Blind Sight

by Carol O'Connell

  “Kathy, that—”

  “Mallory,” she said, reminding him to keep the professional distance of her surname. She had rules.

  And he always ignored them.

  However, her interruption had spared him a point lost for mentioning the obvious thing—that the roses had certainly preceded a religious calling. Catholic nuns so seldom visited tattoo parlors. And now Sister Michael’s apologist added, “It is rather beautiful work.” Late in life, he had found that he was something of a romantic, and he had privately rechristened the dead woman as She Who Lay in Chains of Roses. “I can’t name the tattoo artist. We’ve got nothing like this on file.”

  “She didn’t have tattoos when she was arrested for prostitution.” The detective raised her eyes in time to see his rare moment of confusion. Too pleased with herself, she said, “I’m sure that was before Sister Michael became a nun . . . but I could check.”

  Without rising to this bait, he said, “Red roses. That might suggest the lady fell in love.”

  “The lady?” Kathy moved to the head of the dissection table and picked up a photograph taken with his instant camera prior to the autopsy. “A Polaroid? You wanted a souvenir?”

  Of course she would see no other reason for this archaic form of photography in an age of digital everything. However, she was actually right. She had nailed him.

  Kathy stared at the picture. “The nun’s smile. . . . That still bothers you, doesn’t it?”

  Yes, but he was loath to admit this. “It’s rare, but facial expression can survive the primary relaxation after death.” Sister Michael’s smile had not survived the second laxity of rigor mortis passing off, but it had not vanished until he was done with her. The woman had smiled at him all through the brutality of her autopsy, the cuts that had laid her open from breastbone to Venus mound. And all the while, he had known that he was missing something here.

  Something vital?

  “Those stitches . . . that’s your work.”

  “I always pitch in on high-profile cases.” Did that sound defensive? Apparently so.

  Kathy’s eyes lit up—only an illusion of flickering eyelids, but a good one. She had something on him; she wanted him to know it. “No, this time it’s different.” In the sweep of one hand, she covered the length of his closing stitches. “This is almost like . . . embroidery.” The detective looked up to catch him—at what? Now she was distracted by a line of stitches that intersected his autopsy cuts. “So my perp’s a slasher.”

  “Not exactly. He cut her open and—”

  The naked corpse was attracting sideways glances from a morgue attendant, who had entered the room all too quietly to collect the dead. Dr. Slope ripped the sheet from the young detective’s hand, and he covered the body again to protect the nun’s modesty.

  A sign of weakness.

  A game point lost.

  Kathy watched in silence as the interloper was waved off and told to “Come back later.” He knew the detective had long suspected this minion of serious leaks to the press, but then—she suspected everyone of something, including his pathologists and, of course, himself. When the door had finally closed on the departed attendant, she looked down to stare at a pocket of the doctor’s lab coat.

  Might she have a paranoid conviction that he was holding out on her? Oh, yes. Always. He looked down to see only a tip of the cellophane bag protruding from the suspicious pocket, and he had to wonder how many volumes of information she had extrapolated from that.

  He pulled out this piece of evidence, properly tagged for chain of custody. The plastic identity bracelet bore the name of the nun and the hospital where she had been a patient. “Sister Michael was in town for diagnostic tests. I spoke to her attending physician. The day she went missing, she should have been in surgery to stem the leak of a brain aneurism. She was in pain, but she postponed the operation. She mentioned some pressing family business. Her doctor didn’t get any details.”

  And Kathy said, “She wanted to visit her mother while she still had strength to deal with a crazy woman.”

  This added more depth to his collected lore of the dead nun—scientific and not. “Sister Michael checked herself out of the hospital on Friday morning. She was expected back in the afternoon.” He was looking forward to playing his hole card, the one obvious aspect of the nun’s smile that he could back up with evidence. Though the essence of the smile bewildered him. Something familiar. What had he missed? Sometimes he felt that he was close to grasping it—like now—and it eluded him again. As if to some guilty purpose, the thought sprouted legs and ran away.

  Kathy Mallory had lost interest in the nun’s corpse. She turned to the other dissection tables, the three bodies left naked and with less lovely embroidery, obviously the work of other pathologists on his staff. “What about them? Same cause of death?”

  “By that, I assume you mean heart failure—due to the fact that their hearts were cut out of them.”

  “Trophies?”

  So she had not yet spoken to CSU. This butchery was news to her. But the theft of body parts was a hallmark of the unbalanced killer, one who would leave the messiest tracks to his door, and this possibility should not have disappointed her—yet it did.

  “The hearts have to be kept quiet.”

  “Not a problem.” He had already gone to some trouble to ensure that no leaks would be made to the news media. “So . . . things in common. Except for the nun, they all had tape residue around their hands and feet. No food in the stomach. Signs of dehydration.” He glanced at the row of tables beyond this one. “Those three had antemortem knife wounds. I can’t tell you if the killer’s sadistic or just impervious to suffering.”

  She examined marks on the arms of the middle-aged man, the purple bruises left by fingers and thumbs—upside-down handprints. The bodies on the neighboring tables had similar discoloring. “They were dragged.”

  “Yes, I was getting to that.” Via a different avenue. “Three victims had abrasions in the leather at the back of their shoes. The fourth wore sandals. His abrasions were in the heels, and some broke the skin. So, for that one, you’ve got antemortem drag marks and postmortem.”

  “Still alive when he was dragged the first time. No defensive wounds. So he was drugged when the perp moved him to another location for the wetwork.”

  “Or only tied up hand and foot.” Edward Slope’s problem was with her logic. Did he not mention the tape residue on wrists and ankles? Her conclusions were too often right, as in this case, but for the wrong reasons. And he had yet to mention the—

  “You found needle marks, right?” Score for Kathy.

  “Except for the nun. The other three have scabbed injection sites. But no drugs showed up in any of the tox screens.”

  “You’ll have to redo them. Add a few things to check for.”

  The hell he would.

  She handed him a sheet of bloodwork with the letterhead of a New Jersey hospital lab. “Trace evidence from a live victim.”

  He scanned the text. “No point in retesting. These drugs wouldn’t survive my time frames for death and decomp. The first one’s used on livestock. That might suggest injection with a medi-dart. Very smart. Your killer could inject his victim from a distance of thirty feet—assuming he’s a good shot with a dart gun. I don’t see the point in the other drug, the Rohypnol . . . unless he wanted to induce blackouts.” But that would indicate a plan for catch and release—a plan that would hardly fit a serial killer. Well, that was confusing, and he could see by her smile that she was waiting for him to admit this—so she could humiliate him with a simple explanation.

  Tough luck.

  Instead, he fired off his best shot. “As I said, there were no needle marks on the nun . . . but then . . . she wasn’t killed with a knife wound. That was done postmortem. And she was the only one with head trauma.” Ah, something Kathy had missed. A clear
win.

  The detective returned to the nun’s table to inspect the scalp, lifting the dark hair to expose the bruising of a bloodless wound.

  “The weapon was a hand or an arm with a good deal of force.” He smiled when she eyed him with suspicion, not buying this at all. And so, moving along to Kathy’s second miss, he said, “Check the other side of her head. More trauma. I found crumbles of hard, reddish material embedded in the cloth that covered her head.”

  “Red brick.” She walked to the other side of the steel table. “Crumbles? Old brick.”

  “CSU will have to confirm it.” But that had also been his guess. “It appears that the first blow knocked her into a wall.” Hence a hand or arm for the initial trauma.

  Kathy inspected the second wound. “You found a skull fracture on this side, right?”

  “No, not enough force for a fracture, but that’s your death blow. It ruptured her aneurism. The cloth of her veil protected the impact site. So . . . no broken skin, no blood to nail down time of death by coagulation. She might’ve died on the spot, but she could’ve easily lingered for hours. A stroke from hemorrhage—”

  “You told me she was dead when he cut her open.”

  “Right. With the first three victims, the killer came up behind them for the injection.” He was inappropriately cheerful when he said this, for she had missed something else. “Look at the angle of the first blow to the nun’s head.”

  Kathy hunkered down, eyes level with the nun’s skull. “So Sister Michael was the only frontal assault. She knew the perp.”

  Oh, please. As a man of science, he preferred solid evidence over unsupportable inference. “Well, here’s something . . . factual,” he said. Not too caustic. He held up the New Jersey hospital’s tox screen for her live victim. “If the other three were injected with these same drugs, the doses would’ve been tailored to weight.”

  “So every time out, he worked off a shopping list of specific victims.”

  “It would seem so.” He pointed to the first drug on Mrs. Cathery’s lab report. “That one’s got a paralytic component. It’s used for tagging animals in the wild. Lethal in the wrong dose. The injected victims would’ve fallen down almost immediately. That would suggest a location that wasn’t in full view of the public or—”

  “No, it doesn’t.” One hand went to her hip to put him on notice that he was venturing into cop territory. And where did he get off doing her job? “My perp could’ve done it on the sidewalk in broad daylight. Say a pedestrian passes by, sees our guy supporting a helpless victim, helping him. Fine. No need to stop. The good Samaritan moves on . . . while the victim gets dragged away and murdered.”

  “The nun’s assault—”

  “That one needed privacy. An indoor crime scene with an exposed brick wall.” She lifted Sister Michael’s right hand as if to kiss it. “I smell bleach. The perp cleaned her fingernails.”

  Damn. He had lost his last ace. “Only one hand was—”

  “After she died,” said Mallory.

  “You can’t know that. I told you! She could’ve lingered for—”

  “Logic. She got a piece of him.” The detective held up the doctor’s personal Polaroid, the shot taken when the nun still wore a sly smile. “She had his skin under her fingernails. She wouldn’t smile that way after the perp bleached out the evidence. So no DNA, but now we know he’s got scratches.”

  “She marked him for you, that’s obvious.” And, per the rules, no score for Kathy. “But you—”

  Oh . . . fresh hell.

  Edward Slope bowed his head as the other mystery, the most troubling one, came undone. He called himself six kinds of a fool. How could he have failed to recognize it—when the young cop beside him was the Queen of Get Even? The nun’s smile that had so disturbed him—but affected him most while he had been cutting into her—it was Kathy’s smile.

  —

  THE CHAIN-SMOKING STRANGER finished another beer, and now he considerately dumped his crushed can into the duffel bag at his feet, rather than mar Albert Costello’s coffee table with a ring from the sweaty aluminum.

  Well, somebody had raised this guy right.

  The younger man’s meaty arms spread across the back of the sofa—so at home here. It was like they had known one another for years. He had not yet tired of the mugging story, asking, “What was you doin’ out there on the street that day?”

  “Watchin’ life go by,” said Albert. “Every day I got a cravin’ for it. So I go outside. But I got nowhere to go. I lean against a lamppost for a while. I watch the people walk past me . . . the ass end of life.”

  The last cigarette in Albert’s pack had been smoked, and there was no more beer in the refrigerator. What food had remained over the past few days of his hospital stay was inedible now. And so he accepted the stranger’s offer to share a meal with him, cold beer and smokes, too.

  What a deal.

  His companion led the way down the stairs. On the ground floor, the man turned his back on the street door to open the one for the rear of the building. “I’m parked out here.”

  When Albert stepped into the alley, the sun had gone down, though there was still lots of light left to a summer evening. The air out here was cooler, invigorating, and he was not tired anymore. No, he was coming back to life. Precious life.

  —

  WHO WAS ALBERT COSTELLO?

  The commander of the Special Crimes Unit sat in Detective Mallory’s chair, staring at one paper neatly aligned with the edges of her desk. It was a fax cover sheet for a report from the Lower East Side precinct, but where was the report? The information on this single page was sparse; it only told him that she had blown off the priority case to waste time on a days-old mugging.

  The lieutenant opened and slammed every insanely neat drawer to no avail. And when he had checked the call history on Mallory’s landline and savaged her wastebasket, he raked one hand through his hair, a bad habit that increased the bald spot at the back of his head.

  Jack Coffey would credit most of his lost follicles to the stress of running a homicide copshop. Otherwise, he was the average physical specimen who could rob six banks in a day without a single witness able to supply one distinguishing feature. At the age of thirty-seven, what set him apart on a police force of thirty thousand was the early rise to an elite command position, and he would have to agree with his mom that he was one smart cop—because he always knew when Mallory was scamming him.

  Her desktop was so clean that insects would not land here for fear of leaving incriminating prints in the fresh layer of furniture wax. Apart from the telephone, the report’s cover sheet was the sole item on display, and he read it again—all four lines of text.

  He called it bait.

  Yeah, after sending all his calls to her voice mail, Mallory knew she could count on him to go through her stuff and go a little nuts over the one totally meaningless thing that was not there—the damn report.

  He walked away from her desk, cover sheet in hand, with a plan to hunt down the missing report on Albert Costello’s mugging and actually read it—a waste of more time—instead of following a better instinct to crush this paper into a ball, set it afire and spread the damn ashes all over her desk.

  —

  FROM BASEBOARD to ceiling molding, the walls of the incident room were lined with cork, and the pinned-up text and photos for the priority case were spreading virally. Jack Coffey quickly spotted the mugging report. It was fixed to the cork at two corners, and so it had caught his eye as the only sheaf of paper that did not dangle by a single pin. He knew that a carpenter’s plumb line applied to one edge would find it in perfect alignment with heaven and earth. Mallory’s contribution. Where was that neat freak now?

  And “Who the hell is Albert Costello?”

  “Mugging victim,” said Rubin Washington, a broad-shouldered cop with thirty years on
the job and an invaluable lack of charm that worked well on hard-core felons. Not a chatty man, he stood before the wall, pinning up the ME’s preliminary. But now, with a glance to the side, he noticed that his lieutenant was still staring at him. “It was a bop-and-drop, boss. It went down on St. Marks Place a few days back. Riker and Mallory went over there to chase the old guy down.”

  Oh, and dare his boss ask, “What the fuck for?”

  “Costello left the hospital, and he doesn’t answer his home phone.”

  And that was so not Jack Coffey’s point. “They’re wasting time on a damn mugging?”

  “Mallory says the nun won’t fit the pattern, but the old man might.”

  There were times when Lieutenant Coffey believed that he was in charge of this squad. Today he was more in line with reality. He walked down half the length of this wall to read a spread of yellow sheets, the handwritten statements gleaned from interviews. He had sent detectives out to canvass the neighborhoods of their victims, in part just to make the point that Mallory could not get all the pertinent background data from a computer. But her theory was proving out from one sheet to the next in this information gathered by mere humans knocking on doors. There was a pattern—but it would only fit three out of four victims.

  The first and most decomposed was Ralph Posey, forty-one years old and a resident of the Upper West Side. He never spoke to neighbors, and he had no job, no coworkers or family to notice if he was alive or dead. He was only known to the local grocer, who bagged his purchases every Monday at noon and professed no surprise at the man’s murder because “He was a shithead.” The oldest victim, Sally Chin, had lived on the Upper East Side. She had twice weekly hobbled to her chiropractor’s office on crutches. If not for this habit, no one on her street would have recognized her photograph. And the very shy young Alden Toomey had worked from his home in the West Village, only venturing outside on Sunday to attend church services, the only service that would not make a delivery to his apartment.

  Mallory was right. The nun would not fit the victimology, and neither would her nephew. They were the only two people who would have been reported missing on the day they vanished. Unlike his aunt, Jonah Quill did have a predictable routine, the daily route of a schoolboy, but he had not been following it when he was taken.