Blind Sight

by Carol O'Connell

  She phoned her shortlist in to Riker. “Check the state tax roles for these three.” She fed him names and dates of birth and death. “Whatever you can find on them.”

  “Okay, let’s go,” she said to the groundskeeper. He walked alongside her on the path to the main building of the Elroy Cemetery, where all the records were kept.

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Miss. The boss’s computer is secondhand crap—almost as old as the cameras. No Internet. Penny-pinching bastard.”

  —

  PENNY-PINCHING did not fit with the décor. Even Charles Butler, her walking, talking reference book for all things antique, would have approved the appointments of this private office. The furniture dated back to the mid 1800s, when the first grave was dug. The detective and the groundskeeper sat in matching high-back leather armchairs from the same period.

  The young man behind the mahogany desk was the descendant of a long line of Elroys. He stared at another antique, his outmoded desktop computer, as he searched it for names of the dead and buried. He had found all but one from her shortlist. “This last one? You must’ve made an error when you—”

  “I was there,” said the groundskeeper, taking offense on Mallory’s behalf. “I know she wrote down the right names. Section and plot numbers, too.”

  “Impossible,” said Elroy. “That last one’s in a section that was closed over fifty years ago.” Done with the old man, he flashed a toothy smile for Mallory. “But we do cross-index.” He scrolled down a list of numbers and names. “Ah, plot 947. Like I said, we’ve got no Moira Conroy buried anywhere in this cemetery. That plot belongs to Moira Kenna. That’s the name that would’ve appeared on her temporary marker, the one we always put down for the funeral. So . . . I can see what happened here. When the monument company finished carving her permanent headstone, obviously they delivered the wrong one, a stone for an entirely different Moira. We can’t be expected to keep track of things like that. And, apparently, the Kenna family never made a complaint.”

  A corpse with an alias carved in stone?

  Mallory reached out to swivel his monitor sideways for a look at the screen of names and numbers. She pointed to the end of one line. “Check out the dates for birth and death. Explain that.”

  He leaned in to peer at the glowing numerals that followed Moira Kenna’s name. “She died in 1931 . . . at the age of five.” And now he consulted the notebook page with Mallory’s neatly printed date of death for Moira Conroy, a woman who had lived much longer and died only nine years ago. “Oh, yes, I see.” It was highly unlikely that it had taken the stone carver more than eighty years to deliver the wrong monument.

  “That’s why the family never complained,” said Mallory. “They were all dead when you illegally sold that grave the second time.” Did she believe this? No, she had a better theory. But menace inspired cooperation.

  Mr. Elroy got off to a sputtering start. “N-n-no! We would never—”

  “Prove it! You still have paperwork on that plot? Forms with next of kin? A funeral home?”

  “Our paperwork dates back more than a hundred and fifty years, and it’s all intact. Most of it’s on real paper.” He said this as if it might be a good thing to run a business in the wrong century. “The older sections haven’t been scanned into the computer yet. So the Kenna child is downstairs with the rest of the backlog.”

  —

  OR NOT.

  In the basement storage area, Mallory stood before an old wooden filing cabinet, one of many, and she waited for the flustered Mr. Elroy to go through the contents of one drawer—for the third time. The file for plot 947 was not to be found.

  “Oh, dear,” he said. “If she’s been misfiled, we’ll never find her until all the paperwork gets scanned. That might be years from now.”

  Mallory’s scenario for that was never. But a theory was proving out by the evidence that could not be found.

  The file might have disappeared nine years ago, shortly after the second interment, the burial of Moira Conroy’s trespassing corpse. Or it might have been stolen earlier, maybe on a day when the hit man was trolling cemeteries, hunting for an identity to steal for a living woman with roughly the same date of birth, another Moira. An elderly woman might find it hard to give up her entire identity—easier to keep her own first name.

  Only a dead child would do. Children left no paper trails in the system, and a little girl with the same first name would have been a greater stroke of luck in a smaller cemetery than this one. The buried girl’s birth certificate was all that was needed to apply for a Social Security number and a fresh start with bogus credentials. This was theory, but it fit so well with a single fact: Mallory knew she could count on two bodies in that grave.

  The man who brought flowers to the deceased poseur had ordered the replacement gravestone with the extra corpse’s true name, an act of sentiment that had served a second purpose. It obliterated the last visible trace of the grave’s first tenant.

  But the stolen identity would have had a life span of its own, one that left tracks. Mallory phoned her partner to add another name to her list of searches. “Run a tri-state trace for a paper ghost, another Moira, last name Kenna.”

  —

  FOR THE LENGTH of a commercial break, all of Iggy Conroy’s possibilities remained intact.

  He waited for the news story promised by the teasing mention of a suspicious death and the exhumation of a New Jersey grave—after a word from the sponsors. With the tap of the mute button on his remote control, he killed the TV volume and watched a silent parade of film clips to sell him this thing and that. How many ads could be smashed into a single minute?

  Another minute.

  An eternity of ads.

  C’mon, c’mon.

  The news anchor reappeared. Iggy turned on the volume as the picture changed to a field reporter on location in a parking lot. He recognized the old man standing alongside the young woman with the microphone. She introduced him as an employee of the Elroy Cemetery, the only one willing to speak to the media, though he did not seem all that willing. The reporter had boxed him in between two cars and the shrubs that lined the parking spaces.

  Following her first question, the surly groundskeeper said, “No, lady, I ain’t seen a cop car all day.” Asked why the small casket had been exhumed and taken away in a van, he replied, “Ah, who knows? It’s not like that never happens. Let’s say you’re dead, and you think you’re all set in your final resting place. But then your family decides to take you with ’em when they move down to Florida. Better weather, right? And maybe your new grave’s got an ocean view. . . . People are stupid. . . . But that kills your rumor on a grave robber, don’t it? The relatives never haul off empty coffins.” And now, on to the traffic report.

  A small casket. A lying old man.

  The cops had that kid’s heart!

  Had Dwayne Brox just handed it over to them? Was that why they let him go?

  Iggy walked through all the rooms of his house, saying goodbye to every wall. It was time to torch his meat locker.

  26

  The tumbledown house, a shelter to vermin and squatters, sat on the ragged edge of a slum that used to be a town. Even the rats here were down to skin and bone. The only thriving life forms were weeds that came up through cracks in the pavement. Harvey Madden, the wasting man on the front stoop, smiled wide as Iggy Conroy cruised past him to park the van at the end of the block.

  Years ago, before Harvey had started sampling what he sold, he had been a pharmacist who owned his own drugstore and drove a nice car. Today the addict was a marginal man, such a puny man that he crouched below the notice of narcs, and no one would miss him if he never went back to that house for his bedroll. There was no muscle on him, but the height and age were roughly right. The skeletal junkie was coming down the sidewalk as Iggy opened the rear door of the van.

  Harvey obli
gingly climbed inside, and with him came the smell of underwear never washed. Every dime made on deals went to feed his habit. Nothing left for soap. Between a bony finger and thumb, he held up the promised sugar cube. “Not your usual buy,” nothing like the drugs he supplied for Iggy’s murder kit. “This is primo, my friend. Packed with hallucinogens for the trip of a lifetime. Forget Paris.” He dropped the cube into the hand of his best customer. “Made to order for a quick dissolve with no aftertaste. And it kicks in fast. You’ll love it.”

  “It’s goin’ in a pint of water.”

  “No problem. I promise you, it’s packed.” And Harvey had been about to say more, but he felt the jab of the dart in his neck, whispered the words, Oh . . . rats, and then he lay sprawled on the floor of the van.

  Only paralyzed.

  There needed to be smoke in Harvey’s lungs when he died.

  Iggy’s exit plan was simple. Torch everything. Kill everybody.

  —

  DETECTIVE GONZALES sang out, “Road trip!”

  All around the squad room, men were opening and slamming drawers. Some clipped side arms to their belts. Others favored shoulder holsters.

  “Hey, Mallory. You still at the cemetery?” Riker cradled the desk phone’s receiver between his shoulder and chin, freeing his hands to hide his eyeglasses and find his gun. “Your paper ghost, Moira Kenna—she’s still pretty lively. Pays utility bills, property taxes. . . . Naw, no driver’s license, but she’s the registered owner of a vintage Jag. . . . Yeah, I thought you’d like that. But get this. Twelve years ago, she bought a house for cash. . . . Right, that was the year she applied for a Social Security number.”

  Janos called out to him from three desks away, “Tell her Moira Kenna’s still writing checks on her bank account!”

  “Hear that? Mallory, you’re gonna love this. The date of birth you gave me for the other woman—that fits a Moira Conroy in New York. She dropped off the tax rolls the year Moira Kenna bought the house in Jersey. . . . Yeah, twenty-two Birch Drive in Lowell. Everybody’s on the move. The whole squad. We’ll meet you there.”

  When he ended the call, the other detectives were filing out the stairwell door. He shouted to them, “Sirens all the way! We need speed! Mallory doesn’t want any backup from the locals!”

  “Smart move,” said Gonzales. “They’d just fuck it up.”

  So true. If one patrol car pulled in the driveway, it would get the boy killed. Cops, too. The alternate game plan for the Jersey police would be dicking around for hours, waiting for a hostage negotiator to show up on the scene. Either way, the kid was dead, and their hit man was out the back door.

  This was a job for shock and awe and a battering ram.

  Washington pumped the address into his smartphone and squinted at the map on the little screen. “Right across the bridge and down the road we go. We’re a helluva lot closer than Mallory. That cemetery’s seventy miles from this address.”

  Obviously, Washington, smart man, had never ridden in a car with Mallory behind the wheel. And so Riker said, “I got twenty that says she beats us to the house.”

  Every man on the squad had a sporting nature, and this guaranteed him more speed on the road. He would cover every single bet and hope to lose—rather than have her go in alone.

  —

  IGGY CONROY stood at the kitchen counter with ingredients culled from his drug stash. After mashing pills with mortar and pestle, he emptied powder from the bowl and cut it into two parts with a razor blade, but the doses were not equal. He had become proficient in estimating the weight of the meat—the measure of a drug.

  And now for something different. He dropped Harvey Madden’s sugar cube into one of the water bottles, a promise of pretty pictures for a boy who could not see, not with his eyes.

  Iggy thought he finally had the hang of blindness, and maybe it should not be called that. There was seeing—and there was seeing.

  —

  AS MALLORY TORE up the access road that led to the freeway, she had a name for the hit man: Ignatius Conroy, only child of the late Moira Conroy. He was also the beneficiary of his mother’s life insurance—which he had never collected. No death certificate had ever been issued for the woman buried in that plot nine years ago.

  Mrs. Conroy, alias Kenna, could never be allowed to die, not on paper, not while her son was alive with all his assets in her name. Very creative, using a woman for his paper persona—but why steal the heart of a little boy from that cemetery? It was a place he knew well, a comfort zone for grave robbing, but why the risk?

  Why not just cut out Jonah’s heart?

  —

  IGGY OPENED THE DOOR that led down to the basement. The dog was yapping, so happy to hear him coming. By the time he cleared the stairs and crossed the cement floor to unbolt the laundry-room door, the mutt had barked himself into a coughing fit. Iggy leaned down to pour the contents of one bottle into the dog’s dry water bowl.

  Beyond the doorway, Jonah sat cross-legged on the mattress. No fresh blood had seeped through the gauze wrapped round his head to cover the damage done by a stone troll, but, despite the antibiotics, pus oozed from the bandage on his leg. Dog bites were a bitch to heal.

  Iggy wished the boy would close those broken eyes.

  —

  BURNING DOWN THE ON-RAMP and into four lanes of traffic, Mallory had no portable siren for her silver convertible. That kind of warning was futile. Few motorists would take this cute Volkswagen for a police vehicle, even with a screaming siren, and time would be lost to their confusion. This was the rationale she had given to her partner for silent running, and she half believed it.

  The detective drove up on the tail of the pickup truck ahead, quickly turning a frail old man into a road-rage crazy. He did get out of her way, but then he tried to chase her down with the mistaken idea that his junker could beat the Porsche engine hidden under her hood.

  Some things in life were just more fun than guns.

  Next she bore down on a sports car that could give her at least some competition— should the driver fall into a vehicular-homicide state of mind. Nothing could make this motorist crazier than a VW in his rearview mirror, keeping pace with his real car, coming up to kiss his very expensive paint and maybe take a bite out of his fiberglass shell.

  —

  THE CONVOY OF DETECTIVES, stuck in city traffic, created a deafening scream of sirens and horns trained on motorists up ahead. Civilian drivers were jangled enough to brave the red light, and some pulled into a one-way side street to face oncoming traffic—anything to get out of the way, to escape the noise that played with their nerve endings. Other vehicles were crawling up on sidewalks to startle pedestrians, who turned en masse to face the string of wailing, honking cop cars, and they waved to the detectives, middle fingers extended in that New York salutation of Hi, how are ya—and go fuck yourselves.

  —

  BEYOND THE OPEN LAUNDRY-ROOM DOOR, the dog lapped at his bowl with thirsty gusto.

  “Here.” The man pressed a small bottle into Jonah’s hands. “No tricks. The water’s drugged. Pretty soon, this house is gonna be one big ball of fire. You don’t want that, kid. . . . Burnin’ alive? . . . Naw.”

  “You could let me go.”

  The cigarette lighter clicked. “There won’t be any pain. I slipped in somethin’ extra, a little somethin’ for the road. You’ll like it. . . . Up to you. I’m not gonna pour the stuff down your throat. But you really don’t wanna wait for the smoke to come downstairs.”

  Jonah rocked himself as he strained to listen. No bells. No sirens. No one was coming to carry him away.

  “Arson is where I really shine. It’ll start in the back of the house. Then it’s gonna rip along the hall and into the front room. . . . I wish you could see what I’m lookin’ at, kid. The support beams for the floor—they’re right over your head. No termites now,
but they had a go at that wood for years before I bought this place. Brittle, dried out, fulla holes. It won’t take much to bring the floor down . . . and down comes the fire. . . . But maybe the smoke gets you first. It’s like breathin’ in acid. You cough your insides out. Then you choke. You can’t breathe. You go nuts. Total panic. I don’t know what’s worse. The flames or the smoke. So . . . drink the water. Don’t drink it. Up to you, kid. But I know your Aunt Angie would want it this way. No fear, no pain.”

  Outside the laundry room, the lapping at the pit bull’s water bowl had stopped. There was thump to the floor, but this was not a lie-down-to-sleep sound. More like a dropped sandbag. “You killed the dog?”

  “He’s not dead. Not yet. Wanna see?” Footsteps crossed the threshold and, seconds later, returned to the room.

  Fur grazed Jonah’s toes as the dog was laid on the floor, not with another thump, but gently. The man took the boy’s hand and lowered it to the animal’s pelt. Jonah could hear the pit bull’s breathing, and he could feel it by the rise and fall of the ribs. And then came the familiar whistle the dog always made while asleep, a lullaby of old lungs.

  “Oh, hey,” said Cigarette Man. “You gotta see this.”

  He moved Jonah’s hand down the dog’s fur to rest it on a lively haunch, and the boy’s blind fingers walked up the animal’s kicking leg.

  “That’s how you know he’s dreamin,’” said the man. “He’s runnin’ around in his dreams, chasin’ down squirrels. . . . If that ain’t Dog Heaven.”

  The kicking subsided.

  The leg dropped.

  The dog’s song, the whistle of lungs, that stopped, too.