The detective walked alongside him, working the volume of the cassette player as they crossed over to the opposite wall. ‘Listen to this one more time.’
Pssst.
‘Regular intervals,’ said Riker. ‘We know it’s automated. Our techs think it might be a plant mister in a florist shop or a commercial greenhouse.’
‘I’d rule out a workplace,’ said Charles. ‘If the scarecrow was worried about being interrupted, you’d hear that in his voice. But it’s level, isn’t it? Utterly flat.’ He listened to another sentence fragment, then – Pssst. ‘There – a breath pause. The rhythm of his speech works around the ambient sound. It’s like punctuation. I’d say he’s been living with that noise for a very long time. It might come from a machine related to health issues.’ While Charles was speaking to Riker, in another compartment of his mind, he was absorbing the text of Edward Slope’s autopsy report on a living woman. ‘Doesn’t this coma patient have a last name?’
‘Sparrow,’ said Riker. ‘That’s it.’
Mallory was in the room, but Charles could not say just when she had arrived. Cats made more racket with soft padding paws. He sometimes wondered if this was her idea of fun, watching startled people jump – as Riker did when he noticed her strolling along the wall behind them. She showed little interest in the photo array of Sparrow’s nude body. Only one picture at the edge of the group attracted her, a close-up of a vicious wound on the victim’s side. The scar was an old one, a gross knot of flesh grown over a hole. Mallory closed her eyes, a small but telling gesture, and he read much into it. She had more in common with Sparrow than a paperback western retrieved from a crime scene.
Mallory looked up to catch Charles staring at her. ‘What?’
Pssst.
‘There’s something I’m curious about.’ He stepped back to the group of photographs taken at the hospital. Edward Slope’s signature appeared on the last page of notes in Mallory’s rigid handwriting. He pointed to the picture of Sparrow’s scar framed by the gloved hands of the medical examiner. ‘Evidently, Edward spent some time exploring this wound, but you didn’t mention it in any of your notes.’
‘It’s old history,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with this case.’
‘So you know how it happened.’
Pssst.
Riker was suddenly leaving them with uncommon speed, moving to the other side of the room, and that was the only warning that Charles had trodden on some personal landmine.
‘It’s an old knife wound. Very old. A waste of time.’ She ripped the photograph from the wall. ‘It shouldn’t even be here.’
‘But you told Coffey this woman was good with a knife.’
‘None better.’ She crumpled the photograph in one hand, and Charles could see the bright work going on behind her intelligent eyes.
Because he was handicapped with a face that could not run a bluff in a poker game, most people wrongly assumed that he could not tell when he was being lied to. Mallory never made that mistake. He guessed that she was simply wondering what half-truth might be most misleading.
‘It wasn’t a fight,’ she said. ‘Sparrow never saw the knife coming.’
‘So she had a blind side?’
‘No!’ She wadded the photograph into a ball, then rolled it between her palms, making it smaller and smaller. ‘Yes.’ And now her voice was smaller too. ‘You could say she was blindsided by a joke.’ The little ball of paper disappeared into her closed fist. ‘Sparrow was laughing when he did it to her.’ And while Charles was watching this little magic show, her other hand flashed toward him, and he was lightly stabbed in the chest by one red fingernail.
‘And now you can forget the scar,’ she said to him, ordered him. ‘We’re clear on that?’
Oh, yes, the threat was very clear. Mallory crossed the room with long strides. She could not leave him fast enough. Charles wished she had slammed the door on her way out; that would have told him that she was merely angry, that he had simply annoyed her. But that was not the case; he had damaged her somehow. There would be no more mention of Sparrow’s scar, not ever, for he sensed that it was also Mallory’s scar. However, the photograph was locked in his memory. He could not let go of it, and now it began to grow, attracting other bits of paper, a fifteen-year-old receipt from Warwick’s Used Books, an inscription to a child on the title page of a western. When had Mallory witnessed that piece of violence?
If one truly wanted to maim a human being for life, it was best to start when the victim was very young – ten years old?
Now that the field was clear of explosives, Riker was strolling back to him, folding a cell phone and saying, ‘Okay, Charles, you got your wish. I gave Duck Boy a real job. He’s taking the old man on a field trip – an interview with the cop who found Natalie Homer’s body. Are you happy now?’ Hardly.
At the top of the page, Ronald Deluthe had identified the interview subject as the first police officer to enter Natalie Homer’s crime scene. During a testy silence, he wrote down a careful description of Alan Parris’s apartment, noting worn upholstery, cracked plaster and all the dust and grime of a man who had hit bottom before the age of forty-two.
Parris’s personnel file had listed only the dry statistics of a short career with NYPD, but the garbage pail overflowing with beer cans indicated a serious drinking problem. The sink in the galley kitchen was piled high with dirty dishes and one cracked teacup with a delicate design, perhaps something the man’s ex-wife had left behind when the marriage ended twenty years ago – only a few months before Natalie Homer’s death.
Alan Parris’s T-shirt was stained; his boxer shorts were torn; and dirty toenails showed through the holes in his black socks. The man was so underwhelmed by the interview style of Lars Geldorf that he appeared to be nodding off.
No, Alan Parris was drunk.
‘You’re lying!' Geldorf paced the floor and raised his voice to rouse the man from lethargy. ‘I know one of you bastards leaked the details. It was you or your partner. Now give it up!’ The old man leaned down, bringing his face within inches of Parris’s. ‘Don’t piss me off, son. You won’t like me when I get mad.’
All the incredulity that Parris could muster was a small puff of air escaping from pursed lips, a lame guffaw. He kept his silence, showing remarkable patience with the retired detective and his ludicrous threats.
Lars Geldorf s promised anger was unleashed, and Deluthe took faithful shorthand, recording every obscenity. The old man finally succeeded in triggering Parris’s temper. And now the four-letter words were flying both ways as Deluthe’s pencil sped across the page of his notebook, not resting until Geldorf stomped out of the apartment.
This was Deluthe’s cue to pull out his list of prepared questions. The script Geldorf had outlined for him was reminiscent of days in uniform and visits to elementary schools in the role of Officer Friendly. ‘Just a few more questions, sir.’ He gave Parris a lame smile, and the man rolled his eyes just as the schoolchildren had done. Another tough audience.
Screw Geldorf.
Deluthe dropped his smile, then folded the paper and slipped it back into his pocket. ‘What about neighbors? Do you remember anyone in the hall near the crime scene? Maybe there was a – ’
‘It was a long time ago, kid.’ Parris leaned down and moved a newspaper to one side, exposing a beer can crushed and discarded after some previous binge. He upended it over his open mouth to catch the last drops of flat warm liquid.
Though the ex-cop showed no sign of anxiety, soon he would be eager to get to a liquor store and replenish his supply of booze.