Mallory's Oracle Read online

  Riker nodded to Coffey. That much was true. At the top of his interview notes for that date, he had underscored the words ‘victim/nanny.’ The grandmother had obviously been Henry Cathery’s caretaker. Without her ministrations, the boy’s flesh and laundry had gone unwashed. He had been on his own for a full month before Markowitz interviewed him. His grandmother’s homicide had become the property of Special Crimes only after the second death made it the work of a serial killer. As he recalled, the apartment the kid had once shared with Anne Cathery had the smell of a cleaning woman’s recent visit, but the woman’s chores had not involved cleaning the boy. Body odor had been noticeable despite the floral air freshener.

  “I helped out with small things,” Margot Siddon was saying to Coffey. “I made sure he was eating regularly, things like that.”

  Riker nodded again when Coffey glanced his way. The next words underlined in his notes were ‘Margot Siddon—new nanny.’ The day the girl had opened the door to Markowitz, she had a clean pair of jeans and a man’s shirt draped over one arm. There had been no doubt about who was in charge. Henry Cathery had never answered a question from Markowitz without looking first to the girl. And when the answers were slow in coming, she had answered for him. Not only was she the dominant one, but Henry even gave the impression of being the frailer of the pair, though he was of above-average height and weight, fleshy in the face and gut.

  “I’m not even sure that Henry knew where the groceries came from,” Margot Siddon explained to Jack Coffey. “I suppose he wondered why the refrigerator wasn’t full anymore, but he didn’t know what to do about it.”

  Riker scanned the word groceries. Right, the groceries had been delivered to the apartment ten minutes into the interview. Henry Cathery had given her a wad of cash to pay the delivery boy, and then she had left them for a few minutes to put the perishables in the refrigerator. Acts of charity, Riker had supposed at the time, though he didn’t take the girl for the good-mother type. But they were two lonely kids, both outside the mainstream in their quirks.

  He looked at the last note he had made on the day of the Cathery interview. It was written in the car after the interview was over and they were heading back. Markowitz had mentioned that the girl never gave Henry Cathery the change for the groceries. Riker had written ‘parasite’ and underscored it.

  The lighting in the Cathery apartment had been subdued. Under these brighter fluorescent lights of NYPD, Riker noted that Margot Siddon’s clothes were not fashionable grunge dressing, but merely old. The elderly and wealthy cousin had not been generous with the girl.

  Done with her coffee, she set the cup on the desk and folded her hands in her lap. There was a pressure on the fingers to keep them there, behaving themselves. Her less disciplined legs crossed and recrossed at the ankles.

  Coffey was extending his condolences on the death of Margot Siddon’s cousin. The interview went on for another twenty minutes, and Coffey glanced Riker’s way several times to let him know he hadn’t missed the detail that half an hour passed before Riker thought anything had been said that was worth writing down. There were those impatient looks of ‘Don’t needle me’ in Coffey’s eyes. But Riker’s pen only hovered over the page.

  “No, she didn’t have any enemies,” said Margot, accepting the photograph from Coffey’s hand and nodding. “Yes, that’s Samantha. Was it a serrated knife?”

  “What?” Lieutenant Coffey leaned forward as though he hadn’t heard her right.

  “The knife that killed her. Was it serrated?”

  She set the photograph down on the desk. It was a head shot for identification purposes. A white towel covered the wound to the throat. The face was unmarred and seemed at peace, only sleeping.

  “Ah, we’re not sure,” said Coffey. “The autopsy is in progress right now.”

  “I can probably tell if I see the photographs of the wounds.”

  “We don’t expect that of you, Miss Siddon. The identification is sufficient.”

  “Is there some reason why I shouldn’t see them?”

  “We’d like to keep some of the details out of the press for now.”

  Big mistake, thought Riker. The kid’s eyes were gleaming.

  “I insist on seeing the wounds,” said Siddon.

  And then it was the kid’s mistake to try and smile with half her face. The result was a smirk that was obviously irritating Coffey as he pulled out the envelope with the glossy prints and handed her the shot that showed only the wound to the throat.

  “A long knife,” she said, holding the photo close to her eyes in the way of a nearsighted person. “And not a serrated edge.”

  Coffey stood up and straightened his tie. He’d had enough of this—that much was in his face and the stiffness of his stance.

  “Sergeant Riker will have a few questions for you, and then he’ll see that you’re taken home.”

  The lieutenant left the room.

  Riker made a few notes and then looked up. Her face was all accommodation.

  “Miss Siddon, do you remember where you were between eleven this morning and two o’clock this afternoon?”

  “TriBeCa, in a rehearsal loft.” Anticipating his next question from a childhood based on television, she said, “There were a hundred other people there for tryouts. The director will remember me. He said I was very good.”

  But she and Riker both knew she’d be remembered for the left side of her face.

  “They told me they’d call,” she said, smiling on one side as the opposite cheek crinkled the scar into a hideous waning moon.

  Sure they would.

  “I’ll drive you home, Miss Siddon.”

  The East Village was filled with kids from good families who affected the look of starving-artist poverty. But this young dancer with the cheap shoes was the genuine article, legitimately hungry. He had remained in the background of their first and second meetings. Now, in the closeness of the car, he detected the smell of the thrift shop, a distinct odor of secondhand clothes. And the girl also exuded a palpable energy, waves of it.

  He turned off Houston and rode north for three blocks before he pulled up in front of her apartment building. A small clutch of teenagers were gathered on the near corner, taking an interest in the unmarked car. Rats scrabbled in and out of the garbage cans. The shattered bits of a syringe sparkled amid the trash on the sidewalk.

  “I’ll see you upstairs,” he said, removing his key from the ignition.

  “No, don’t,” she said, too quickly. “I don’t want to be any trouble.”

  A drunk was relieving himself on the wall across the street.

  “No trouble at all.”

  “No, I insist,” she said, half smiling and no sincerity in even half of her face. She was out of the car and leaning in the window before he could open his door.

  “Good night, Sergeant Riker.”

  He nodded and started up the car, pulling slowly away into traffic. She stayed awhile on the sidewalk to see him off and gone. In his rearview mirror, he watched her growing smaller and smaller until she disappeared in the dangerous landscape of Avenue C.

  He tried Mallory’s home number on the car phone. He let it ring, knowing that she took her own sweet time about answering.

  Before the interview with Margot Siddon, he had pointed out to Coffey that the girl would probably inherit everything the old woman had in the bank, and Markowitz had always leaned toward money motives. Coffey had pointed out, for the second time in one night, that Markowitz was dead, as if the old rummy cop could not get that one simple thing through his head. And, said Coffey, this was not a woman’s crime—for the tenth time, for Christ’s sake.

  At the next stoplight, he made his last note of the evening: Why not a woman?

  Margot Siddon turned on the light in her apartment, and a roach scurried across the floor underfoot. She walked through the galley kitchen and passed a rack of knives, more knives than a professional cook could find uses for. And in the alcove that passed for a
bedroom, there were other kinds of knives—Swiss Army knives, common pen-knives, switchblade knives.

  Sometimes she forgot that the rest of the world was not so preoccupied with cutlery. She had gone too far tonight. The cops had both been looking at her as though she had just dropped in from the dark side of the moon.

  She thought the younger cop, Coffey, was going to drop his teeth when she asked what kind of knife had killed Cousin Samantha.

  Dear, dead Samantha. All that lovely money.

  She would inherit more than enough money to buy back her old smile, the smile she used to go around in. Her eyes gleamed and glassed as she grinned with half her face. And she began to dance. Her arms and legs were a celebration of leaps and rippling movements as she danced through the room of her dingy walk-up, kissing every wall goodbye.

  Mallory passed a walking woman on the dark SoHo street. The woman gasped, not with fear but with surprise. There had been no footfalls, no noise at all. Mallory had suddenly materialized at her side and then walked beyond her.

  Without turning to look back, Mallory knew by which doorway the woman behind her had left the street, that the woman had used her own key drawn from a snap-lock purse, and by the quick steps, that the woman was suddenly afraid. Good. Civilians should be afraid. They would live longer, and longer still if they were more aware of their surroundings.

  She walked north to the parking garage that held her car. A block short of Houston, she stopped. She listened. She turned to stare at the space of sidewalk behind her, eyes narrowing, the better to search the empty air for traces of a human who had recently been standing there.

  Nothing. No one.

  She was alone on the street, said her eyes, reporting back with the facts. But she could feel that other pair of eyes on her.

  A memory came jumping with light’s speed to the front of her brain, all decked with flashing red warning lights. ‘Most people never look up,’ Markowitz had told her in her rookie days. She pulled back and looked up as a black shape was falling toward her, rushing to meet her and send her to a better world than New York City. With the married reflexes of forked lightning and quick city rats, she jumped clear as the large block of concrete crashed into the pavement beside her and left a web of cracks in its wake.

  She scanned the long line of the roof and caught the movement of a dark shape against the night sky, only a shadow moving across the edge of the roof. Her gun was clear of its holster and in her hand. But she had lost that fraction of a second between here and gone. The shadow had pulled in.

  She moved to the side of the building and jumped for a handhold on the ledge of the fire escape. She was shot through with adrenaline and never felt the strain of the muscles which pulled her body straight up to the first grated landing. She took the stairs of the six-story building at a dead run, rubber soles touching to metal on every third step.

  On the roof, without a moon and only the glow of city lights, she saw the fast-receding shadow was rooftops ahead of her. She jumped the barriers between one roof and another, and then she was airborne in the wider gulf where two buildings did not join. The shadow was not so quick but had the advantage of time and space. Its dark coat was flapping in the high wind like the wings of a bat, and then it was flown. Gone into air.

  All her senses told her she was alone in the dark. Both feet touched to ground at one time, and her gun hand came to rest at her side. She stepped lightly across the tar surfaces of the rooftops, checking fire escapes and roof doors. One door had been left open. She stared down into the dark of the stairwell, looking for disturbances in the air, the trail of body heat, the sound and sensation of a fugitive life-form. Nothing came back to her but the stillness of those nine-to-fivers sleeping therein, and she knew the thing had not gone this way. She checked the door of the roof beyond and the metal stairs of its fire escape.

  Finally, she pulled her eyes back from the street below, drew back from the edge of the roof, and stared out at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the panorama of the night owls’ lighted windows, all the eyes that never saw anything when the cops came knocking at the door.

  Jack Coffey sat alone in his office, which was still called Markowitz’s office. Margot Siddon had gotten to him. All that talk of knives, her lips curling into a smirk. He had pegged her then as another punk kid from the Village, another cop-baiter. Screw that.

  Now he looked down at the file Riker had placed on his desk. Stapled to it was the requisition slip Markowitz had signed. Markowitz, the lover of details, must have ordered it after the interview in the Cathery apartment. The two-year-old account of the assault on Margot Siddon included the knife wound to the face, the cutting of the facial nerves. And the scar had been there for all to see, and all he had seen was the smirking insolence which only the knife could be accountable for and not the girl, the victim.

  Oh, all the damned victims.

  What else had he missed? Christ, he was tired.

  Riker’s own notes had been added to Margot Siddon’s old file. The sergeant had tracked down the case officer for personal comments. Coffey was looking at a school photograph of a nice-looking kid with a normal smile, taken shortly before that cruel bastard had said, ‘Now watch the dancing knife, little girl.’ And according to the case officer’s statement, Margot had actually watched the blade cutting into her skin, watched the blood flow, in shock from the violence he had already done to her, stark naked by then, covered only with blood.

  All the damned victims.

  He turned off the overhead lights, ready to leave but too tired to get in motion. He flicked on the desk lamp, and the softer glow illuminated the walls repainted and denuded of Markowitz-style clutter. But Markowitz had come stealing back to reclaim the place. The floor was littered with folders tonight. Another stack of case files filled the two chairs on the other side of the desk, and on the new, unmarred blotter next to his new computer terminal sat a stack of letters and diaries to read and handle in the old-fashioned way.

  It troubled him that the writings of the old women had tapered off more than a year ago. Either they had ceased to have anything of interest to write about, or they had all become so fascinated by some thing or event that the writing of letters and the keeping of journals had been displaced by another, more interesting occupation. This nagged at him. In one case, all the writing he could find had been in a storage trunk. No letters of any kind had been found in the apartment. Yet the woman had the history of a dedicated diarist, not missing a day in the ten years of leather-bound books he had recovered.

  All the victims had been one-dimensional before he began reading their private thoughts. None of the heirs had been able to give him even the most routine aspects of an old woman’s life. Who were their friends, what interests might the victims have in common—the relatives could tell him nothing. And the day-hire women told him only the most mundane habits of their elderly employers. Tonight he had invaded the victims’ minds in search of who they had been and also rounded out the profiles of the heirs. The victims’ fears had centered on losing touch with the only relations they had, their touchstones with the world, the continuity of blood.

  In a fluid, old-fashioned script, one old woman berated herself for all the irrational questions asked just to keep conversation going, to prevent the rare visit from ending all too soon. And there were sometimes tear-blind rages for the lack of understanding, the inability to communicate with a generation she had nothing in common with. The crying jags, the terrible giving in to the futility of putting up any fight. The anger at being treated as a child—as though crying robbed her of her maturity. The frustration of misunderstandings that came about because the young only half listened and never did grasp the simplest fact that arthritic hands couldn’t open childproof caps. The common thread that ran through the women’s lives was the need to be touched.

  Samantha Siddon had that need. The page open before him was the last entry in the diary of the fourth victim, dated one year ago:

  She tolerates
the hugs at meetings and partings. It must seem to her, in those moments, that I am clinging to my very life, and so I am. She is all the warm flesh that I may touch and be touched by. One dies without the touch. What if she should never return?

  He left the light burning when he walked out of the office and moved down the hall to the incident room where they kept all the things Riker had retrieved from Mallory and all the physical evidence. It was a chaos of bloody carnage in full-color prints and bits of paper that must somehow chain together. Too many clues, Markowitz had said. And now there were too many suspects. Two of them could be working in tandem. The Cathery boy, who fit the FBI profile, was just too perfect in every respect but motive. Jonathan Gaynor, the sociology professor, had inherited the largest fortune of all. Margot Siddon was the neediest heir.

  Markowitz and his damn money motives. Ah, but the old man had something. This killer was a sick bastard, no doubt about it, but not crazy. Markowitz had tipped to something. Why hadn’t the old man given him a sporting chance, just a note in the dust, any damn thing at all.

  “No, nothing new on my end. Thanks for calling, Riker. Yeah, see you tomorrow.”

  Nothing new? Well, she was still alive. That hadn’t changed.

  Mallory put down the telephone and walked into the den. She pinned her last surveillance notes on Gaynor to the wall. So the fourth victim had gone down between noon and two. With the best transportation, all the right connections of subway cars or traffic lights, it would take nearly an hour to make the round trip from the edge of Harlem to Gramercy Park if she only threw in a few minutes to do murder. Except for the hours of his student interviews, he had not been out of her sight for that length of time. The hall was the only exit from his office. Could Gaynor have slipped by? As Mrs. Pickering had pointed out, surveillance was not her forte. She had wanted it to be Gaynor. It would have fit so nicely.