Blind Sight

by Carol O'Connell

  Charles nodded his understanding of legal flypaper.

  “They’ll never cooperate with us,” she said. “But they might talk to you. Then you can pick me a likely psycho—a killer.”

  Well, this was progress. At least she acknowledged an element of insanity in four murders. He read the list of badly damaged investors—her suspect pool. Among them, he recognized names of people he knew, two of them old friends of his parents’. That elderly couple could never have been a party to anything like this. “How many of these—”

  “I’m only interested in ten big losers for one transaction.” She tapped the document again. The page changed to her pared-down list, and his parents’ friends were still there. “One of them hired out four kills.”

  What? Murder for hire? “So the spree—”

  “Not a spree killing. Forget what you read in the newspapers,” she said for the hundredth time in their acquaintance. “Here’s what the papers can’t tell you. Our perp paid for those murders over a two-week period . . . and his hit man cut out the hearts.”

  That made less sense. “A serial killer’s not likely to pass up the joy of hands-on murder. And the hearts, the trophies, wouldn’t provide any pleasure, either. If someone else cut them out, they couldn’t give him a tactile—” Oh, he was telling her something she already knew. He intuited this mistake by her folded arms and a warning in her eyes that said, Don’t. Seriously . . . don’t.

  Aloud, she said, “Rich people. They hire out raising the kids, walking the dog and murder. But you’d have a point—if the hearts were trophies.”

  And what else might they be?

  Ah, now he understood. They were clearly into her sport of the day: finding new and different things to do with human body parts. It took him two seconds. “That would only work with kidnap and extortion. . . . Ransom. . . . The heart of one victim prompts payment for the next one?” When she smiled, he knew this was the correct answer—even though it could not possibly be right. “But it’s my understanding that the four victims were selected randomly.” Again, her smile was his confirmation, and he said, “So . . . no apparent reason to pay a ransom.”

  Her smile held.

  And before his head could spin around three times upon the axis of his neck, she changed the subject, turning away from him to face her shortlist on the screen. “I matched some of these people to the Social Register.”

  He counted three names from the old families of the New York Four Hundred, and he recognized others from the charity circuit. “I can tell you some of them are dead.”

  “But they had heirs.” In Mallory’s reckoning, the love of money would be in the DNA of their descendants.

  Would she ever return to the matter of random murders and stolen hearts? Certainly not. No sport in that. There were subtle rules to be observed in this game of hers, chief among them, no begging. And so he could only continue on the topic at hand. “Why do you think any of Polk’s former clients might talk to me?”

  “Because you have lots of money, Charles.”

  She classified him as one who was not on her side, but one of them, the silver-spoon suspect class. This should have given him a hint of things to come, but he was startled when both hands rode her hips as she said, “So you and Father DuPont . . . what did you talk about last night? Catching up on old times?”

  Ambush by appointment. How original.

  Now it was her turn to be surprised. She was studying him, waiting for the telltale blush of embarrassment, a genetic defect that programmed him to be honest in all things. A sudden cherry-red complexion made deceit impossible, and so it was said that his face could not hide a thought. Untrue. He could keep a confidence with no intent to deceive. However, the blush’s loophole of all things pertaining to principle seemed to escape her.

  She failed to read his mind. It pissed her off.

  Well, too damn bad.

  No—just a trick. Her half smile set off warning bells in his brain, great swinging gongs sized to fit a cathedral.

  Was it just possible that he had already given up everything?

  Yes. And was this witchcraft on her part? Well, no. Mallory’s logic was good, but she also had a lexicon of silences to work with. And what had she gleaned from his?

  Oh . . . everything.

  Obviously, last night she had followed Father DuPont from the church and confirmed her suspicion that he and the priest had met before. Though, the previous night in the restaurant, neither man had acknowledged the other. Charles’s failure to comment on their acquaintance, both then and now, had given her two silences, enough to infer the rest—up to a point, but what point?

  Pressure, pressure—almost a race to outrun her galloping paranoia.

  Well, she could deduce that he had first met Father DuPont in the context of a psychologist’s trade, or else he would have mentioned this man quite naturally in passing, but he had not—and Mallory made a feast of things unsaid. More damage: Since he had no private practice, she could guess that his first meeting with the priest had been a one-off therapy session for a man in deep distress.

  “Here’s what I don’t know,” said Mallory. “The first time DuPont came to you for help, was he was still counseling Angie Quill?”

  At least, that part she could not tell. And he would not tell. Though, when she was done probing this silence, he felt like a shopworn virgin with little to nothing saved for the marriage bed.

  —

  MALLORY HAD BEEN WORKING late last night.

  Lieutenant Coffey stood at the center of the incident room. Every cork wall was so orderly now, but this was more than compulsive neatness. She had also pruned evidence, shifting attention to her own focus points by taking down all the paperwork and pictures for every victim that was not a nun or a schoolboy. Even Albert Costello had disappeared from the walls, his hour in the media spotlight used up and gone. Albert and the other three hermits had been relegated to file holders stacked on the evidence table—should anyone care to look at them, and he guessed that no one ever would. Mallory only saw these people as clutter. Cold as that was, he could not argue the point.

  The lieutenant pinned up Joey Collier’s sketch of the boyfriend who had accompanied Angie Quill to the tattoo parlor. How reliable could this drawing be?

  Almost a decade had passed since the only meeting of the tattoo artist and their prime suspect. A thick head of hair had been roughly sketched in, probably not a well-recalled detail, and neither was the mouth of faint lines that were almost not there. But he knew the drawing had gotten one feature right—the eyes of a predator in that moment right before the lunge. Tension, tension—waiting for the strike. Waiting to be dead.

  The boyfriend had kept close watch on the artist for maybe an hour while the first rose was tattooed on young Angie’s thigh. Not exactly a hit-and-run memory.

  Alongside this drawing was a blowup of the tollbooth photograph taken on Sunday. Computer enhancement had raised finer detail—a waste of time for a picture of nothing. The driver’s face was hidden by the pulled-down brim of a blue baseball cap—not one visible feature. But there was a departure from the sketch—no hair to be seen, not a single strand stuck out below the rim of the cap. Short hair or no hair? He could not tell. If the driver in this photo was completely hairless, shaved-head bald, that would fit with a killer evolved over time into a forensic-savvy pro, who wanted no DNA left at his crime scenes.

  The lieutenant bit down on the tip of his tongue. The pain kept him from tumbling into that Mallory mind-set, a kind of black pit where evidence, based on nothing, mushroomed in the dark. Even when she was not in the room, she could still get him.

  But, unlike Mallory, Jack Coffey would not bank on anything quite this flimsy. He was for damn sure not going to alter the artist’s sketch to shave a head he could not even see.

  —

  CHARLES BUTLER trailed Mallory into her
favorite interrogation room, and this should have given him pause, though it was nothing like his own kitchen, no warmth, no charm to make a suspect less wary. It was all stainless steel with mechanized utensils like the computer that passed for a mutant coffeemaker. She was the antichrist of Luddites, but her brew was rather good. When they were seated at the table, she poured their coffee into brown ceramic mugs, and he took this as the warm-up for a deceptively cozy chat. He knew she would begin with casual conversation, something innocuous and only one rung above a comment on the weather.

  “Picture Angie Quill as a kid hooker,” she said, “a little girl getting raped every night by five or ten men.”

  Oh, a gut-shot warm-up.

  She leaned toward him. “Or maybe just one man, a priest, her counselor, someone who’s supposed to protect kids like her. She’s only thirteen years old. She’s got no way out. I’ve heard of younger hookers slitting their wrists, but not this one. Angie Quill knows how to wait. Now imagine that little girl all grown up and full of hate. She tells this priest she wants to be a nun. Well, Angie can hang him out to dry. He knows it—and she works it. She forces him to get her into a monastery. Then she’s off the street, out of reach. No one can ever touch her again. Better than that—she gets revenge. Every day that goes by, DuPont’s going nuts. What’s she confessing to the local priest? And what about the nuns in that monastery? How many people know what he’s done to her—what he is—this man you like so much? The one you protected, defended.”

  Charles dropped his head. He was helpless to—

  “But that’s not what happened,” said Mallory.

  On this cue of hers, his head jerked up.

  “Did your good friend DuPont ever rape that girl? I guess we’ll never know, Charles. He’s such a damn liar—but he wasn’t Angie’s steady john.”

  When would this end?

  “I had a little talk with the prioress of her monastery,” said Mallory. “What she said backs up my theory that Angie had one regular customer for years. So . . . one day, she must’ve realized that her rent-money john was a pro, a hit man. If he ever found out what she knew, she’d be dead. Hookers are usually so good at reading men. They’re better than you are at figuring out who’s nuts, who’s likely to go off on them—cut them—kill them. But here she is, sleeping with a killing machine. When she finally figures out what he is, it gives her the shakes. Cold-sweat fear. She knows she can’t hide that from him. She has to run.”

  “Why wouldn’t she go to the—”

  “The police? Prostitutes are dirt to cops. So she went to Father DuPont for help. The monastery was his idea. That’s the only way it all fits. I didn’t just take the Reverend Mother’s word for it.”

  Of course not. A trustworthy nun? Not on Mallory’s planet.

  She looked down at his coffee mug—cooling, untouched. “I could’ve sorted this out a lot earlier, wasted less time on the priest’s lies.”

  He anticipated her final salvo before she said, “Maybe Jonah would be home by now . . . if you’d been straight with me.”

  And—bang—Charles was truly shot through the heart. He had done nothing wrong. Logic was not on her side. And yet he sat there calmly waiting to find out what his punishment would be. There would always be payback. Though the biblical quotation must be paraphrased to spell it out as such—Vengeance is mine, sayeth Mallory.

  —

  SO, LATE LAST NIGHT, she had been in here, too.

  Jack Coffey set a mug of freshly made coffee on his desk beside an envelope addressed in Mallory’s machine-perfect printing. It was marked for his eyes only, and this was rare. Normally, if she wanted case details kept secret, she just held out on everyone, even her own partner. Inside the envelope, all he found was a standard background check on members of the Quill family. Standard was the key word here. Any civilian could have gotten the same data by running a credit check, and there was nothing among these dry facts that could further the investigation.

  But who had not already seen them? For days, these pages had hung on open display in the incident room. What was the point of secrecy now?

  He could not ask for enlightenment. Giving her that satisfaction would be like taking a direct hit in their never-ending boxing match.

  Lieutenant Coffey smiled at his own private joke on her. It would destroy Mallory to know that, perverse as it might be, one of the high points of his job was going round and round with her. She had a fight style that fascinated him. His wins were few, but they got him through all the down days. So many times he had wanted to turn in his badge and gun, to bail on the political hell, the power plays and the squeeze of higher-ups—the crap side of his career. And then along came Mallory, and he would be up for a battle, on his toes and back in the fray. Most of the time, he wound up bloodied, beaten, and yet he reveled in it, and she always left him wanting more.

  Following protocol, he locked her envelope in a desk drawer. Mallory’s data of no significance continued to bother him, and he figured that was the object here. He knew how her mind worked. There had to be something in that envelope that he should have caught, some item that would make him feel foolish after she explained it to him.

  A sucker punch.

  Hours would pass before he realized that he had guessed wrong.

  15

  “Sorry, Miss. I’ve never seen him before.” The owner of the bodega returned the tattoo artist’s sketch to the detective. “But don’t go. Not yet.” While the old man worked a crank to lower an awning over his sidewalk flower stall, Mallory endured a lecture. His subject was roses.

  He dipped into a silver bucket of water and fresh-cut flowers to pluck a red one from a cellophane-wrapped bouquet. “Take this rose, for instance. Commercial trash. No scent. Looks pretty for a day, and then it droops. But that little girl’s roses? Perfection. Ah, my Angie.” He blew a kiss up to the sky.

  Upon their first meeting, he had not been told that Angie Quill was among the dead of Gracie Mansion, and now, days later, he was deep into grief. His eyes were shot with red from long crying jags, and he looked to be on the verge of one now. The elderly man was also moving more slowly this time, his face fixed in an expression of sad surprise. She recognized it from other homicides, that look that asked of everyone he met, How could she be dead?

  For the first time in this case, Mallory said the customary words that were normally reserved for family members, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  He thanked her and held out the rose—a gift. “A bribe. Don’t forget my Angie. You find the one who killed her.”

  “I’m working on it, but Angie changes with everyone we talk to. It’s like she was three different people. So . . . you were close.”

  “I watched her grow up. If you hear things about her on this street—dirty things—pay no attention. She was a wonderful kid—sunny, happy. But then later . . . I think she was maybe twelve or thirteen. . . . Well, next thing I know, she’s lugging a baby around everywhere she goes.”

  “Her nephew.”

  “My Angie stopped being a little girl that year. You could see it in her eyes. Like she was my age, looking back at life the way it used to be. Kids, they’re always looking for what’s up ahead, but not her. It killed me to see that happen . . . but I can’t blame Jonah.”

  More likely he blamed her baby-hooker life. He knew what that girl was—he knew a lot. “Did you ever picture her growing up to be a nun?”

  “Never. When I saw her in that nun’s habit, I couldn’t believe it. I still don’t. Kids raised by religious freaks, they go the other way. And nobody’s got more reason to hate God than my Angie.”

  So he could tell her more, but never would he volunteer any stain on that girl’s memory. The old man was so vulnerable right this minute, showing her his underbelly, exposing his heart for her best shot, and this could be such easy short work. But instead of laying him open and making him cry, Mall
ory held up his rose, nodded her thanks and moved on down the sidewalk.

  —

  “THE PUBLIC STILL THINKS we’re dealing with a spree killing,” said Lieutenant Coffey. The better story of a serial killer kidnapping taxpayers and cutting out their hearts—this had not yet occurred to the very imaginative news media. “But that won’t last long.”

  He stood behind the lectern in the incident room, addressing a squad of detectives slumped in their chairs. Half of them should be sleeping in the bunkroom down the hall.

  Only one man was on his feet, and the tall psychologist’s back was turned, his attention focused on the evidence pinned to the cork walls. Mallory had finally allowed Charles Butler full access to the case—except for the dry details she wanted locked away in a desk drawer.

  Jack Coffey stared at an empty chair. Mallory was late.

  “Between forensics and the autopsy reports,” and one insane theory of the crime, “it looks like we’re chasing a hit man.” Well, that woke up one cop in the back.

  Other detectives only stared at their boss in disbelief, none of them wanting to buy into the idea of a contract killer, a pro. If this was true, they stood a better chance at catching lightning in a pisspot.

  Lonahan’s voice boomed from the back of the room, where he had been napping. “You mean a hit man gone nuts, right?” He seemed to like this idea for good reason. It might give them an edge. Lunatics were easier to bag.

  “Good logic,” said Coffey. “But, no, that’s not it.” And now, since Mallory was a no-show, he presented her theory. “A serial killer may have hired a hit man for the wetwork.” At this point, no lynch mob was forming among the ranks, but maybe they were only too tired to fetch a rope. “So we’ll start with the hit man’s client.”