Blind Sight

by Carol O'Connell

  Click.

  Not a penknife. A switchblade. Such a long blade, and rather wicked looking. And—Oh, my—the tip of it was hesitating in the air, a bare inch twixt sharp tip and a mayoral eyeball. Without so much as a tremor in his voice, Andrew said, “You can’t do this, can you? You really need to know—”

  “Idiot. You got two eyes. And me? I got the time.”

  So distracting was the blade, the mayor never saw the detective, only her hand—red fingernails—a big gun, its muzzle gently pressed to the knife wielder’s temple.

  Her voice was soft, one pure silk note. “Don’t.”

  “Conroy!” Her partner was standing on the other side of the bed, aiming his weapon.

  The knife never wavered. Andrew Polk resumed his cross-eyed stare at the blade’s sharp point.

  Detective Mallory said, “I’ve got all your answers, Conroy.”

  The knife dropped to the mattress.

  Excellent. One might say the relief was an orgasmic release—all the fireworks splendor of sex.

  —

  RIKER’S EARPIECE DANGLED from one pocket by a wire, and now he could hear the feet of other men on the stairs beyond the door.

  Detective Gonzales bent the hit man over the mattress. He had his prisoner handcuffed before the two young rookies entered the room to deliver the body count for the house and grounds.

  “Four officers down,” said Rowinski.

  “Ambulances on the way,” said his partner, Morris.

  “So . . . about that stiff you left back in Jersey.” Gonzales yanked Conroy to his feet. “The one who died in your bed? We figure him for a homeless guy. I don’t suppose you got his name?”

  “They have names?”

  “Sorry, man. Stupid question.” And Gonzales said this with all due sincerity.

  Riker had to agree with the sentiment. A pro was unlikely to implicate himself in burning a man alive—but what the hell. Worth a try.

  Mallory held up a Miranda card. “Ignatious Conroy, you have the right to—”

  “Iggy. Call me Iggy.”

  “Iggy,” said Riker, “your client, Dwayne Brox, died tonight. . . . We’re sorry for your loss.” He snapped on a latex glove and picked up the knife. “What’ve we got here? You and the mayor got some weird little sex fantasy going on? ’Cause I’d be willin’ to buy that—my hand to God.”

  “Cut the sarcasm, Detective.” The mayor smoothed out his bedding and fluffed his pillows. “Oh, no,” he said, as if five more detectives were filing into his bedroom just to irritate him. “Get out, all of you. Just take your prisoner and go.”

  “Iggy stays for now.” Riker never responded well to that tone for ordering servants around. He tipped back a lamp on the nightstand and removed a small metal pellet from its base. “Mr. Mayor, you’re the one who’s leaving.”

  “You bugged my—”

  “Yeah, when we did that walk-through. We got ’em all over the mansion.” Riker laid a folded sheet of paper on the mayor’s lap. “That’s the warrant for the bugs. I told a judge your security detail was doin’ a shabby job. I’m not sure he really cared. That judge didn’t vote for you, but he signed the warrant anyway . . . for your protection. And your confession to conspiracy? Hey, that was a bonus.”

  “A confession under duress is no good in court. I was only—”

  “The mayor’s got a point,” said Riker. “I suppose we could just use the part where he admits to siccing Conroy on the kid in the hospital.”

  “No,” said Mallory, as though this might be a serious negotiation. “I like the part where he tries to hire a hit on his aide. We should play that for Tucker. See if he wants to roll on his boss.” She turned to their audience of grinning detectives and two rookie officers—one hit man. “Any volunteers to cuff Mayor Polk and read him his rights?”

  Hands went up all around the room, and Mallory picked the winners.

  Andrew Polk was so startled, he inadvertently invoked his right to remain silent before those words were read to him. He barefooted out of the room, cuffed and in the custody of the youngsters in uniform. Mallory’s selection of these officers was taken for generosity that netted thumbs up from other detectives. A high-profile collar would make those two rookies shine tonight. But Riker put it down to his partner’s sick sense of fun. When their sergeant saw them come down the staircase with the mayor in handcuffs, that poor bastard would faint dead away.

  Iggy Conroy stood manacled between Lonahan and Gonzales. Mallory pointed to the armchair by the bed. “Sit him down.”

  Great idea. The lights were low. The furniture was comfortable. No lawyers in sight.

  She finished reading his Miranda rights, with a small elaboration. “If you invoke your right of silence, I can’t tell you about—”

  “Okay, you got questions,” said Conroy. “Me, too. Go for it. But first you gotta tell me the game those two clowns was playin’.”

  “I can do that,” said Mallory. “When Polk was a Wall Street broker, he swindled ten of his own investors with bogus information on a stock offering. Then he bribed the victims with hush money—just a small percent of their losses. When they signed off on that deal and lied to the feds, every one of them was complicit in Polk’s felony.”

  “Screw that part. What was the damn game? How was Brox gonna collect on it?”

  Mallory sat down on the edge of the bed, facing Conroy, only inches between her knees and his. “When those four bodies turned up on the mayor’s lawn, he took it for the work of an investor. One of them wanted restitution for the stock losses. The terms were all spelled out in the first ransom note.”

  Those ransom notes were long gone to ashes. Riker had to wonder why she would lie about that.

  “If Polk had only known who was behind it, the game would’ve ended with those four kills. Brox never had any leverage. His parents got swindled, not him.” Mallory leaned back on one arm, eyes half closed like a drowsing cat. “And I know they didn’t tell their kid a damn thing about insider trading . . . or that would’ve been in the ransom notes.”

  The notes she had never read.

  Taking his cue from Mallory’s body language, Conroy relaxed every muscle, more at ease with this conversation—and with her. “So that little freak Brox, he was all hot air.”

  “No, he had a plan,” said Mallory, “a good one.”

  And there they sat, as if they were alone in this room, the cop and the hit man, just two people discussing their workday in the after hours. All that was missing was the beer.

  “So,” she said, “by the time Polk finds out it’s Brox—an outsider who can’t do him any harm with the feds—it’s too late. The mayor’s already trashed evidence on four murders, and he’s gotten himself snagged into a kidnap-murder conspiracy for Jonah. Now Brox has leverage for a plea bargain . . . if he gets caught. And he’s on the news, every damn channel, laughing it up for the cameras—advertising guilt. It’s like Brox is begging to get caught. Very smart. More pressure on Polk. A first-rate squeeze play.”

  Oh, better than that. Riker saw it as a cop’s idea of high art.

  “Get to the payoff,” said Iggy Conroy. “The mayor’s got eyes on him every damn minute. No offshore accounts. How the hell could a ransom get paid?”

  “Without Brox getting caught? That was the easy part,” she said. “No risk at all. When I found out about the stock swindle, it only took me six seconds to figure that out.”

  Every cop’s eyes were now trained on Riker. By a bare inch, he moved his head side to side to tell these men that she had to be lying. But what if she was telling it straight? If she had been holding back on the rest of squad all this time—

  The room full of detectives got very quiet.

  “There’s only one way it could work,” said Mallory. “Brox wanted Polk to pay back all the losses to everyone he scammed on that stoc
k deal. No need to collect any ransom. Brox would’ve gotten a check in the mail—like the rest of Polk’s victims. By my count, that would amount to less than a third of the mayor’s holdings . . . but he didn’t plan to pay out a dime.”

  “A standoff,” said Conroy.

  Mallory nodded. “That was the flaw.”

  And that backed up Charles Butler’s theory of Polk and Brox as two of a kind—twins in greed and sociopathy.

  “It could only end in a draw.” Mallory raised her eyebrows and exchanged you-gotta-love-it smiles with the hit man. “But it should’ve worked out fine on your end. Gail Rawly didn’t leave us any ties to you. And Brox didn’t lie about his plan being foolproof—for you. No chance you’d ever get caught. If you hadn’t palmed off the heart of a graveyard corpse, we wouldn’t even know your name. You could’ve just walked away with the money. So . . . here’s my question. Why didn’t you cut out—”

  “Cut out Jonah’s heart? . . . I couldn’t do it.”

  Mallory was up on her feet—so fast—and there was a touch of outrage in her voice when she asked, “Why the hell not?” It was like this psycho in handcuffs had been somehow unreasonable—or worse, ripped her off. She was owed an explanation. A deal was a damn deal.

  “It was the bells,” said Iggy Conroy. “Jingle bells in the sky. . . . I want my lawyer now.”

  31

  Another hospital visitor had left a newspaper behind in the waiting room. It was a tabloid, not his first choice for news of the day, but Charles Butler found the front-page story irresistible. And now he learned that Ignatius Conroy had become a media darling, granting press interviews with the blessings of the Manhattan District Attorney. Given a plethora of evidence against Andrew Polk, now painted in the blackest publicity, he could be prosecuted for any crime, real or imagined, and a jury could be counted upon to hang him from the handiest lamppost.

  So ended the era of the enfants terribles, a mayoral string of tiny kings with Napoleon dreams. A deputy mayor had stepped into the vacated office, and the newspaper heralded him as a man of average means—but above-average height.

  Charles looked up from his reading to glance at his watch, a Swiss timepiece that had never dropped the smallest increment of a second. There was only one minute to go before the appointed hour.

  Not soon enough.

  This area of the pediatrics wing was a cheerful place of bright-colored walls. However, it reeked of fragrant diapers, spilt milk and five kinds of foods being imbibed by harried visiting parents and their noisy offspring. He folded the newspaper and turned to the elevator. The metal doors slid open, and Mallory stepped out, right on time.

  When she was seated beside him, he said, “So, your hit man confessed, and I understand the mayor’s aide turned state’s witness.”

  Mallory took the newspaper away from him. “Why do you read this trash? I planted half the stuff in that article.”

  “But Conroy’s confession—”

  “No, that part’s true, but Tucker’s not locked in yet. Then there’s Andrew Polk. He’s got the best lawyers a rich man can buy, and a judge could toss his taped confession. . . . I need more. I need Jonah’s testimony.”

  “If Conroy confessed, how could Jonah possibly matter to—”

  “He figures in Polk’s trial. I used to have one really great piece of evidence—a little boy’s heart.”

  “The wrong boy’s—”

  “It was a kid’s heart, Charles. It just doesn’t get any better than that. The jury could’ve held it in their hands. But Dr. Slope just gave it away. Hell, he even sewed it back in.”

  Oh, yes, evil bastard, pissing her off that way, all for the sake of a child’s grieving parents. “But Edward said you had photos and tissue samples.”

  The wave of her hand told him, Sadly, it’s just not the same. “But I’ve got Jonah Quill. Polk colluded in a murder plot, and he all but drew the hit man a map to the hospital—to kill a twelve-year-old. So what do we do about that, Charles? . . . Bygones?”

  “But Jonah isn’t—”

  “The jury needs to see a little boy on the witness stand . . . so they can hate Andrew Polk and convict him. If my tape gets thrown out, obstruction might be the only charge that sticks—if anything sticks. So . . . no more conversations with a dead nun. The kid’s ghost has to go.”

  —

  WHEN CHARLES entered the room, he saw Lucinda Wells standing by Jonah’s bed. She was playing nurse today, dutifully plucking medicinal pieces of chocolate from a heart-shaped box and feeding them to her patient. Oh, but she looked so unhappy.

  No—that was not quite it. This little girl was worried.

  Jonah’s uncle rose from his chair by the window. “Did you—”

  “Yes,” said Mallory. “I tracked down the roses.”

  Harold Quill smiled and thanked her for this strange errand. Late at night, a bouquet had appeared out of nowhere, and there had been no card to give away the sender. The boy’s uncle had begged the police for a solution to this mystery that had had such an adverse effect on his nephew.

  Mallory had been happy to oblige—entirely too happy to disabuse a child of his belief in a haunted hospital room. And, of course, she must still wonder why this boy’s heart had not been cut out of him. But then there was the greater puzzle of how Jonah had survived the night of the hit man’s killing spree.

  A fanatically tidy detective, she hated the straggle of loose ends.

  But first . . . the roses.

  She began with the legend of Angie Quill among the nuns. Years ago, the monastery had raised only fruits and vegetables for sustenance and meager trade for goods. “Then your aunt joined up. She was good with all kinds of plants. Now they have a larger crop, a cash crop.” The young acolyte had even coaxed rosebushes to grow in small patches, here and there, on land that had previously not even yielded weeds. “No ordinary flowers,” said Mallory. Those were the words of the prioress, who had put all of this in a letter, and she had sent it with the bouquet, but it must have been lost along the way. “The Reverend Mother wouldn’t tell me how she knew you were alive—or where to send the roses. I figure she badgered the cardinal, and he leaned on the police commissioner.”

  Mallory had even caught the culprit who had left the flowers in the boy’s room. “You and Jonah were sleeping. The cop on guard duty didn’t want to disturb you. There wasn’t any space on the dresser, and that’s why he put the vase in the corner on the floor.”

  Out of sight when a hit man came calling.

  That vase had since been moved to a small table by the window. Fabulous. Dozens of roses were in full bloom, and their scent was potent. The prioress was right. These were no ordinary flowers, although they were a common breed, and thus he had to wonder how and why—

  “So they’re Aunt Angie’s roses.” By Jonah’s tone of voice, this seemed to vindicate him in some way. “That’s how she scared him off.” The child must believe that his aunt had worked in God-like ways—via messenger service. Insistent now, the boy said, “Her roses scared him away. . . . You don’t believe me, do you?” Apparently, like Mallory, the boy could read much into silences. Jonah turned toward his uncle’s chair. “Tell her.”

  “There might be something to it,” said Harold Quill, somewhat reluctantly. “I had no idea where that smell came from. The room was dark. I couldn’t see any flowers, and neither could that man. He had a pillow in his hands. I know what he was planning to do with it. Well, the scent of roses was very strong. And Jonah was still half asleep. He thought it was Angie’s perfume, Angie in the room with him.”

  “And so did that man,” said Jonah. “He knew she was here. She scared him.”

  The uncle might have supported this claim, but here was another telling silence, a confession by omission, and thus Charles knew there had been no sign of fear in Conroy’s face. So what had stayed a killer’s hand that nigh
t? This was surely the theme of Mallory’s wordless conversation with the uncle—her quizzical glance and his answering shrug of Who knows?

  Charles had a theory of his own, a simple one based on an earlier visit with Mallory’s young witness. No degrees in psychology had been necessary to arrive at it—and no one in this room would want to hear it.

  This had nothing to do with the deceased nun.

  It was all about the child.

  The boy had eaten Cheerios and barbecued burgers with a stone killer, a man who lived in rural isolation. They had shared stories, watched TV, and, even further afield from a kidnap scenario, that man had taught Jonah how to drive a car. Perhaps when Conroy had come here to do murder, he had realized only then that—he had missed the boy.

  “Before that,” said Jonah, “Aunt Angie did it with the bells. That time she made him cry.” Both his hands balled into angry fists. “She brought him down on his knees.”

  “Bells . . . jingle bells,” said Mallory. “Where did the sound come from?”

  The boy pointed to the ceiling.

  “The upper floor?”

  “No,” he said, “we were outside that night. . . . The bells were in the sky.”

  And Mallory’s expression said, The hell they were.

  —

  WHEN THE DETECTIVE quit the hospital room, Charles knew she was on a mission to reduce the boy’s delusion to dead flesh and, ultimately, dust. Mallory was going over the bridge and up the wooded road to the hit man’s house—to find that ghostly bell ringer and drag it back here so she could rip it to pieces it in front of a child.

  Poor child.

  At core, this was a matter of the heart. If there was truth to rumors that Mallory had no heart of her own, she could be forgiven for not knowing how it worked—and how it broke.

  Charles never did find out how the day ended. She would not talk about it, and this would puzzle him for decades to come. Well into his nineties, he would still wonder what did happen when she revisited Iggy Conroy’s house.