Upon ripping open the envelope from the local fan, he discovered that last night's caller had indeed snapped the picture of a surviving juror. Zachary glanced at the clock, then flipped the switch to open a line to the sound booth. "Oh, Crazy Bitch?"
She extended her middle finger to confirm that he was back on the air. "Well, people," he said to his listening audience, "we have an official winner in the photo contest. Randy from SoHo, I assume you're listening tonight. So, Crazy Bitch, will you tell our contestant what he's won?"
Zack hit the time delay button to cut off a stream of obscenities from the sound booth. "That girl's really losing it. So, my friends, I propose a new contest. Pick the hour and the minute that she cracks. Something dramatic, maybe drool and speaking in tongues, pulling out patches of hair – mine or hers, your option. Five hundred dollars. Crazy Bitch will take the first ten callers. We won't have time for more players. I have a feeling that tonight's the night."
Oh, shit. Couldn't you wait another hour?
He overrode her own controls and cut to a commercial break five minutes ahead of schedule. The lights of her squirrel cage had gone out; and now he faced two black windows. She was taking a cue from Needleman and hiding in the dark. Not for long, babe.
It was time to sweep out her idiot remains, the living body but not the mind – that was already lost. Fun's over.
He raised the lights of his studio, for all the good that did. The lighting had been designed to suit his love of dark, cavelike environs. With the slight increase of illumination, he could barely make out her black silhouette in the booth. He walked toward his own lean ghost reflected in the darkened glass, enjoying this vision of himself, for he appeared to be strolling on thin air, neatly surpassing that tired old biblical trick of walking on the water.
At the top of her volume dial, Crazy Bitch screamed, "Showtime!"
He ripped the earphones off his head. The pain, Jesus. "Are you crazy?" he yelled at her – and how crazy was that? "Are you trying to break my eardrums?" Another silly question. Of course she wanted to hurt him. And his eyes were the next target. All the lights in her booth switched on at once. The desk lamp and track lights had been redirected at him, and he was blinded. The pain was passing off, but his vision was scorched with patches of hot white lights, and the earphones were still clutched in his hands when he heard the tinny distant sound of her voice at a normal decibel level, singing to him, "Oh, jerk-off?"
He lifted the microphone element to his lips and whispered, "You incredible bitch."
She parried by extending her middle finger close to the glass. Her tone was actually sweet when she said, "We have a first-time caller on line three. He claims he's one of the surviving jurors."
"Good one," said Zack, all injury and hatred forgotten. What did it matter if this was a hoax? He had an audience of feebleminded, motivated believers. He ran to his panel and tapped the third light on his phone board. "Daddy loves you," he said to the caller, and he was sincere, for this one had drama potential. "Talk to me."
A man's angry voice responded, "You're an idiot!"
"The caller seems a bit confused," said Zack. "To recap for new listeners or anyone just tuning in, this man was on the jury of celebrity-blinded morons. He was so starstruck, he ignored all the evidence of guilt. We're talking blood and fingerprints, people. DNA and eyewitnesses. Out of three hundred million Americans, only the twelve jurors thought the defendant might be innocent. A verdict of sheer stupidity. No wonder the Reaper wants them all dead. Who doesn't? So, listeners, does our serial killer have a point? Is it time to clean out the gene pool?"
"Stop I'll- "yelled the caller. "You can't – "
"Or, as our hero the Reaper would say – is this juror too stupid to go on living? And now the most important question, the one that's worth hard cash. When will this one die?" Zack looked down at the photograph in his hand. It was a good likeness. "I didn't get your name. Who are you?"
"It's MacPherson, and you know damn well who I am!"
Yes, you fool.
The rules his lawyers had carefully laid out were tricky, but now that the juror had identified himself on the air, the man was fair game.
"McPherson? Still there?" Yes, he heard the sudden intake of breath. There was no more doubt. He had the genuine article on the line. "Any… last words?"
"How can you do this to me?" Frustration made the caller's voice crack.
Better and better.
"You and your fans," said MacPherson, "you did everything but draw that maniac a map to my damn house? His voice was stronger, getting louder. "What the hell's wrong with you, man? I was one of the jurors who set you freel"
"Yes," said Ian Zachary. "So what's your point?"
Chapter 7
Charles butler, an avid collector of antiques, entered the only visually chilly room on the premises of Butler and Company. The furnishings of his business partner's office were twenty-first-century cold steel. It was a place of hard edges, mechanical clicks and whirs, and long shelves lined with electronics and technical manuals surrounding three computers on workstations. The single charming aspect of eighteenth-century arched windows had been neatly killed off with stark white metal blinds. Only one wall provided him with relief from severity; it was covered with cork from baseboard to ceiling and served as a gigantic bulletin board. This morning it added a rare human aspect to Mallory's private domain. It appeared as though Riker had taken all the papers from Johanna Apollo's suitcase and hurled them at the wall, pages sticking there of their own accord, and pushpins later added as an afterthought. Each crookedly hung sheet would be an affront to Mallory's pathological neatness.
And so Charles was unprepared for her response, and it gave him pause. She never smiled this way to convey any happiness. The young police detective paced the length of her cork wall, pausing sometimes to read a note or a newspaper article in its entirety. Her standard uniform of jeans, T-shirt and blazer only varied by color and material, smoky silk and cashmere today. Charles had long ago recognized this as the sign of a highly efficient brain with no spare time to waste upon wardrobe decisions. Her long black coat was slung over one arm. She had not yet committed to going or staying awhile. Please stay.
They needed to talk about what she had done to Riker. While she scrutinized her wall, Charles was busy censoring his comments on this subject, culling the words outrageous, dangerously irresponsible and the like. But then he found himself altogether out of words. He stared at his shoes and said nothing. As her friend and foremost apologist, he would always excuse her most questionable behavior. By secondhand stories and deduction, he knew the darkest things about Mallory's childhood on the street, and he had paid dearly for that knowledge; on occasion, it still cost him sleep and peace of mind. She had lost everything that mattered to a little girl before she had even reached the age of reason, and yet a remarkable creature had emerged from devastating trauma. How prescient was the poet Yeats, for he had written his finest lines for Kathy Mallory long before she was made: All changed; changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. "So now it begins," she said.
How he hated the sound of that. Charles faced the paper storm on her cork wall. "Riker finished this about an hour ago. I don't think he'd been to bed yet."