The Man Who Cast Two Shadows Page 4

  In the tone of You got this coming to you, kid, he said, “If you’d had a few years in fieldwork, you’d know how hard it is for most people to ID a corpse from a morgue photo, even one without a damaged face. A mother could make the ID in a heartbeat, and maybe a close friend could do it—but a doorman? No way. So we still don’t know that she didn’t live in that neighborhood.”

  Mallory’s expression in profile might read the venom of I’m going to get you for that, or the merely sarcastic Yeah, right. He was pretty confident it was one of those two things.

  “Where are we headed?” he ventured, testing the atmosphere between them. “Going to Brooklyn?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve been to Brooklyn. Anna dropped the clothes off at a collection center. The center trucked them into the main clearinghouse in Manhattan. Anna’s bundle went to a women’s shelter in the East Village.”

  “So we’re going to a shelter? Mallory, I gotta go along with Coffey on this one. I just don’t see our Jane Doe in a women’s shelter.”

  “I’ve already been to the shelter. The cashmere blazer wasn’t on the inventory. Somebody lifted it at the warehouse. That’s where we’re going now.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t lifted at the shelter?” Oh, stupid question. She had turned the place inside out, and probably alienated every—

  “A friend of Anna’s runs that shelter. She opened Anna’s bundle herself. No blazer. So we go to the clearinghouse and talk to everybody who handled it.”

  Ten minutes rolled by on the road in companionable silence. That was one bright spot of doing time with Mallory—she made no small talk. If she opened her mouth, it was to take a swipe at him or make a point. When they pulled up alongside the warehouse, he picked his own words with careful timing. He put one hand on her shoulder before they entered the building.

  “Mallory, no cowboy shots this time out. I backed you with Coffey, but he was right and you know it. If you gotta spend a bullet, you do it right and you do it clean. Okay? School’s out.”

  They passed through the lobby in a testy silence and rode up to the third floor in a gray metal box the size of a coffin. The elevator doors opened onto a single room the length and width of a city block. Irregular corridors, made of stacked packages and bundles, extended far into the illusion of converging parallels. Dust hung in the air around the forklift shuttling back and forth down the wide center aisle, picking up cartons as numbers were called out over a bullhorn in the hand of a man with bandy legs and a beer belly.

  Mallory flashed her badge and fell into step with the man as he walked the center aisle. Grimy light from never-washed windows gave the place a secondhand look to go with the smell of the clothing. Riker had worn such clothes as a child, and he could never lose that smell.

  He followed behind Mallory, pulling out his notebook.

  The bandy-legged crew chief was alternately calling out numbers from his clipboard and carrying on a conversation that Mallory was not listening to.

  “No one would touch one of those bundles,” said the crew chief. “Who’s gonna risk a job for a crummy secondhand rag?”

  Riker smiled. He guessed the rag in question had set Mallory back at least nine hundred dollars, if not more. Nothing but the best for Mallory. Helen Markowitz had seen to that, beginning in the early days when Riker was still allowed to call her Kathy. But despite the designer wardrobe Helen had lavished on the child, Kathy had gone everywhere in blue jeans, tennis shoes, and T-shirts.

  Today, that wardrobe only varied in the tailored, gray wool blazer that bulged on the left as a warning that she carried a large gun in a shoulder holster. And she had traded her canvas tennis shoes for the most expensive leather running shoes God ever personally cobbled.

  “Who handled the bundles when they came in?” she asked.

  “Could’ve been any one of eight guys,” said the crew chief and then called out, “Four eighty-nine,” in the amplified scream of the bullhorn.

  “Get them out here, all eight of them.”

  “Look, honey, I’m always happy to cooperate with the cops, but I ain’t—”

  “Did I ask you for cooperation? Get them.”

  And now Riker could see that the crew chief was from the old school—no woman was going to dress him down and get away with it. The man turned on Mallory with all the indignation of a pit bull, lips parted to a display of teeth. And then, something in her face shut his mouth. Perhaps he had just remembered that he had come out this morning without a weapon.

  He cleared his throat, lifted the bullhorn and barked off the names. The men came out of all the stacks with clipboards and pencils, sweat and curiosity, leers for Mallory, and puffs of cigarette smoke. They fell into a ragged line.

  As she looked them over like a prospective buyer, the leers dropped away and Riker watched discomfort settle in. There was shifting of feet and the small talk of eyes between them. One man was sweating more than the rest, and his Adam’s apple had a life of its own. Mallory seemed to like this one with the red hair and freckles. Now she kept her eyes on him alone. His shoulders hunched, and his head lowered as he made himself smaller. His muscles were tensing, bunching through the thin cloth of his T-shirt.

  Mallory turned to Riker and lifted her chin a bare quarter of an inch. She looked back to the redhead. Riker circled around to the right. As Mallory moved forward, the redhead balked and ran. Riker reached out to grab the T-shirt and missed. And now Mallory was pounding after the man, and Riker jogged behind her in the dust kicked up by her shoes.

  “Jimmy,” the manager screamed, “come back here, you jerk! It’s only a secondhand sportscoat!”

  But Jimmy was out of earshot.

  Jimmy Farrow was running as fast as he had ever run from a cop, and he’d outrun a few. He looked back to see the old guy turning red trying to keep up, but the woman was almost on top of him. Every time he chanced a look over his shoulder, she was right there, four feet behind and not even breathing hard, her blazer flapping open to expose a very big gun.

  Oh, Christ, was she grinning? She was.

  Bitch!

  She stayed with him through the narrow streets, then across all the lanes of traffic on wide Houston, and over the courtyard wall of an apartment building in the West Village.

  He made the leap of his life and hooked his hands on a fire escape. He hauled his body up and climbed the metal stairs. As he gained the next landing, he looked down through the grate. She was nowhere in sight.

  He was looking up to the landing above when he was grabbed by the hair and pulled backward.

  Where did she come from?

  A kick to the inside of his knee and he was off balance, falling to the grate of the fire escape, rolling to the edge. Blood rushed to his head as he was leveraged over the side and dangling, arms waving in circles. He was looking down at the sidewalk three flights below. Twisting his head to look up through the grate, he could see her holding the back of his jeans and kneeling on his legs. He stopped struggling. If she let go, he was gone. She could dump him anytime she wanted to.

  “So you stole the cashmere blazer and . . . ?”

  She eased off his legs and let him hang a little lower.

  “The jacket!” he screamed. “That’s what this is about? That stupid sportsjacket?”

  “You stole it, right?”

  He saw the pavement come up a few more inches to meet him. A winter breeze chilled the sweat on his body and made him shiver.

  “Yeah, I did it! Okay?”

  “Didn’t she like it?”

  What? Crazy bitch. What does she want?

  “Yeah, she liked it! She liked it just fine!”

  He wondered if he might be right side up after all, and it was the world that was upside down. The old cop was down below, snagging the ladder for the fire escape and lowering it down to the pavement. The old guy took his sweet time walking up the stairs, like it was nothing to see some poor bastard hanging in midair and pointed headfirst toward the cement.

>   Damn cops.

  “Mallory, don’t do this to me,” said the old guy. “You don’t want Coffey on my ass, do you?”

  And the woman said, “He won’t complain. I can do anything I want with him.”

  “You drop him, and that’s three days of paperwork.”

  She loosened her grip. He dropped lower.

  “Okay, okay!” screamed Jimmy Farrow. “I already told her I did it! Let me up!”

  He was being hauled up by four ungentle hands. When he was right side up and sitting down, the old guy took out his notebook. “You wanna make a statement, kid? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Yeah, okay. My grandmother’s Social Security check got screwed up this month. A neighbor bought her groceries for a few days till my mom could replace the money. I just wanted to give Amanda—she’s the neighbor—I wanted to give her something. It was my grandmother’s idea.”

  “Now let me get this straight,” said the old guy, pen circling over his notebook. “First you gave Amanda the blazer, then you killed her—and your grandmother made you do it?”

  Oh, God, they’re both nuts.

  “I didn’t do anything to her. I just gave her the sportsjacket.”

  “Were you very close to Amanda?”

  “No! I go to my grandmother’s building twice a week to sweep out the halls. My grandmother’s the super, but she’s not up to slopping all those floors and stairs anymore.”

  “What a good boy you are,” said the old guy. “Now, about Amanda?”

  “I see Amanda in the hall now and then, that’s all. She and my grandmother were real tight. Talk to the old lady.”

  The old woman was waiting for them on the front steps of the building. Jimmy Farrow stood between two uniformed officers on the sidewalk, his head bowed and his hands cuffed behind his back. Riker climbed the steps behind Mallory and watched the old woman looking from Mallory to her grandson, lips slightly parted in disbelief.

  “Police,” said Mallory showing the ID card and shield. “You’re Mrs. Farrow? This is your grandson?”

  The old woman nodded, her eyes blinking rapidly.

  Riker looked back to the sidewalk. The siren on the squad car had scattered most of the hookers like roaches, but now one came weaving back, too jazzed on crack to be afraid.

  “I want access to Amanda Bosch’s apartment,” said Mallory.

  “Do you have a warrant?” the old woman asked automatically.

  That was predictable to Riker. It was a neighborhood where such a phrase came tripping to the tongue, spoken even before that all-time favorite, “I didn’t do it.”

  “She’s dead,” said Mallory. “You think I need a warrant?”

  Nicely worded, kid.

  And the denial in the slow shake of the old woman’s head was also predictable. Such a thing could not be, said Mrs. Farrow’s eyes. She pulled her thin sweater close about her neck, as though that would protect her from Mallory. She retreated two faltering steps. Mallory’s long reach put a photograph in the old woman’s face.

  “Is that her? Is that Amanda Bosch?”

  Ease up, Mallory. We don’t want to kill a taxpayer.

  Mrs. Farrow stared at the image of the dead woman and crossed herself. Another protection failed her as Mallory put her face in the old woman’s face. “Is that her?”

  “Yes, yes. It’s Amanda Bosch.”

  Mallory made a note, and Riker knew her meticulous report would read that positive ID was made at 10:56 a.m. That would make a department record for a corpse without prints.

  They followed the old woman up the stairs and down the hall to the apartment at the end of the second landing. Mrs. Farrow fumbled with the lock, but finally managed it. When the hand with the key ring came back to the old woman’s side, the keys jingled with the trembling.

  Riker entered the apartment behind Mallory. Mrs. Farrow hovered on the threshold for a moment and then melted away down the hall.

  The first thing he noticed about the apartment was that it was clean. From where he stood, he could see through the sparkling galley kitchen and into the room beyond it. Spotless, smelling of cleansers and powders, all cleaned up for company. Or had the place been cleaned up for blood traces and prints?

  The inside doorknob gleamed. He looked down and moved his head to see it from every possible angle. There might be latent prints on it, but he doubted it. Even Mallory was not so neat that she wiped the prints from her own doorknob when she left her apartment. He called through the open door to a uniformed police officer standing out in the hall with Jimmy Farrow.

  “Looks like this might be the original crime scene. Ask the old lady if you can use her phone to call the techs.”

  “Waste of time,” said Mallory, bending low to approve the polish of a small table. Every surface was gleaming. “Very neat. If our guy gets off on a psycho defense, I may hire him to clean my condo.”

  Markowitz had raised her right. She touched nothing, hands jammed into the pockets of her jeans as they continued the routine walk-through into the next room.

  The back room was tiny, with only space enough for the single bed and the personal computer. She knew better than to touch it, but her hands pulled out of the pockets the moment she saw it. From now on, she would have no interest in anything else. She did not have her father’s mania for small details.

  The door to the closet was ajar. Riker’s eyes adjusted to the dim light within until he made out the outline of the old-fashioned wooden cradle on the floor. So Amanda had purchased a cradle for the aborted baby, and then put the cradle away, out of sight, when the child was cut out of her.

  He looked away.

  He perused the bookshelf and found style guides and reference books: one on how to prepare a manuscript, another on writers’ markets. In this room, too, all the surfaces were cleaned. In the better light of two windows, he could see the scallops of sponge marks high on the wall. Had there been blood on the walls? Had Amanda managed to do some damage to him before he killed her?

  “Well, that tears it,” he said, turning to Mallory, who was reading the label of a computer disk on the console shelf. “This has to be the crime site, and the bastard wiped it clean.” He spoke on blind faith that she might be listening to him. “You know, this may be the end of the road, kid.”

  She was pacing back and forth in front of the computer. She could hardly wait to get at it. He knew she was only holding off for a technician to tell her what she already knew—it had been wiped clean. She was ignoring everything else in the apartment.

  Not the old man’s style.

  Markowitz always had his investigators bring him every damned detail they could fit into a notebook or a plastic bag. She was letting every detail go by.

  A uniformed officer appeared in the bedroom doorway. “There’s a crew in the area. They can be here in about fifteen minutes to a half hour.”

  “Thanks, Martin,” said Riker.

  If Mallory approved the cleaning job, it was a certainty they would find nothing. She had called it a waste of time, and she had called it right. Twenty minutes later, Heller, the senior man in Forensics, was sharing Mallory’s opinion. He stood in the center of the bedroom, his slow brown eyes wandering over every polished surface, and wincing.

  As Heller pulled on his rubber gloves, the nod of his head sent another technician to the kitchen. A third man was already at work in the front room. A ricochet of flash-bulb light found its way to the back of the tiny apartment. Heller, brush in hand, turned to the small nightstand by the narrow bed.

  “No. Do the computer first,” said Mallory. “I need it.”

  Perhaps another man with Heller’s years in the department might have bridled at a direct order from Mallory, who was younger than Heller’s youngest daughter. He only nodded, taking no offense, and set his kit on the floor by the computer.

  A uniformed officer filled the bedroom doorway. “Your keystroker brought this over.” He handed Mallory a leather case. She opened it to display a s
et of delicate tools and boxes of disks.

  She turned to hover over Heller as he worked with the black powder.

  “Don’t get that crap in the keyboard,” said Mallory. “And watch the vent—you don’t want it dropping in the vent.”

  Riker had never seen Heller work so fast, anything to appease Mallory. And when he was done, he couldn’t get out of her way fast enough.

  “I’m going up to talk to the old lady and the kid,” said Riker.

  “Right.”

  She was onto the computer now. He was dead to her, as were the technicians who worked around her.

  As Riker was closing the door behind him, Heller was working on the nightstand and bitching about the perp being a good-housekeeping fanatic, forgetting that only four feet away from him sat just such a fanatic, and she was armed.

  “Don’t bag that,” said Mallory to Heller as he was trying to ease the card file off the small table next to the computer. “I need it. It’s a client list—all the people she did research for.”

  “You got your own tweezers in that kit?” Heller asked, looking down into her case of tools.

  She looked up at Heller. Did he think she didn’t know how to handle evidence? No. He was just doing his job. Markowitz had always coddled and petted Heller, even when he was giving the man fits, checking out details within details. And she needed this man.

  “Don’t worry about it, Heller. If his prints were on it, he wouldn’t have left it behind.” She moved her chair to one side of the screen. “Here, look at this.”

  Heller bent down to look at the lit computer screen of white letters on a blue field. It was a list of names. He looked back to the exposed first card in the spindle.

  “You see? All the information on the first entry matches that card. You’re looking at an electronic copy of the card file. Someone logged onto this computer at least six hours after Bosch was killed. Whoever cleaned the apartment cleaned up the computer, too. He deleted this file. I brought it back with a utility program. If I get lucky, that card file won’t be an exact match to the computer file.”