Dead Famous Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  EPILOGUE

  DEAD FAMOUS

  “A palpable neo-noir grit ... O’Connell devilishly fills in the pieces so that the reader’s perspective undergoes constant shifts.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Stark and chilling. Mallory is tough as nails, a female equivalent of Burke, Andrew Vachss’s legendary loner.”

  —BookPage

  And more praise for the Mallory novels by Carol O’Connell

  CRIME SCHOOL

  “Mallory has become the fictional personification of New York City. O’Connell is that rare mystery/thriller writer who finds complex characters to be as important as intricate plots . . . [a] fascinating series.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Easily one of the most original and striking crime fiction protagonists to appear in the last few years . . . Multi-layered, serpentine in plot, Crime School is a rich, evocative novel.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “A standout among modern mysteries.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Like the best work of James Lee Burke and Barbara Vine, O’Connell’s character-driven procedural transcends genre pigeonholing.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Breathtaking . . . Searing suspense.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “O’Connell delivers all the best parts of suspense fiction—plot twists, chilling details, and a rapid pace—while simultaneously delving into the psyche of her protagonist. She displays not only the dark horrors of the criminal mind but also what lurks in the hearts of those who try to protect us.”

  —Library Journal

  MALLORY’S ORACLE

  “Mallory’s Oracle is a joy . . . exciting, riveting . . . Mallory is a marvelous creation.”

  —Jonathan Kellerman

  “A classic cop story . . . one of the most interesting new characters to come along in years.”

  —John Sandford

  “An author who really involves you, and makes you care.”

  —James B. Patterson

  “Wild, sly, and breathless—all the things that a good thriller ought to be.”

  —Carl Hiaasen

  THE MAN WHO CAST TWO SHADOWS

  “Even more satisfying than Mallory’s Oracle. And that’s high praise indeed.”

  —People

  “Beautifully written.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “The suspense is excruciating.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  KILLING CRITICS

  “Darkly stylish . . . highly original . . . This is great fun.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A tight, twisting mystery.”

  —Newsday

  “[A] crafty page-turner.”

  —People

  STONE ANGEL

  “Mallory makes a hard-edged, brilliant and indomitable heroine. Stone Angel, as much Southern novel as mystery novel, is rich in people, places and customs vividly realized, with mordant humor, terror and sadness.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “O’Connell conjures up a world of almost Faulknerian richness and complexity. In Stone Angel, her imagination truly takes wing.”

  —People

  SHELL GAME

  “An intricate whodunit.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “One of O’Connell’s best.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “The plot’s hairpin twists and turns are dazzling.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Rich, complex, memorable . . . another superb effort from one of our most gifted writers.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  Also by Carol O’Connell ...

  JUDAS CHILD

  “Breathtakingly ambitious suspense . . . A brilliant twist . . . mesmerizing.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “More than enough darkness and tension to make fans of Mallory take notice . . . Solidly crafted . . . a compelling tale.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Her most stunning novel yet . . . more chilling, twisted, and intense with each page . . . [a] soul-shattering climax.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  TITLES BY CAROL O’CONNELL

  Find Me

  Winter House

  Dead Famous

  Crime School

  Shell Game

  Judas Child

  Stone Angel

  Killing Critics

  The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

  Mallory’s Oracle

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

  are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,

  events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  DEAD FAMOUS

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with

  the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Copyright © 2003 by Carol O’Connell.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without

  permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the

  Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is

  illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic

  editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of

  copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67945-2

  BERKLEY®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated to the walking wounded, in and out of uniform, all around the town, and to those who came from far away to help us. Though New York City is the prime character in my novels, the event of September 11, 2001, does not appear in these pages, not even in passing, no mention at all. There will be readers who find that odd, for it changed the very landscape, but one does not have to draw a tragedy literally in order to draw from it. Some New Yorkers still stop and raise their eyes to the sound of overhead planes, but then they move on down the sidewalk. Life goes on. It’s a very tough town—unbreakable.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Dianne Burke, researcher extraordinaire, for her wide-ranging technical support; Bill Lambert, Arizona firearms aficionado; Richard Hughes, for valuable insight on a psychological disorder; radio station personnel from coast to coast; the Chelsea Hotel; the FBI Firear
ms Tactical Institute; and special thanks to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for being good sports. They never sent me hate mail for things done to them in previous novels. This time, in an effort to be evenhanded, I have also taken broad shots at the news media and the American Civil Liberties Union. As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, I would be proud to receive their hate mail. However, I believe they are equally blasé in the area of satirical pounding.

  PROLOGUE

  JOHANNA COULD HEAR CAT’S PAWS MADLY THUDDING on the bathroom door, and the animal was crying in a human way—so frightened. Or was he merely hungry? She had fed the poor beast, but how long ago? No matter. The cat’s cries receded, as though her front room had decamped from the hotel suite, floating up and away with utter disregard for gravity.

  And time? What was that to her?

  The whole day long, Johanna had not moved from her perch at the edge of a wooden chair. She sat there, wrapped in a bathrobe, as the sun moved behind the window glass, as shadows crawled about the room with a slow progress that only a paranoid eye could follow. One of the shadows belonged to herself, and the dark silhouette of her body was dragged across the wallpaper, inch by inch, extending her deformity to a cruel extreme.

  Inside her brain was the refrain of a rock ’n’ roll song from another era. “Gimme shelter,” the Rolling Stones sang to her, and she resisted this mantra as she always did, for there were no safe places.

  Perhaps another hour had passed, maybe three. She could not say when night had fallen. Johanna unclenched her hands and looked down at a crumpled letter, as if, in absolute darkness, she could read the words of a postscript: Only a monster can play this game.

  1

  THE BLACK VAN HAD NO HELPFUL LETTERING ON the side to tell the neighbors what business it was about on this November afternoon. Here and there, along the street of tall brownstones, drapes had parted and curious eyes were locked upon the vehicle’s driver. Even by New York City standards, she was an odd one.

  Johanna Apollo’s skin was very fair, the gift of Swedes on her mother’s side. And yet, from any distance, she might be taken for a large dark spider clad in denim as she climbed out of the van, then dropped to the pavement in a crouch. Dark brown was the color of her leather gloves, her work boots and the long strands of hair spread back across the unnatural curve of her spine. Her torso was bent forward, her body forever fused into a subtle question mark as her face angled toward the ground, hidden from the watchers at their windows. They never saw the great dark eyes—the beauty of the beast. And now the neighbors’ heads turned in unison, following her progress down the street. Dry yellow leaves cartwheeled and crackled alongside as she walked with a delicacy of slender spider-long legs. Such deep grace for one so misshapen—that was how the neighbors would recall this moment later in the day. It was almost a dance, they would say.

  And none of them noticed the small tan car gliding into Eighty-fourth Street, quiet as a swimming shark. It stopped near the corner, where another vehicle had just taken the last available parking space.

  The young driver of the tan sedan left her engine idling as she stepped out in the middle of the street. Nothing about her said civil servant; the custom-tailored lines of her designer jeans and long, black leather coat said money. And the wildly expensive running shoes allowed her to move in silence as she padded toward a station wagon. She leaned down and rapped on the driver’s window. The pudgy man behind the wheel gave her the grin of a lottery winner, for she was that lovely, that ilk of tall blondes who would never go out with him in a million years, and he hurried to roll down the window.

  Oh, happy day.

  “I want your parking place,” she said, all business, no smile of hello—nothing.

  The wagon driver’s grin wobbled a bit. Was this a joke? No man would give up a parking space on any street in Manhattan, not ever, not even for a naked woman. Was she nuts? He summoned up his New Yorker attitude, saying, “Yeah, lady—over my dead body.” And she raised one eyebrow to indicate that this might be an option. The long slants of her eyes were unnaturally green—unnaturally cold. A milk-white hand rested on the door of his car, long red fingernails tapping, tapping, ticking like a bomb, and it occurred to him that those nails might be dangerous.

  Oh, shit!

  One hand had gone to her hip, opening the blazer for just a tease, a peek at what she had hidden in her shoulder holster, a damn cannon that passed for a gun.

  “Move,” she said, and move he did.

  Kathy Mallory had a detective’s gold shield, but she rarely used the badge to motivate civilians. Listening to angry tirades on abuse of police power was time-consuming; fear was more efficient. And now she drove her tan car into the hastily vacated parking space. After killing the engine, she never even glanced at the black van.

  It was her day off and this covert surveillance was the closest she could come to an idea of recreation.

  The routine of the van’s driver was predictable, and Mallory was settling in for a long wait when a large white Lincoln with rental plates rounded the corner. This motorist was less enterprising, settling for double-parking his car across the street from the vehicle that so interested Mallory—until now. The driver of the rented car became her new target when he craned his neck to check the black van’s plates. His head was slowly turning, eyes scanning the street, until he located the deformed figure of Johanna Apollo walking down the sidewalk in the direction of Columbus Avenue.

  Mallory smiled, for this man had just identified himself as another player in the mother of all games.

  The company uniform was stowed in Johanna Apollo’s duffel bag along with the rest of her gear. She never wore it when meeting the clients. The moonsuit was far more unsettling than the sudden appearance of a hunchback at the door.

  A man her own age, late thirties, awaited her on the front steps of a brownstone built in the nineteenth century. He wore a flimsy robe over his pajamas, and, though his feet were bare, he seemed not to mind the cold. When Johanna lifted her head to greet him, his face was full of trepidation, and then he nearly smiled. She could read his mind. He was thinking, Oh, how normal, so glad to see her conventional human face. He adjusted his spectacles for a better look at her warm brown eyes, and he took some comfort there, even before she said, “I’ll be done in an hour, and then you can have your life back.”

  That was all he wanted to hear. Relieved, he sighed and nodded his understanding that there would be no small talk, not one more chorus of I’m so sorry, false notes in the mouth of a stranger.

  Johanna followed him into the house and through another door to his front room. It was decorated with period furniture and smeared with the bloody handprints of an intruder. She recognized the spots on the wall as a splatter pattern from the back-strike of a knife. The chalk outline sketched on the rug was that of a small, lean victim who had died quickly, though her blood was spread thin all about the room, giving the impression that the attack had gone on forever. She wondered if anyone had told the husband that his wife had not suffered long. Johanna turned to the sorry man beside her. It was her art to put disturbed people at ease; she did it with tea.

  “You don’t have to stay and watch. Why not wait in the kitchen?” She pulled a small packet of herbal tea from the pocket of her denim jacket. “This is very soothing.”

  The client took the packet and stared at it, as though the printed instructions for steeping in hot water might be difficult to comprehend. He waved one hand in apology to say that he was somewhat at sea today. “My wife usually handles these—” Suddenly appalled, he lowered his head. His wife had usually handled the messes of their lives. How could he have forgotten that she was dead? His hands clenched tightly, and Johanna knew that he was silently berating himself for this bizarre breach of etiquette.

  The murder was recent, and she would have guessed that even without the paperwork to release the crime scene. Judging by the growth of stubble on the man’s face, only a few days had passed since his wife’s dea
th. Unshaven, unwashed, the widower walked about in a stale ether that the bereaved shared with the bedridden. His head was still bowed as he edged away from her and ambled down a narrow passageway. Upon opening a door at the far end of this hall, he raised his face in expectation, perhaps believing that he would meet his dead wife in the kitchen—and she would make him some tea.

  Johanna knelt on the floor and opened her duffel bag. One hand passed over the hood and the respirator. No need for them today. She pulled out a protective suit and gloves for working with blood products in the age of AIDS—even the blood of children, nuns and other virgins. Her employer had given her the basic vocabulary of the job: fluids and solids and hazardous waste, though she had never seen the common debris of brains and shattered bone, feces and urine as anything but human remains. She had also been encouraged to remove photographs of the victim before she began, and this was another trick to dehumanize the task. But Johanna never disturbed the wedding portrait on the wall, and the bride with downcast eyes continued to shyly smile at the chalk outline of her own corpse.