Blind Sight Page 14

  That response was only interesting to Janos because the CSIs had not made their surprise visit until after the mayor’s aide was taken into custody. “They’re looking for pieces of mail connected to the murders.” As yet, nothing tied Andrew Polk to any of the victims, and ransoming strangers was an insane idea. A stupid idea. But who among his fellow man was perfect? No one. Thus, Janos was seldom critical of serial killers. “We figure at least four letters were delivered to the mansion over the past two weeks.”

  “The mayor was out of town,” said Tucker. “He wasn’t there to open any mail. And I never saw—”

  “Careful,” said Janos. “You want all the paperwork on your arrest to disappear. Am I correct?”

  The man’s head bobbed up and down.

  “Good. We’ll start over. I know the mayor was in town. I got the duty logs from the guys on his protection detail. Oh, and where’d the housekeeping staff disappear to? We need to talk to them.”

  “The mayor was on his yacht for the last two weeks. The staff’s still out on paid furlough.”

  Janos pretended to scan the contents of his file. “Naw, there’s no paperwork on furloughs. And Polk for damn sure wasn’t on his boat all that time.” He laid down a sheet with a telephone company logo. “See here? We got calls between City Hall and maybe twenty people. The ones we talked to never got through ’cause Polk was jammed up in meetings uptown and down. That accounts for the—”

  “There were no meetings! . . . I covered for him, handled all the calls myself. And those furloughs were off the books.”

  “Hey, I got logs from three shifts of detectives on the mayor’s protection detail. You’re telling me all those cops lied about—”

  “Only two of them were on the yacht,” said Tucker. “The other four got the time off—just like the mansion staff. The mayor does this a lot. Call the harbormaster. He’ll tell you.”

  No need. Janos had already made that call. “So all that time, it was just you in the mayor’s private office at City Hall.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Just you answering phones at the mansion. Trucking in mail from downtown.”

  “Only the personal mail. And nobody opened it.”

  “Till the mayor got back on dry land. Well, I guess that explains a lot. Now I see why the bodies were dumped at the front door. The killer got pissed off . . . waiting for his ransom.”

  “I’m not aware of any ransom demands.”

  This time, Tucker’s words did not have the ring of panic that Janos found so reliable. No, it was the sound of something read from a script. Mallory’s ransom theory was gaining traction.

  The detective unfolded his newspaper and pushed it across the table. The photograph of Jonah Quill was on the front page. “That kid’s still missing. You really do wanna help us. I think you read those ransom notes. I’ll tell you why. The mayor knew about the nun’s kidnap before we did—before he ever met Father DuPont. Polk didn’t get that news from ripping into two weeks of mail—like a secretary. That leaves you.”

  The whites of Tucker’s eyes got wide in the way of frightened horses. Lovely.

  “I never open his personal mail. If the address is handwritten—”

  “Any of those envelopes stand out?”

  “I just stacked the letters on his desk. He’d been gone for—”

  “But you got ahold of him . . . when the nun and the boy disappeared. A ship-to-shore call was made from the mansion, and you were the only one there. No staff, no dicks. Just you.” The detective sat back in his chair, admiring his work—this look of dumb surprise spreading across Tucker’s face. “There had to be communication between our perp and the mayor,” if Janos bought into the cracked theory of kidnap for ransom—and now he did. “But the yacht captain killed the idea of cell phones and email. At sea, they gotta be wired for that. And you placed the only ship-to-shore radio call.”

  Tucker sat with this last bomb for a few nervous seconds. Was he counting up his lies and the trip wires of facts?

  “Let me help you with this,” said Janos. “The captain tells me the boat was parked six miles offshore when—”

  “I called the ship to tell him that Father DuPont was coming. That’s all I said—all I knew. And the mayor did read his personal letters. That was the first thing he did when he got back. I never—”

  “So Polk hauls ass to get back to town in a hurry . . . and read the mail? Now, that’s where you’re losing me, kid. The cardinal’s man is on the way—and the mayor takes time to rip into bundles of letters? No, that’s your job. And it was a big pile of mail. I know the mayor gets around fifty handwritten letters a week, mostly from whackos—like our perp. Here’s what the mayor’s secretary tells me. Friends, family, people like that get a four-digit security code. If you don’t see those numbers on the return address—you read the letters. I figure you opened a lot of envelopes, maybe packages, too . . . and you saw something hinky.”

  Like a human heart.

  Janos could not ask about the hearts. That information had to be volunteered or it was useless.

  —

  ON THE OTHER SIDE of the one-way glass, Lieutenant Coffey sat in the dark of a watchers’ room that was the envy of copshops everywhere. While other squads made do with cramped standing room, this space had three tiers of cushioned theater seats—the anonymous gift of a grateful city politician—or so the fable was told.

  And the real story? No one knew.

  In one rendition, Lou Markowitz had dropped his jaw and clutched at his heart when the contractors rolled in to revamp this room—gratis and zero paperwork—a terrifying miracle in Copland. Kathy Mallory would have been fourteen years old at the time, though no blame had been laid on the little wizard of irregular requisitions. That would have been a leap too far and unfair, given a child who only ripped off electronics. But there had been speculation that Lou’s kid might have a sense of humor, and maybe she thought a peepshow should have the look of one—replete with whorehouse-red velvet chairs.

  The lieutenant leaned toward the wide glass window on the room next door, and he turned down the volume on Janos’s interview with the mayor’s aide. He had questions for his fellow eavesdropper, the psychologist in the next chair.

  He wanted to ask what kind of freak cuts out human hearts, but Mallory had cited a conflict of interest as her reason to narrow Charles Butler’s access to case details. She had offered no evidence against this man, only suspicion, though Jack Coffey could think of one solid reason. She had to know that Charles, a dead honest man, would never support her hit-man theory of the crime, and that alone was enough for her to place him in the enemy camp.

  Though she had magnanimously allowed the use of her pet shrink as a human polygraph machine, and this interview was netting more than a stall for time. Kidnap for ransom was now solidly on the table. The lieutenant nodded toward the window on the interrogation room. “Gimme something on that clown. Can you see him in a conspiracy?”

  Charles shook his head. “I can only tell you he’s holding back on something. I know he’s more afraid of the mayor than Detective Janos.”

  The lieutenant tuned out the shrink’s lecture on alpha dogs versus subordinate personalities, only politely waiting for this man to stop talking, but then Charles asked, “What was that business about ransom notes? The newspapers call it a spree killing.”

  Jack Coffey waited a beat before framing a lie for this walking-talking lie detector. “Janos was only jerking him around. But we gotta figure—with a psycho like this one—there’d be some communication between the perp and the mayor.”

  “Well, there was. That’s obvious from Tucker’s reaction to—”

  “Okay, thanks.” The lieutenant meant to end this before Mallory’s wall between Charles and every case theory could fall down.

  “But if the mayor did hear from the killer, why wouldn’t he—
”

  “We’re done here. Gotta run.” He had no problem leaving Charles alone in the watcher’s room. No more useful information was likely to come from the ongoing interview, a ruse to kill an hour while Mallory had a look at what was taken from the mayor’s errand boy. But Janos had, at least, confirmed her not-so-paranoid ideas about ransom and a mole in the District Attorney’s Office.

  This had not been a total waste of time.

  Jack Coffey glanced at his watch, as if it could tell him how many days had passed since Jonah Quill had gone missing.

  —

  THE PIT BULL padded up to the sofa to snuffle the sneakers again, and Iggy swatted the air to send the animal away.

  The boy pulled off his pricey running shoes, tied them by the laces and strung them around his neck. Well, that was not too bright—risking the feet to keep the sneakers safe. This kid had no way to know that the mutt smelled blood on them. The T-shirt and jeans were also stained with Angie’s blood.

  “You got her eyes,” said Iggy. “Me, I got my dad’s eyes.” And one look from his father had scared the shit out of people. That should have been a drawback, what with Dad selling shoes for a living. But no. Folks would come in to the shoe store for one pair and leave with three. Long as he lived, Dad could never stop at selling just one pair. And the customers—they did not want to disappoint the scary shoe salesman.

  “But you got the nun’s eyes for sure.” Unforgettable. Silvery gray, bright and shiny as dimes. Iggy waited for the boy to say something, anything about Angie.

  “Why do you have a toilet in your laundry room?”

  “Ma’s idea. . . . Old legs. Sometimes, near the end, she just couldn’t make it up the stairs fast enough to pee. Then there was a day when she couldn’t go nowhere on those legs. Spent the last month of her life with a bedpan.”

  “What did you do with her . . . after she died?”

  “Hey, a little respect.” Damn kid. “You think I dumped her body by the side of the road? This was my mother. I buried her like everybody else does. She’s in a real nice cemetery. Once a week I bring her roses.”

  “I thought she liked tulips.”

  “Flowers is flowers. I go with what I got.”

  “What did you do with my aunt’s body?” The boy turned his blind eyes to where the rose garden would be if he could only see through walls and doors. “Is she out there?”

  “No, kid.”

  “But she’s nearby, isn’t she? I can feel her—”

  “Knock it off! . . . Don’t play me one more time.” Iggy got up from the sofa and walked to the kitchen to get another beer. As he reached for the refrigerator’s handle, a cupboard door swung open. Not the work of a ghost. The catch was worn, and the house had a tilt that made spilled water run downhill on the kitchen floor. The bedroom’s other-way door had the opposite habit of closing itself.

  The exposed shelves were full of mismatched glasses, coffee mugs and one cup that was special. Every morning when he opened that cupboard door, there it was, the girl’s favorite cup. Just sitting there, waiting for him. And there was weight to it, like an anchor that kept her close in his thoughts. Even dead, she was unfinished business.

  There was no sound at his back, but he was so well attuned to every space he occupied, he could sense that the boy had come creeping, barefooting up behind him, and Iggy spun around.

  He was alone in the kitchen.

  He turned toward the arched opening on the living room. The kid was out there, sitting on the sofa. Could a blind boy move that fast? That quiet?

  There was no way to test this idea, and so it nagged at him until he resolved the problem of skewed senses by the sleep he had lost, the pills he had taken to stay awake in the daylight hours. He liked this solution better than a cracked-up brain, better still than things from mirrors stepping out to follow him through the rooms of the house.

  But maybe he should break that last one, the painted-over mirror in the bathroom.

  —

  DETECTIVE MALLORY waylaid the lieutenant in the hall outside the geek room. “I’ve got proof,” she said. “The mayor’s not just a liar. He’s a thief.”

  Ah, one of your people.

  Jack Coffey did not bother to suppress a yawn. The mayor had made his wealth as a stockbroker, and damn few of those Wall Street boys did not belong in jail.

  His detective was holding a cream-colored envelope. Her proof? It was an expensive piece of stationery. He held out one open hand to take it, and she pulled it back, unwilling to give it up. His first instinct was to protect himself by walking away from what had to be fruit of the search through Samuel Tucker’s pockets. The uniformed cops downstairs tended to gossip like old biddies. Cantrell, the property officer, was the worst of them, and this envelope fit his description of the dangerous personal item that might cause—paper cuts.

  Oh, what the hell.

  Now in the mood for jumping from high windows, he snatched the unsealed envelope and opened it to read the first sheet of paper. It was printed on cheaper stock, and the letterhead belonged to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal cops of Wall Street. At the bottom, there were signatures in blue ink. When had the tree-killer feds ever printed any document on a single sheet of paper? This alone was grounds for suspicion. The SEC agreement gave only a case-reference number as the cause for a penalty. Might that indicate something hidden? Yeah. The nondisclosure clause could only mean embarrassment to both the mayor and the government. The second sheet, printed on stock to match the envelope, was a personal letter with an opening salutation of “Hi, Arty.” No title but— No! This was Polk’s instruction for a lawyer to vault a flash drive and a federal document. He pointed to the single line written on the envelope. “You didn’t check out the address—before you opened it?”

  Mallory declined to respond, and this was her gift to him, assuming he would prefer to believe that she had inadvertently steamed open a client letter to an attorney. He tallied up the day’s damage. One, two—yes, three violations of civil rights.

  Beating her to death was not feasible, not in a police station. Maybe later.

  Jack Coffey’s head lolled back, as if she had ripped out every bone of support. Could his day get any worse? “And the other thing?” By this he meant the letter’s mention of a flash drive. Cantrell had left it out of his paper-cut story, and Coffey doubted that the property officer from the old-fart generation would even recognize a flash drive.

  Mallory stepped to one side to give the lieutenant a clear view through the open door of the geek room. Seated in there was Charles Butler, an antique lover with an aversion to any gadget manufactured after 1900. Yet this man was staring at a computer screen of rapidly scrolling text. Poisonous fruit of the flash drive? Definitely. And some kind of punishment for this man? Absolutely. Mallory was shielding everyone in the station house from this illegal scanning—except for Charles. What terrible crime had this poor bastard committed against her? She had the use of a world-class shrink for a set of sick kills, but she only used him as a walking file cabinet that could store everything in a freakish memory and spit it out on command.

  Poor freak.

  The lieutenant kept his silence as he backed away from the door. With one crooked finger, he commanded his detective to walk with him, and when they stood at the end of the hall, Mallory said, “So . . . the other thing,” the flash drive, which, of course, neither of them would have any knowledge of, “I think it’s the mayor’s idea of smoke. He didn’t want Tucker to get too curious about the sealed envelope. That SEC doc was all Polk cared about, and he couldn’t destroy his signature copy.”

  The lieutenant gave the federal document a last glance, then folded it into the envelope. “Okay, Polk did something outside the law. He admits that to the feds.” And normally a broker would have to rip the face off a newborn baby to lose his license. “But the crime’s not spe
lled out. Unless you’ve got a snitch in the SEC. . . . No? Well, then I guess you’ve got nothing.”

  Mallory shifted to a boxer’s stance and grabbed the purloined envelope. “This nets me a suspect. You know the feds caught him in a stock scam. So Polk did some financial damage to our hit man’s client, and that guy wants payback.”

  She was spinning theory from air again. Four people had their hearts cut out, and Mallory only saw a money angle, but now she had layered on the imagined element of revenge—another favorite of hers. And she was going to run with it. Run where? Into whose computer?

  And why was she smiling?

  Coffey held up both hands to say that he was in collusion with all three wise monkeys of see no evil, hear none, and know nothing that you do behind my back. This surrender attitude had originated with the former commander of Special Crimes, that late great cop Lou Markowitz. Hacker’s goods could not be used in court, but they could be useful.

  So . . . need he have any worries on this account?

  All the time.

  The monkeys were heavy; they weighed on his back; they fed on his brain. He would take them to bed with him tonight and get damn little sleep. And that was why she smiled.

  —

  FOR THIS OCCASION of a home invasion by the Crime Scene Unit, the mayor expressed an appropriate amount of stress, though he felt none. And Sunday’s discovery of four dead bodies on the lawn had not quickened his pulse by one beat. This was nothing like the old days on the trading floor, all hell cracked wide open, the heat and the screams and the pain, the roof coming down, the ante jacking up. Wall Street knew how to do up a bloodbath. A serial killer was somewhat tame by comparison.

  Once the CSIs were done with the laptop in his personal office, Mayor Polk sat down in the leather chair at his desk. Its seat was perfectly molded to receive his backside, and now, relaxing in cushioned comfort, he smiled at every cop to pass his way, and he posed with one of them for a cell-phone-picture souvenir. His own phone vibrated in his breast pocket. He pulled it out to see that it was just the lawyer texting to tell him that Tuck had been delayed in traffic, but now everything intended for the vault was accounted for.