"Good," said Mallory. "I've got him hooked."
On any other day, Charles would have done headstands for the pleasure of her smile. However, this morning, he could only wish that she would stop, drop it, and not relish this mad game so much. He walked up behind her in the role of conscience and softly said, "You know this isn't wise. A psychotic shot Riker, and now you throw him in the path of a serial killer, another lunatic."
That's what makes it so perfect. Another jury of idiots." She stepped back to take in the entire sprawl of Riker's mess on the cork wall. "This case looks a lot like the horse that threw him."
Indeed, there was a clear parallel of jury verdicts and violence. If a teenage killer had not been found innocent, despite a plethora of incriminating evidence, then Riker, the prosecution's star witness, would not have been ambushed in his own home. And now another jury had come to an equally insane verdict in the Zachary trial, but, this time, the result had been a mass slaughter.
"However," said Charles, "this murderer is a bit more organized, more dangerous than the boy who shot Riker." He tapped the crime-scene photograph of a dead FBI agent, another parallel, for the Reaper also had a law-enforcement victim. In this case, it was an interesting departure from the juror killings. "What happens when this maniac recognizes Riker as a player? Given any thought to that?" Though he faced the wall, he was aware of Mallory's eyes on him, perhaps calculating that her only mistake was bringing him into the game.
One hand went to her hip as a warning. "You have a better way to fix Riker?"
"No." Sadly, he did not. Though one of his Ph.D.s was in psychology, he only applied it to assessing the stability of gifted clients, the better to find the right niches for them. He had never treated anyone as a patient, never even thought of opening that sort of practice. But Mallory, with no such background, was attempting shock therapy on a trauma victim in a very fragile state of mind. Charles made his own appraisal of the wall and pronounced it horrific. "You said you were going to feed him this case a piece at a time." A teaspoon of murder as medicine – that had been her stated intention. "This is too much."
"I know that," said Mallory. "But I didn't know about Dr. Apollo's stash, not until we tossed her hotel room. So what's the damage? Is there anything in her papers that would give Riker the whole picture?"
"Well, obviously he knows about the relationship with Agent Kidd. But there's nothing here to tell him precisely how Dr. Apollo fits into the game."
"And I don't see that woman making any confessions." Mallory sat down at a workstation topped by a glowing monitor.
He watched as she downloaded photographs from a camera to a computer. The array of images appeared on the screen. Sometimes he wondered why she made so many portraits of Johanna Apollo. In most of them, the woman's deformity was covered by long tresses of dark hair and only mildly apparent in the forward curve of her upper body. His favorite was a close-up of the doctor's face. A man could make friends with those warm brown eyes. The most recent picture was a full-body shot. The wind had ripped aside the sheltering curtain of hair to reveal the hump. Somehow he knew that this would be Mallory's last portrait of Dr. Apollo. She had finally achieved the full exposure of vulnerability. And Charles felt suddenly protective of this woman he had yet to meet.
"You don't like her, do you, Mallory? Please tell me she's not a suspect." "The only players I don't suspect are the dead ones." "You never did tell me how you got caught up in this business. When did you first – "
"The day I met Riker's hunchback," she said. "I ran a background check on her alias, and the documentation was just too perfect, too neat. That's always a good marker for the FBI's witness protection program." Mallory was looking past him now and suddenly distracted. She rose from her chair and stepped close to the cork wall, honing in on the only sample of Riker's messy handwriting. She read this margin note aloud. '"Jo's wine.' What's that about?" A more careful perusal of the board offered her no enlightenment. "Damn Riker. He's holding out on me."
Johanna Apollo slung her duffel bag over one shoulder, and this was Mugs's cue to cry. There was a touch of betrayal about the cat's eyes, for she was obviously abandoning him. She would not be there to defend him when the maid arrived with the water pistol. Johanna was in no position to complain about the hotel staff defending themselves from a mauling, though she gave them hazardous-duty pay in the form of lavish tips. Also, Mugs preferred open warfare to being confined to his pet carrier. Nothing could drive him quite as crazy as being locked up in that box. She bent low to pat him where there were no memories of damaged nerves to make him scratch her. He pressed his head into the cup of her palm and cried again. In this moment, he managed to communicate a desperation, a message that he was already having a bad day, and he would be lost if she left him behind.
Upon entering the bathroom, she opened a box from her store of pet tranquilizers. She disliked drugging Mugs, though sometimes it was a mercy. If the maid arrived and found him docile and drowsing, it would not be necessary for the woman to shoot him with the water pistol in self-defense. After breaking open a capsule, Johanna poured half of it into his water bowl.
Next, lest Marvin Argus return with his own search warrant, she unlocked the armoire, retrieved a packet of letters and folded them into the pocket of her denim jacket. And last, she counted up her wine bottles, a neurotic ritual worthy of Timothy Kidd.
Mallory tidied up Riker's careless pushpin style, moving sheets of paper to hang at exact right angles to the architecture. No, on second glance, Charles decided that she had actually improved upon that, for now he realized that the building had settled out of alignment over the past century. He put more trust in Mallory's internal plumb line that ran infallibly to the center of the earth.
"So you spent some time with Riker," she said. "Notice any changes, anything odd?"
"No, in most respects, he seems his old self. Quite relaxed I'd say, no tics or twitches that I was aware of. He does have a tendency to slam doors, a very un-Riker-like thing to do. But that's been going on ever since the – "
"He's angry."
"No," said Charles. "He was rather affable."
"He's angry at me." And the slow shake of her head said that she had no idea why – only that this was true.
He understood her rationale. Underlying anger could explain Riker's monkish behavior since his release from the hospital. "Perhaps it's not you – not something quite so personal." And here he had the good sense to stop, for she disliked being challenged. Her arms were folded against him, and her eyes narrowed, reminding him that – true or untrue – she was never wrong.
"Why don't I refer him to a psychiatrist?" said Charles. "Therapy is what he needs."
"A talking cure? I don't have time for that." She amended this pronouncement, adding, "Riker doesn't have time. His apartment is a pit. Mrs. Ortega says it should be condemned."
"Well, that's because she never saw his old apartment in Brooklyn. I'm sure it can't be in worse shape." Ah, he had made another error, finding a logical explanation that disagreed with her own. He turned his eyes away from hers, hoping to avoid another ocular argument.
"The mess is twice as bad," she said. "So you haven't been down there yet?"
"No." He had not been invited. But now he gathered that Mallory had been visiting Riker's apartment, and not by invitation. She passed through locked doors too easily, so adept at breaking and entering – invading. He wondered how to broach the subject of Riker's need for privacy and security now more than ever. Empathy would be the wrong approach. She had none.