Blind Sight

by Carol O'Connell

  The police commissioner should have been the lone figure on the facing love seat, but there sat Chief of Detectives Joseph Goddard, a broad-shouldered man in a silk suit. Even before she saw his face, Mallory recognized the bullet-shaped head and the crew cut. He was an interesting choice of police confidant for Mayor Polk. All around them were civilian staff and NYPD bodyguards, most of them standing, others seated on chairs and a striped couch. In the next moment, all of them, except for the mayor’s aide, filed through the door, leaving in obedience to the wave of the chief’s hand and the word, “Out!”

  The seat of power was now made clear.

  So a deal had been struck, and the chief of detectives had a brand-new victim for his dossier collection. It was said that the use of power revealed a man’s true face, but Joe Goddard’s was on display all the time—a thug’s face. At least, they had been spared his trademark entrance, a walk on leaden feet to make the floor quake. The chief liked to advertise that he was coming—and that he was dangerous to cops and felons alike. His political currency was information, and he was a master at acquiring dirty secrets.

  Did that frighten the mayor?

  It should.

  “I didn’t send for you.” Chief Goddard addressed Riker, showing displeasure with this gatecrasher and—the other one. Mallory easily read the man’s expression when he finally looked her way, all condescension and irritation, a warning to the puppy cop: She should not piss on the rug. He turned away from her, and she became invisible—dead to him. He wished she were dead. They had a history in a little dance of Crush Me If You Can.

  “We ID’d one of the victims,” said Riker. “Sister Michael. She ties in to another case.” This was their passport. None could challenge it. Both cases would merge at the top of the NYPD priorities—now that the deadly virus scam had fizzled out.

  When Chief Goddard grudgingly introduced the detectives, Mallory’s name did not register with Father DuPont. Was he that good an actor? Her second thought was that this priest had instructed Father Brenner not to name the selection for pet cop. Maybe the phrase, plausible deniability, was also terminology of the church.

  “So . . . four bodies.” Mallory turned to Mayor Polk. “Four ransom notes?” Oh, the poor man was startled—as if she had smacked him. Well, damn.

  It was Samuel Tucker who stepped forward to say, “We’re not aware of any ransom demands.”

  Riker ignored the aide to speak with the mayor. “Well, sir, you can see why we’d ask. . . . That dead nun outside? You knew she’d gone missing before the cops did.”

  Good shot.

  Polk’s left hand wrapped around his right fist. Again, his aide was the one who first opened his mouth for the predictable denial, and Riker said to this younger man, “That’s not a question, kid. It’s a fact.” The detective’s subtext was clear: Don’t let me catch you in a lie. And that closed Tucker’s mouth. Riker turned back to Mayor Polk. “About the nun. We have to wonder why you didn’t call the police.”

  In a little masterstroke of deflection, Andrew Polk turned to Chief Goddard and leaned forward, as if to ask this man the same question.

  Without a glance at the detectives, the chief said, “He did call it in. I knew the nun was missing. I had a detective looking into it . . . quietly.”

  “A cop picked out by the church?” Mallory said this with a heavy lean on incredulity. “That’s a roundabout way of assigning a case.”

  Joe Goddard looked up at her, quizzical at first, and then his expression changed to one reserved for stepping on a dog turd.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I was the one who got tapped to look into it. I’m the church-friendly cop you were all praying for.”

  Surprise!

  Father DuPont only widened his blue eyes, confirming her theory that he had opted not to be told which cop had won the honor of church toady. And she could see that the chief of detectives had been left out of this backroom arrangement of priests. No way had Goddard known any details about Sister Michael. But he did have the makings for conspiracy.

  “Chief, I’m guessing you never got a look at the dead nun’s face.” Mallory thumbed keys on her cell phone to raise a crime-scene photograph of a smiling corpse. “Maybe the ME rolled her body after you got here. This is Sister Michael.” She held up the small-screen image of the dead woman—who bore a twin’s resemblance to the kidnap victim, Jonah Quill. And that schoolboy’s likeness had been seen by every cop in the NYPD, including the chief, who had assigned record numbers of detectives to find him. “You had a detective—one cop—looking into this missing Quill . . . quietly?”

  The chief’s cover-up for the mayor, exposed as a lie, hung in the air, the great stinking fart in the room. Goddard glared at Polk, his eyes yelling, You screwup!

  —

  THE AIR CONDITIONER clanked and whirred above him, and liquid splashed on the floor all around him. Gasoline—it burned Jonah’s nostrils.

  He was a ball of a boy, curled up and shaking, teeth clicking, his toes and fingers numbed by cold. But—odd thing—upon waking, his fear had not kicked in again. He only wondered how she could be dead, and “Is it my turn?”

  Still groggy, Jonah was lifted to his feet by rough hands, big hands. His mouth was dry, his head ached, and there was a wobble to his knees as he was dragged across the raised threshold of a door to a warmer place. The air beyond the room was muggy. Gone was the stink of putrid meat—except for what traveled with him, trapped in his clothes. Hands, too. The smell of corpses and—

  Smoke?

  Behind him was the crackle of fire, a sound that terrified him—but not today. He was so calm. Crazy calm.

  Weak and woozy, the boy stumble-walked as he was pulled along. Below the sleeve of his T-shirt, the flesh of one arm brushed the sandpaper texture of a wall. The man walked alongside him, gripping the other arm to yank him through another doorway. They were outside now and climbing stairs to city sounds of horns and cars. This noise was still high above him when Jonah ran out of steps. An overpass? That would kill the sunlight, the clue of radiant heat beating down on his raised face to tell him it was daytime. There was no pedestrian noise at ground level and no word of warning to be quiet. So there was no one close by who might see him or—

  Careful, Jonah. The vestige of Aunt Angie still survived in him, his homemade ghost of her, assembled from a kit of remembered things. Her soft voice whispered, No one will hear if you scream. So don’t make this maniac angry.

  A catch of metal undone for another door. Jonah was pushed through it to sprawl on a padded seat. The smell of leather. His feet were lifted and jammed in behind him and—Slam! The air in here was oven-toasty. The driver’s door opened. Slammed shut. The engine came to life. And—click. A cigarette lighter? Yes, a smell of expelled smoke. They were rolling forward, and the driver had yet to say one word.

  Throat parched, voice raspy, Jonah asked, “Is it my turn?”

  —

  MALLORY’S PARTNER pretended to take down notes while the mayor pretended to tell him the truth. Again, Riker asked how His Honor knew the nun was missing, and Andrew Polk offered up Father DuPont as his source.

  The priest turned his back on them to look out a window. Hiding a guilty face?

  Mallory lost only seconds to speculation on Father DuPont. Polk was more interesting. He had not yet blamed Missing Persons for the fumble on the nun. A timely report had been filed with police, and Polk knew it.

  So why invite Chief Goddard to spin that lie?

  “Yeah, still here.” She had been left on hold with a cell phone to her ear, and now an officer in a neighboring state had returned to end their conversation with the transmission of a police report and a photograph. Mallory lowered her cell phone to study the new image on its screen. She looked up and raised her voice to say, “Jonah Quill was spotted at a tollbooth in New Jersey.”

  As every head
turned her way, she saw no reason to add that there was no eyewitness, only a security camera, and all she had was a bad-to-useless picture of the passenger’s bowed head. The driver’s face was hidden by the brim of a baseball cap pulled low. She only said, “They got the car.”

  An SUV, stolen from a senior citizen, had been recovered from a shopping mall’s parking lot. No kidnapped boy was found inside it, no evidence at all, but when Mallory said, “The boy’s alive,” perhaps they all inferred that Jonah Quill was safe in police custody.

  And maybe she should clear up that mistaken impression—or not.

  Father DuPont seemed happy with this news. But the mayor’s face went slack. A prelude to losing his breakfast on the carpet? Mallory gave this politician a tender smile from her repertoire of rarely used expressions, and so he was unprepared when she said, “Whatever the nun knew, the boy knows it, too. Is there anything you’d like to tell us . . . before we talk to him?”

  Mayor Polk mouthed an easy-to-read obscenity as he gave Chief Goddard a look that asked, What now?

  The chief held up one spread hand in a tempering gesture used by mothers to quiet excited children, and this said that he had the situation and the young detective under control. In response to that sign language, Mallory said to him, “Yeah, right.”

  Riker gave her a shake of the head, a warning that she was overstepping.

  The chief turned to face her, wary and hostile, but he said nothing about her insubordination. There could be no better test. She was bulletproof.

  Goddard would not be reassigning this case to more manageable detectives. He could not. That chance had been missed when he was caught in a lie for the mayor—as good as a confession of collusion. Though Mallory believed the chief’s involvement only extended to the hour before her arrival. It was a matter of style. In the past, this man had been careful not to step in the dirt he collected for his dossiers.

  But now he had forfeited his opportunity for a power grab.

  Wrong.

  The bastard was confidently staring her down, silently telling her that he planned to stay in the game—and Mallory should watch her back, so certain was he that she would never see the kill strike coming to end her days as a cop.

  She nodded to acknowledge that glove thrown down, and now Goddard had a startled look in his eyes, and he mouthed the word, shit! He was staring at something behind her.

  Mallory turned to catch Andrew Polk in an unguarded moment when all eyes but Joe Goddard’s were turned away. He was showing the chief his true face.

  What a big toothy smile you have, Mr. Mayor. And so creepy. Were his little rat’s eyes shinier now? Yes! He was having a good time.

  What sick game was this?

  3

  On the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, the unmarked police car was launched like a highway rocket at a hundred miles an hour. No siren—more fun that way for Mallory, but not for the man in the passenger seat. Though Riker climbed into a car with her every day on the job, he could still be startled by a near-death experience.

  His partner loved nothing better than a long stretch of dry road with no traffic lights and no rules but hers. Mallory’s only obstacles were civilians. She called them speed bumps—and fair game. So far, her fellow motorists were only fighting back with obscene hand gestures, and some of them rolled down their windows to shout colorful remarks about her driving as she sped by within inches of scraping their paint.

  Riker averted his eyes from the road, putting his faith in the gods of seat belts and airbags and—

  Prayers answered, the car slowed down to make the turnoff for the Jersey hospital where the detectives would find Ellen Cathery, the owner of a stolen car that might have transported a kidnapped child and a serial killer.

  —

  ON THE MANHATTAN SIDE of the bridge, an elderly mugging victim signed his discharge papers in another hospital. Days ago, Albert Costello had been found unconscious inside a vacant store. After suffering a fall that had left a bloodstain on the floor beneath his fractured skull, he had been unable to help police with the how or the why of it. Today, though he had not completed his stay for observation, he cast aside the flimsy hospital gown and pulled his own clothes from the closet, preparing to leave against medical advice.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, showing his naked rump to the young man with the stethoscope. “All I need’s a decent night’s sleep.” Albert glowered at the patient in the next bed, whose snoring had driven him insane for two nights. One more hour in this place and he might tear out all the white hair he had left.

  Also, he missed his beer and smokes.

  Lost weight might be another grievance against the hospital. While tying his shoelaces, Albert wondered if his arms were bonier now. The boy doctor hovered over him, wanting to know if there was someone at home to look after him. “Naw, I outlived everybody who gave a shit.” And this summed up the ten years since his wife’s funeral. That long ago, he had lost the hang of making new friends to replace those who had moved away or passed away. His life had been all about people, and all the people were gone.

  Albert decided to walk home, a mile or more. Occasionally he brushed up against other pedestrians, touching life before it sped up and left him behind on the sidewalk. Bouts of dizziness forced him to rest along the way. Now and then, people would stop to ask if he needed help. He pegged them for out-of-towners, easy marks, and he snagged them into conversation until they tired of the mugging story and his complaints about hospital food and the snoring man in the next bed.

  He arrived at St. Marks Place in the afternoon. Had anyone been willing to listen to him as he walked along the street, he could have married up some history with these addresses, the former digs of anarchists and artsy-fartsy types. He never read poetry, but he knew that W. H. Auden had lived twenty years at number seventy-seven. And up ahead was the site of the first Mafia hit in Manhattan. He had so many stories to tell about this neighborhood—and no one to hear them. Not anymore.

  After unlocking the street door, he entered his apartment house; he called it his tomb. During the day, when other tenants were at work, this old five-story brownstone always had a dead feel to it. He rarely met people on the narrow stairs, not that he would recognize them, damn transients. Albert only knew a few by habits that invaded the halls on the weekends. The ground-floor tenant was the one with the strong cooking smells. On the second floor, he passed by the apartment where the loud radio lived, but the cook and the radio player had no faces. As to the floors above his apartment—well, that was another country, and he had no reason to go there.

  Albert stood before his third-floor door, pulled out his keys—and discovered that the apartment was not locked. This should have alarmed him. The town prided itself on three deadbolts to every front door. In a situation like this one, all New Yorkers were geographically obliged to be paranoid. Fearful. At least suspicious.

  Yet he did not back away.

  His recent mugging had left him with a taste for adventure.

  —

  NEW JERSEY RESIDENT Mrs. Ellen Cathery raised her head from the pillow of the hospital bed, her wrinkled neck attenuating as she strained to sniff the air for a fragrance that was neither antiseptic nor medicinal. The New York detective’s floral perfume was faint, a single dab at most, and alien. Mrs. Cathery—“just call me Elly”—could not identify the flower by its scent, and the young blonde’s accent was equally untraceable. On the other side of the bed, the man’s intonations were rooted in Brooklyn as he said, “Sorry to put you through this, ma’am, but anything you can tell us will help.”

  On the other side of the room, Mazie Wade, a stout woman with henna-red hair, was pacing and muttering over and over, “Goddamn it.”

  Elly had reassured her dearest friend six times that she was fine, just fine—except for her memory of the event. That was gone. She could only recall that she h
ad borrowed Mazie’s SUV because her own vehicle was in the shop. They both favored the large gas hogs that fit so well with their antiquing expeditions, augments to Elly’s pension. Her friend Mazie was still a kid, only fifty-two, and gainfully employed by the town’s police force.

  One of Elly’s blue-veined hands covered the needle that fed her fluids for dehydration. She fussed with the tape that anchored it to her arm while the nice man from Brooklyn read out a list of four names. “No, sorry, I don’t know any of them.” Oh, she had disappointed the other one, the tall blonde, who walked away from the bed. “I’m sorry,” she said to the remaining detective. “I can’t remember much. But we have Mazie’s car back. That’s the main thing. I do remember waking up in her car.”

  The paramedics had helped her out of the front seat, where she had apparently fallen asleep behind the wheel—such a deep sleep that she had gone weak in the knees and in need of assistance to the ambulance. But her location, that strange parking lot, had been a mystery to her. Then a greater mystery had unfolded when the medics noticed a light imprint on the thin skin of her face. It had suggested to them that her mouth had been taped shut.

  Detective Mallory stood beside Mazie Wade, asking, “Was Mrs. Cathery a regular at that mall?”

  “No,” said Mazie. “The mall’s twenty miles from here. Elly’s very civic-minded. She makes a point of doing all her shopping here in town.”

  The New York detective consulted a small notebook. “So your guys found a slick of oil on her dress and a bruise on one hip.”

  “Yeah,” said Mazie, the hometown detective. “I figure she took a fall on a garage floor, and there’s acres of parking under her apartment complex. That’s where those kids must’ve snatched the car.”

  “Kids.” The young blonde said this in the tone of a challenge.

  “Happened once before,” said Mazie Wade. “It was an old man that time.”