Mallory's Oracle Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Epilogue

  Teaser chapter

  Praise for the Edgar® Award—nominated Mallory’s Oracle ...

  “MALLORY’S ORACLE IS A JOY ... Kathy Mallory is a marvelous creation.”

  —JONATHAN KELLERMAN

  “CAROL O’CONNELL IS A GIFTED WRITER with a style as quick and arresting as Kathy Mallory herself. I read Mallory’s Oracle with great pleasure.”

  —RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON, author of Degree of Guilt

  “TOUGH, DARK, MOODY, VIOLENT. At its center is Kathleen Mallory, a cop with a barely repressed crooked streak ... Carol O’Connell has a distinctive voice and a great eye for the city and its streets.”

  —JOHN SANDFORD

  “O’CONNELL’S WRITING IS STUNNING in its luminosity, originality, simplicity and power. Her plot is ingenious, inventive, and enigmatic, and her characters sparkle with originality and charm.”

  —Booklist

  “MALLORY IS THE MAJOR, BUT NOT THE ONLY, COMPLEX AND FULLY REALIZED CHARACTER to emerge in this skillful debut ... Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “SUSPENSEFUL.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “MALLORY IS SOMETHING ELSE ... surprising, super-smart and wholly original ... Her appeal is immense.”

  —LINDA ELLERBEE

  “WELL-WRITTEN, SAVVY, AND UNFORGETTABLE.”

  —NELSON DEMILLE

  “O’CONNELL PEOPLES HER TALE WITH COLORFUL CHARACTERS.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A STUNNER. It’s the best first novel I’ve read since Minette Walter’s The Ice House, and I’m tempted to say one of the best first novels ever ... powerfully written ... vivid characterizations.”

  —Deadly Pleasures

  “A MASTERPIECE ... Is Mallory’s Oracle as good as the hype? No, it’s better! This is not just a well-written mystery with a fascinating new personality. This is prose of the highest caliber.”

  —Mostly Murder

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  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. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-parry websites or their content.

  MALLORY’S ORACLE

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons edition / August 1994

  Jove mass-market edition / June 1995

  Copyright © 1994 by Carol O‘Connell.

  Excerpt from The Man Who Cast Two Shadows copyright © 1995 by Carol O’Connell. The Edgar® name is a registered service mark of the Mystery Writers of America, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

  without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in

  violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-46593-6

  JOVE®

  Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  JOVE is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “J” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Paul Sidey, with thanks

  Prologue

  The dog came when she called. He came slowly, shivering in his pelt as he walked, picking his way lightly and gracefully on slender Doberman feet. By her voice, he was pulled along through the rooms of the apartment and past the open door to the outer hallway. He entered the kitchen with the light clatter of nails on linoleum and met his mistress there. All the muscles of his body tightened in the dog’s version of attention.

  The animal’s eyes were soft brown wounds in a sleek black face, and there were more literal scars on the skin beneath the dark fur. He owed his life, many times over, to youth and quick recovery, but he was no longer a puppy.

  The woman was seated in her chair, and the dog knew it would be a while before she moved again. It was something in the smell of her when she was in this state, even before the woman’s eyes would go all wide and staring.

  A small misery of crying began deep in the dog’s throat. He paced back and forth before the chair, sensing the woman’s temporary blindness to her surroundings, her deafness to the dog’s fear.

  Time. How much time before the woman came round again? The eyes were rolling back in a trance. Soon now. The dog barked. Nothing, no blink, no reflex of any kind in the woman. The dog circled the chair, fear rising up to a human crying. He moved her hand with his nose. Nothing. The hand fell limply to her lap.

  The dog wailed.

  Soon.

  The dog’s mind was breaking. Regimentation instilled by pain was falling apart. He was departing from ritual, backing out of the room, terrified eyes fixed on the woman till he was clear of the kitchen. Now he turned and flung himself into the next room, racing across the carpet, passing through the open door and down the long hallway, paws touching lightly to ground in the perfect poetry of a beautiful animal in motion, muscles elongating and contracting, eyes shining with purpose. Now springing, rising, flying, crashing through the glass of the fifth-floor window.

  The dog’s heart was killed by the fright and strain of flight without wings. He was dead before his bones were broken on the pavement.

  1

  The boy’s stringy brown hair fell over one eye. The other eye was fever bright. His T-shirt was grime gray and yellow in the rings of stale sweat beneath the arms. Bony knees pushed through the strained and faded threads of his jeans as he crossed the room to the pawnbroker’s cage.

  Safely locked behind wire and glass, the old man in the cage only feared the pain in his mind mig
ht bleed from his eyes, and so he kept them cast down as he examined again what the boy had brought him.

  The police station was only minutes away. How much time had passed? he wondered. Where was Kathy? Had he been right to call her? The old man’s hand trembled as he wiped his face. What would the boy make of tremors and tears?

  “What’s taking so long, old man?” asked the boy. “Gold is gold.”

  Well, no, it was not.

  The pocket watch bore the name of Louis Markowitz’s grandfather. And the engraved initials inside the heavy gold ring told him this was the wedding band that Helen had given to Louis. The old man had attended that wedding. And twenty years later, when Helen died, he had been at the grave with Louis and Kathy. The watch and ring were more than gold to Louis, and he would not have given them up while he lived.

  The boy hovered close to the cage and then flitted across the room. He spun around, levitating off the floor. He was so thin, made all of wire, coursing with manic energy, sweat pouring off what little flesh he had, heat rising off his cooking brain, only wanting money to fill his veins with magic and fly away.

  There was a light tap at the pawnbroker’s window. Kathy Mallory had come. He buzzed her through the lock, and she walked in slow, stalking on long legs in dungarees. A black blazer over her T-shirt hid the gun. All the old man’s compliments to her were made of hard but precious substance: her eyes were cold green jewels set in ivory and framed in an aureole of gold.

  She moved on the boy in the shutter blink of the old man’s eyes. It looked to him as though she had disappeared from the shaft of light by the window and then reappeared behind the boy on the other side of the room. Her lips parted, and just the tip of her tongue showed between her teeth. It must be his old eyes or his imagination—she seemed to be tasting the moment. Her hands were rising, curling.

  The boy was quickly turning, and he had not faced her yet when she grabbed him by one arm and pulled it up high behind his back. The boy screamed with pain as she slammed him into the wall. And there was fear in that scream, too. He seemed younger now, a wild-eyed child caught in the claws of his nursery closet monster. This could not be happening, said the boy’s eyes.

  Where did you get the watch? she was asking him with another slam into the wall. Where? she asked, and never raised her voice, but tufts of the boy’s hair came away in her hand when she had to ask him again.

  Jack Coffey’s mind was breaking with the exhaustion of nights without sleep. The question was endlessly looping back on itself: why had Markowitz gone in there alone? Why?

  It made no damn sense at all, not for a smart cop with thirty years on the force. Raw recruits, still damp at the bib with mother’s milk, were not so dumb and loved their skins more.

  Lieut. Jack Coffey held his suit jacket slung over one arm. The wet stains on his pin-striped shirt were darkest at the shoulder holster. His lean and sun-brown face was slack at the jaw, and his eyes were closing to slits.

  Oh, talk about rookie cops. Maybe if he’d had a decent night’s sleep he might not have behaved like one himself, stumbling out to the sidewalk to lose his last meal on the pavement. And now his knees were failing him. He covered himself by leaning casually against one of the black-and-white units.

  The street was crawling with black-and-whites and a few of the department’s less conspicuous tan cars. The meat wagon was waiting patiently, doors hanging open. The two men from the medical examiner’s office stubbed out their cigarettes and walked back inside. Nothing would get Jack Coffey back in there, nothing but the possibility of losing face in front of Kathy Mallory.

  A siren cut the thick, humid air, screaming like a woman. Some fool had called an ambulance, and it was rushing toward them as though there was still time for Louis Markowitz, as though the man had not been dead for two days.

  And what a place to die. The windows of the six-story building were all cracked glass and black holes. Chunks of concrete lay on the sidewalk, having fallen from the once elaborate facade. In the past few weeks, this abandoned East Village tenement had done some service as a crack house. The addicts had left a trail of works winding from the sidewalk to the door.

  The car dipped as another, heavier man joined him on the car’s fender.

  “Hello, Coffey,” said Chief of Detectives Harry Blakely, who was all gone to gray hair and not so lean as the younger man by forty pounds, nor so beautiful by twenty years of drink which put veins in his eyes and sallowed his flesh.

  “Chief,” Coffey nodded. “Riker filled you in?”

  “Much as he could. It’s the same freak? You’re positive?”

  “It’s the same pattern with the wounds.”

  “Oh, God,” said Blakely, as if God could find him in this section of lower Manhattan. Not likely, yet he wiped his face with a handkerchief and squinted up to where heaven would be if not for the crumbling brick of the tenement building. “You got a preliminary yet?”

  “Yeah, but it’s half-assed. Slope hasn’t shown up yet. The techs figure they died maybe forty to fifty hours ago. There’s plastic in the woman’s wounds.”

  “You got an ID on her?”

  “Miss Pearl Whitman, age seventy-five. She’s from Gramercy Park, same as the first two.”

  “No shit. You know who that is? Pearl Whitman of Whitman Chemicals. You got any idea how much she’s worth?”

  It was like the Chief to give a credit line to a corpse. He was a good political animal.

  “Look who’s here.” Blakely was nodding in the direction of a van with a TV news logo on the side. He gestured thumb down to a uniformed officer who moved quickly to direct the van and its cargo of reporters and cameramen onto the cross street and away from the crime scene. “Speaking of freaks. Those bastards can smell blood before jackals can.”

  Jack Coffey closed his eyes, but it did him no good. He could see the Post’s headlines on the inside of his eyelids: “Invisible Man’s Third Kill.” A rival newspaper had favored the name Gray-Lady Killer, but the public had taken more of a fancy to the supernatural aspect of the first murder.

  That first old woman had been a daylight kill in the park at the center of Gramercy’s square. Anne Cathery had died in full view of every window that looked out onto that square, and every bench sitter, every passerby. Yet no one had witnessed it. Her corpse had lain in anonymity among the shrubs, ignored by blase, uncurious New Yorkers. In the early-morning hours of the following day, flies had attracted the curiosity of a resident.

  The second victim had also been found in the square. But now Pearl Whitman had broken the pattern by dying at an unfashionable Manhattan address, twenty blocks south by geographic standards and miles further down by economics. Another deviation from the pattern was the death of a cop, the head of Special Crimes Section no less.

  Harry Blakely lit up a cheap cigar, and Coffey bit down on his lower lip to offset a new wave of nausea and stop the onset of dry heaves. He was only hoping to keep some of his dignity, for he had nothing left of his lunch to give to the sidewalk.

  “How do you suppose the perp got the old lady down here, Coffey? Any ideas?”

  “Had to have a car,” said Coffey, his mind working on automatic pilot now, only really concentrating on his innards. “Probably snatched her off the street in Gramercy. No rich old broad is gonna be out for a stroll in this neighborhood.”

  “Well now.” Blakely smiled. “He has a private car. That’s more than we had yesterday. So Markowitz wasn’t a total loss.”

  What would they do to him, Coffey wondered, for punching out the chief of detectives? Well, he would have free beers for the rest of his natural life, but no pension.

  “You’re the senior man in the section, Coffey. You do right, you’ll make captain before the year is out. It’s your baby now.”

  Yeah, right. And who was going to explain that to Mallory?

  Coffey was facing the long black limousine slowly pulling to the curb, but he was not really seeing it, not registering that this must be P
olice Commissioner Beale’s limo.

  “Aw, Markowitz,” Blakely was saying, as much to himself as to Coffey. “This was a real bonehead mistake. He should’ve pulled the pin years ago.”

  Coffey’s hand clenched wrinkles into the wilted material of his suit jacket. So all the times Lou Markowitz made the department shine had counted for nothing. He would be remembered for this last mistake. Maybe the perp was just smarter than Markowitz. Coffey had never met anyone that smart. And if and when he did? Would Blakely be sitting with someone else and remembering Lieut. Jack Coffey for his last mistake?

  “Has anyone told Mallory?” asked Blakely.

  “She’s in there now with forensics.”

  “Oh Jesus—”

  “She was the first officer on the scene. You were figuring to keep her out of it?”

  “She’s in there with Markowitz’s body?”

  “Yeah, and she’s pissed off.”

  He was only vaguely aware of another man standing close by his shoulder and putting one bloodless, bony hand on the fender of the car. Coffey winced as the man leaned close to his ear and yelled, “Are you telling me Sergeant Mallory is in there!”

  Where had Beale come from on his little ferret’s feet?

  Still a bit slow and slightly stupid with shock, Jack Coffey turned to look down at the little man’s watery gray eyes. He thought the commissioner had a very big voice for a little jerk.

  Dr. Edward Slope had come straight from a poolside barbecue at his suburban Westchester home. Actually, he had escaped from his in-laws and neighbors, running from their screaming children, ducking the flying Frisbees, keeping a blind eye to the smoking hamburgers and franks on the grill, not stopping to change his clothes but only grabbing up his bag. His apologies, on the fly, had been profuse, but when he last saw his wife, she had been holding a long, sharp skewer and miming the words ‘I’ll get you for this’ as he backed his car down the driveway and left her to the whirlwind.