook her head. ‘Rocket Mann’s ViCAP search is the only proof that it ever happened.’

  The date placed this mess in the early, dirty days of a decentralized NYPD, when no cop was allowed to know the crime rate in the precinct next door. Reporters had learned to get their new-and-improved crime stats from the mayor’s office. Despite the sensational aspects, it would have been easy to keep this old case out of the media – low risk of leaks, fewer c
ops to silence. Central Park was the only uninhabited precinct in Manhattan.

  Mallory laid down a map of the Ramble. It was marked with the Hunger Artist’s crime scenes, all three of them clustered in one small patch of the acreage. The epicenter, Tupelo Meadow, was marked with an X. ‘That has to be the clearing in Mann’s ViCAP description. So that’s where the boy was found hanging. We want an interview with Rocket Mann.’

  Did he feel a tension headache coming on? Jack Coffey gave himself up for dead and placed a call to One Police Plaza. Mallory’s request would go first to Chief of Detectives Joe Goddard. The chief would then carry her message up the chain of command – or wad it into a ball – his call. But payback was a certainty. Rocket Mann was next in line for the job of police commissioner, and he would not want a light shone on this old case – not after he had gone to the trouble of burying it.

  His head was shaped like a bullet with a crew cut. All the detectives stared at the man whose shoulders nearly filled out the frame of the staircase door. As the chief of detectives crossed the squad room, every believer in his legend listened for the sound of knuckles dragging on the floor.

  Joe Goddard, alias God, had come down from his aerie at One Police Plaza to pay them a personal visit, and this could never be a good thing. The man wore a silk suit, but he was no one’s idea of a politician. The chief of D’s was brutally straightforward, and every word out of his mouth gave him the pedigree of an education on city streets. He never smiled, never tried to hide the fact that he was dangerous. The chief walked by the desks of Mallory and Riker, saying to them in passing, ‘You’re with me.’

  The detectives rose and followed him to the front of the room, where Jack Coffey emerged from his office to shake hands with the boss of bosses.

  ‘I need some privacy for a meeting,’ said the chief. And it was clear that the lieutenant’s company was not wanted when he said, ‘Jack, I’ve got no problem with you.’ He turned to glance at Mallory and Riker. ‘And these two aren’t in trouble . . . yet.’

  Lieutenant Coffey nodded and stood to one side as the three of them passed him by. Then he closed the office door behind them and walked away.

  Chief Goddard sat down at the desk. The detectives remained standing in the unwritten protocol for dealing with this man: Show respect or be pounded into the ground.

  The big man held a fax sheet in his hand and waved it like a flag. ‘I bypassed the chief of the department and personally delivered your request to Rolland Mann. And I showed him your copy of his old ViCAP search. He’ll see you this afternoon in Commissioner Beale’s office. He moved all his stuff in there the other day – five minutes after they carted the old man off to the hospital. If Beale dies in surgery, then his first deputy won’t be just the acting commissioner. That’s what I hear from City Hall. A permanent appointment is in the bag . . . I can’t have that.’

  He turned from one detective to the other, silently asking if he had made himself clear.

  Oh, yes. Very clear. There was a war on in the Puzzle Palace. Riker and Mallory had just been drafted as foot soldiers.

  ‘When I said you guys wanted a meeting, that made him nervous. And the bastard agreed to it way too fast. It was like he knew you were coming for him. Your lieutenant isn’t invited to sit in on that meeting. Me neither. That’s how I know you guys have something on that little prick. He’s going down – with or without your help. The acting commissioner can’t promise you squat . . . I want you to remember that.’

  So lines were being drawn and every soldier on Rocket Mann’s side was dead meat.

  ‘That bastard can’t make you guys bulletproof . . . but I can.’ Unsaid were all the other things that the chief of detectives could do to them.

  Joe Goddard was not in line for Commissioner Beale’s job. He would first have to kill the chief of the department and maybe a few of the fourteen deputies serving one notch below Rolland Mann. And so Riker believed the chief of D’s when the man sat well back in the chair and said, ‘I like a nice clean house.’

  Riker stole a quick look at his partner. If Goddard asked them for dirt on the deputy, they were both dead. The detectives had none to give him – not yet – but they would not be believed. No, they would be gutted. Any minute now.

  Mallory wore the poker face of a world-class player when she said, ‘We need Rolland Mann to close our case. Then you can have him . . . and everything we’ve got on him.’

  It was a good bluff and a worthy gamble, but her delivery showed no respect; it lacked a groveling tone. That much was easy to read in Goddard’s face. Could this man be more pissed off? Riker thought not.

  ‘You don’t set the terms. I do,’ said the chief. ‘I liked your old man, Mallory, but I never owed Lou Markowitz any favors. So now your partner’s wondering why you’re still standing.’ His angry eyes fixed on Riker, and there was ugly menace in his voice when he said, ‘I’m in a real good mood this morning. So the kid skates on insubordination.’ Turning back to Mallory, the offender, he said, ‘Detective, you’re young, and maybe you need this spelled out.’ He pounded the desk for punctuation. ‘Don’t ever fuck with me! First, you close out your case. If that takes more than seventy-two hours, you’re overpaid. Then you bring me Rolland Mann’s head.’

  Outwardly, Riker was deadpan, though inwardly grinning. The chief had phrased this as his own idea, and now it was an order: They were going to do it Mallory’s way.

  Chief Goddard pulled a wad of papers from his breast pocket. ‘You’ll need this.’ He handed Riker the fistful of small, yellowed pages filled with handwritten lines. ‘Those are personal notes from a retired cop. Officer Kayhill was on park patrol fifteen years ago.’

  Riker scanned the sheets, straining to read them without his glasses. Damned if he would wear his bifocals in front of this man. After two pages, he turned to Mallory. ‘This backs up the ViCAP questionnaire. Kayhill was there when the kid was found hanging in a tree.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the chief of D’s. ‘And I’m sure he filed an incident report, but that seems to have disappeared. If Rolland Mann should ask – tell him you got those notes at Kayhill’s nursing home this morning. The old guy’s senile. No worries about him backing you up. Kayhill’s notes say the victim was alive when he was cut down. But the boy couldn’t talk – no ID.’

  And Riker, still squinting at the notebook pages, had just gotten to the part that explained why the boy was mute. ‘And then the kid was shipped off in an ambulance.’ He looked down at the desk blotter as Goddard laid out a document with a raised seal. The words Death Certificate were writ large.

  ‘This boy’s a good fit,’ said the chief. ‘He’s from the Upper West Side, and his parents reported him missing three days before the hanging in the Ramble. Has to be the same kid.’

  For one scary moment, Riker thought his partner was going to challenge Goddard on this point; they had been through the Missing Persons reports for that period and come up dry. But Mallory only picked up the document. ‘This boy died a month after the hanging.’ She handed the death certificate to Riker. ‘Check out the date.’

  He held it out at arm’s length and nodded. ‘The same day Rolland Mann made the ViCAP search.’ If this death had resulted from the park assault, then the acting police commissioner had buried a child’s murder.

  The little boy who was not there waved both hands in wild protest and silently formed the words, No! and Don’t!

  Against the good advice of Dead Ernest, Phoebe Bledsoe answered the telephone.

  ‘My condolences on Humphrey,’ said the voice of Willy Fallon. ‘I just heard the funeral announcement on TV. Very tacky. Most people place obituaries in the—’

  ‘I gave my mother your message.’ Phoebe turned to Dead Ernest, who mouthed the words, Hang up, hang up.

  ‘She still won’t take my calls,’ said Willy. ‘So try again. Try harder! Tell her the third victim is Aggy Sutton. That’s not on the news – not in the papers. But you already figured that out, right? . . . And
when you talk to your mother, tell her you’re next.’

  Phoebe shook her head.

  And Willy laughed, as if she could see this gesture of denial through the telephone line. ‘You were there that day. Does your mother know that, Phoebe? Do you think that might get her attention? Will there be cops at the funeral tomorrow? I could talk to them.’

  NINETEEN

  It’s four blocks in the wrong direction, but sometimes Phoebe and I follow Toby Wilder home after school. He’s a traveling safety zone. Nothing bad happens when he’s around.

  Phoebe wants to marry him. I want to be him. Toby is contagiously cool. He walks to a rhythm of music in his mind, head bobbing, fingers snapping. So cool. And that music – I can almost hear it when it rises to a crescendo in his brain, when he can no longer help himself, and he has to stop and dance on the sidewalk. Passersby smile at the dancing boy, and their heads bob, as if they can hear the music, too.

  —Ernest Nadler

  They had been kept waiting in the anteroom for thirty minutes. Mallory and Riker had used the time to chat up Rolland Mann’s bodyguard, a detective who had once worked the SoHo precinct and owed a favor to their lieutenant. And so they learned that Detective Monahan hated his new boss, and the acting commissioner had ditched his bodyguard at least once on the day he took over Beale’s office. But Monahan was a savvy cop, and today he had resolved that problem by posting a white shield downstairs to follow the man if he should leave the building unescorted.

  Mallory handed Monahan her cell phone. ‘Not today. Call him off.’