The Man Who Cast Two Shadows Read online

  “You think the guy might have removed his own card?”

  “I’d bet even money on it. Why would he delete the list if he wasn’t on it?”

  Heller was nodding as he accepted a plastic evidence bag from a technician. He scribbled his initials on the label and turned back to face her.

  “We’re done here, Mallory. I can’t tell you much. The guy was tall. He’s got a long reach up that wall.”

  “How do you know he wasn’t standing on a chair?”

  “You can follow the track of the sponge along the wall. No stop-and-start motion to move a chair. He was walking along the length of the wall. I’d guess his height at six-one to six-three. And he’s a thorough bastard. We’re taking the rugs and the mattress into the lab. If there was any blood, we’ll find it. We pulled a few prints off the shoes and the belts. The prints probably belong to the victim.” He looked up to the marks high on the wall. “Nobody that tall could have such small finger pads.”

  Heller seemed to be casting for words.

  “Anything else?”

  You wouldn’t hold out on me, would you, Heller?

  “The guy’s weird,” he said at last.

  Heller leaned down and pulled out a drawer from the nightstand near the bed. It was empty; the contents had been bagged. He turned the drawer upside down and held it out to her. The pine-scented cleaning solvent was still strong on the wood.

  “He cleaned the exterior surfaces of all the drawers,” said Heller. “Now that’s weird. And it’s not like there was a bloodbath here. There wasn’t. I’d get flecks, at least, with the light and the spray. But nothing. The guy’s just weird.”

  “You mean I’m looking for a psych profile based on a cleaning job?”

  “Could be. I saw something like this ten years back. Maybe your old man told you about it. The crime scene was already as clean as this one. They caught the bastard when he came back to the site to clean it again. There was a detective in the apartment when the perp showed up with rubber gloves, a bucket and a mop. They should all be so easy. That’s all I got.”

  And thank you, Heller, prompted the ghost of Markowitz who sat in an overstuffed armchair inside her brain.

  “Thanks, Heller.”

  She smiled again and made a show of taking the tweezers out of her tool kit and carefully pulling back each card on the spindle, matching it to the files on her screen.

  Heller and his men were gone when she was into the H’s. Missing was the card on Betty Hyde. According to the retrieved computer file, Hyde was a gossip columnist with a large syndication. Mallory didn’t need the file to know that the woman also did television spots on an evening news program. Her residence was the Coventry Arms, an upscale Upper West Side condominium.

  Gold.

  The address was a six-minute walk from the site in the park where the body was dumped.

  A quick perusal of the electronic calendar told her that Betty Hyde used Amanda Bosch’s fact-checking services on an irregular basis. The notes on parties indicated something more social in the relationship.

  Mallory recalled the face of Betty Hyde from the gossip columnist’s regular five-minute news segments. Hyde was vicious in her reporting of private lives. The woman would make a better victim than a suspect. When Mallory was done with the list, only the columnist’s card was missing from the hard copy. The address had to tie in.

  Next, she went into a set of hidden subfiles. The security would be chimp-simple to crack, but why would Bosch need that kind of lockout on a home computer? Was there someone else spending time in this apartment? It would hardly be Betty Hyde, whose tastes were radically different, judging by the address of multimillion-dollar condos.

  The computer was asking for a password. Mallory flipped through her software array with the eye of a burglar viewing her selection of pry bars and glass cutters. She selected a disk and started up the program to bang down the door with a crashing cascade of every variable on a password. It was BOOK that unlocked the door, and now a novel came tumbling out.

  Well, that fit nicely with the books on writers’ markets and the style guides which lined the bookshelves, and which were not part of a researcher’s trade.

  “No, you’re absolutely right, Mrs. Farrow,” said Riker. “She shouldn’t have talked to you that way. But you see, she lost her father recently, and she just hasn’t been the same since.”

  Actually, there was no difference at all in Mallory.

  “Oh, that poor child,” said Mrs. Farrow.

  Mallory was never a child.

  Riker sat back in a well-padded chair upholstered in roses, and there were roses on the wallpaper and in the pattern of the rug. Roses even trimmed his coffee cup. He smiled at the old woman, who lived in the apartment over Amanda Bosch’s.

  “I understand you’ve been having problems with your Social Security checks.”

  “Yes. Jimmy steals them and cashes them. I thought that was why you arrested him. His mother usually makes it up to me, but this month she was a little short. I’m not pressing charges. I never do. Amanda came up with groceries and helped me out with my medication. I told Jimmy if he didn’t pay Amanda back, I would put him in jail. Not that I would, you understand. So what does he give her? A secondhand sportscoat with a cigarette burn on the sleeve.”

  “Do you know where Jimmy was on that morning?”

  “My grandson was right here in this apartment. His father dragged him over here to apologize to me at six in the morning. My son works nights, you see. Gets off at five. Well, when his wife finally told him about the check, he went crazy, my son did. And Mrs. Cramer—she’s my neighbor down the hall. Oh, she’s such a sweet woman. Every morning since my last heart attack, Mrs. Cramer comes by to check on me before she goes to work at the hospital. Well, she was here when Jimmy and his father came by. You can ask her—she’ll tell you the same. Then we all went to mass together and sat down to breakfast at my son’s house. My son drove me home at noon.”

  Riker looked at his notebook. It tied with what the kid had told him. He didn’t take the old woman for a good liar. Her eyes gave away every thought, every fear.

  “And your grandson was never out of your sight the whole morning?”

  “No. Father Ryan will tell you. He’ll remember. He was shocked to see Jimmy in church.” She looked down at the hands in her lap, a collection of arthritic knots wrapped around a square tin box. “What are you going to do with my grandson?”

  “I’ll have a man drive him back to the warehouse.”

  “No charges?”

  “No.”

  She pried open the box and rewarded him with sugar cookies.

  “I have a few more questions about Amanda,” said Riker, with one hand in the tin.

  “I still can’t believe she’s dead. She was so young. Amanda was a good, gentle person. I can’t—” The rest of her words were too weak to find their way out of her throat. She was suddenly very tired, and it showed in the slump of her back and the sag of her shoulders.

  “I’d like to talk to some of the neighbors,” said Riker. “Maybe they’ll remember seeing Amanda with a boyfriend. Hard to figure, isn’t it? Pretty young woman like that one, and no man in her life?”

  Amanda had not started that baby without a man. Although it was the Christmas season, Riker required a few thousand years of distance from miracles. The old lady was keeping something back.

  “Well, the neighbors wouldn’t know,” said Mrs. Farrow. “They’re all working-class people in this neighborhood. They’re out of the building during the day, and all in bed at a reasonable hour. So they wouldn’t know.”

  “And you never heard the guy downstairs on a weekend, I bet.”

  “Well, no.”

  She hunched her thin shoulders, and her chin dropped to her chest. She fixed her startled eyes on the carpet at her feet, understanding now what she had given away.

  Riker smiled, and regarded the old woman as though she were made of precious stuff.

 
“You know,” said Riker, “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead either, but I don’t think Amanda would mind. And I know you want to help us find the killer, don’t you? So, you figure the boyfriend is married, right?”

  “Amanda never talked about him, and he only came in the afternoon when no one was at home.”

  “But you heard them downstairs. You heard them together.”

  And oh, what she had heard, said the nervous fidgeting of her fingers about the cookie tin. She would not meet his eyes.

  Mallory scrolled through the lines of the novel, looking for anything out of place, any sign of a damaged file. The fire escape window was at her left. Beyond the glass pane, she heard a baby crying, and then the soft thudding on the glass. She turned to the window.

  Not a baby.

  She was staring into a pair of slanted eyes as green as her own. The cat’s fur had been white, but now it was grayed with dust and dirt, and one ear was torn and bloody. Amanda Bosch must have been in the habit of feeding the stray.

  “Tough luck, cat, you’re on your own.”

  She turned back to the computer and continued the scrolling, scanning the lines for gaps and odd characters, gleaning a little from the plot. One of the main characters lived in an expensive condo on the Upper West Side. Now that fit nicely with the missing file card bearing the address of Betty Hyde’s condo. The fictional man was a married cheat. Better and better.

  The cat would not shut up.

  Mallory looked back to the window and tried to convey, by narrowing eyes, that the cat must stop, and right now, or she would dispatch it to kitty heaven. The animal misunderstood, its own eyes narrowing to the slits of I love you, too. Then the cat was on its hind legs, pawing at the glass with mewls of Let me in, now, now, now.

  Mallory raised the sash. But before she could terrorize the small animal, it slipped under her arm and into the room, depositing cat hair on the sleeve of her blazer in passing. It ran through the galley kitchen and into the front room.

  She shrugged. What the hell. Bosch was dead, the apartment was tossed, let the cat steal what it could. It was nothing to her.

  It began the mewling again. Mallory looked at the cat with a new idea for making it shut up. A rare change of heart changed her mind. The cat would have enough problems out on the street without a fresh injury.

  She watched it hook a paw in the closet door and open it. After a brief search, it was out again and sniffing the floor. It came back to the bedroom to rub up against her leg. The plaintive meowing ceased, and the soft roar of purring began. Mallory repressed the urge to kick it. She pushed it off with her leg. And now the cat went to the bookshelf and knocked out the bottom cartons of computer ribbon to pull out the catnip toy.

  Not a stray.

  Mallory got up and walked into the galley kitchen. She looked in the cupboard. All the dishes were neatly stacked, but one seemed out of place, a bowl sitting on the dinner plates. Over the blue ceramic glaze, the word Nose was printed in gold letters. The cat was staring up at her, and now she noticed the long gray marking around the muzzle, a shading she had taken for dirt. It had the comic illusion of making the cat’s nose seem long and bulbous. Nose was well named.

  It was mewling again. Mallory put one hand on her hip, drawing back the blazer to expose the holstered gun, forgetting momentarily that this gesture would have no effect on a cat.

  The cat stood up on its hind legs and twirled in a circle, dancing with delicate, practiced steps. Done with dancing, it sat quietly staring at the bowl in Mallory’s hand. And now the small animal had been further reduced in her eyes. The only thing a cat had going for it was the refusal to do stupid pet tricks. This one had copped out.

  She opened a can of tuna, guessing food would keep it quiet. The cat ate as though it had been starved.

  She went back into the bedroom and set the printer to spit out the cued-up files. And now she checked the closet and looked down at the cradle on the floor.

  A cradle for an abortion?

  She walked into the bathroom. In the closet under the sink was a long plastic box, the kind used for Kitty Litter. It was dusted with black powder, but there were no prints. The killer had cleaned the litter box.

  This apartment was not the crime site; she knew that after a careful inspection of the other closets. She sniffed the insides of the closet doors for the familiar odor of the recent cleaning. He wasn’t cleaning up after a break-and-enter. This was a place where he had spent a lot of time. He was the one Amanda Bosch had locked out of her subfiles, her novel. She might have done that if he figured prominently in the book.

  But he had left the card file behind. How convoluted was he?

  Of course.

  He had to leave the addresses of the clients for the police, so they wouldn’t have to go looking on their own, maybe asking for public assistance on the evening news. It fit. The park site where the body was found was only a few minutes’ walk from Hyde’s condo. It was the address he was hiding.

  Now she went over the rooms of the apartment with greater care.

  Details, said Markowitz from the room inside her brain, which she had outfitted with his favorite chair, a rack of pipes and a pouch of cherry-blend tobacco. Details.

  She went through the canned goods in the kitchen pantry. Two cans of fish, but no pet food. Well, some people were a little strange about animals. Now she found the vacuum in the living room closet and pulled it open. The bag was gone. Heller would have taken it. Around the insides of the vacuum cleaner she found cat hair.

  The cat was rubbing up against her leg again, depositing more hair. It stood up on hind legs, soft paws on her jeans. Mallory bent down and picked up the cat’s paws.

  No claws. Not an outside cat.

  And that would explain the torn ear and the rest of the blood. Such a cat could not survive on the street. The animal had escaped when the killer returned. Or did he throw it out for a reason?

  The cat had eaten its food with ravenous hunger, and now the bowl was licked clean. It must have gone without food for a long time. That would fit if the killer had returned to the apartment the day of the murder, the last date on the computer log.

  Riker had never expected to see Mallory with a cat in her arms. Cats were the natural enemies of the compulsively neat. It had already deposited a mess of white hairs on her gray blazer. And most surprising, the cat was still alive. She set it down on the carpet beside her. The cat rubbed up against her leg, shedding more fur, and yet, she didn’t kill it.

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “The cat’s name is Nose. He lives here.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He bent down to pet the cat. It shied around to the other side of Mallory’s legs. “So, what else have you got?”

  “This isn’t the crime scene,” she said, pushing the cat off with one leg and uncharacteristic restraint. “The original crime scene is in the park. The perp lives in that neighborhood. Not likely he’d drag a dead body home to dump it. That’s where she had a meeting with him.”

  “A meeting? You got that off the computer?”

  “No. It rained that morning, and there’s no umbrella in this apartment. She had something on him, so she met him in the park and threatened him.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “She was a free-lance researcher and fact checker. It fits. So she threatened him, and he killed her. He panicked and ran. Later, he came back, dragged her deeper into the woods and worked her hands over with a rock to get rid of the prints. That bought him the time to come down here that night and clean up the evidence of a relationship with the victim. He lives at the Coventry Arms. I’m betting he’s married, and he’s over six-one. So what have you got?”

  Riker smiled and slowly folded his notebook into his coat pocket. “The kid’s story checks out.”

  He followed her into the bedroom. The floor was littered with rolling sheets of paper which were still pouring out of the mouth of the machine on the shelf below the computer. She scanned the she
ets until she found the one she wanted, and ripped it free of the rolling paper.

  He read the list of names.

  “First he deleted this client file. Then the jerk only took that one client address out of the card file. Bosch did occasional work for Betty Hyde, the gossip columnist. They also had a social relationship.”

  “So you figure Hyde is tied to it?”

  “No. Hyde hasn’t used Bosch’s service in two months.”

  “Maybe Amanda was in the neighborhood picking up more work from Hyde.”

  “No. Look at this.” She ripped another sheet free of the roll. “This is her production schedule. There’s nothing on her calendar for Hyde’s projects. There’s even a note saying Hyde is out of the country. I checked it out with the paper and the airline. She’s due back in the country this afternoon.

  “Look at the billings on these accounts. Bosch logged in all her time—she never worked weekends. And she never made pickups. For the past two months, all her work was messengered in and out of this apartment.”

  “But the perp lives in the same building as Hyde?”

  “The fool only took one card away. Yeah. He lives in that building. He didn’t want the police coming back to that address asking questions. It’s like he left me a map.”

  “When Coffey hears this, he’s gonna scream like a woman in childbirth. It’s a little out of your neighborhood, kid, but you know the kind of people who live in that building.”

  “Helen grew up in a building on that block. Her sister, Alice, still lives there.”

  “It’s good you got those kind of connections, kid. You’re gonna need ’em if you step on any toes in the Coventry Arms. I didn’t know Helen came from money.”

  “Helen’s people were well-off, but not wealthy. It’s an odd mix in that neighborhood. You can have a woman on Social Security living in the same rent-control building with a society matron.”

  “How’s your Aunt Alice’s building situated? You think she might give us some space for surveillance?”