Blind Sight

by Carol O'Connell

  This cop had an eye for detail. She was looking at the middle row of volumes, no doubt taking interest in the five books that had been hastily replaced upside down. Searchers from the Crime Scene Unit had also found this hiding place, and within only minutes of entering his office, though the CSIs had found it empty on that occasion.

  A gracious loser, he removed the small safe that was disguised as a fused block of volumes and sized to fit numerous dirty documents—or just the one human heart. After removing the contents, he was startled by the quick flash of a cream-white hand. Red fingernails. Long ones. And now the small cardboard box was hers.

  “It’s been opened,” she said.

  “Must’ve happened at the Post Office. They’re opening all my mail. I didn’t look inside yet. I was going to hand it off to—”

  “The mailman told us the package was sealed with tape when he gave it to you. We have his sworn statement.”

  “Well, then . . . one of my bodyguards? Maybe after I—” Oh, why bother? It took a player to know one. He made a slight bow of appreciation.

  She pulled up the loose cardboard flaps and, with no show of surprise, looked down at the blood-red heart in plastic wrapping that was marked with the words, PROOF OF DEATH. “What about proof of life? Where’s the ransom demand?”

  “No idea what you’re— That hurts!” His right arm was jammed up behind his back as she bent him over the desk.

  —

  MALLORY MARCHED THE HANDCUFFED mayor down the stairs to see Courtney, the younger detective on the protection detail. He stood before the front door on the other side of the foyer. He avoided her eyes.

  She ignored him, turning with her prisoner to enter the hall leading to the Wagner Wing, her planned route to East End Avenue. The senior man, Detective Brogan, blocked her way down this narrow passage. His face was grim, his arms folded to put her on notice that he would not be moved from his post. Polk smiled at this bodyguard and gave him a nod that said, Good doggy. But Brogan seemed unaware of the mayor of New York City standing there in irons.

  Brogan’s eyes were locked on Mallory.

  Showdown.

  But why? He had to know there was a squad of reinforcements one phone call away. It was a fight he could not win. Mallory held up the small cardboard box. Each word carried equal weight as she said, “This is the bloody body part of a little boy. . . . Step aside.”

  The man had no bristle to him, only the tired stance of a cop who did not take orders from her. He was already saying goodbye to his shield and his pension. He might not mind if she shot him. Too many rules broken, too much gone past him, and now this. A piece of a dead child had been walked in the door on his watch. And—he—had—missed—that.

  “Proof of Jonah Quill’s death.” She opened the box flaps to show him. “It’s his heart.”

  Brogan looked sick.

  He held his ground.

  “This is the deal.” His eyes were on her again, and he spoke cop to cop. “There’s not gonna be any perp walk through that media circus out there. And no handcuffs, Mallory. This goes down real quiet. Me and my partner, we bring him in, not you. Where the mayor goes, we go with him—that’s the job description. That’s our job. It sucks, but—” His eyes drifted back to the small box.

  Brogan’s arms unfolded and dropped. The man’s career would end today or tomorrow. That was a sure thing. But this, his last stand, was left hanging.

  And his dignity.

  In Lou Markowitz’s confrontations with politicians, feds and cops, the old man had always shown great generosity to the losers. Mallory was more inclined to treat this detective like the grafting screwup that he was. Yet she unlocked the mayor’s handcuffs—and stepped aside.

  —

  IGGY CONROY stood near the edge of the roof, his binoculars trained on the sidewalk across the street. Dwayne Brox was leaving his apartment building in company with the same two cops who had made last night’s arrest at the diner. No handcuffs? The little twit was grinning, having his fun with them. That could only mean the police had no evidence to charge him—not today.

  When the unmarked Crown Victoria had pulled away, more cars of the same make were double-parking along the street. He counted six men in suits—more detectives. A search party! Would they find a cell-phone connection? If Gail was suddenly worried about the burner number, that meant the cops could backtrack Brox’s calls.

  Gail, you shit!

  How many more loose ends could there be?

  —

  THE UNMARKED POLICE CAR had reached its destination. Dwayne Brox heard the double click of lock releases and a clear invitation to “Get out!” But he waited in the backseat until Detective Gonzales was forced to play chauffeur, opening the rear door for his passenger.

  At his leisure, Dwayne climbed out to stand on the sidewalk in front of the SoHo station house. Reporters were corralled behind wooden sawhorses, no doubt invited here by the police. He grinned and waved to every camera lens.

  Detective Lonahan pointed him toward the entrance to the police station. At the stop of the stone steps, Dwayne waited until a uniformed officer finally stepped forward to do butler duty and open the door.

  For all this, he was still invisible to Detective Riker, who stood only inches away, leaning back against the brick wall and taking a long drag on a cigarette. All the reporters and every camera turned to this cop. In response to a shouted question, Riker said, “No, Mr. Brox isn’t being charged. He’s only a person of interest.” And that last phrase was every TV cop’s code for He did it! He’s guilty! We got him!

  Glorious.

  It was all the pressure that anyone could ever ask for. Oh, dear God, could the day get any better than this? Dwayne laughed as the door closed behind him.

  —

  THE DETECTIVES had finished with the filing cabinet that held only the detritus of two lives, the dead parents. Even the pile of junk mail and unpaid bills were addressed to the late Mr. and Mrs. Brox. No scrap of paper could be found with any helpful notation—like maybe a phone number for a hit man.

  The suspect seemed to have damn little use for paper. Better luck was had by Detective Sanger, the most computer literate among them today, as he scanned the files of a laptop computer. “The guy’s an idiot. I don’t even need a password. Dwayne never logged out.”

  Sanger clicked the icon that would give up an address book of contacts, and he recognized one name. It was an old movie title for his girlfriend’s favorite chick flick. “I dunno,” said Sanger. “Our hit man might be Anna Karenina. Or maybe he’s one of these guys.” He pointed to the given names, Dmitri, Alyosha, Ivan and Pavel, each followed by the initial K. Given a bias from his days in Narcotics, he liked every tie with a Russian-mob flavor.

  Janos, who favored books over movies, leaned close to the screen to read that segment of the contact list. “What a showboating jerk. He screwed up, too. Pavel’s last name begins with an S, not a K. He was the old man’s bastard.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Sanger diddled the keyboard as he waited for someone else to jump in and say, “WHAT?”

  —

  “WELL, THERE’S NO reporters in the house,” said Jack Coffey. “I want him cuffed before Mallory brings him up here.” The lieutenant ended his call with the desk sergeant, having settled the downstairs argument with the mayor’s protection detail.

  Appearances were important today. He had arranged for the two men to meet in passing. Dwayne Brox was seated at a desk in the squad room, one that had been moved to face the stairwell door. He was filling a sheet of paper with samples of his block lettering. One line might match the box that contained the child’s heart, though printing was only the next best thing to no good in handwriting identification. But that was busywork while waiting for—

  The stairwell door opened, and there was Mallory, holding the arm of the handcuffed mayor of New York City.
For this historic interrogation, no lesser lawyer than the Manhattan DA was en route to the station house.

  When Brox looked up to see Polk in handcuffs, the lieutenant anticipated fear and anxiety. What he had not expected was their exchange of smiles, each man so happy to see the other—in custody.

  This was fun for them?

  The lieutenant turned to the tall psychologist beside him, saying, “What’s up here?”

  Charles Butler looked worried. “I should’ve guessed. . . . I’m so sorry.”

  —

  THE SOLE OCCUPANT of the interrogation room, Mayor Andrew Polk, was smiling at some little joke he had told to himself.

  Next door was District Attorney Ambrose, who had arrived with no entourage for this special occasion of bringing down a political enemy. Best to gloat alone.

  And so there were smiles on both sides of the one-way-glass window when Riker entered the watchers’ room to say, “We’re just waitin’ for the mayor’s lawyer to get here.” After that, if need be, the detective would spin a few lies to explain any further delay, while Mallory sat with Charles Butler behind the closed door of the lieutenant’s office.

  —

  “TALK FAST.”

  This psychologist was prone to carefully considered wordy responses, and Jack Coffey broke the long silence, saying, “A little faster than that, okay?”

  “I’ve never set eyes on the mayor before today,” said Charles, “But still . . . I should’ve seen it. Polk and Brox, they’re both high-risk sociopaths. Dueling sociopaths. You might call this the ultimate game of chicken. Neither of them is going to back down. It’s not about money anymore—if it ever was. It’s the power play, the game. All along it was headed this way. I should have realized . . . given who they are, what they are. It could only have ended badly . . . and now the boy is dead.”

  Charles might be the saddest man in New York City. He was taking on all the guilt and responsibility for Jonah’s murder. And the lieutenant could see that this man’s self-inflicted torture was just fine by Mallory.

  She was so quiet. A bomb with no tick. Could she be any angrier?

  Her cell phone rang. After reading lines of text on her screen, Mallory was out the door and gone. And, yes, she could be and was a damn sight more angry.

  —

  DR. EDWARD SLOPE dropped his cell phone into a pocket of his lab coat. Kathy Mallory was on the way here, or so she said.

  She damn well better be.

  There had been an improbable, inexplicable error, and someone was going to answer for it, but he was determined that no one in the Medical Examiner’s Office was going to take any blame. Well, maybe one person. Yes, certainly one. It was predictable that she would first blame him. What were friends for?

  24

  Gail Rawly quelled the urge to yell, to flap his arms and bang his head against a wall.

  Perhaps it was a mistake to let Mary believe that they were going on a surprise vacation. She had wasted precious time securing every window’s hurricane shutters to protect the house from summer storms while they were gone—never to return. And she had given Gail his own list of chores. Insanely enough, he had done them, though speed was everything today.

  Mary and the princess were packing bags—still not ready to go!

  He should’ve just tossed his wife and child into the car. One small mercy on a bad day, Mary and Patty could not see outside the shuttered windows as Gail lay flat on the driveway, opening the garage door with his remote control in one hand—and a gun in the other—checking to see that there were no feet hiding behind the two cars parked in there.

  —

  “MY PEOPLE don’t make this kind of mistake!” said the chief medical examiner as he led the young detective into the old autopsy room that had been repurposed for secrecy. No keys to the door were held by janitors or morgue attendants. A single archaic lightbulb was trained on the dissection table, another artifact from the infancy of forensic medicine. Only the half-size refrigerator belonged to this century. Dr. Slope had wheeled it in here himself, and now he opened it to extract a small metal tray, one of five. “The chain of evidence is indisputable. It’s got your signature on it.” When he turned around to face an angry Kathy Mallory, he held a child’s heart in his gloved hand, but “It’s not Jonah Quill’s heart.”

  And gone was her best evidence.

  He gently placed the organ on the table. “It has the bio markers for a male, but it came from the body of a younger boy, six or seven years old. And there’s one more departure you might find interesting.” He nodded toward the small refrigerator, his makeshift morgue of hearts. “The other four were well preserved by the vacuum-sealed bags. No air to oxidize the tissue, and carbon monoxide was added to keep them red.”

  “Like meat from a fresh kill,” she said. “That’s what the hit man’s client expected to see.”

  “And the grocer’s customer, too. Gas flushing—that’s a meatpacker’s trick. Your killer shows an insane attention to detail.” He looked down at the tray that held the child’s heart. “But this one’s a bit too red. It wasn’t wrapped within hours of death—but days afterward. That’s why your killer bathed it in red food coloring. Smell it.”

  Always game to sniff body parts, she bent low to the table and inhaled the odor of the heart. “Sour,” she said. “Spoiled meat.”

  “Spoiled before the packaging, and it wasn’t nicked by the cut to open—”

  “But there is a wound,” she said, as if he might have missed that gaping slice, so different from the cuts needed to sever the heart from the body. Every other appendage was a stub.

  “Your butcher might’ve been in a hurry this time. Or—back to insane detail—he was trying to hide the fact that this child had an artificial valve.” He saw the challenge in her eyes, a look that said, Prove it! And, as she well knew, he could not identify what was not there. She was always annoyed when he played detective, and he seldom missed an opportunity to irritate her. Now for his best shot. “If there was no artificial valve—maybe there should have been. The boy needed at least one. I found a congenital defect in another valve.”

  Take that.

  “A damaged heart? So this boy died of natural causes.”

  And now it was his place to be annoyed. She was always making leaps with no foundation. “I can’t make that call with only the—”

  “I can,” she said. “The hit man’s got Jonah. It would’ve been a lot easier to take his heart.”

  Excellent point. If the killer had not slaughtered and mutilated twelve-year-old Jonah, what were the odds that he would murder a younger child for a heart? “So . . . let’s say it’s a death by natural causes.”

  “Right.” She could pack so much sarcasm into a single syllable, but then she layered on a bit more. “Let’s say that.”

  “Then your killer went shopping for corpses. There was no embalming, but you can rule out hospital morgues. They refrigerate the—”

  “I would’ve done that anyway. Too risky for my guy. Too many security cameras, and they’re staffed round the clock.” By tone alone, she managed to convey that he should stop this cop kind of speculation. All she wanted from him were facts.

  Well, too bad.

  “Funeral homes,” he said. “The boy might’ve been Jewish Orthodox. There wouldn’t have been embalming for the—”

  “And no stolen body parts. A relative or a family friend would’ve stayed with the corpse till they put it in the ground.”

  Kathy had done that service for her foster father, a not-so-orthodox Jew. The vigil had not been required for Louis Markowitz’s death, and no one had asked this of her. But that ancient custom had been her story to the rabbi on the night when he had gone to the morgue and tried to coax her home.

  However, Edward Slope, her greatest detractor, was not so easily gulled. He had always seen that observance of ritu
al as a liar’s cover story for a long goodbye. Stubborn Kathy, neither ready nor willing to give up her dead on that night, had only grudgingly surrendered the body to a casket come morning. And so it was the doctor’s theory that she had loved Lou Markowitz more than that good old man ever knew.

  —

  UPON WAKING, Jonah obeyed the old command of Aunt Angie’s to open his eyes—to no purpose. Only his fingertips could see the bandage that covered his head like a helmet. More gauze was wrapped around his swollen leg. Both wounds throbbed, but there was no pain. He was only groggy. Drugged again?

  There was moisture in the air. He was back in the basement, and an antiseptic smell overpowered the stink of the mildewed mop.

  Upstairs, the man’s feet were heavy as hammer falls, pausing only for the slam of doors and the lighter bangs of cupboards roughly closed. Objects dropping, breaking on the floor overhead. And now an outcry, a long strung out Ah! from the gut that spelled out Cigarette Man’s despair.

  The dog was agitated. A bark. Panting. Wheezing. Toenails crossed the cement beyond the door, on the way to meet the man’s footsteps stomping down the stairs.

  Was Cigarette Man coming to beat him to death? Was he that angry?

  The bolt on the door slid back. The smell of cigarettes walked in.

  And Jonah said, “Before you do this . . . tell me why you killed her.”

  The footsteps came closer. The rubber mattress sank on one end as the man sat down, and his voice had no anger to it when he said, “Sure you wanna hear this?”

  “Yes . . . please.”

  “I don’t know why she died. . . . I set out to kill an old man that day.” The lighter clicked. A sigh. The smell of exhaled smoke. “I was inside an empty store, waitin’ for this geezer. He’s like five feet away when I shoot him with a dart. His knees give out, and I’m right there to catch him and take him back to the store. So I’m halfway in . . . and I see you comin’ down the sidewalk . . . with Angie’s face. I dump the old man on the floor, and I lean outside. I’m lookin’ at you, kid—when she comes up behind me, jumps me. She’s on me. We roll into the store. Her on my back. Fingers goin’ for my eyes. Screamin’! I get her off me. Backhand her and knock her into a wall. Now I see her face. Angie. . . . ForthelovaGod, it’s Angie. . . . She’s slidin’ to the floor when you come runnin’ in. But she’s already dead. She didn’t hit that wall hard enough to even knock her out, but she’s—”