Oh, all the damned victims.
What else had he missed? Christ, he was tired.
Riker's own notes had been added to Margot Siddon's old file. The sergeant had tracked down the case officer for personal comments. Coffey was looking down on a school photograph of a nice-looking kid with a normal smile, taken shortly before that cruel bastard had said, "Now watch the dancing knife, little girl." And according to the case officer's statement, Margot had actually watched the blade cutting into her skin, watched the blood flow, in shock from the violence he had already done to her, stark-naked by then, covered only with blood.
All the damned victims.
He turned off the overhead lights, ready to leave but too tired to get in motion. He flicked on the desk lamp, and the softer glow illuminated the walls repainted and denuded of Markowitz-style clutter. But Markowitz had come stealing back to reclaim the place. The floor was littered with folders tonight. Another stack of case files filled the two chairs on the other side of the desk, and on the new, unmarred blotter next to his new computer terminal sat a stack of letters and diaries to read and handle in the old-fashioned way.
It troubled him that the writings of the old women had tapered off more than a year ago. Either they had ceased to have anything of interest to write about, or they had all become so fascinated by some thing or event that the writing of letters and the keeping of journals had been displaced by another, more interesting occupation. This nagged at him. In one case, all the writing he could find had been in a storage trunk. No letters of any kind had been found in the apartment. Yet the woman had the history of a dedicated diarist, not missing a day for the ten years of leather-bound books he had recovered.
All the victims had been one-dimensional before he began reading their private thoughts. None of the heirs had been able to give him even the most routine aspects of an old woman's life. Who were their friends, what interests might the victims have in common? The relatives could tell him nothing. And the day-hire women told him only the most mundane habits of their elderly employers. Tonight, he had invaded the victims' minds in search of who they had been, and also rounded out the profiles of the heirs. The victims' fears had centered on losing touch with the only relations they had, their touchstones with the world, the continuity of blood.
In a fluid, old-fashioned script, one old woman berated herself for all the irrational questions asked just to keep conversation going, to prevent the rare visit from ending all too soon. And there were sometimes tear-blind rages for the lack of understanding, the inability to communicate with a generation she had nothing in common with. The crying jags, the terrible giving-up to the futility of putting up any fight. The anger at being treated as a child – as though crying robbed her of her maturity. The frustration of misunderstandings that came about because the young only half-listened and never did grasp the simplest fact that arthritic hands couldn't open child-proof caps. The common thread which ran through the women's lives was the need to be touched.
Samantha Siddon had that need. The page open before him was the last entry in the diary of the fourth victim, dated one year ago:
She tolerates the hugs at meetings and partings. It must seem to her, in those moments, that I am clinging to my very life, and so I am. She is all the warm flesh that I may touch and be touched by. One dies without the touch. What if she should never return?
He left the light burning when he walked out of the office and moved down the hall to the incident room where they kept all the things which Biker had retrieved from Mallory and all the physical evidence. It was a chaos of bloody carnage in full-color prints and bits of paper which must somehow chain together. Too many clues, Markowitz had said. And now there were too many suspects. Two of them could be working in tandem. The Cathery boy who fitted the FBI profile was just too perfect in every respect but motive. Jonathan Gaynor, the sociology professor, had inherited the largest fortune of all. Margot Siddon was the neediest heir.
Markowitz and his damn money motives. Ah, but the old man had something. This killer was a sick bastard, no doubt about it, but not crazy. Markowitz had tipped to something. Why hadn't the old man given him a sporting chance, just a note in the dust, any damn thing at all.
"No, nothing new on my end. Thanks for calling, Biker. Yeah, see you tomorrow."
Nothing new? Well, she was still alive. That hadn't changed.
Mallory put down the telephone and walked into the den. She pinned her last surveillance notes on Gaynor to the wall. So the fourth victim had gone down between noon and two. With the best transportation, all the right connections of subway cars or traffic lights, it would take nearly an hour to make the round trip from the edge of Harlem to Gramercy Square if she only threw in a few minutes to do murder. Except for the hours of his student interviews, he had not been out of her sight for that length of time. The hall was the only exit from his office.
Could Gaynor have slipped by? As Mrs Pickering had pointed out, surveillance was not her forte. She had wanted it to be Gaynor. It would have fitted so nicely.
Once Markowitz had caught her cutting the pieces of a picture puzzle to make them fit. "Kathy," he said, in the early days when he was still allowed to call her that, "you can cheat the pieces to fit, but they won't show you the real picture. This is life's way of getting even with you, kid."
She put the Gaynor notes off to one side of the board with the long shots of Henry Cathery playing chess in the park.
She needed a new best suspect and a new angle. She stared at Markowitz's pocket calendar. Suppose he never made it to the BDA appointment that Tuesday night? He hadn't been seen since Tuesday morning. Markowitz hadn't gone to the Thursday-night poker game the previous week. What if he also missed the Tuesday appointment in that week before he died? What had he been doing with his nights?
If Markowitz had figured it out, it had to be linked to one of the first two murders. Or had he worked out a connection to the third one? What had he seen, that she could not see?
She loaded the slide carousel and sat watching the shots of Markowitz killed again and again, melding into shots of the first two murders, and finally her own shots of Gaynor and Cathery and the magic show of the medium, minion and baggage emerging from the yellow cab. "Pick up all the oddball things you can find," Markowitz had told her in her first year in crimes analysis. "Never throw anything away, kid."
"Don't call me kid," she had shot back. And it was always Mallory after that. It had cost him something to call her Mallory after all the years she had been Kathy to him, as though he'd never had a hand in raising her.
She watched the slides, lights playing on her face as the images changed quickly. What would the old man make of all this? Well, first he would say she was leaving tracks, big messy ones. Markowitz the dancing fool would never do that.
So how did he get killed?
The slide carousel looped back to the first shot of Markowitz lying in his own blood. She no longer took pride in the fact that she never cried. Dry eyes closed tightly as she switched off the projector and sat alone in the dark.
The new order she had created for him permeated his entire life these days, extending even into the office kitchen. He opened the refrigerator to gleaming metal shelves which Mallory had stocked with ample makings and condiments for every kind of sandwich known to God and Charles Butler.
It was an odd moment to realize how deep his feeling did go, as he was gathering ham and pickles, mustard and mayonnaise. Thieving, amoral, liar that she was, he knew with a terrible finality that he would love Kathleen Mallory till he died. Where was the Cheddar cheese? And it would always be the one-sided affair of a solitary man with a ridiculous face.