Mallory rested one hand on Charles’s arm, and it had the effect of a warm current of electricity. She so rarely touched anyone. ‘What’s the problem?’ she asked.
Well, there was a flock of butterflies crashing about inside his chest cavity. That was a problem. And he was wondering how long this contact with her would last if he sat very, very still, if he never moved the arm beneath her hand, not by so much as a hair.
Mallory leaned toward him – so close. ‘Charles, are you breathing?’
‘What?’
She lifted her hand from his arm, realizing that he was not choking on his supper, and the man with total recall forgot the threads to their conversation. Heat was rising in his face, the prelude to a blush. Riker gave him the kindest of smiles, the one that said, You poor bastard.
‘The problem?’ said Mallory, impatient with him now.
Oh, the lock on Natalie Homer’s door. ‘Sorry.’ Damned sorry. ‘According to the landlady’s statement, the odor in the hall was overwhelming, and she was desperate to get into Natalie’s apartment. The old woman had the key, but it wouldn’t open the door. You see, the lock had been changed or another one added -that part’s not clear.’
The detectives exchanged long glances.
‘Natalie had security issues.’ Charles paused again as both of them turned to stare at him. ‘She was being stalked. Perhaps this is something you already know? I don’t want to – ’
‘Go on,’ said Riker. ‘You’re not boring us.’
‘Well, the landlady made one more try at opening the door -right before she called the police. Now the first officer on the scene made a very detailed report – but no mention of kicking down a door or breaking a lock. He just entered the apartment. So, obviously, some third party opened that door before – ’
‘And Geldorf didn’t catch this?’ Riker refilled his wine glass. ‘Naw, I don’t see him missing a thing like that. There should be paperwork for repairs on a busted lock. It travels with the Cold Case file.’
‘No,’ said Charles. ‘I read every word of that file. Between the landlady’s call and the police response, there was a four-hour interval. I gather a bad smell wasn’t a high priority. So, during that four hours, somebody opened the door with a key.’
‘The perp must’ve had Natalie’s key,’ said Riker. ‘He’d be the one who locked up after the murder. So he forgot something and went back to – ’
‘No,’ said Mallory. ‘He wouldn’t risk it – not that day.’
‘I agree,’ said Charles. ‘Between the heat and the insects, that body was badly decomposed. The stench was incredible – that’s in the officer’s report. The killer would’ve realized the police were on the way. Also, this was a Sunday evening. Most of the tenants would’ve been at home. More risk of – ’
‘Okay,’ said Riker. ‘Let’s say the intruder wasn’t the killer.’
‘But someone with his own key,’ said Charles. ‘Maybe a lover. If he saw the crime scene – it was horrific – that might’ve left him unhinged. Now he’s not the man who murdered Natalie Homer – ’
‘So he’s the one who did the copycat hangings.’ Mallory turned to Riker. ‘It fits with the anniversary kill, a woman with Natalie’s long blond hair. Then Sparrow – ’
‘Poor Sparrow.’ Riker poured the last drops of wine into his glass. ‘Nothing personal, the freak just needed another blonde.’
On toward midnight, Mallory circled the block once more, then cut the car’s engine and turned off her headlights as she coasted silently to the curb. Her eyes were fixed on a third-floor window dimly lit by the screen of Riker’s television set. She knew what he was doing up there. He was chain-smoking cigarettes and sipping bourbon – medicine for missing his ex-wife. Every glass in the apartment might be dirty, yet she knew he would not be drinking from the mouth of a bottle.
Riker’s rules – only winos did that.
Mallory covertly kept him company for a while, sitting in the dark of her car, keeping watch on his window. It was the kind of thing one partner did for another – as if she could fly that high when his gun went off.
A year had passed since the last time his ex-wife had inspired a day-long binge. Mallory had helped him stagger up all those stairs, then rolled him on to an unmade bed, where he had slept in his clothes, but not his shoes. And she had also removed his gun that night and taken the bullets away.
He was a sorry alcoholic; that would never change. And Mallory was also constant.
The light in the window went out.
‘Night, Riker.
She started up her car and headed home.
He would not kill himself in the dark; it would be too difficult for a blind and trembling drunk to thread his finger into the trigger. And she could not foresee him dying in the bathroom by the glow of his plastic Jesus night-light.
CHAPTER 8
The rear office was flooded with morning light. Charles thought the room temperature had chilled by a few degrees since he had last looked in, but little else had changed. Mallory was still averting her eyes from the paper storm on her cork wall, an anathema to someone who straightened paintings in other people’s houses. She sat at a metal workstation, but no longer communed with her network of computers. The three machines hummed amongst themselves while she leafed through Louis Markowitz’s old notebook. The only human sound was the tap of Lars Geldorf s pacing shoes.
Impatient to begin the day, the retired detective removed his suit jacket and loosened his tie, but this clue was lost on her. Occasionally, she looked up from her reading to watch his travels about the room – her room – as he inspected metal shelves stocked with electronics. Geldorf wore a brave pretender’s smile and nodded in a knowing way, though he had no idea what her machines could do. They were new, and he was old.
She rose from her chair and approached the cork wall to stand before a haphazard arrangement of crime-scene photographs. Charles observed tension in her face, a small war going on at the core of her as she struggled with the urge to place every bit of paper at perfect right angles to the next.
Lars Geldorf hurried across the room to join her. And now Charles understood what the last fifteen minutes of silence had been about. Mallory was teaching the old man to follow her lead. There should never be any doubt about the hierarchy in this room, and Geldorf should not call her honey one more time. Charles decided that she must like the old man, for this was the mildest and most drawn-out show of contempt in her repertoire.
She lifted the edge of a grainy photograph to expose a small square one pinned beneath it. Then she looked under the other eight-by-ten formats in this group, each one covering a picture from an instant camera. ‘All you’ve got are Polaroids and blowups.’
‘Yeah,’ said Geldorf. ‘So?’
‘Where are the originals?’
‘That’s all of’em, kid.’
‘Mallory,’ she corrected him.
‘Suppose I call you Kathy?’
‘Don’t.’ And that was a threat. ‘So there was no police photographer on the scene?’
‘Yeah, we had one, a civilian. But he didn’t last three minutes.’ Geldorf waved one hand to include all the images of a hanged woman, two days dead in the heat of August, an incubator of maggots. ‘The photographer got sick and dropped his camera. We couldn’t get it to work after that. So we borrowed one from a neighbor.’
Mallory stared at a shot of the hanging rope draped over a light fixture. ‘What’s that brown smear on the ceiling?’
‘Bugs on their way to a meal,’ said Geldorf. ‘Cockroaches love their grease. And here.’ One bony finger pointed to another photograph depicting a large brown glob on the kitchen floor.
‘Roaches swarming over a frying pan.’ He squinted. ‘You see those little logs on the floor? Those are sausages and more bugs. The ceiling light was coming loose and cracking the plaster. Must’ve been a nest of’em up there. I had more blow-ups made.’