Mallory continued to stare at the building across the street, never even turning to look at him, and that made him a little crazy. He had to know she was aware of him. He circled around in front of her, and now she saw the perp in all his sick glory, eyes runny with infection, sores on his face. He smelled rank from soiling his clothes with his vomit and his bowels.
Did she want to touch that?
No way.
Hands behind her back, she worked on a pair of kid-skin gloves.
He was grinning at her, hovering. One hand was in the pocket of his jacket, and that would be where he kept the razor or the knife. There was not enough bulk for a gun.
The hand was pulling slowly from the jacket pocket. But now the junkie was all surprise as Mallory’s arm flashed out, and his straight razor went flying into the gutter. He was even more surprised to find himself kneeling on the sidewalk, feeling the pain in his testicles and staring at the hard steel of a large gun forced into his mouth. The gun barrel was set between an old man’s rotting rows of teeth, but he was just twenty-one, if that.
A car with NYPD markings was gliding silently to the curb alongside her. She never took her eyes off the terrified thin man, not even when she heard Heller’s deep voice.
“Mallory, you know the rules. If you can’t play nicely with the animals, you can’t play with them at all.”
After the backup unit arrived and the debris of the mugger was cleared off the street and shoved roughly into the back of the car, Mallory and Heller were alone again in front of the deserted gallery.
“Poor bastards,” said Heller, staring after the departing vehicle. “Their car is gonna smell like a junkie for the rest of their shift.”
He turned around now to see Mallory working a wire in the lock of the gallery door. It opened under her hand. Heller took her by one arm and pulled her away from the door. He reached around the wooden frame to depress the lock button in the knob, and then pulled the door shut. Mallory only stared at him as though he had lost his mind.
“Markowitz never taught you that,” said Heller. “I gather you don’t have a warrant.”
“I’m not supposed to be working the old case. How am I going to get a warrant?”
Heller said nothing. He only looked at her the way Markowitz did when he was waiting on a better explanation for what she’d done wrong this time.
“I’m not violating anybody’s civil rights. Before he died, Koozeman put the gallery up for sale. If you want, I’ll go find the real estate agent. But that will take time. This is-”
“Do that. I’ll wait.”
“Heller-”
“Get the key from the real estate agent. Do it right.”
He was a solid man, a large bear of a man. Bears did not back down. Why should they?
She returned to the gallery twenty minutes later, her wallet lighter by one fifty-dollar deposit, and she was holding the legal key. Heller was waiting by the door, comfortable in his slouch and his cigar.
“It was a sad business,” said Heller as they legally passed through the door and into the small reception area. He flicked on the wall switch. A panel of fluorescent bulbs made buzzing noises overhead as the lights flooded the main room of the deserted gallery.
“We found the artist and the dancer over there.” He pointed toward the center of the back wall.
Mallory reached into her tote and pulled out a floor plan. According to the crime-scene diagram, this part of the gallery was sixty feet in length, and twenty-five feet wide. Beyond the side wall was another five feet of storage space running the length of the room.
“We were a long time recovering the body parts,” said Heller. “The heads were spiked on the rods, and the bodies were wrapped with wire.” Heller opened his briefcase and folded back papers until he found the plastic slide sheet. He pointed at the first slide pocket. “Now this is what Ariel’s work looked like before he died and became part of it. That hunk of metal used to be a car.”
She held the slide sheet up to the ceiling light and looked at the rusted metal sculpture with two iron rods shooting straight up from the center of the car, which had been crushed and compressed to the size and shape of a steamer trunk.
Now she walked the length of the side wall, until she found the gouge in the baseboard. She beckoned Heller to join her. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” She walked to the rear storage area door, counting her paces, and passed into the narrow hallway which ran alongside the gallery space. Just as Charles had done, she entered the gallery through the hidden door in the wall behind Heller’s back. She tapped him on the shoulder, and he whirled around to face her.
“Jesus! Don’t you ever-” Suddenly dumbstruck, Heller stared at the open door. His eyes traveled over the interior side of wood slats. “I can’t believe this. I checked out the storage area. I must have taken this for part of the wall.”
“Not your fault. The door is a perfect job. No seams, no knobs.” She closed it again, and pushed on the edge. It popped open. “Pressure lock. You’d have to know just where to press. See the nick in the baseboard? Koozeman has the same door in his new gallery in SoHo.”
Heller bent down to see the small gouge in the board at the base of the wall. “So, the killer might have hidden back there-”
“And come out of the wall to join the crowd before the uniforms showed up to chase them out.”
“Shit, it could’ve happened that way. Markowitz figured the perp cleaned himself up and left the gallery. We found blood in the bathroom-sink traps. But I guess he could have stayed.”
Mallory pressed her floor plan to the wall and penciled in the site of the door. “That night, did Markowitz figure the girl for the primary target?”
“No, not at first,” said Heller. “But we got the prelim from the ME before I finished reconstructing the scene. I fixed Aubry’s blood type to the victim who took the most abuse.”
“You did a reconstruction?” Damn Markowitz and his tabloid paranoia. How many pieces of this case was she going to find squirreled away in someone else’s mind, someone else’s notes? “I thought the reporters botched all the physical evidence.”
“Oh, those bastards.” Heller’s words were hard, his head was shaking-unforgiving after all these years. “They tracked blood everywhere. The reconstruction took days, and days-and then the jerk confesses. All that work for nothing.”
“Did you work up any of the hair and fiber evidence? I’ve got all these bags and no-”
“No. The money for the case dried up after Watt confessed. There was no budget to do any tests. It would have been a waste of time anyway. This was a public place-people coming and going. There’s no way to tell when materials were left on the scene. So hair and fiber evidence wouldn’t have held up in court, even if we could’ve sorted out what belonged to the reporters. Same problem with latent prints.”
“But Markowitz the detail freak, he talked you into running tests off the books, right?”
“Sorry, Mallory, it didn’t happen that way. I gave him what I could on a cursory examination of the bodies- colors of stray hairs and some speculation on the clothing fibers. That was it. It’s no more good to you now than it was to the old man.”
“Go back to the early part of the night.” Mallory was looking at the entrance to the gallery. “Watt delivered the pizza and went back to the restaurant to collect his check. After he left the gallery, Peter Ariel would’ve locked up behind him. Didn’t you figure the next one through that door had a key?”