What’s wrong with this picture?
The senior detective strolled into the meeting and assumed his usual position, slumped down in the nearest chair with a cigarette dangling at one side of his mouth. After a heavy lunch, Riker was not inclined to waste energy on actual words, and so his eyes merely opened a little wider to say, Okay, I’m here. What?
‘I understand you sent that kid – ’ Lieutenant Coffey paused to glare at his sergeant’s cigarette, as if that ever worked. ‘The guy from Loman’s squad – what’s his name?’
‘Duck Boy.’
‘You sent him down to the warehouse to go through eight million boxes of old evidence. I’m guessing you hoped he’d get lost down there.’
Riker shrugged. That had been the general idea, but not his idea, and Mallory was not stepping up to claim the credit. She was busy with her upside-down reading of all the lieutenant’s paperwork.
‘Well, the kid got lucky.’ Jack Coffey lifted an evidence carton from the floor and settled it on the edge of his desk. ‘It only took him five minutes to find your hangman’s rope.’
Mallory seemed not to care. Behind the cover of the carton, she teased a red folder from the mess on the lieutenant’s blotter and opened it. Riker caught the glimpse of a full-color autopsy photograph, then turned back to his commanding officer, feigning interest in the adventures of Duck Boy. ‘So how did he do it?’
‘Last month, the warehouse roof sprung a leak and damaged a few cartons.’ Coffey opened the box flaps and pulled out a bulky object in brown wrapping. ‘A clerk remembered repackaging the evidence. The paperwork was wrecked, except for a few of the case numbers. So Duck Boy – Let’s find another name for him, okay? So the kid used the numbers to pull a file from the ME’s archive.’
The lieutenant unwrapped a coil of rope, then knocked the carton to the floor and reached out to grab the red folder from Mallory’s hands. ‘And this is a twenty-year-old autopsy report. It washes out any connection to Sparrow. So we’re kicking the hooker back to the East Side precinct. Now she’s Lieutenant Loman’s headache.’ He dropped the rope and the folder on his desk. ‘I guess we’re done here.’
With an attitude of not so fast, Mallory swept the rope off the desk and into Riker’s lap, then opened the ME’s folder and spread the contents across the blotter. She tapped a photograph in the center of her array. ‘Take a look at this one.’
Riker and Coffey leaned over for a closer inspection of a corpse bloated with gas and thriving maggots.
‘This was another scalping.’ With one long red fingernail, Mallory called their attention to the blond hair matted and plastered to the woman’s skull. ‘It was hacked off with a razor.’
The lieutenant’s smile said, Nice try, but no sale. ‘I’m looking at a woman with a short haircut, and I don’t see any hair packed in her mouth.’
‘She was a blonde,’ said Riker. ‘Like Sparrow.’
‘Not good enough.’ Coffey rooted through the companion paperwork, then handed a sheaf of stapled pages to Riker. ‘Here, read the report. The woman was found hanging, but that wasn’t the cause of death. Dr Norris was chief medical examiner in those days. He said she was strangled first.’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time that hack got something wrong.’ Mallory sifted through the other photographs. ‘Markowitz said he was drunk half the time.’
‘No.’ Riker slapped the desk. ‘I remember that old bastard. He was drunk all the time.’
Coffey clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. ‘So, you guys think a pathologist, drunk or sober, could overlook a wad of hair packed in a victim’s mouth?’
‘Last night, a pathologist pronounced Sparrow dead,’ said Mallory.
The lieutenant’s smile widened. ‘That’s pretty lame.’
The boss was entirely too cheerful, and this made Riker uneasy. Though he had no faith in premonitions, he did have a clear vision of Jack Coffey digging a deep pit for Mallory, then concealing it with twigs and branches.
And there was no way to warn her.
She picked up the old autopsy report and leaned over the desk to dangle it in front of the lieutenant’s face. ‘Did you read this?’ Her unmistakable implication was that fault had somehow shifted on to Coffey. ‘No one assisted on this autopsy. And that’s odd, because Markowitz said it took two assistants to cover the old drunk’s mistakes. Norris never worked alone.’
Jack Coffey was unimpressed. ‘Your point?’
‘He wouldn’t want any witnesses if he was suppressing evidence. So he omitted a few things from the – ’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ Coffey ripped the report from her hand.
Fun’s over.
The lieutenant was not smiling anymore. ‘All right, Mallory. Let’s talk about another fairy tale. The old file in Cold Cases? Nobody on that squad remembers a search request from you. I ordered you to requisition that file. I can guess why you didn’t waste the time.’ He looked down at the report to refresh his memory. ‘Natalie Homer. Her murder was never one of their cases.’
‘They’re lying,’ said Mallory. ‘They lost the file.’
Even Coffey had to admire gall on such a grandiose scale. ‘You’re telling me they were too embarrassed to admit they lost a file? So they lied?
‘That’s right,’ said Detective Janos. Three heads turned to the open doorway and a man built like a refrigerator with salt-and-pepper hair. ‘Natalie Homer is a Cold Case file.’ Janos’s soft voice was at odds with a face that resembled mugbook shots of the most violent offenders. ‘They assigned it to an independent.’
‘So they lost the paperwork and Mallory’s request?’ Coffey was not yet convinced. ‘And they lied about it?’ His tone of voice implied that a lying cop might be a new concept in this room.
‘Take the charitable view.’ Janos smiled. ‘Cold Cases moved to a new office. They’re a little disorganized. If the boys didn’t make a copy before they released the folder, they’d never find it again. The copy holds the transfer sheet. Very minimalist filing system. So, today, a hanged hooker is big news – front pages. And they get a request for a connected file – a lost file. Yeah, I think they’d lie to you, boss.’
‘But you found the file?’
‘Better than that,’ said Janos. ‘The name of the catching detective was in the ME’s report. So I took a ride over to his last known address. This old guy answers the door – he’s got the damn file in his hand. He says to me, „What took you so long?“ And here we are.’ Janos nodded toward the stairwell door on the other side of the squad room. ‘That’s Lars Geldorf’
Riker swiveled his chair around to face the window on the squad room and a lean, white-haired man. ‘He’s gotta be seventy-five years old.’
Lars Geldorf had grown tired of waiting for a summons, and now he walked toward the lieutenant’s office, not hobbling but making good time. No one had told this retired detective that he had grown old. He wore a silk suit in the best tradition of all the young Turks of his day. The swagger agreed with an arrogant smile, and anyone could read his mind: Geldorf was thinking, I’m going to save your damn hides.
‘He’s gonna be trouble,’ said Coffey.
Riker agreed. He was reminded of his own father, another cop who had not had the grace to take up knitting after being pensioned off. Geldorf had the same way of walking, as if he owned all the real estate under his feet. The old man strolled into the private office and shook Coffey’s hand in silence, trusting that his name and his fame had preceded him. Then he opened his suit jacket, so as not to wrinkle the silk when he sat down.